Looking for a unique puzzle game to fill your hours? Take a look at Joining Hands [$2.99] by 10tons, creators of Grim Joggers [$1.99] and Azkend [$2.99]. It tells of the Whispering Wood, a place filled with boogeymen to frighten the little Peablins, Gloobins and Brufflins that inhabit it. To make it through safely, they all need to hold hands.

In each of Joining Hands' levels, you're faced with a hex grid and several of these cute little creatures. The trick is to arrange them so that no hand is left unheld. Creatures are happy when their hands are held, and unhappy with they have a free hand. When everyone's happy, the level is complete. This is easy to do when you're just dealing with Peablins--those little green guys will hold hands with anyone. But then they start sprouting extra limbs, and soon you're trying to link up one guy with 4 arms, another with 3, and a few other friends. It gets a little messy.

The levels have a few tricks to mix things up as well. Some hexes are blocked by stones. Others have stars, which can be claimed by covering them and completing the level. Hearts (or "Comfort Zones") add another twist: any creature on a heart will be happy even if his hands are empty.

There are six types of creatures, including Peablins. Brufflins have inflexible arms, so they need to be positioned carefully. Poeglins need their personal space, so don't put them next to anyone else. Grimmlins can't be moved--their armor is too heavy. Whisprins are always happy, but they frighten anyone next to them. And Gloobins, who were added in a recent update, can only hold tentacles with each other.

Joining Hands has a simple set of controls: drag to move the little guys around, and tap to rotate the Brufflins. There aren't any time limits or move restrictions, so you're free to experiment and work your way through each level with trial and error if needed. This makes the game feel a little bit too easy early on, but don't even think about relaxing. Later levels are a serious challenge--hard enough that I occasionally found myself wishing for a level skip mechanic.

You won't find any achievements here, but Joining Hands has a huge amount of content to keep you occupied. There are currently 10 episodes covering over 150 levels. You can also compete on Game Center leaderboards for total collected stars, although that caps out with people who've mastered the whole game.

I'm a bit of a sucker for cute art styles, but Joining Hands marries its cute art and sound design with solid, original gameplay. Our forum users have been quite happy with it too. Puzzle fans should definitely check it out.

Long-time hirsute, psychedelic game writer Jeff Minter of Llamasoft has released two iOS games, and they're two of the best games in the App Store: Minotron: 2112 [link] and Minotaur Rescue [link]. His third iOS game, a Universal (iPhone and iPad) release called Deflex, is on the way, and I've been frustrating myself having fun with a pre-release he recently sent over, for the past couple of days.

Deflex is a dexterity puzzle game, of sorts. It is an iOS adaptation of a 1982 Llamasoft release for the Sinclair machines, VIC-20, and Atari 8-bits, itself inspired by an earlier, simpler Commodore PET title. Gameplay is tricky to describe, and trickier to master. Or so it seems -- I'm rather a ways from mastering it, myself.

The game takes you through level after level (52 in all) of different characters -- oxen, bulls, smileys, telephones -- arrayed about various wall configurations. You control a ball that appears at level's start, bouncing slowly back and forth along a linear path. The object of the game is to absorb the on-screen characters with your ball. It's the manner in which you get your ball over to all the characters that's the thing about this game.

At the bottom of the screen sit two buttons, one in each corner. These are your only controls. Each button drops a "bat" onto the screen at the exact position of your ball. These bats are mirrors, deflectors. The left button drops a " / " bat, while the right drops a horizontally opposed " \ " one. You can drop as many bats as you like, but I'd caution towards judicious deployment, and you'll see why.

The instant the bat is dropped, two things happen. First, the ball hits it and its course deflects 90-degrees, heading off in a direction dependent upon the direction of its path prior to impact. Second, the bat flips to the opposite type (" / " turns to " \ " and vice versa), adding a sort of mind-bending, deeper complexity to the challenge of strategically clearing the levels. And it's definitely an exercise in strategy, here -- the hurried sort. Because, in order to get the ball to each item on the screen, a clever arrangement of bats must be laid down. Too many bats can lead to chaos, and some levels reward you for lean placement. But you can't take too long about it, because time spent zipping through empty space is time where your score multiplier is dwindling. If it gets too low...your ball disintegrates.

