Apple aims to drive the use of electronic textbooks in the classroom by making it easier for publishers to create interactive titles.
Apple is pursuing different market angles, and one of them is the e-reader one, and kids love the big full-color interactive titles in iBooks.
By embedding historical performance of key metrics within interactive titles, users can swipe and tap their way through (what are presumably) more compelling and engaging insights.
And HD-DVD players include extra hardware: USB jacks accommodate game controllers for future interactive titles, Ethernet ports let you update the firmware via the Net (something I had to do once with the Toshiba player I tested) and someday may let you add timely new features to store-bought discs.
We've seen a number of very passively interactive titles emerge, such as Telltale's The Walking Dead and Tales from the Borderlands, and DONTNOD's Life is Strange, which provide tension through putting certain decisions on a tight timer, but generally don't test the player's eye-to-hand-to-screen reactions like, say, Gears of War or The Last of Us does.
It's the most interactive exercise title to date, offering a tailored, personal workout that records data such as heart rate and calorie burn but also easy to use and effective.
As a primer, here's a quick guide to the art of writing newsgames, written with the help of Tomas Rawlings from Auroch Digital in Bristol, a studio that has worked on several of its own interactive news titles, such as Endgame: Syria and NarcoGuerra.
Barnes & Noble is now offering a dozen interactive NOOK Kids Nickelodeon titles, and will expand to more than 20 next month, as the partnership continues to grow with new, exciting digital books.
Firewatch is unique within the "walking simulator" (uh) sub-genre of immersive, interactive-fiction titles; Far Cry Primal is taking the first-person shooter back 10,000 years to a time of spears and sabre-tooth cats; and Superhot is bringing both a singular visual style and innovative time-based strategy to the guns-and-ammo field.
Firewatch is unique within the "walking simulator" (uh) sub-genre of immersive, interactive-fiction titles; Far Cry Primal is taking the first-person shooter back 10,000 years to a time of spears and saber-tooth cats; and Superhot is bringing both a singular visual style and innovative time-based strategy to the guns-and-ammo field.
