This week’s episode of The TouchArcade Show is an awesome one because it sees the return of The Bearded One, Jared Nelson, after his Grand European Adventure. At the top, we talk about the sights, sounds, and tastes of Mordor, Germany, Paris and other exotic places. Somehow, we find the time to talk about games later on, but when we do, we cover a lot of bases. Topics include the next iPhone, the latest video game releases, Kindle Fire, and your e-mails.

If you’d like to give this a listen, go ahead by clicking that link just below. If you’d like to save a piece of us on your hard drive (and who wouldn’t) while also getting the next ‘cast the second it’s uploaded you, you should really grab us on iTunes and Zune.

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A few weeks ago we brought you word that WayForward, the studio behind a brilliant A Boy And His Blob re-make as well as a new (and good) BloodRayne title, is setting its sights on the iPhone and iPad with a port of Shantae: Risky’s Revenge. Now, we have the its first trailer and we thought it’d be hip to share it with you because we’re cool.

As you’ll see in the trailer, Risky’s Revenge is an action-y platformer. Generally, the more kinetic the game the more its mobile port suffers, but WayForward has done a miraculous job on the virtual controls -- the game moves like it should and plays how it was designed to be played in the first place. Sounds strong, I know, but our preview build communicates that the studio knows what it’s doing here.

We still don’t have a solid release date, but the window continues to be “soon.” We’ll make sure fill you in whenever we know what’s up.

What does a good-looking, yet buggy and monotonous game like Shadowgun [$7.99] really need? It needs extremely ambitious multiplayer, apparently. Madfinger Games has announced that it’ll launch bits and pieces of the game’s slated competitive online component in waves. First up: cross-platform team and regular deathmatch. Next up: more exotic, though still un-announced modes.

Love or hate the game, you have to appreciate the scope of what Madfinger is working within as it continues to try to raise the bar with Shadowgun.

What’s kinda striking us as funny is that there’s no ETA on this update. Generally speaking, that’s a bad sign. We rarely see iOS game competitive components release after launch and if they do, they launch a long, long time after initial game release. Hold on to your butts, in other words.

[Via Pocket Gamer]

Radiangames, an indie outfit headed and directed by Volition veteran Luke Schneider, is set to release its first iPhone and iPad game, Super Crossfire, with help from Chillingo. We’ve got the first trailer just below this text stuff.

The game caught our all-seeing eye earlier this week and we’ve gone hands-on since. Its psychedelic visuals and multitudes of explode-y bits and bobs are truly hip to experience, but the actual game part isn’t too shabby either. Basically, it’s a ramped up take on Space Invaders that lets you alternate planes of attack: you can move your ship from the bottom of the screen to the top as you please, allowing for some interesting play.

This is actually the third game in a series that started out as an Xbox Live Indie Games joint. Radian has made several games for XBLIG, including the woefully underrated JoyJoy. In our upcoming bonus podcast, we get on the honker with Schneider and talk about XBLIG, and of course, jump into some detail about his time with AAA and his thoughts on Super Crossfire.

No word on price or release date just yet, but that’ll come in time. As a side-note here, if you’re really into the business or philosophical side of why an indie studio would want to get into a partnership with a publisher, check out Radiangames' post on Super Crossfire and what went down with the title since its PC debut trailer in March. It’s a hip read.

Hardcore privacy advocates might want to think twice about playing EA games in the future, per a recent press release fired off the starboard bow of the U.S.S. Electronic Arts corporate battleship. What EA legends does is summarized in this hilariously buzzword-laden sentence: "The insights suite aggregates metrics, brand impact, social buzz, ad effectiveness, and ROI across all of EA's ad products and platforms." In other words, EA has came to the realization that they've got over 300 million players in their games worldwide, and will be providing marketers as much about you as they can to effectively run ad campaigns and dabble in other forms of sponsored content.

The motivation behind al this is actually fairly reasonable, even if it does feel a little creepy to know that EA is essentially analyzing you for maximum profits. With the rise in the popularity of gaming, combined with the forecast of EA increasing its audience reach by 30% this year, they think they're going to have a real shot at competing directly with advertising dollars that would have traditionally been funneled into TV ads.

