I'm a bit of a closet Sims admirer. Not exactly a die-hard fan, but I appreciate what the series does in a lot of ways. I've still kept up with each release and although the iOS ones haven't been constantly solid, The Sims: Medieval [$4.99] still stuck out to me as playing to two of my weaknesses, wizards and sandbox play.

The most obviously different thing about The Sims: Medieval is the directed nature of it (aside from the setting, clearly). After picking your social type and designing your character, you're immediately struck upside the head with a few quests and tasks to complete that don't inherently feature screwing around, socializing and trying to make your Sim make kissy faces at other Sims.

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I want to love Madfinger's Shadowgun [$7.99]. I really do. It's a lovely looking game, one of the best on iOS, but it's so riddled with holes, crashes, bugs and repetition, it's easier to walk away frustrated than in awe of it.

You play John Slade, a brute with a gun hired to bring back a mad scientist. There's a whole back-story about how corporations rule the world and whatnot, but none of that makes a difference to the core of the game. It's basically you and your A.I. making bad jokes at each other while a mad scientist is on the loose causing havoc.

Shadowgun is a looker in all respects and running it on both an iPhone 3GS and an iPad produces amazing results (although, text is incredibly blurry on the 3GS). If you look closely, you can see some of the tricks Madfinger used to make it run and look the way it does, but as far as the environments go, it's hard not to sit with your mouth agape in awe.

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Big Blue Bubble’s Fling a Thing [99¢] is one of those simplistic games with an almost indescribable appeal. Its core mechanic is so refined and entertaining and its constituent parts exist in such a strong harmony that you can’t escape re-visiting it. Fling a Thing is great because of the sum of its parts – the sound direction, the presentation, the action, and even the level progression system live to serve each other and it makes for a good time over and over again.

Fling a Thing is what happens when a studio takes the Doodle Jump formula and gives it structure, and then swaps the alien for an insect that has a suction-cup for a mouth. In the game, you control a sticky-mouthed "Thing" that adheres to glass panes. By grabbing its tail, you gain the power to fling the Thing in an arc. Sometimes you’ll need to attach to other bits of glass, but more often you’ll be flinging to bubbles, which act as a puzzle device. (more...)

When it comes to the crowded Tower Defense genre, a game truly needs to take an innovative (or extremely well-produced) approach in order to make its mark. Unfortunately, Tiny Defense [$0.99] doesn’t really satisfy this lofty goal. Sure, Tiny Defense manages to take the core gameplay of Plants vs Zombies and offer a twist on the traditional formula (as well as a vastly different setting), but it just doesn’t offer any sort of gameplay  experience that can’t be found in better games in the genre.

As mentioned above, Tiny Defense closely mimics tower defense gameplay made popular by Plants vs Zombies – gamers place various attacking and support units on the right side of the screen in order to defend against baddies coming in from the left. If any enemies get to the other side, you lose a life. Lose enough lives, and the game is over. Tiny Defense differs somewhat in its theme and perspective. Instead of plants, you control a variety of robotic units that are defended against evil (and usually much bigger) robots. Also, instead of the gameplay arena taking place from a top-down perspective, Tiny Defense has a purely 2D perspective.

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Earlier this month we brought news of Elite Systems' initiative to expand on their ongoing retro rebirth efforts and bring a host of classics of old to iOS -- those that originated on platforms beyond the ZX Spectrum, which was their initial source platform. Studio co-founder Steve Wilcox was kind enough to provide us with builds of the first wave of titles that will soon arrive in the Elite Collection of 8-bit home computer games to share with our readers.

The first Elite Collection titles that will arrive in the App Store are Datasoft's 1987 magical platformer Black Magic, Image Works' lovely 1992 release First Samurai, and the frantic 1992 space shooter Enforcer from Manfred Trenz. Every one of these titles is very well implemented in iOS and is among the top tier of games to be found on the 8-bit platforms of decades past.

Let's have a look.

