Hasta La Gadget!

It looks like the Unicorn Apocalypse game featured in Samsung’s commercials is actually a real game. Samsung held a contest to get developers to create a game that matches the “Unicorn Apocalypse” theme portrayed in its commercials. Developers were given the freedom to create the best unicorn game they could come up with. The winner of the contest, who turned out to be Liquid Gameworks, received a grand prize of $25,000.

The game was released yesterday to Google Play, and is free to download. It was highly anticipated thanks to the hype from Samsung’s commercial, but unfortunately, the game was not positively received. The game currently holds an average rating of about 2.1 stars, with many users experiencing crashes and bugs in the game. The most common bug is when the user falls off the rooftop, and never respawns.

Fortunately for me (and my Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1), I was able to play the game just fine. However, I agree with many other users who say that the game very much seems like a copy of Adult Swim’s Robot Unicorn Attack. You’re still jumping from platform to platform and dashing through objects, however instead of instantly dying to a trap or gunfire, you sustain damage to your hit points (which is a bit nice). You also get to fire your rainbow, unicorn, horn laser thing at humans, which is neat too.

For those of you who haven’t played Robot Unicorn Attack, and don’t want to pay the $0.99 for the app, Unicorn Apocalypse is a nice alternative. I haven’t spent too much time on the game, but apparently there are 3 “menacing” bosses in the game that you will encounter. Go ahead and grab the game from Google Play, and enjoy hopping over fiery buildings and blasting through the soldiers of the AUF (anti-unicorn force).

[via Android Community]

Samsung’s fictional Unicorn Apocalypse game comes to life is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Pssst! Are you thinking of a method to achieve a quick buck or two? It seems that malware developers are right now handing out up to $100 for ‘active’ Google Play accounts. Yes sir, virus writers are actually willing to fork out top dollar in order to gain access to ‘active’ Google Play accounts, which will in turn enable them to spread even more mobile malware throughout the rest of the Android ecosystem.

At this point in time, Google charges Android developers a cool $25 before they are able to sell their apps via the Google Play marketplace, and it seems that this system has been compromised in a sense, abused rather, as a bunch of cybercriminals are willing to pay up to $100 for a legit Google Play account. These are then used to offer malware, as it has been masked as legitimate apps, prior to the Trojanized packages being put for sale to unknowing folks. If you ever get such an offer, it would bode everyone well to refuse it, and inform the relevant authorities so that such activities can be clamped down.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Pantech Vega No. 6 Goes International, Sprint Sonim XP STRIKE Is One Tough Cookie,

A year ago this week, the Android Market sloughed its cocoon, emerging triumphant and sassy as a Google Play butterfly. To celebrate the metamorphosis, Google’s giving stuff away, for free, all week. More »

The Android Market might seem to be a distant memory to many of us by now, considering how Google decided to slap a new name over it, calling the Android Market, Google Play. Well, how time flies when you are having fun, and with Google Play debuting one year ago tomorrow, you know for sure that a birthday is always a time to celebrate. For those of you who are living in areas where it is Wednesday, you might be interested to know that Google Play has introduced price slashes across a wide range of apps, movies, and books.

Nice to see the “birthday boy”, so to speak, be the one giving out presents, instead of the other way around. Some of the apps were being sold at a 50% discount, and chances are Google might just expand the sales list over the coming few days. Of course, if you happen to be a voracious reader, you can also check out selected books that retail for $5 tops, while there is also a slew of movies that are going for $5 a pop, or $1 if you want to rent them. Bear in mind that the prices quoted here are in Australian dollars, and as the nature of their currency rates are nearly the same at this point in time, it could cost the equivalent in dollars, too.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: ZTE And Intel Partner Up To Launch Atom Z2580-based Smartphones, Samsung To Introduce Low-End Galaxy Pocket Neo Smartphone,

Rumors from an “extremely reliable source” speaking to 9t05Google have suggested Google will start to operate its own physical retail stores starting as soon as the 2013 holiday season in the U.S. Brick-and-mortar shops from an Internet search company? Sounds like a stretch, but the Goog is breaking out of its search box big time, and recent additions to the Nexus line are proving it has a real chance at establishing a direct relationship with customers.

Google has had a difficult time keeping its Nexus 4 smartphone, manufactured by partner LG, in stock, with the device being mostly unavailable through Google’s Play store until just recently. But the company’s efforts to sell direct weren’t an overnight success; it attempted to sell hardware direct with the Nexus One back in 2010, but stopped selling after a few months, since very few customers opted to buy the device at its full, unsubsidized price online.

But if Google does one thing well, it’s iterating on less-than-stellar product launches and building on a firm foundation of failure. And that’s exactly what it has done with Nexus; the tablets it starting selling the via its online hardware store did major one thing better than the Nexus One, by offering no-strings-attached hardware at a bargain basement price. Hardware sales, Google seems to have learned, won’t work if customers are asked to eat a cost hit in exchange for freedom. They needed both, and weren’t willing to trade economy for freedom.

Now Google has the recipe right for online sales, and it appears to have worked very well for the Nexus 4, and at least moderately well for Nexus tablets. But Google is still missing a key ingredient that has helped the iPad gain enormous consumer traction, and this latest rumor indicates it’s listening to the words of its biggest rival about how to possibly finally come up with a significant breakthrough for Android tablet market share.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has made no secret about Apple retail’s impact on iPad sales. Most recently, he essentially attributed the iPad’s worldwide success to Apple’s physical stores, and the opportunity they provided to make believers out of customers who might otherwise not necessarily have understood Apple’s tablet as a product category. As Ingrid noted in her recent piece covering Cook’s comments on retail at a Goldman Sachs investor conference last week:

“One of the things that’s not understood that well about the stores is that I don’t think we would have been nearly as successful in the iPad as an example if it weren’t for our stores,” said Cook. He noted that people’s view of the tablet, prior to the iPad, “ingrained in their minds [was] a heavy thing that no one wanted.”

Google needs a tablet to achieve the same kind of thing with an Android tablet, or at least to come close. Making an “experience”-baed retail store akin to what Apple’s offering doesn’t guarantee consumers warm up to Android tablets, but it’s a risk that’s likely worth taking, given that Google has had positive indicators for its online retail efforts of late, and that Apple seems to place a lot of the credit for the iPad’s success squarely on the Apple Store’s shoulders.

Nexus tablets need a home run, and that hasn’t come in the form of hardware so far, despite modest gains by gadgets like the Nexus series and the Kindle Fire. But maybe that’s because a device isn’t the answer they’re looking for: customer outreach is.