We’ve been hearing for a while that a mobile version of Battlefield 3 will launch alongside the PC and console releases later this fall. While we still don’t have confirmation on that, we at least have some additional confirmation that Battlefield 3 is coming to iOS. EA confirmed this to Pocket Gamer, though left any other meaningful details out for the time being.

If Bad Company 2 for mobile [$2.99 / Free] was a solid indication of future direction for the mobile versions of DICE’s shooters, chances are BF3 for mobile will follow the events of its source material. BF3 proper is set in Iraq during 2014, just as an earthquake ravages the region. It follows the story of Henry ‘Black’ Blackburn and his five-man squad deployed in the region at the time of the quake.

(more...)

Emberwind [$0.99 / HD] is a delightful 2d action adventure side-scrolling platformer with fantasy themes, published by Chillingo and ported to IOS by Innogiant. It was originally released on PC / Mac by TimeTrap in 2009-- And yet, it's still a wonderful game to play today, on our fancy new hi-tech iOS touch screens.

This platform game has a fantasy storyline.  The city of Grendale has been besieged by gremlins led by the demon war-lord, CandleFinger. And the King has suddenly gone missing. As the local watchman, 'Kindle' the heroic fire-gnome bravely sets out to investigate. He rides into each level on a giant white snow-owl, called 'Wick'. His adventures unfold through cut-scenes and in-game dialog with the characters he meets as you unlock  the world map. While there's a storyline, you can still replay levels for better scores, or just for pleasure.

(more...)

Have you ever played Sim City and taken a perverse enjoyment from surrounding your residential zones in power plants, landfills and industrial zones while they wither away to abandoned slums? Or is that just me? Either way, there's something for each of us in Megacity HD [$1.99]. Despite its looks and inspiration, this is a puzzle game, not a building sim. And it's a little rough around the edges. But it's smart, and it has the heart of a city builder -- with none of the Farmvill-ian frills we're all too used to these days.

You're presented with a 6x7 grid of empty grass, and a queue showing the current tile you can place and four upcoming tiles. These tiles represent buildings and civic projects: houses, power plants, hospitals and the like. Everything but the residential tiles modify the spaces around themselves in unique ways. Think of it as property values - while the properties on the outgoing side of a water treatment center may not mind it, the properties in the path of the intake probably aren't going to be worth as much as they otherwise would be. Megacity HD applies that kind of logic to parks (great for the whole neighborhood), landfills (no one wants to live near one) and many other locales. As you raise or lower a space's value, the tile on it gets a visual upgrade or downgrade to match. Slums ahoy!

(more...)

It's pretty rare to see an iOS strategy game that not only has a captivating story, sound gameplay mechanics, and challenging difficulty, but also manages to accomplish all this while not being a tower defense derivative. Companions [$4.99 / Lite] manages to achieve all this and more, and leads to a great experience for those iPad owners looking to try out a real strategy game.

Companions offers two game modes: a quick play 'Single Map' mode that has you pick from a set of maps and jump right into the fray, and a campaign mode, which is where the vast majority of content lies. The campaign mode is a fixed story that follows your adventurous group as they take on hordes of enemies while trying to save the world. I actually found the underlying campaign story compelling, as the game’s writing does a great job explaining why each of your individual teammates ends up in this fight against evil. Also, it's refreshing to see each party member actually have a personality and want to accomplish the end goal for their own personal reasons.

(more...)

Here's a history lesson for you: way back in September of 2010, Parry Gripp (Internet celebrity and lead singer of Nerf Herder) chopped up a popular video of a cute animal persuasion and added his own soundtrack. Since then, Baby Monkey (Going Backwards On A Pig) has earwormed its way into brains some nine million times.

It's been stuck in my head for two days straight, by the way. Help me.

YouTube is pretty good at monetizing memes already. Its Partner Program gives creators a cut of the ad revenue, and some folks have made good money that way. But now the App Store is where it's at, and where there is money to be made, you can expect memes to follow. This isn't the first time (there are a few Nyan Cat games out there, for instance), and it sure ain't going to be the last.

(more...)

