Across Age [App Store]
Current Version: 1.1
Our Review
Forum Thread

This update addresses several of the issues that those in our forum thread had with the game upon launch, mainly control-related problems. An expanded d-pad with visual feedback and reduced angles for diagonal movement should help with most of the control problems people were having before, and those who couldn't quite figure out how to do team actions now have a separate control option that they can choose which utilizes two separate buttons for team moves. Various other balancing issues have been addressed, and dying three times in one room with now restore your character with full health--a much needed concession that will help prevent players from getting stuck in an area.

Battle Blasters [App Store]
Current Version: 1.1
Our Review
Forum Thread

This update seems insignificant since it's only adding bluetooth multiplayer to the game, but in reality it's a pretty huge deal. I asserted that multiplayer was the most crucial thing that Battle Blasters lacked when I reviewed the game shortly after its release, as the only option it offered at the time was a somewhat broken same-device multiplayer feature. Now that bluetooth multiplayer is out (and online multiplayer is still on the way, apparently) a lot of people will likely return to Battle Blasters to finally take on friends who also own the game. I know I will.

Chop Chop Ninja [App Store]
Current Version: 1.1
Our Review
Forum Thread

We really liked Chop Chop Ninja, so the addition of three new levels, eight new enemies to fight against, and two new powerups in this update will most certainly see us giving the game another go. OpenFeint has been added as well in this update, so fans of the game can look forward to trying to collect all 18 achievements and making a name for themselves on the seven new leaderboards.

Finger Physics: Finger Fun [App Store]
Current Version: 1.4
Our Coverage
Forum Thread

Finger Physics has been well-supported with content updates and fixes, and it's good to see this trend continue in this newest update, which adds in 18 new levels. Aside from the two new stages which contain the new levels, a Doodle Jump cross-promotion has been integrated, for those interested. An often-requested retry button is now present after each level is completed, so perfectionists and high-score chasers will now have an easier time grinding for better times.

The Horrible Vikings [App Store]
Current Version: 1.1
Our Review
Forum Thread

Driving Range Island (essentially an open-ended survival mode) is now playable, and should provide some entertainment for those who have finished The Horrible Viking's campaign. Also included in this update are new--and much more difficutl--levels. Random shark encounters add a new dimension to Viking's gameplay, so if you've had your fill of Viking-launching the new levels, new modes, and slightly added element of gameplay variety with the addition of the sharks should be enough to convince you to come back for more.

Speed Forge Extreme [App Store]
Current Version: 1.2
Our Review
Forum Thread

This feels like several updates combined into one. Aside from a large variety of bug fixes, a new "inverted career" allows advanced players to take on races with an increased difficulty level and all weapons and powerups unlocked from the start, and Crystal integration now allow for online leaderboards and achievements. A mini-map now helps track navigation, and shorter loading times (along with the ability to skip arena fights) keep things moving at a fast pace.

Tiki Towers [App Store]
Current Version: 1.3.0
Our Review
Forum Thread

A new "underwater" world adds content to Tiki Towers in this update, and magnets have been added as a resource to aid in tower construction. The biggest news for those who love the game is undoubtedly the addition fo pinch-zooming during both building and playback, which will essentially allow for a much higher level of control to see what could be improved in your constructions.

Last month we reported that a number of highly notable retro titles are on the way as DLC for Manomio / Kiloo's C64 for iPhone [App Store] emulator. We've just gotten an update from the developers, naming the first of the upcoming releases.

The first new games out of the gate will be Super Pipeline and Super Pipeline II from Taskset as well as Paperboy from Elite. The Super Pipeline games will cost $0.99, while Paperboy will go for $1.99 as in-game DLC. Following these first titles into the app will be several as yet unnamed free titles.

The developers previously indicated that the app's forthcoming v1.5 update will be focused on usability and playability, with some control and UI tweaks. Kiloo has just pointed further down the road to the v1.6 update that will follow, which they indicate will bring the notable update of customizable controls. We're glad the folks behind C64 for iPhone are keeping the ball rolling for retro fans like myself.

