Mirror's Edge [Free /HD] for iPhone and iPad are dangled at a discount quite a bit, but today's deal is way too juicy for anyone without either to pass up. For a limited time, both games are now free. All you have to do is hit download on either or both, and then you'll be jumping around in the mobile iteration of one of EA DICE's most clever and colorful titles ever, for zero dollars.
This deal, by the way, is brought to us by EA's new Daily Deals program, which we've mentioned in a past post earlier this week and is offering more than just the aforementioned. Dead Space for iPad [$4.99], for example, is also being offered up on the cheap today. It's now $4.99 instead of its usual $9.99. You can read more the gory, ultra-atmospheric title at this convenient link right here.
We've beenkeepingtabs on Paradox Interactive’s Defenders of Ardania [$4.99 / Free] since its initial unveiling way back in February. While Defenders boasts beautiful artwork and a decent amount of content (including multiplayer), the majority of attention is centered on its gameplay, which attempts to move beyond the typical tower defense experience with some new and interesting ideas. Overall, despite some minor concerns with the UI and other areas, Defenders of Ardania is an excellent addition to the tower defense genre and is a must-try for any fan.
One of the first things you’ll notice when playing are the gorgeous visuals. The artwork showcases a variety of fantastical locales and certainly looks as if the developers paid extra attention to setting the scene for the entirety of the campaign. The actual units and towers look a little out of place, but I think that’s mostly a credit to the attention paid to the backdrops. Of course, heightened visuals aren’t going to necessarily make or break a tower defense game, but well done efforts deserve credit nonetheless.
Most gamers are probably familiar with The Behemoth from their Flash game turned console game turned HD remake XBLA title Alien Hominid, and their subsequent XBLA release Castle Crashers. You might even remember that earlier this year they released a game for the App Store called Super Soviet Missile Mastar [Free], which was a strange and humorous mini game straight out of Alien Hominid that was turned into a standalone iOS game that we thought was pretty cool.
Well, The Behemoth is back in the iOS space with their latest offering called Alien Hominid: PDA Games [Free], which as the title suggests is a compilation of the PDA mini games that you could play in Alien Hominid. It's basically a simplistic platforming game where  the goal is to collect the gems and kill the enemies in each level, which will unlock the door to the next level. It has a pretty cute grey and white color scheme which is a throwback to the PDA devices of yesteryear, and some well designed levels that will occasionally rough up your brain as you determine how best to complete them.
At heart, Catball Eats It All [Free] does not have a unique premise. At all. At heart, all you do is battle physics with your thumbs to keep a fat cat rolling around big shapes and eating stuff. Sounds a bit boring, doesn't it?
However, great execution is all about a clever take and excellent design, as fans of standout iOS titles will tell you. And if Catball Eats It All has anything nailed, it's in presenting a title that looks so wacky that you can't help but be drawn to its inherent weirdness and wonder what the gameplay will be like. It's actually like someone chopped up a bunch of weird photos of animals on the internet and made playable levels out of them. And you get to play one too. You're sold, right?
Here's some news I wasn't expecting. Andriasang.com is reporting that Capcom is readying an enhanced version of Mega Man X, the beloved Super Nintendo classic starring everyone's favorite blue hero, for release on iOS sometime this month.
The only catch with that is the game is only confirmed for release in Japan, but it's not a big stretch to imagine that Capcom would be bringing the game to other territories as well. In fact, I'll eat my blue helmet if we don't get Mega Man X in the US App Store at some point.
If you're new to iOS devices, or haven't been following the scene as closely as you should have been over the last year, Apple's year end feature App Store Rewind 2011 has an incredible amount of must-have games and apps that, in my opinion, you can basically just blindly download as they did a great job of picking out the cream of the crop.
