fantasy

Baseball Boyfriend app: Fantasy fun or insultingly immature?

Spring training has barely begun, but Baseball Boyfriend already has people thinking about which player they would most like to "date" this season.

Baseball Boyfriend is a $2.99 mini-game add-on to CBS Sports' fantasy baseball offerings. (Disclosure: CNET is published by CBS Interactive, a unit of CBS.) Users choose a single draftee and collect points based on the player's performance. You can keep or dump a draftee, depending on his stats and your level of emotional attachment.

The app offers three looks: clean, original, and pirate. The original look could have been cobbled from a love-struck … Read more

CBSSports.com opens fantasy sports platform to developers

CBSSports.com announced today it is opening its fantasy sports platform to third-party developers, allowing them to create free and premium league-specific apps.

Among the first half-dozen partners in the "Fantasy Platform" are MLB.com and Bloomberg Sports, CBS said in an announcement today at the 2012 Fantasy Sports Trade Association Winter Business Conference in Las Vegas. (CBSSports.com is part of CBS Interactive, which also operates CNET.) Advanced Sports Media, Rotowire, StatSheet, and Ziguana will also be partners in the platform.

Jason Kint, senior vice president of CBSSports.com, said the Fantasy Platform is designed to offer … Read more

The 404 952: Where time flies like an arrow, fruit flies like a banana (podcast)

Leaked from today's episode of The 404 Podcast:

HTC and Facebook pair up for the HTC Buffy phone, a Facebook-powered smartphone modified to use HTML5 as an app platform. The ESRB and CTIA will soon unwrap a cross-platform rating system for mobile applications. Science has spoken: sarcasm is for smarties, according to the neuropsychologists at USF. With Final Fantasy XIII-2 only a few months away, Square Enix proposes to release a new Final Fantasy game every year.… Read more

Free turn-based strategy game

This open-source, turn-based strategy game is fun once you learn the basics, although it can be a bit choppy compared to most modern games. The object in Battle for Wesnoth is to build a hero and strategically use your units to attack the enemy and conquer villages as you follow your quest.

The story line is compelling and provides a nice backdrop to the game play which can get confusing once several units on both sides enter into the fray. The two-dimensional graphics are nothing special, and the sounds aren't very advanced, but as a free game with large … Read more

Final Fantasy-themed PS3 reloaded

Remember the PS3 Final Fantasy XIII Lightning Edition launched in late 2009? Well, Sony and Square Enix are releasing yet another version of the console centered on the popular role-playing game. But instead of the ceramic-white shade of its predecessor, the new Final Fantasy XIII-2 Lightning Edition will come in black. This revised styling should appeal more to guys, while the pink wording still give this console a feminine touch.

Price-wise, expect to shell out around $500 for the 320GB kit bundled with a copy of the game. The set will be available in Japan on December 15, followed by the U.S. and Europe in early 2012.

(Source: Crave Asia via Kotaku)… Read more

Hack-and-slash excellence

Pocket RPG brings a fun and mindless dual-stick hack-and-slash adventure to the smaller Retina Display on the iPhone.

You start by choosing one of three character classes: Dark Ranger, Blade Master, or Battle Mage, each with a different fighting style and special moves. When you're done choosing according to your playing style, you'll be dropped into the first dungeon and will need to talk to the NPCs scattered about to learn the basics. From there, Pocket RPG is all about mindless hack-and-slash goodness, battling against swarms of enemies, and finding chests full of treasure, weapons, and items. As … Read more

Have NFL players had enough of fantasy football?

The Web breeds fantasy.

It lets us become different people. It lets us impress those we never thought we'd ever have a chance of impressing. And it lets us believe that we are just as wily, difficult, and very slightly obnoxious as the most successful people in the world. The New England Patriots' coach Bill Belichick, for example.

Yet now that fantasy football has become more prevalent in human minds than, say, learning a foreign language (some say 25 million people will have teams this season), a couple of NFL players have come out and expressed some heartfelt--and not … Read more

Hot new iOS games for the long weekend

Several great new games were released this week for iOS that are perfect for keeping you busy during downtime over the long Labor Day weekend.

A couple of days ago, I wrote about Spy Mouse, Firemint's latest game that has you play as Agent Squeak, the mouse who stealthily steals cheese across tons of cleverly made levels. I highly recommend that you grab that game in addition to this collection, but I found three more that will satisfy just about every gamer's personal taste.

This week's collection of iOS apps are all hot new games from different genres. The first lets you draw your path around a racetrack; the second lets you use a jetpack to go for distance; and the third is a beautifully made hack-and-slash RPG.… Read more

Craction: A fantasy-football tool for the rest of us?

The PR flacks for Craction, a new online football game, deserve a little credit for getting one point of their rollout publicity campaign correct: it's more or less impossible to have a fully functional life while aggressively competing in an online fantasy-football league.

Dedicated fantasy-football participants--the type of people who spend hours neglecting their jobs and families to pore over player stat sheets looking for the best punter--often sacrifice their maturity and dignity in an obsessive pursuit of a statistically perfect virtual NFL football team.

Craction looks to offer football competition without "all the fantasy-sports commitment." The game launched online this month, but Scott Schmidt developed it in 2000 when he was a business student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

"I wanted to stay connected with my friends who were spread out at colleges across the country," Schmidt said during Craction's debut. "NFL football was something we could all relate to, but I knew I'd have trouble getting people to commit to fantasy football because it requires so much time. So I just invented a better game." … Read more