Earlier this month we took a look at IUGO's amusing dual-stick survival shooter Daisy Mae's Alien Buffet. We liked the game, which offers solid shooter action and, unlike most other games of the sort, an impressive ability to interaction with obstacles in the environment. The game has an atmosphere straight out of a B-movie and features an array of ridiculous weapons along with humorous taunts and unlockable outfits for the voluptuous Daisy, each smaller than the next.

It all comes together to make for a fun romp of carnage, but that last seems to have stuck in Apple's craw after recent changes to the company's App Store approval policies. As IUGO informed readers in our forums, Daisy Mae has been pulled from the App Store.

And Daisy Mae isn't the only one to get a tap on the shoulder. A great many adult-themed apps have been pulled from the App Store. One such app is Wobble iBoobs from ChilliFresh, who yesterday received an email from Apple indicating that their popular iPhone app had been pulled.

The App Store continues to evolve, and as such, we are constantly refining our guidelines. Your application, Wobble iBoobs (Premium Uncensored), contains content that we had originally believed to be suitable for distribution. However, we have recently received numerous complaints from our customers about this type of content, and have changed our guidelines appropriately.

We have decided to remove any overtly sexual content from the App Store, which includes your application.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter. If you believe you can make the necessary changes so that Wobble iBoobs (Premium Uncensored) complies with our recent changes, we encourage you to do so and resubmit for review.

Sincerely,
iPhone App Review

And while a shooter with some risque elements would seem to not be in quite the same place as a "boob"-centric app, Daisy Mae seems to have found herself on the far side of Apple's newly-adjusted line.

IUGO intends to rework the game and bring it back to the App Store, but indicates it's unclear just how long that will take.

Gamevil has released a new trailer for their upcoming sequel Zenonia 2. This latest RPG from Gamevil will feature more content than their original. We detailed some of the changes back in January:

Zenonia 2 will have four distinctly different character classes: The paladin, shooter, magician, and warrior. Ranged attacks are also being implemented, allowing players to use various skills to attack from a distance. New difficulty modes are also being added, aside from the standard "normal" difficulty, "hard" and "hell" modes will allow hardcore players to access additional loot and a hidden boss stage only available in the higher difficulty modes. There are also new terrain effects thrown in to the mix such as water, snow, ice and others.

In addition, there will be a new asynchronous online multiplayer feature that you will be able to "download and compete against" your friends' characters.

It's that time of the week again, and the only thing that can make Friday even better is lots and lots of free or cheap games. This week oddly enough is absolutely loaded with great freebies. As usual, the standard iTunes price change disclaimer applies in that the prices listed here are current as the time of this posting, but are subject to change at any time. If you want any of these games (especially the freebies), grab them now.

FaceFighter, $1.99 → FREE

Appy Entertainment's crazy fighting game allows players to either snap a photo or import one from the photo library of someone's face. Whether that's your wife, Neil Patrick Harris, or your cat, the game doesn't care. After that, you're able to fight your new opponent in game. As you pummel them to death, FaceFighter overlays black eyes, a broken nose, swollen lips, and other things on top of their face to indicate the damage you're inflicting.

Sentinel: Mars Defense, 99¢ → FREE

Still one of my favorite tower defense games, Sentinel has everything you'd expect out of a good tower defender. Give this one a spin and if you like it, you'll love the sequel, Sentinel 2: Earth Defense [$2.99], even more.

Other free games worth checking out include:

• Tiki Totems, $1.99 → FREE
• Air Assault, $2.99 → FREE
• Texas Tea, 99¢ → FREE
• Depict: The Multiplayer Drawing & Guessing Game, 99¢ → FREE

Space Miner: Space Ore Bust, $4.99 → $1.99

Venan Entertainment's Space Miner is absolutely amazing. Great controls and graphics combine with a fun Asteroids-like core gameplay element that is all wrapped in the wacky Space Miner universe loaded with ship upgrades that will keep you playing until your battery is dead. We absolutely loved the game in our review and since the price drop the game has been rocketing up the top app charts. You don't want to miss this sale.