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Whoa, it's Wednesday again, and what a Wednesday it's been. Crazy announcements everywhere between all the Amazon stuff this morning and things leaking out of the Unity's Unite convention like Bladeslinger and some other surprises behind the scenes (potentially… even… contests) has had me as one busy bee. So, excuse this extraordinarily late "Coming Tonight" soon to be "Out Now" post!

Anyway, on with the show!

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Yesterday we posted a great video on rapid prototyping in Unity, and among other comments came confusion as to why we're focusing on Unity lately. This, my friends, is why. Aside from having a real cool company culture, Unity is powering some downright incredible iOS titles recently, and it's only getting better. Anyway, Bladeslinger was announced mere moments ago, and the trailer has sent my monocle blasting off into space:

Watch that trailer. Seriously, just watch it. Then watch it again, make sure you're viewing it in HD, and kick it into full screen. If Luma Arcade is to be believed, this is what it will look like on current-gen devices.

So what do we know about the game? Not a whole lot just yet, aside from a vague description and a bullet list of features. It's a third person "action brawler" where players will be pitted against multiple enemies (at once, apparently) in both ranged and close quarters combat. It's set in a dystopian future, which always is a great setting for a game, and comes packed with "intuitive touch controls" designed exclusively for touch-based devices. There's said to be an engaging storyline that will play out through "hours of unique gameplay," and there's even talk of high replay ability.

As far as release dates are concerned, Luma Arcade is sticking with the delightfully vague "Q4 2011", which hopefully will give me time to track down my monocle so it can blow right off my face again the next time they tease some more details on the game.

When a new "jumping game" appears on the App Store, it's sometimes difficult to feel excited because there's just so many of them, and they usually all feel the same. But, despite the genre being thrashed to death, it appears there's still room for a little creativity. Com2uS have recently released Escape the Ape [99c], which while definitely fitting nicely inside of the vertical jumper mold, mixes things up a bit by requiring you to draw your own platforms to jump on in real time.

Here's the story: Jo-Jo the curious chimpanzee tried to snatch a precious jewel, which was clutched in the hands of a giant gorilla statue. Unfortunately for Jo-Jo, the statue came to life and wasn't impressed with the little furry kleptomaniac. The thieving monkey fled upwards, into the trees, with the agitated ape in hot pursuit. ...And that's where you step in.

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Just a smidge over a year ago, Epic announced that the Unreal Engine would be hitting iOS. We've seen a great game or two developed in the UDK since (Infinity Blade [$5.99] being the obvious example), but most studios outside of Epic seem to still be feeling the engine out. Those cautious, early days might finally be coming to an end, thanks in part to Gyro13 [$5.99].

This game is sexy, pulling out most of the bells and whistles we've come to expect from the Unreal Engine. Textures, lighting and shadows are all top notch. But we've seen that before, and slick visuals don't make the game. Luckily, Gyro13 follows through with outstanding gameplay, an original soundtrack and even a hint of a story.

You play a pilot of a gyrocopter, tasked with rescuing people in a mine that's filling with deadly gas. In each of the game's 24 levels you're told how many miners there are to save and how long you have to save them before the gas overtakes you. You can survive it, but your cargo hold is unprotected and your passengers will die.

Speed is of the essence, but so is safety. Your ship is fragile, so a few slight bumps against the wall will blow you apart. Thanks to a complicated set of controls, avoiding the walls and obstacles can be a serious challenge. Your ship moves on a central axis, controlled by an on-screen slider. Slide to the right to tip your nose down and left to raise it up. That covers the steering, and a separate button controls thrust. You can also tap the screen to pulse certain obstacles in front of your ship. It's complicated, but that difficulty is fundamental to the game's success. It takes quite a while to get the hang of it, but practice enough and it'll click. When it does, Gyro13 comes together beautifully.

Rescuing the trapped miners takes skill. The mines they're trapped in are filled with all kinds of old equipment, explosives, wind tunnels and poisonous gas clouds. And those are just the early obstacles. The time limit is generous in most levels, but only if you can get through cleanly. Crash your ship and you'll be sent back to the last checkpoint, but with 5 more seconds on your total time. As time gets tighter and tighter, landing on those platforms to pick up the miners becomes an exercise in cost/benefit analysis. Is it worth it to save the miner who's so badly injured he can only crawl slowly to the ship? It might cost the lives of the other eight miners in your hold, and you might not save him either. Could you make the hard call?