Just last week, we were filling your juicy brains with the knowledge that Kairosoft, the preeminent developer of cutesy mobile simulation titles including the highly lauded Game Dev Story [$3.99/Lite], was getting ready to release their latest title on US soil. We were fairly certain that his next title would be Mega Mall Story, as we spotted a banner for the game on their official website. And in fact, as of right now, our suspicions have been confirmed, as Mega Mall Story [$3.99] is now readily available in the US App Store.

Gameplay appears somewhat similar to the popular Tiny Tower [Free] where you are tasked with populating a fledgling mall building with various stores, staffing them up with qualified employees, and creating a successful and profitable mega complex of commerce where everybody wants to go to shop.

(more...)

Back at Mobile World Congress, held in early February in Barcelona this year, Fish Labs was showing off some incredible looking version of Galaxy on Fire 2 [$9.99] running on Nvidia's Android-based Tegra 2 devices. Here's the demo video of the graphical tech they were showing off, which admittedly was much more impressive when you saw it running on an actual device:

(more...)

In this week’s bonus episode of The TouchArcade Show, we sit down with two of the men behind Incinerator Studios’ elaborate curtains, chief creative officer Jeff Garsteki and chief technical officer Gary Wise. Card games and the creation of these kinds of games were the two biggest topic covered, but we also hit on where Incinerator started, what got it into mobile development, and even the future of the studio. You know, the usual.

If you’d like to give this listen, just hit those links just below. If you’d like to subscribe to The TouchArcade Show, you can do so right now for the price of $0 on both iTunes and Zune Marketplace. What a deal!

(more...)

TechCruch has the scoop on a fairly basic HTML5 game of Blackjack running on the Apple TV. While a browser-based game of Blackjack isn't exactly mind blowing, it's still awesome seeing the Apple TV taking these baby steps towards becoming what could potentially be a brand new market for iOS developers. Remember, the foundations of the App Store we know and love today was largely in part of jailbreak developers proving it could be done.

(more...)

Trainyard [$.99 / Free]creator Matt Rix is working on a new update to Trainyard. Over the weekend, Rix was posting images of an upcoming level editor that will be included in an update dubbed the “Engineer Update.” From the images we’ve seen so far, we can tell that you’ll be able to create and share your own user-created puzzles, as well as download others’ creations. It appears as if there will also be some sort of ratings feature, too, as a promotional “Features” button figures prominently on this piece of UI in particular.

You could already share your Trainyard experience from the get-go by uploading videos to the game’s official Web site. This, I suppose, is sort of a natural evolution of that side of the puzzle game’s experience. In our review in particular, we lauded this additional element, but sadly, we haven’t seen many games attempt to do the same thing.

(more...)

If you're not familiar with Venan Entertainment's Space Miner [$2.99], let me get you up to speed. In a nutshell, the game is incredible. So incredible in fact that it was our 2010 iPhone Game of the Year. It's an awesome modern spin on the Asteroids formula with light RPG elements, a lovable game world, and upgrades out the wazoo for your ship. Additional difficulty modes (including a super-difficult perma-death mode) add a silly amount of replay value, making Space Miner one of the few iOS titles I've ever replayed from start to finish multiple times across multiple difficulties. In other words, you need to check it out.

(more...)

Late last month, we detailed an impending update to CAVE’s bullet hell shmup Deathsmiles [$11.99/Lite], and over the weekend that update went live in the App Store. It includes a screen shifting option to give you more room to control the game on either edge of the screen, unlockable costumes for Tiara in iPhone mode, brand new background music hidden in the game, and a number of new DLC items including weapons from past CAVE shooters Guwange and Dodonpachi Resurrection [$11.99/Lite].

You may also remember us mentioning that CAVE was broadcasting a preview of the Deathsmiles update over UStream last Friday, and hinted that there would likely be other surprises in store as well. It turns out that there were a couple of pretty big announcements during the stream.

(more...)

This past June at WWDC, we sat down with the folks from Illusion Labs to dish on all things Touchgrind [$4.99] related, and the team revealed to me that their original iOS mega hit would be coming to the Mac App Store this Summer. Illusion Labs showcased a proof-of-concept video in January of 2010 showing Touchgrind being played on a MacBook Pro using the multi-touch trackpad, which led to our speculation that the game would come to the Mac with the announcement of the Mac App Store last October.