Other rad games worth picking up that all saw recent price drops include:

• ARKANOID , $4.99 → $2.99
• Chop Chop Ninja, $1.99 → 99¢
• Extreme Lawn Bowls, $1.99 → 99¢
• Rogue Touch, $2.99 → 99¢
• Sniper Vs Sniper: Online, $1.99 → 99¢
• SPACE INVADERS, $4.99 → $2.99
• Starship Defense, $1.99 → 99¢
• TileStorm, $1.99 → 99¢

Of course this is just a small selection of the games on sale this week. For a full listing, head over to AppShopper where you can see a listing of all games as well as all popular games with recent price changes.

Yes, there are tons of zombie games on the App Store. Yes, there are also tons of line drawing games on the App Store, maybe even more than zombie games... But how many line drawing zombie games are there? Viqua Games' upcoming post-zombie apocalypse line drawer, Zombie Escape is exactly that. Using the same skills you honed landing planes in Flight Control and docking ships in Harbor Master, you can save survivors from a legion of zombies.

Helicopters land, and you must draw lines to guide the survivors to them. Each helicopter can only hold a few survivors, indicated by the dots below each helicopter. When one is full, it takes off, and after a while another one takes it place. Things get hectic quick as the screen fills with zombies and you need to manage the survivors while you wait for a new helicopter to arrive to load them in to.

This is where the toolbar at the bottom of the screen. Crates are randomly dropped in game that contain goodies that the survivors can pick up by walking over them. These goodies include bombs that can clear out swarms of zombies, emergency helicopters that are great for dropping on groups of survivors waiting for a ride, meat to lure zombies, and others.

You can see how this all goes together along with how the difficulty ramps up in this gameplay video:

Three different levels are included that are slowly unlocked as you play, and Zombie Escape has full OpenFeint integration with loads of achievements and online leaderboards. Zombie Escape is currently entering beta testing, and the build I played in the above video is a work in progress that doesn't even have an icon yet. I like what I've seen so far, and can't wait to see the final product once it's fully tested and tweaked.

There are a lot of crazy rhythm games on the App Store, including the recently released Thumpies, but Bulkypix's Maestro Green Groove takes the cake in being the most insane musical game I've played so far on my iPhone.

Maestro Green Groove is a crazy combination of a beat matching and platforming. You control a pink duck who struts along the level, and by swiping up or down you pluck the rope he's running across to make him either jump or fall down. Fruit are scattered throughout the level, and each fruit you pick up plays a musical note. Also, there are special strings that glow which must be strummed by swiping across them just as the glow is completely fading. To make things even more complicated, various monsters pop up which must be tapped to eliminate at the same time the circle that appears comes in to contact with them.

If you manage to do all these things at the right time, you'll actually be playing a piece of classical music. The way it all flows together is nuts, and there is so much going on at once that you're frantically swiping your finger and tapping that the first few times you go through a song there's little you can do to not end up failing and having to do it over again. After a little practice, you're bombing through levels watching your smug smiling duck parade around as you bust out Beethoven's 5th. It's awesome.

Here's a video of me doing poorly:

According to Bulkypix, Maestro Green Groove is "nearly ready" to be launched on the App Store, and when it finally appears for download it will be priced at 99¢.

As a kid, one of my absolute things to play at the arcade with my Dad was the hockey table machines. If hockey tables (or arcades for that matter) were before your time, a hockey table is similar to a foosball table with players on opposite ends controlling a team of miniature hockey players that are controlled with handles that can be pulled in or out to move the player in their track and spun to make them move their stick around. Much like foosball you could either play this with extremely calculated moves, or, my technique of choice, wildly flail the handles about, spinning your players like crazy and knocking the puck all over the place.