It's an elegant experience, one made even better by the accompanying soundtrack. Tense techno beats increase the anxiety of the last moments of breathable air slipping away. A few other bits and pieces help Gyro13 stand out, including unlockable skins for your ship. Each level's introduction is voiced, too -- and while the voice acting isn't top of the line, I've certainly heard (much) worse.

Gyro13 isn't the most ambitious title we've seen built on UDK, but it is one of the best so far. I only have one major complaint: you can't see how much time you have left in a level, so if you've forgotten your time limit some of the hard choices become moot. Otherwise there's little left out -- even the currently-absent Game Center support is planned for the first update.

Still, this is a challenging title, and it's one that requires players to commit to an unusual control scheme. I grew to love those controls, but if you're worried they're not your style you can always get a few more opinions in our discussion thread. For the daring, though, there are miners to be rescued, and it looks like you're the only one who can do the job.

So, Amazon let the cat out of the bag this morning and announced its low-cost and full-color seven inch tablet, Kindle Fire (and a less relevant-to-our-interests new touch-centric Kindle). Fire is an Android-powered device, though you wouldn't recognize that fact from its UI alone. It’ll hook into Amazon's cloud, be able to stream Amazon movies from its download service and, just like the Kindle, connect with Amazon’s rich e-books store, but the one thing that really caught our attention was, of course, the promise of games.

At the press event held today, Amazon’s demo Kindle Fire had a pre-loaded icon for Angry Birds, heavily suggesting that Rovio Mobile’s property will debut with yet another tablet computer this year. After the event, Amazon opened up its Kindle Fire advertisement page, displaying Angry Birds Rio, Plants vs. Zombies, Cut the Rope, Doodle Jump, and even Peggle on the device. That page states that every app that touches the device will be “Amazon tested on Kindle Fire for the best experience possible.” The Fire has a 16-million color display, a resolution of 169 pixels per inch, and it runs on a dual-core CPU. No camera or 3G, though.

Fire will hit this November 15 at $199 -- a price that, if the device turns out to be good, gives potential owners a legitimate low-cost option to play Android games. This is an opportunity we haven’t really seen yet from an actual company with chops in the tablet space (excluding the HP Touchpad ridiculousness), so we’ll definitely keep our eyes on Fire as it grows and hopefully becomes the iOS-y platform that Amazon wants it to be. Also, it plays Angry Birds, guys! Whoo!

[Via Gizmodo, Engadget]

When Madfinger Games said that Shadowgun [$7.99] was going to be available on the 28th, I think most of us assumed that they meant at 11:00 PM Eastern like most iPhone games with planned release times. If you were planning on spending the day jealously cursing New Zealanders who have been able to get their hands on the game nearly a day before you, I've got a better plan: Just go download it now.

While we prepare our review, the best place to head is our forums where initial impressions and comments are rolling in. It seems the main criticism is lack of multiplayer, but Madfinger says they have "a lot of plans" for it. Some have even already beaten the game, and are reporting back that completing Shadowgun's single player campaign on medium takes around 5-6 hours.

There’s a grotesquely misshapen tiger that haunts my dreams. His butt is where his head should be. He implores me to make him whole again, but the more I try to help the more horrific he becomes. I move his parts around in a fevered panic to no avail, unwillingly transforming him from proud feline predator into a twisted terror that would give even H.P. Lovecraft pause.

He is the tiger that was on the plastic sliding puzzle I had when I was 5 years old. When I finally did get that poor beast into his god-given form again, it was as if I had exorcised a demon. It felt like the laying on of hands. Much more pleasant and significantly less nightmarish was my recent experience with MixZle [$.99]. No pictures, no waylaid arses, just a simple but challenging physics puzzler with a sliding panel mechanic.

The game is a series of challenges (ala Angry Birds or Cut the Rope) where you must drop a ball from the top of the screen and ensure that it goes through a hoop elsewhere on the screen. Drop too many without getting one through and you must restart the level. It’s as stripped down a conceit as you’re likely to find.

