Exclusive: The 'Aralon: Sword and Shadow' RPG Extreme Make Over Continues
Monday, June 28th, 2010
In early May we first posted about Crescent Moon Games getting involved in the development of Aralon: Sword and Shadow, an RPG by Galoobeth Games that had been in development long before Crescent Moon even started on their previous RPG, Ravensword: The Fallen King [$4.99 / Free]. In essence, Aralon had been the project of two developers who were extremely passionate about building an immersive RPG with levels of detail seldom seen on mobile platforms... But neither of them were artists. Aralon was filled with what amounted to mediocre character animations, place holder art, and 3D models that were beyond basic.
Crescent Moon saw the potential this game had if the graphical front-end could be brought up to par with all of the various subsystems powering the game world that Galoobeth had spent so much time working on. With artist Mark Jones, Aralon had the last piece of the puzzle it was missing to be the game it needed to be.
This is what the world of Aralon was going to look like:

And this is what Aralon will look like now, running at the Retina Display resolution of the iPhone 4:

The night and day difference continues through the rest of the screenshots we were provided:
The time that's being put in to the complete artistic makeover of the game has allowed Galoobeth to add even more to Aralon than they were originally even planning on launching with. For instance, the game now has a complete pet system where any NPC (even a human) can be charmed and serve as your pet. The game now includes well over 30 hours of gameplay, what has been described to us as a "massive" world that players can completely explore, hundreds of items, mounts, four playable classes across three races, and other gameplay mechanics such as faction systems, herb gathering, crafting, and more.
Aralon: Sword and Shadow is planned for a fall release, and if they manage to deliver on the things they're promising, Crescent Moon and Galoobeth games will likely have a hit on their hands. For more on Aralon, take a look at our previous post on the game or the thread on our forums. If you like seeing these kind of drastic before and after shots, swing on by this thread on our forums where other developers are posting shots of their placeholder art compared to their final release art as well.





Alright, this is a ridiculous amount of good freebies out there for a Monday afternoon, and really, nothing should stop you from downloading all of these games as soon as possible. Of course, the standard App Store disclaimer applies here in that freebie promotions are often for a very limited time, everything is free as of the time of this posting, but if you delay they may return to their normal prices before you get a chance to snag 'em.
Three games came out recently which are all fun in their own way, but not really deep enough to warrant their own individual reviews. This isn't necessarily a bad thing by any means, as some of my absolute favorite iPhone games are the ones you only play for 30 seconds at a time. So if you're looking for a new game to play while you're waiting for your microwave popcorn to finish popping, consider any of these:













Being a match-three title, the core mechanic is swapping tiles on the playfield to line up three-of-a-kind eliminations. But the whole thing is set against a ghost chasing PAC-MAN in the playfield border. Every match causes PAC-MAN to gobble a dot and move one space away from the ghost in pursuit. It's just a fancy way to present a timed match, but it's nicely done. What's more, a column of bonus tokens appears to the right of the playfield that, when tapped, performs certain power moves such as a row + column elimination and a sort of ghost attack.




Back in early March of this year, a port of Street Fighter IV was released for the iPhone to much positive fanfare. The graphics and sounds were incredible, but the biggest doubt on everyone's mind leading up to release was how well the game could work with virtual touch screen controls. In the end, SFIV for iPhone turned out to be a highly playable and fun affair. Rather than the controls, the biggest complaint from gamers regarding this otherwise excellent fighter was the slim roster of characters. Featuring just 8 playable combatants (the same number of the original SFII mind you), many fan favorites from from the Street Fighter universe were notably absent.

Battle Bears -1 is the follow-up prequel to last years incredibly popular Battle Bears: Zombies! If you aren't familiar with the first Battle Bears game, you play the role of Oliver the bear, stranded and forced to fight back against near-endless waves of adorable pink bears (called huggables) that want nothing more than to hug the life out of him. An assortment of clever weaponry was at your disposal to battle against this pink menace. The gameplay wasn't bad, but it was the hilariously bizarre storyline and cutscenes that really made the game a hit, which we 


Austin, Texas based iPhone developer 



