Stinger Table Hockey effectively duplicates the same insanity of a real hockey table, and while the controls are still in the process of being tweaked, I thought they worked pretty well. Basically, dragging up and down on a track moves that player back and forth, and swiping right or left on the same track causes the player to spin around. It's pretty intuitive, and works well enough to be fun.

There is a single player mode that allow you to play against an AI opponent which is a little on the lame side since the fun part of hockey tables were always playing with another person. Thankfully, Stinger Table Hockey has both bluetooth and wifi multiplayer that I can't wait to try out. There are also tournament modes, and skill tests that feature shootouts and other challenges.

If all goes as planned the guys at Stinger Games are going to finish tightening up the controls and physics and should have Stinger Table Hockey on the App Store sometime next week.

Following a pair of really cool teaser trailers, we finally got our hands on a copy of The Hero, a game where you play as super hero doing various super hero-y things like flying around dispatching bad guys using three different super powers while high-fiving people hanging out their windows and catching falling babies.

The graphics of The Hero are absolutely incredible, all of the animations are extremely well done, and the landscapes are beautifully detailed. You control your hero by using a virtual joystick in the bottom right corner, and can speed up by mashing the on-screen button on the bottom right corner. The controls work well enough, although making precise movements can be challenging as you can't just stop in mid-air and turn around, your hero has to go through his whole turning around animation before you can go the other way. This is a minor complaint, but something I ran in to a few times while playing.

While I'm not very far in The Hero yet, the game seems to have a considerable amount of content with a full campaign where you fight crime in 15 different levels along with an unlockable survival mode. Two difficulty options are available, along with Chillingo's Crystal integration which brings online leaderboards and achievements to the table.

Expect a full review of The Hero when it's released soon on the App Store.

If Doodle Jump's insane popularity is any indication, PapiJump-like jumping games are loved by many. I'm not entirely sure if Axolot Games' Above is the next Doodle Jump, but it is pretty cool with an insanely intricate art style that really puts other games in the genre to shame.

In Above, you play as a guy who runs from side to side across the screen jumping on a series of platforms that apparently just mysteriously spawned in the air as he was walking down the street. Of course the logical thing to do in this situation is to start jumping on them to see where they go. Instead of constantly jumping like Doodle Jump, you touch the screen to charge up a jump which allows you to make quick hops as well as giant leaps depending on how long you hold your finger down. As you go higher and higher, the background scrolls up with you until you reach the clouds, and eventually make it in to space on the hard difficulty level that has you starting by jumping off the solar panels of the International Space Station.

Above is delightfully ridiculous, and has a constant element of urgency to the game not seen in the other platform jumpers where your guy is constantly running back and forth, forcing you to either keep jumping, or fall between the gaps to the level below. Because of this, the game is a little more forgiving and you can fall down a few levels of platforms before you actually lose.

Above is still in development, and is missing several sprites and other refinement, but here is some gameplay video of this work in progress to give you an idea how this all goes together:

Axolot Games expects to have Above on the App Store sometime in March.

Last week we took a look at InMotion Software's dual stick dungeon crawler, Catacombs [App Store], which was just released mere moments ago. We're still working on our full review of the game, but here are some details from the preview:

Catacombs takes the familiar controls of the numerous dual-stick games, but instead of simply asking you to slay a never-ending supply of enemies, you have to make your way through the maze-like corridors of whatever evil dungeon your character found themselves in.

Along the way you will come across locked doors that must be unlocked with keys hidden inside the dungeon, as well as tons of gold and treasure. To assist you on your quest, the monsters of the dungeon randomly drop power-ups that do things like increase your movement speed, or offer different offensive bonuses.

Fans of dual stick shooters, dungeon crawlers, and Gauntlet will be right at home rampaging through the halls of Catacombs. Catacombs comes loaded with 24 dungeon levels, with a level pack that has another 24 forest levels available for an additional 99¢.