Don’t let that throw you off, however. There’s plenty of depth and variety here, due to the aforementioned sliding puzzle mechanic. Every level is a series of panels with one square missing. The others will either be blank or contain structures that you can position to divert the course of the ball towards the net. Early levels will be a breeze, as the correct positions for most tiles are quickly apparent.

The challenge steadily ramps as new structures come into play, which ensures that MixZle is fresh throughout. Rudimentary planks and ramps give way to fans, pneumatic launchers, and more. Additional difficulty is slowly mixed in, in the form of fixed tiles that you must work around, cranks which can rotate tiles, and other constraints. Also, not every tile with a structure on it will be necessary to solving some puzzles; it’s a clever twist that keeps your mind working.

The developer clearly has a mind and a passion for puzzle design. The game has over 100 levels, so value-per-dollar hounds will find no complaints in the content category here. A score is assigned based on the number of ball drops and tile movements it takes to complete each level, meaning perfectionists will find lots of replayability looking for that optimal solution.

On the minus side, the need to restart a level after x number of drops kills the will to be creative with your problem-solving. There’s already a point system that will tell me if I made a mess of things or took an embarrassing number of moves, so having the panels reset to their beginning positions is an unnecessary fail state. Not to mention I had some cool moments of emergent gameplay where I had fun setting up panels and just playing with the physics, and it always seemed that the level would reset right when I had the board the way I wanted it.

Lack of character is this game’s biggest drawback. It’s a smart game, but it doesn’t seem to really have a sense of play to it. The art is clean and the music is chilled out and conducive to puzzling; there’s just nothing in the presentation to get very excited about. With such well done level design, it’s a shame to have the vanilla assets and sounds turn me off to extended play. In short bursts, however, the game shines as a bite-sized brain teaser.

There’s much to like about MixZle, and at a buck for a heaping biggie-sized helping of levels, the value proposition cannot be denied. It’s not going to set the world on fire, but it’s a smartly executed twist on a well-worn genre. Pick it up, and you’ll find yourself stashing it in the corner of your screen and snacking on it periodically, like trail mix on a road trip. It’s a great palette cleanser between games, and if you’re like me, you may find yourself redeeming some of the dark shames of your childhood ineptitude.

So, we got a build of Forever Drive and decided to put the pedal on the floor in order to bring you some early impressions. And, wow, guys, does this seem cool.

With Forever Drive, Supermono Studios is taking a way smarter approach to user-created content design: instead of asking players to shape entire experiences, it asks that they mold a fraction of a blip of an infinitely expandable super-highway. By managing expectations before you even start creating, Supermono is freeing you from failure and the game’s players at wide from having to filter out tons of garbage. Most user-created content leaning titles, including Media Molecule’s venerable series, don't enforce any kind of control or creative constraint, which makes Forever Drive unique, and as we’ve been discovering, pretty fun.

Forever Drive is built by you and everyone else. There are no curated races, no lifeless campaign, and no attempts at narrative. Supermono is shooting from the hip and guessing that its approach to user-content will be enough to keep everyone interested in the racing part, which by the way, is more about the journey instead of the destination or wins. It's some next level stuff.

“What we've tried to create is a very streamlined experience — something a little different from the "load a track, do 3 laps, stop, repeat" gameplay that's become almost universal in driving games,” Supermono’s Dave Ferner told us earlier this year.

“We're trying to create something that feels more like an epic journey, with that feeling of discovery and wonder you get driving fast into an unfamiliar land…”

I recently gave the level editing portion of the title a go and I’ve been surprised by how deceptively simple it is and how graceful most of your projects end up being, even if you’re just goofing around and attempting to make something phallic. You’ll probably never make a level on par with 1-1, but you’ll make something that works and fits with the game.

Basically, there are two parts to the creation process: track editing and environmental editing. The former editor lets you build a small swathe of track from one end of the editor to the other, while the latter gives you the power to add scenery. Other tools give you the power to raise or lower the track where you please, as well as make fine adjustments on the turns you may or may not choose to have.