There is some behavioral variety to the on-screen character objects. Many just sit there. Some move towards you. Some (like jiggly bananas) dart away from you. It's a bit chaotic. And the elimination of each character triggers the next note in a haunting piano melody. The whole things delivers a tangible, very bizarre game mood. Standard Minter fare, really.

The first few times I played the game I was utterly lost at sea. After a while, I began to understand what was happening. And now, I feel I have some degree of skill at the game, but I've got a ways to go before I'm at the top of the leaderboards. Well, there are no leaderboards at the moment, but they're on the way. OpenFeint and Game Center integration will be worked in before release, and there'll be 53 score tables in all.

Minter is known for putting out titles that are distinctly "different." (Have a look at Space Giraffe.) Deflex is no exception. The game gets huge points for challenge, uniqueness, and also drippy visual eye-candy. The psychedelia is, as expected, in full effect here.

We'll let you know when Deflex hits the app store. In the mean time I'll be honing my skills in an effort to rule the leaderboards. Well, here's hoping, anyway....

When Atari's Greatest Hits landed back in April, bringing 100 Atari arcade and VCS/2600 classics to iOS, retro gamers across the land bowed to Atari and the awesome they had brought. But still, there are plenty of great cartridge titles that aren't part of Atari's collections. Most notably, games by other studios. Studios like Activision, with games like River Raid. In fact, several readers specifically lamented the absence of that Activision vertical shooter, one of the best ever created for the 2600.

Tango Games just dropped us a line to make us aware of their recent release, AirFox HD [App Store], a Universal title (for iPhone and iPad) that seeks to fill the iOS River Raid void with what's more or less an exact clone of the game.

We tried to make the exact clone of this fantastic game with its marvellous atmosphere in every possible aspect of the original game (sounds, graphics, gameplay, scoring, etc.) and added few touches here and there, like adding GameCenter for online scores.

AirFox, as the author intended, feels pretty much exactly like River Raid. The game utilizes tilt controls for navigation and speed control, with a tap to the screen to fire. It even sounds like the 2600 original.

It's worth noting that several direct River Raid remakes have come to the App Store, like River Striker and Next Bridge...but they have also gone. We'll have to wait and see about AirFox HD's staying power. (River Raid fans might want to grab this one soon...)

UPDATE: The developers behind AirFox HD are the same folks who brought the iOS port of Activision's Atari 2600 title Enduro [App Store], through Nemo Games.

On this week’s TAS, the Brad, Eli, and Jared discuss conspiracies, the sudden explosion of promising titles on the App Store, popes, and for the first time ever, answer Nintendo Hot Line e-mails that somehow, someway ended up in our own Tips Line inbox.

Ready for over an hour of hot and steamy entertainment? Great! You can catch us on the iTunes Music Store for Music or the Zune Marketplace or if you’re a streamer, you can grab the latest episode just below. Don’t forget to rate us on the iTunes (and tell us your favorite monster movie in the review; I think we all agree that "Swamp Thing" was the best, EVER.)

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
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Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-005.mp3, 47.6MB

And now for the show notes:

GAMES:

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Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are tiny little squares and circles with big eyes and toothy frowns. Others are sharp-toothed maw beasts. And sometimes those maw beasts like to eat cuter, smaller monsters. That you toss in their mouths. Using bombs. When you get down to it, Big Blue Bubble's Paper Munchers [$0.99 / HD / Lite] is an illustration of the circle of life -- little monsters get eaten by bigger monsters, who spit out their cardboard remains and return them to the ecosystem.

You've got to make sure the big scary monsters are properly fed. When you tap the screen, a bomb explodes under your fingers and sends the little monsters flying. If a little monster matches the color of the mouth it falls into, you get an extra bomb. To get through each level, feed all the little monsters to the big monsters without running out of bombs.

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An open-source tool is making some waves on the Internet this afternoon, specifically on various iOS-centric blogs. It’s called ExEn and it’s noteworthiness is tied to its supposed ability to port XNA development code -- most popularly used for the Xbox Live Indie Games channel and Windows 7 games -- to the iOS, Silverlight, and at some point, even Android devices. A new build that does the former two things is available right now.

The technical details of how this all works is beyond the scope of this "Hey this is cool!" post, but you can read the developer’s blog here to get a greater sense of what he’s done, how he’s done it, and what he’s shooting for in the future. I’m also not so certain if using this program can somehow breach a license agreement, as even though there's a lot of great games on Xbox Live Arcade that could be ported, there could be tons of legal paperwork preventing it.