It makes sense too, as it's not very hard to find someone in the advertising industry who is more than happy to tell you how the way lots of people are shifting how they're entertained (as opposed to, say, sitting in front of the TV watching network programming for hours on end) is rapidly changing. As far as what information of yours EA will have access to and will be able to offer advertisers, we'll have to wait to find out, it seems until EA Legend is premiered at the Advertising Week convention next week in New York City.

Here's a brief public service announcement of sorts to those of you out there who are still rocking the click wheel iPod and regularly use it to play games-- At some point last night they vanished from iTunes entirely. If you haven't already, now is a fantastic time to back up your existing library of click wheel games, as it's really not clear if you'll ever be able to download them again. A free Dropbox account would work perfectly for this, or really any other cloud storage service that you can just upload your games to and forget about.

Reading further into this move by Apple, it seems reasonable to think that this might be the end of the iconic click wheel line of iPods. MacRumors notes that there haven't even been any new releases in the click wheel iPod game library since 2009. The click wheel iPod wasn't updated in last year's iPod event either, casting even further doubt onto the fate of the device. With Apple pushing so hard into cloud-based services and the shocking array of media streaming apps available for iOS devices, it seems reasonable to think that the company feels there's no longer a place for the non-iOS large-capacity traditional iPod.

Seriously though, back up those games.

Infinite Dreams’ Jelly Defense [$.99] is a well-made by-the-numbers tower defense joint with an embarrassingly unorthodox and captivating art direction that arterially informs and fleshes out its otherwise boring core mechanics. Without this direction it’d look and feel as flat as a modern FPS, but its detail, vividness, liveliness, and the raw skillfulness employed in making it this way morph it into an experience.

Conventional tower defense games are demanding, punitive, and scripted pretty harshly. You usually have to “get” the vision the designer had in mind for levels, which leaves a lot to be desired from a play perspective. Jelly Defense doesn’t depart from these norms, nor does it do much to differentiate on any other level outside of its look. You build towers. Those towers fire on specific enemy types and have certain effects on them as they crawl towards an ultimate end goal. If they reach the goal enough, you lose. If you pick bad towers, you lose. If you try to be unconventional, you lose. If you spend poorly, you lose. There’s a lot of losing in general until you understand and execute on proper placements, upgrade paths, and memorize the order of waves. (more...)

You might remember back last month when CAVE announced that their excellent manic shooter Espgaluda II [$11.99/Lite] would be gracing the larger screen of the iPad in the near future. We even caught a quick glimpse of the title in action during their UStream broadcast, though it didn’t offer much insight due to some dodgy camerawork. Well today CAVE has sent along a brand new trailer for what will be known as Espgaluda II HD, along with some other interesting new details.

First off, and probably not coming as a shock to those familiar with CAVE’s work, Espgaluda II HD will only be compatible with the iPad 2, and won’t support the original iPad. The extra horsepower and especially the extra RAM afforded by the iPad 2 is a necessity in pushing the crazy amount of bullet and explosion sprites that are a hallmark of CAVE games.

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Commander Pixman [99¢] from One Minute Games is a retro platformer. In fact, it's so retro that the graphics are intentionally pixelated, the landscape is formed by a simple yellow line and the background is an old-school scrolling star-field. Graphically, this is platforming cut down to it's most basic form. And I'm totally enjoying it.

Commander Andrew “Pixman” Blazkowicz has crashed and must escape from an alien base by reaching the end of each level. If we do this fast enough, we'll be awarded three stars. And if we kill all the enemies on a level, we'll receive a red badge. Both of these goals can be completed in one attempt, or during separate runs. This allows a rapid enemy-avoiding run-through and a separate unhurried enemy-hunt, squeezing more playability from each level.

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A cute panda, a match three puzzler, and a summery theme with cute accouterments such as picnic baskets and watermelons -- where can Panda Picnic (Free) go wrong? I mean, if you literally think about the idea of pandas out on a picnic together, you immediately start smiling. Or at least I do. I'm assuming the picnic basket is full of bamboo, though -- not my idea of a scrumptious lunch. Maybe I'll hang with the humans after all.

Enough about food: Let's talk about how Panda Picnic works. If you have ever played the notoriously popular Words With Friends, at least one pat of the format here will look familiar, and that's the part where you play with online friends. Panda Picnic has one flaw right out of the gate, in my opinion, and that is that is does not have a single player mode to allow you to practice on your own. Your options are to start a game with a Facebook friend, a random opponent, or a local friend.