It’s not rocket science and I think that’s important: executing on the design concepts floating around in your head at any given time is about as hard as drawing your bedroom realistically from the mental picture you see when you close your eyes. By making the editor simple and keeping the bar low with the amount of content you’re responsible for, Supermono is constricting the scope of your ideas, but not their potential.

And while whatever you make will probably be gold, there are tricks to making a good track, as I’ve learned from Dave. He suggests paying attention to the actual curvature of tracks, how a straight benefits the overall design, other high-concept-y things. He also suggests checking out this article by Luke McMillan called A Rational Approach To Racing Game Track Design, which is crazy good read if you’re into design or production.

"One of the main barriers to mainstream acceptance of user-created tracks is the complexity of the editors -- we didn't want a PC style professional tool with a million hotkeys, we wanted a super-streamlined editor which was fun to use," Ferner tells us. "We honestly spent months on that thing -- it takes a lot of work to make something simple out of something complicated!

"And because our game relies on users to create the content, we aimed to create an editor that was almost a mini-game in itself -- there's even some unlocks which you can only get by building popular tracks, and we may even put a highscore table for track creators... it's all a big experiment, but hey, you never know until you've tried it!"

If a section of track somehow manages to suck, you’ll be able to down-vote it. After enough, it’ll be removed from the rotation.

The track I made while farting around (after the no-no shaped one, that is) was a simple “S”-shaped joint. The game automatically integrates in spots where players can drift to earn XP (which is currency used to purchase upgrades, cars, and more stuff for the editor) and it also auto-scaled the height in order to accommodate some lackluster building placement. The actual placement was a simple as dragging and dropping or pinching to zoom to smooth out the rough spots. You’ll see a few images of it if you look around this write-up.

We still haven’t seen the full-full game -- you know, the one with the potentially hundreds of thousands of user-created sections of tracks, so we haven’t really dug into the core of the experience. We’ll definitely do that when the game goes wide later this October.

On that note, this is definitely a game that’ll live and die by its audience. It’s a title that will rely on a community and a vast one at that, so we’ll have to wait and see how people react to it when it hits and how long they’ll stick with the user-creation component in a post-release environment. Provided there is an audience, Forever Drive has the potential to fulfill the promise of its insane conceit, and really, we can’t wait to see if it can manage.

A new turn-based iteration of aerial combat game Steambirds [$1.99 / HD] is on the way, and get this: it’s a free-to-play venture headed up by the original crew behind Steambirds, Spry Fox, AND the video game gurus over at Fruit Ninja [$.99 / Lite / HD]creator Halfbrick. Talk about a mash-up.

Phil Larsen, Halfbrick’s potential Hollywood movie star and marketing wizard, calls Survival the “ultimate dog-fighting tactical aerial combat game” and he’s probably right. I mean, what other game manages to fall under that description? This is why he’s a wizard, folks.

We’ve seen preciously little of Survival thus far, but we do know that it’s a turn-based combat joint similar to Spry’s original game in look and vibe. It’ll hit later this October with eight planes and 64 missions at launch with the promise of more to come. We’ll definitely try to get this in our e-office soon and give you the skinny from a hands-on perspective.

I've been chastised in the past for using phrases like "Unless you grew up under a rock, you've probably heard of...", but in this case, if you haven't heard of FarmVille, you've probably never used the internet. Or you're Amish. Possibly both. At any rate, while there's nothing new about the whole land management genre, we can definitely give FarmVille a nod for making it popular on a massive scale -- and not with just gamers, either. Facepalm all you want, but when your mom tells you that she totally built out her English Countyside, you have to admit that games like this have changed the gaming landscape in a major way (although good or bad, we can't quite agree on.)

Tiny Farm [Free]  is the latest offering in this popular genre, and I'm just gonna say it right off the bat so I don't feel like I'm holding back: It looks a billion times better than FarmVille. It trades in the deformed character style that makes you feel like you've stumbled into an avatar generator for a clean cartoon look, and I admit it made me like the game ten times more right off the bat. The cute little sounds the animals make when they get all swoony over you for feeding them in pretty great, too.

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