Apple's iPhone game of the year is NimbleBit's Tiny Tower [Free], a great free to play little tower building simulator that we loved in our review. If you haven't tried it yet, you really should. Runners up to iPhone game of the year include Tiny Wings [99¢], which shockingly enough we also thought was great. Illusion Labs' Touchgrind BMX [$4.99] also made the cut, and, believe it or not, we positively reviewed it as well.
It's hard to come up with an IP I have more fond memories of than the MechWarrior family. Anyone remember the actual BattleTech Centers? After spending a few hours in one of those, you basically become a MechWarrior fan for life. Anyway, MechWarrior: Tactical Command was announced mere moments ago, and is the first MechWarrior title designed for iOS. It's apparently even been in development since 2009, and it utilizes touch controls to facilitate a real time tactics system of battling. Check out the trailer:
Over 30 mech options will be included, along with an advanced weapon system and all sorts of missions to complete. Details aside from that are vague right now, but we expect more information to start dribbling out next year as the game gets closer to release.
Hey guys! Here's a surprise, Chrono Trigger [$9.99] just came out of nowhere. Well, not entirely out of nowhere, since Square Enix had mentioned that it was coming this month… But after the rampant delays that Final Fantasy Tactics saw, my hopes that they'd hit this release window could be best described as "cautiously optimistic."
My first impressions are fairly positive so far with this port, mostly because Square has re-rendered all of the text and game UI to actually be legible, unlike Final Fantasy Tactics! We'll offer a more thorough review in the not too distant future, but in the meantime you can swing by the thread to check out forum user impressions as well.
One of our several iPad Game of the Year contenders, Anomaly Warzone Earth HD [$1.99], just got a great update and another price drop. The headlining addition in version 1.2 is iCloud support. Starting now, your save games are pushed to the cloud and can be retrieved on any device with the game and rocking iOS 5. 11 Bit has also continued on its incremental visual update spree, too. Multi-sample anti-aliasing, post-processing, and extra details on clouds and dirt have been added, as well as red outlines for enemy towers.
Regular non-Universal Anomaly Warzone Earth [$.99] has also received a price-slashing. It's now $.99 instead of the usual $1.99. The HD version, which as you have observed already hopefully, is now sitting at $1.99 instead of the usual $3.99. If you haven't read our review and don't either version of this game, do yourself a favor and check it out. It's an impressive game that's worth your time.
Dragon Shout [Free] has cleared the certification hurdle and it's available now at the low, low price of $0. What it does, it does well, and it proves a point. Games as deep as Skyrim should be embracing mobile companion apps across the board. Dragon Shout is an app that not only makes Skyrim better, but down the road, it might add an entirely new layer to the experience: social.
We wondered before why Bethesda or a member of its family didn't produce a Skyrim map app like this from the get-go. Later, we discovered that Prima has a one on the way. We're unsure of what it'll contain,  so we'll hold off on speculation. But this is a good sign ... and also kind of a bad one since Dragon Shout isn't official and all.
Fans of the excellent Battlezone-like Vector Tanks and Vector Tanks Extreme titles will be excited to hear that Black Powder Media has taken the baton from original developer Peter Hirschberg and is creating the next installment in the Vector Tanks series, Vector Tanks 3, on iOS. Larger in scope, Vector Tanks 3 will try to introduce competitive local multiplayer to the franchise, as well as "bold new graphics," new vehicles, and configurations. One problem: it needs funding, and the creators are crowd-sourcing that via Kickstarter.
Some of its goals might change based on hitting different levels of funding. The best example of this is in the multiplayer arena. Depending on the cash received, the team might or might not be able to incorporate world wide, Internet multiplayer. Or consider platforms like the PC or XBLA.
If this project succeeds, chances are that we'll see more Vector Tanks in the future. On the game's funding page, it's mentioned that this is just one chapter of up to seven in the series, all following the adventures of Vic Vector.
We're huge fans of the firsttwoVector Tanks games, so we'd love to be able to get our hands on Vector Tanks 3 at some point in the future. Extreme, in particular, was a sharp, focused, and really well-executed iteration that amped up the action in glorious ways. If the trend of bigger and better continues with each new game, Vector Tanks 3 could be really special.