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We were shot some unexpected, but welcome news from the folks at Double Fine this afternoon. The studio -- which is probably most known for Brutal Legend but let’s not talk about that because ugh -- has launched its first iOS application: the Psychonauts Vault Viewer [Free]. Milestone!

As its name implies, it’s a companion app loaded with every slide from the game’s vault. The added bonus that the app adds is commentary from Double Fine’s Tim Schafer and Scott Campbell. In addition to learning a thing or two about the game, you’ll probably get a few laughs. Also, it’s free and universal.

Here’s a small taste of Tim and Scott in just one of the slides:

TIM: “Now, he’s way up in the air. Is there an artistic term for that? Can you tell?”

SCOTT: “Uh, air-spective.”

TIM: “And what is the dad doing? Is he unapproving? Is he saying, ‘why are you throwing my baby in the air?' "

SCOTT: “He’s probably like, ‘I don’t understand the fun in this.' "

TIM:“And you snuck in a little cleavage, too, which is your way… sneaky.”

In other Psychonauts news, Double Fine has also launched a Steam update for the title, adding in cloud saves and achievements and a small tweak said to make the its brutal Meat Circus level “slightly less punishing.” A Mac version of Psychonauts [$9.99] is also now live on the Mac App Store and Steam. Play this game, people! It's great!

Back in the depths of 2008, we had our hearts broken by I Love Katamari. The controls were problematic, there were performance issues, it was Katamari, but it was a mess. Now Namco is taking another shot at winning our love with Katamari Amore [Free].

Full disclosure: I'm a Katamari fan from way back. I got in on the ground floor with Katamari Damacy on PS2 and I've played every console release since. Over the years the formula has become a little stale, the craziness has started to feel a little forced, but I'm still a person who loves to roll things up. Sushi, cats, Ultraman, I'm not picky. So it's with a heavy heart that I tell you that Katamari Amore is a loveless thing.

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Metro Games’ Pixel Ranger [$.99] is a deliciously offbeat vertical shooter that executes on its old-school SCUMM-like art direction and its jokey It Came From Outer Space vibe well, but it’s an otherwise forgettable game on a mechanical level. A crippling jump mechanic that feels out of place, a horrific control scheme, and poor checkpointing hamstring the action and combine for a storm of constant frustration. Pixel Ranger looks good, is hilarious when it intends to be, and it has a lot of potential, but it falls flat in the face of its issues.

Like most of its breed, Pixel Ranger combines tons of overhead enemy archetypes and power-ups into an increasingly feverish orgy of upwards-based shooting and pixelated vomit. Its angle is that shooting should be methodical: ammunition is a finite resource and in order to get more, you’ll need to take out enemies and gather up what they spill onto the ground. (more...)

If you're not familiar with Johnny Two Shoes, you really should be. They're responsible for Plunderland [$2.99], which we thought was absolutely fantastic in our review. It's a super clever physics-based pirate game that, while being a little old by App Store standards, has aged wonderfully. It's even universal, which only serves to sweeten the deal further. Anyway, they revealed their next game earlier today. Take a look at the trailer:

Details are vague at this point, but I've managed to juice some information out of the looser of the Johnny Two Shoes brothers. Prevail is a game about the small planet where your character lives. It's on this world where you've got a happy, beautiful, and technology-free existence. Well, some jerk aliens (I added the "jerk" part myself, they could be nice, who knows.) abduct you and you begin to slowly realize that there is so much more to the universe than your tiny existence of building and farming. It's at this point where the game shifts to a more exploration-centric experience where you're discovering new planets, species, and need to decide what to do with them.

All of these things and more will be revealed in future trailers, along with additional "secret" features of the game. I loved Plunderland, and according to Johnny Two Shoes, "We want to make Plunderland look like sh*t." If they manage to do that, we're going to have one hell of a game on our hands.

A few days back we posted word that John Calhoun would soon be launching an iOS version of his classic early Macintosh game, Glider, in the App Store. Glider Classic [link] is now available for download and I've had a chance to put it through its paces. Let me share my impressions.

The good news is that Glider Classic for iOS is just what Glider was for the early Macs: quaint casual gaming with nicely frustrating puzzle elements and a simple visual aesthetic.

That simple assessment should be enough to let those familiar with the original title know that it's definitely worth a grab. For the uninitiated, let me explain the magic of the formula. (But I'll go ahead and toss out a spoiler: you want this game, too.)
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