Provided it works as well as one would hope, ExEn is offering a cost-free opportunity for Xbox Live Indie Game developers to port their games onto the App Store. That’s kind of a big deal for that small, but vibrant community. Will we see a flight of games? I hope so.

[Via TUAW]

Mighty Fin [$0.99] is a pretty cool one-button game. When I reviewed it earlier this month, I was struck by the stylish art and the intuitive controls. And the hats. I really love the hats. But half the game's content was taken up with Endless Mode levels that were kind of a bummer. Since the difficulty never ramped up, they were exercises in attrition.

So when the 1.1.1 update hit yesterday, I was thrilled to see a shiny new mode included: Survival. It's basically Endless Mode, but Fin gets faster and faster as he goes. Each of the game's eight areas has a Survival level to compete on, with Game Center leaderboards tracking your success. Hard to complain about that, when other games build their entire schtick out of a single level of endless running.

And here's the kicker: you're still ranked for your performance on the Survival levels, and when you earn a gold ranking, you get a new hat. It looks like gold rankings are going to be very hard to get on some of the later levels, too. Eight new hats and eight new leaderboards to compete on - that's what I call a good update.

Jamie Grove over at ThinkGeek, who was kind enough to show me around their Megaplex HQ and the original iCade prototype, just sent word that, as of 3PM EDT today, the iCade SDK is available for download, without an NDA.

Just click the developers link on ION Audio's iCade page.

Granted, the iCade Bluetooth keycodes have been known for some time and iPad developers had already started to work iCade support into their titles. But with the SDK now openly and officially available -- what are you waiting for, guys?

I think Jared is a time traveler. On last week’s podcast, The Bearded One asked us what happened to Marathon for the iPad. We reported on that back in February, but the project seemed to have gone dark. And here, just yesterday, Bungie out of the blue issued an update of sorts and interviewed the designer behind the project. Turns out that things have been going well enough. The iOS Marathon port will hit the App Store for $0 as soon as it clears certification, which it appears, presently, to be in.

If you’d like to know more about the designer, check out Bungie’s interview with him. It has a lot information about his experience with the Marathon series, development of the port, and even has some advice for would-be programmers.

Development iPad game screenshot. More here.

I’ve plucked this notable out of it just for you. As most of you know, Marathon is an old FPS built specifically for a mouse and keyboard. It took a lot of revisions, but it appears as though the nut for this game has been cracked.

There are still a lot of controls. For now, there is a left thumb virtual joystick for moving, the "action" button is tucked under. On the right thumb, you have primary and secondary fire buttons; the weapon switch buttons are at the bottom.

There are a few hidden buttons as well. Touching the HUD motion sensor brings up the auto map. The left and right sides of the ammo display switch weapons and the center toggles between the ammo and inventory displays. The original Marathon didn't have an aiming reticule, and by default the iOS version sticks to that, but it can be enabled in the options.

There is also an option to tap-to-shoot, but two finger tap for secondary fire didn't make it into the final build. Sorry to the lefties out there, a future release will have adjustable controls!

In other news, Bungie is releasing the source code for its final title in the Marathon series, Marathon Infinity. It’s now “open source,” so I suppose there’s a chance that we could catch it on the App Store, too! That’s hot.

Have a look at some Mac Marathon gameplay while you wait.

War Grimoire [$1.99 / HD] is a tower defense title with the trappings of a great genre-based game, but its execution of fundamental elements and basic design are holding it back.

Instead of lingering on the bad, I’ll note what drew our all-seeing eye to the project in the first place: its visual flair.

War Grimoire's world is a vibrant one, enriched by traditional fantasy and Japanese comics and cartoon tropes. In this genre in particular, it’s unusual to see a well-budgeted game shoot for something outside of space marines, bugs, and ravaged worlds.

Character has a place, too. Instead of traditional towers, soldiers of all builds -- including archers, mages, and dragons -- are the pillars of defense. While it does default to dull monsters, there are some creative enemies that end up attacking your armies in ways I’ve never seen in a tower defense title before.