It may have taken a while, but Touchgrind has indeed launched in the Mac App Store, and it’s currently completely free. The game controls well with the multi-touch trackpad, though it definitely feels different than the iOS touch screen and does take some getting used to. The view is nice and zoomed out, similar to the iPad version Touchgrind HD [$7.99], which makes it a whole lot easier to tell where you are going while cruising around the skatepark.

If you’re a trackpad-equipped Mac owner, there’s really no reason not to head on over to the Mac App Store and grab Touchgrind while it’s free.

Are you the kind of person who has such an extreme affinity to retro gaming that you've let your lust for games like Pac-Man and Galaga invade every aspect of your life, but you've often found yourself disappointed that they haven't taken over your social media feeds? Well, Namco has the answer for you, and it's not part of a twelve step program-- It's PAC'N TWIT [Free]. This free Twitter client does what most Twitter clients do in that it allows you to view your timeline, replies, direct messages, and all that jazz. It even has push notifications, which I was more than a little surprised to see implemented.

PAC'N TWIT also has some strange mini game integration. You can spin a roulette wheel based on the number of tweets you've posted, and winning rewards a puzzle piece to a… iPhone wallpaper. Each skin has its own associated wallpaper to unlock, and apparently aside from the two included Pac-Man skins and two included Galaga skins there are more on their way via updates.

It seems weird for Namco to dedicate resources to developing and releasing a Twitter client, but it was also pretty weird for Taito to release a whole mess of utilities like Space Invaders Calculator [99¢]. Myself, I'm a fan of Tweetbot [$2.99], although I suppose the one drawback that it has is a significant comparative lack of retro game skins.

We’ve seen a lot of physics-based puzzle games since Angry Birds hit its current pop culture status, but Bizango Blast [$.99] is one of a handful that has something new to share. Rendered in 3D and presented in first-person, creator Olivier Archer’s game attempts to be a more in-your-face experience, while still being centered on perspective and angles of approach. Sadly, the only thing it knocks out of the park are its Unreal Engine visuals. The real meat of the game -- the physics, the puzzle design, and the canon play -- feels clumsy and unpredictable at the best of times, and flat-out bad the rest of the time. It’s a unique attempt, but not recommended.

Like most fixed-turret games, the nuts and bolts are wildly simple. You control a turret and the trajectory of its ammunition. The goal is to knock down physics-enabled constructs which nest a special object or objects. In this specific case, you’re firing balls at satellites sitting atop flimsy towers made of materials like wood or concrete.

The first-person perspective is actually kinda neat since it forces you to think around the 3D towers. Want to hit a satellite sitting behind a thick cement shield? You’ll need to pull the trajectory of the ball way up and give the firing mechanism just enough steam to crest and then hit behind the wall. You can also employ brute force tactics, but where's the fun in that?

Within these physics-based mechanics is where the game falls apart. Bizango’s engine is stupidly unpredictable. It’s also prone to technical errors. I’ve run into issues with objects hanging in the air with no supports on several occasions. Also, balls can clip through barriers completely or take wild bounces off of supports and deal zero damage to what you hit initially.

While I can take a bug or two under normal circumstances, these are catastrophic. The entire game is built around the core conceit that the physics engine is reliable and there just isn’t any actual reliability to be had. When the game introduces the egg (a breakable object that you're tasked to save from calamity), this unpredictability causes way to many problems. It becomes almost unplayable.

I’m also having trouble sussing out what the puzzles want me to do. Bizango isn’t so great at telegraphing via design, which has led me into spirals of testing each individual little shot I take. A bit of direction isn’t a bad thing, especially when you’re laser-locked into first-person perspective and having to be brutally precise with the trajectories and angles of attack. On a positive note, the cel-shaded art direction displayed in its levels is pretty cool.

Bizango strikes me as a game that needed more time in the oven. When it works, it’s satisfying and scratches a new itch that I never knew I had, but the times when everything clicks are rare. Skip this one for the time being, but also take note that more and more independent developers are starting to dabble in UDK. I don't know if this has anything to do with the significant royalty change or not, but it's appear as if we're finally hitting that influx of games we've been expecting.