App Store Link: Catacombs, 99¢

If you live outside of New Zealand, when you think "kiwi", you're likely thinking of a brown skinned fruit with a wonderful green interior. The other (and likely less delicious) kiwi is a flightless bird around the size of an average chicken that also happens to be the national symbol of New Zealand. In Fly Kiwi Fly, you play as a small yellow kiwi who wants to fly, much like the unrelated YouTube hit video "Kiwi!" (which you should really watch if you haven't seen it before).

Motivated by watching the Space Shuttle on TV, you take flight and somehow earn money by constantly jumping off a cliff. This money is then spent on upgrades in the in-game shop that will allow you to jump higher off the start, briefly glide, or even rocket forward among other things. Here's some video of very early gameplay without many upgrades yet:

I'm not sure what it is about these flight games, but I always seem to hopelessly get sucked in to them. I probably sunk hours in to unlocking everything in Pig Air [99¢], an extremely similar game where you play as a pig launching off of a silo. Fly Kiwi Fly should be available very soon, and is a fun game to keep an eye out for if the idea of tricking out a kiwi with rockets and wings interests you.

As noted on MacRumors, the over the air (EDGE, 3G) download size limit for the iPhone App Store has been raised from 10MB to 20MB.

Prior to today, apps larger than 10MB required iPhone users to be connected to a Wi-Fi hotspot for direct downloading onto their device. The reason for the limitation is presumably related to agreements with AT&T to avoid excess data usage. Despite evidence to the contrary, developers have long seen staying under the 10MB size limit as a huge benefit, due to the possibility of "on the go" app purchasing. The actual importance of this cutoff size, however, has been up for debate.

The significance of the cut-off size has likely been diminishing over time as the number of iPod Touch (Wi-Fi only) devices has been growing. The tables could turn around again, however, if the 3G-enabled iPad becomes a big seller.

It will be interesting to see if apps that fall in the 10MB-20MB range get a boost in sales due to this change.

Fans of first person shooters are going to be in for a treat this Monday when the sequel to Brothers In Arms: Hour of Heroes, Brothers in Arms 2: Global Front launches. Last month we took a trip to the Gameloft offices to get an early look at the game:

The game features six different play environments — the Pacific, North Africa, Italy, Normandy, Germany, and Ardennes — across 16 levels, each of which offers 25-30 minutes of playtime (6+ hours total, estimated), basically double that of the iPhone original. While much of the combat is carried out running, dodging, and ducking through the various environs on foot, airplanes, motorcycles, and tanks are also thrown into the mix.

Gameloft just released a pretty cool trailer that shows quite a bit of gameplay:

NOVA is going to be a tough act to follow, but so far Brothers in Arms 2 looks very promising. We'll have a full review following the release of the game.

If it weren't obvious by now, ngmoco has completely shifted gears from their former business model of offering "premium" priced games to free to play "freemium" games. Eliminate [Free] and Touch Pets Dogs [Free] were just the start of the pricing trend that will likely permeate the rest of the ngmoco game lineup for the foreseeable future.

A number of things can be attributed to this shift, in a Gamasutra interview with ngmoco VP Alan Yu, he cited 50% to 90% piracy rates, and discussed the increasing difficulty in selling iPhone games at a $9.99 price point as the market drives itself to rock-bottom 99¢ pricing. Free games can't be pirated, and the explosion of Facebook gaming, as well as the success of the various Epic Wars and other similar games on the App Store solidified the validity of the free to play model before Eliminate even launched.

The unfortunate side effect of all this is that Rolando 3 as it originally was envisioned is left as the odd man out, per an IGN interview with Neil Young, founder and CEO of ngmoco. Since ngmoco currently has no plans to release games that aren't free, the Rolando franchise has been sent back to the drawing board until they can figure out a sensible way to deliver a Rolando game as a free to play experience.

Even though there may not be a Rolando 3 anytime soon, I still recommend trying out the existing Rolando games on the App Store if you haven't already. The original Rolando [$2.99 / Free] as well as Rolando 2 [$4.99 / Free] are both absolutely fantastic games, making excellent use of both the touch and tilt controls of the iPhone.