One of the more remarkable aspects is tower placement. Most levels allow you free reign with placement. It’s like the wild west of tower defense titles in this regard. Enemies pile in from all over the place, and you’ve got to be wise with your limited resources, but near infinite placement of long-distance soldiers and close-up fighters.

I also want to make note of the RPG tie-in. As in most tower defense games, you can upgrade your ‘towers’ while a level progresses. In this, however, you can take it a step further by upgrading individual class weapons and skill trees with points earned from the battles you’ve won, or hey, even lost.

In the pre-release images for War Grimoire, we saw massive battles: huge numbers of enemies and soldiers smacking each other in a centralized area. It looked chaotic, but in the fun, manageable sort of way. There was reason to the placement, at least.

In execution, battles fall apart. They’re in fact, too chaotic. Enemy pathways are clearly enough defined from the get-go, but then they take odd turns that you can’t anticipate if you haven’t played a level before. Worst case, they take odd turns that you flat-out can’t defend because it’s impossible to earn enough in-level currency to defend these points.

Disorganized chaos is the tip of the iceberg in a title otherwise riddled with much smaller design issues. The UI is needlessly heavy, games don’t always save properly, the English translation is terrible, and in general, success is measured by trial-and-error.

I’d love to see this game patched with a couple of updates. It has a bright future if the core is tweaked and massaged.

The wait for Tales of Monkey Island HD episodes is over. In one of the craziest App Store maneuvers I’ve ever seen, Telltale Games pushed out the remaining four episodes of the five-episode arc in a single afternoon. Each title is available at an agreeable $6.99, which a few dollars shy of what they continue to cost on other downloadable services.

In the interest of drumming up interest, Telltale has also slashed the price of the first game to $0 for a limited time. It’s a good game at a great price, and like the rest of the titles in the series, it’s faithful to the vision of Monkey Island while also still exhibiting its own charm and takes on the universe.

I've been there and back again with the series, so allow me to give you a little look at each app:

Monkey Island Tales 1 HD, Free - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - Talk about opening with a bang. Within the first minutes of the Tales series, Guybrush defeats his arch-nemesis the evil pirate LeChuck. Unfortunately, in the process, Guybrush loses his wife, his ship, and... unleashes a deadly pox into the world. Most of this episode centers on Guybrush getting a ship in order to find Elaine.

Monkey Island Tales 2 HD, $2.99 - Things don't easier even though a few minor goals were met in the previous episode. In this adventure specifically, Guybrush re-unites with his wife and meets the Mer-people in his search for La Esponja Grande, which is otherwise known as the cure for the misanthropic pox infesting the world.

Monkey Island Tales 3 HD, $2.99 - You'd roast me if I revealed the setting for this episode, but I do want to note that it's something COMPLETELY different than the previous episodes. In this place, Guybrush meets two new characters to the series, one of which becomes a key driver in the rest of the story arc.

Monkey Island Tales 4 HD, $2.99 - Guybrush goes on trial in the place where it all started. How does he defend himself against the accusations thrown at him? If only it was as simple as "Look behind you, a three-headed monkey!"

Monkey Island Tales 5 HD, $2.99 - Now, the task is to save the world against a threat. How Monkey Island of Telltale. Oh, and if it wasn't plain, this is indeed the last episode of the series. But what a conclusion, let me tell you.

As a whole, this is a fantastic series. Sure, there are spots where the story drags and, yeah, there are definitely some horrible puzzles, but this series is easily some of Telltale Games sharpest work. The writing in particular is impressive. If you dig the first episode -- don't forget, it's free -- definitely start diving into the rest of these. They're worth your time.

Ever since we posted the first trailer for 1-bit Ninja [$1.99] from developer Kode 80 I’ve been anxious to get my hands on the title, and after a small delay past its intended release date it’s now available in the App Store. 1-bit Ninja is a platforming game that's an homage to the classic handheld gaming systems of the 80s, but with a modern technical twist. At any point in the game you can tilt the perspective, exposing the previously flat 2D terrain as a 3D environment à la Paper Mario. It’s a neat effect, but also one that impacts the gameplay as it allows you to discover hidden aspects of a level, which makes for one of the most unique platforming experiences in the App Store.