For what seems like forever now, gamers have been clamoring to have the indie arcade platformer Super Crate Box ported over to their beloved iOS devices. And who can blame them, the game is awesome. This past August Vlambeer, the developer of Super Crate Box, made the official announcement that they would indeed be bringing their game to the App Store, with the help of The Blocks Cometh [99¢] developer Halfbot. And there was much rejoicing.
The plan was to have Super Crate Box ready for iOS the following month, but in the world of game development almost nothing ever goes as planned. Yesterday, Vlambeer updated their blog with word that at long last, Super Crate Box for iOS was finished and had been shipped off to Apple for their approval. Again, there was much rejoicing.
Did you love shooting galleries as a kid? Ever pretend that you were a Wild West sheriff? Have you ever rationalized killing hundreds of people by pretending that they’re just plywood target practice cutouts? If you answered yes to at least one of the above, you are going to love McGyro [99¢]!
McGyro is a first-person shooter that utilizes your device’s internal gyroscope to aim at bad guys. You play as Sheriff McGyro (originally leading me to hope that this was some kind of Blazing Saddles/MacGyver hybrid; alas, no), a small town Wild West law enforcement officer who can’t handle the idea of killing actual living things, so he envisions them as plywood cutouts instead. (Kind of like when people tell you to imagine the audience is naked before you give a speech, but with more murdering and less nudity.)
Today, 5th Cell and Warner Bros. unleashed an update to Scribblenauts Remix [$2.99], the iOS port of the popular franchise from the Nintendo DS. The big new feature in this update is something they're calling Scribblespeak. Scribblenauts is a game where you're able to type in just about anything you can think of, complete with descriptive adjectives, and it will be created for you within the game. This is intended to be the way you solve the many puzzles in the game, as you can create objects that you need to complete the tasks that allow you to pass a level.
However, while that's all well and good, the serious fun in Scribblenauts Remix is just thinking up the craziest objects or creatures that you possibly can, and then making them fight each other. At least, that's how I get my kicks, and that goes for just about everybody I know too. This sandbox-like aspect of Scribblenauts Remix is the thing that ensures this wonderful little app will never leave my device.
Holy jeez! We're pretty used to the typical Wednesday onslaught of new releases in the App Store, but today has been a truly insane undertaking. Between Batman making a surprise drop from the shadows and into the App Store with Arkham City Lockdown, the exciting OnLive iOS client finally seeing the light of day (soon anyway), and the normal barrage of new releases we usually see every week, it's been a wild roller coaster ride of iOS craziness. To top it off, Eli is out in Finland hobnobbing with The Mighty Eagle, ensuring that Brad and I are up to our ear balls in busy work.
It's all good though, as I arose from my normal coma-like state to spend some quality time with Batman, and Brad has been pumping out posts with the same vigor that I'd imagine he pumps iron with. At any rate, that should explain why you're seeing the Wednesday night release post on a very early Thursday morning, but that doesn't mean there aren't some great new title to check out on your iOS devices.
Mirror's Edge [Free /HD] for iPhone and iPad are dangled at a discount quite a bit, but today's deal is way too juicy for anyone without either to pass up. For a limited time, both games are now free. All you have to do is hit download on either or both, and then you'll be jumping around in the mobile iteration of one of EA DICE's most clever and colorful titles ever, for zero dollars.
If you're new to iOS devices, or haven't been following the scene as closely as you should have been over the last year, Apple's year end feature 
One of our several iPad Game of the Year contenders, 
Dragon Shout [
Did you love shooting galleries as a kid? Ever pretend that you were a Wild West sheriff? Have you ever rationalized killing hundreds of people by pretending that they’re just plywood target practice cutouts? If you answered yes to at least one of the above, you are going to love McGyro [
Today, 5th Cell and Warner Bros. unleashed an update to 