The first thing to notice about 1-bit Ninja is that it completely nails the retro look and feel that it was going for. The game looks like it could have launched right beside Super Mario Land on the Game Boy two decades ago and would have fit right in. Despite the simplistic, blocky pixel graphics, there still manages to be a ton of character and style in 1-bit Ninja’s visuals. Those without a fondness for the handheld gaming graphics of yesteryear may not be so impressed, but for the rest of us the look of 1-bit Ninja should bring back memories of the good ol’ days.

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Continuity is a pretty awesome Flash game. It won the Best Student Game award at 2010 Independent Games Festival and the Gameplay Innovation Award at IndieCade 2010, so it clearly has some indie cred. Sadly, it also has a huge flaw that most Flash games share—it isn't on iOS. I'm willing to forgive that, though, because we just got an even bigger dose of awesome on iOS in Continuity 2: The Continuation [$0.99].

Continuity 2 is a mind-bending puzzle platformer. Each level is drawn on a number of sliding tiles. You can move them around to rearrange the game world as you play, but you can only connect matching edges. This part of the game is like a simple tile sliding puzzle, though there are never more than 8 tiles to contend with.

Inside the tiles, you control a little stick guy by tapping either side of the screen to walk, and swiping upward to jump. These controls are serviceable, but they don't feel fluid. That's okay, though—after a quick introduction to the basics, you won't be doing a lot of platforming. Rather than moving around the level, you'll usually be moving the level around you.

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I’ve been a pretty big fan of the Joypad Game Controller [Free] ever since we reviewed it back in February. In a nutshell, Joypad allows you to display a selection of different virtual controller types on your iPhone or iPod touch. You then pair the Joypad app with a desktop client via Bluetooth or WiFi which remaps keys on your computer's keyboard to the virtual buttons of the Joypad, and remaps mouse movement to the accelerometer. This allows the Joypad to control games on your Mac or PC, and makes for a very capable substitute controller when you don’t happen to have a real physical controller handy.

While that’s pretty cool in and of itself, the team behind Joypad have taken things a step further and released an SDK which allows any developer to implement Joypad support into their games natively, bypassing the need to pair with the desktop software. This also means that Joypad support can be baked right into iPad games, a feature we saw demonstrated at WWDC a few weeks ago.

And now we have the first actual implementation of Joypad support in an iOS game with Lars [$1.99], a retro-style platformer from Icarus Interactive. The short video below shows just how quick and easy it is to get Joypad working with Lars:

I’ve been playing around with Lars using the Joypad for a couple of days now, and it works just as flawlessly as it does in the video. The connection between the two devices happens automatically and near-instantly, and there’s literally zero lag when playing. One thing I do wish however is that developers putting Joypad support in their games would offer the ability to remove the onscreen virtual controls when the Joypad is in use for a more seamless experience.

Also, Lars isn’t exactly the greatest platformer in the world, although it’s certainly not the worst. In fact, it’s pretty fun, but it does feel a bit bland and repetitious. If you’re curious about trying the Joypad support though, then it might be worth the two bucks to pick up Lars and check it out.

The developers of Joypad hint that there are more games with Joypad support coming out soon, and I'm really curious to find out which games will utilize the functionality. It’s such a great experience playing an iPad game with the Joypad that I hope a lot of developers give the Joypad SDK a look for their own games. For now, at least Lars is a start.

Casey's Contraptions [$2.99] was already a great game before this week's update. In our review, we applauded it for its charming approach to creative physics puzzling. But there was one outstanding concern: for a game with a full-featured level editor, it really sucked not to be able to share new levels with the world.

Turns out the developers got right on top of fixing that problem, because the newly released 1.1 update adds a global level sharing system. You can still share your contraptions with just your friends by email, but now you also have the option to share with the whole world. You can also download other users' creations by heading to the My Contraptions menu and hitting the Download Contraptions button. This takes you to a website that lists all the published contraptions, which you can grab with the tap of a button.

This leads to a new problem that anyone should be glad to have—an overabundance of choice. Thankfully users need to successfully play through their levels to post them, so there are no worries about broken levels. But given how popular level sharing is already, I won't be surprised if a ranking system shows up soon.

For those of you playing with children or family members, there's more good news—a user profile system has been added with support for up to six individual players. There are also a few bug fixes and tweaks to round things out.

It sounds like the next update will give us even more reason to keep playing. According to the developer, there are plans for a new location, new items, and the highly-anticipated iPhone version. The iPad version should be going universal too. Great news all around for Casey's Contraptions.