This past June Stainless Games announced that they would be releasing the cult-classic vehicular combat game Carmageddon to the App Store this year as a side bonus of their successful Kickstarter campaign for the upcoming franchise reboot Carmageddon: Reincarnation. We went hands-on with an early version of Carmageddon for iOS just last month, and felt that it was a faithful port of a game that hasn't exactly aged gracefully in many ways, but is still highly entertaining.
Well, Carmageddon [$3.99] launched internationally earlier today and has just become available in the US App Store. As promised, to say thank you to all the supporters of the Carmageddon: Reincarnation campaign, Stainless Games has made the iOS version completely FREE for the first 24 hours.
They're doing it right with this Carmageddon release too, as the app supports the iPhone 5 and 5th generation iPod touch widescreen Retina Display, iCloud save syncing, and is Universal. It also comes equipped with Game Center leaderboards and achievements, a slick YouTube replay exporting feature, and tons of control options. That's all on top of the fairly comprehensive content of the game itself, and oh yeah, it's FREE.
If you were a big fan of Carmageddon back in the day, then you are no doubt smashing the download button with furious vigor. If you missed out on it originally, there's no reason not to give it a try for free to see if senselessly killing pedestrians with your car in order to better your performance is your cup of tea. Hey, it isn't for everybody.
Also, our forums have been filling up with impressions throughout the day, which are skewing towards the positive, so be sure to check that out as well.
I distinctly remember playing Zaxxon in the arcades, although I’m now a bit shocked to discover it was 1982. What I remember most about Zaxxon isn't so much its amazing graphics, but rather a vague sense of bewilderment as I tried to wrap my head around its pseudo 3D controls.
This was the first game to introduce isometric graphics, which is how we used to have 3D games before the third dimension was discovered. Zaxxon’s visuals perhaps weren’t so much amazing, actually, as they were clever. Impressively clever, mind you. Whoever figured out a method of fooling our senses so simply was definitely underpaid, no matter what sort of wage they were on.
Now we don’t need anything too clever to give us a 3D-looking game; just a bucket full of polygons, an iPhone and thirty years of game development to deliver Zaxxon Escape [$0.99].
The isometric flight through an outer space obstacle courses is now a fully-3D run through endless tubes, which raises the first and most prominent question about Zaxxon Escape, and I expect it’s one that the developer Free Range Games knew the iPhone world would be asking: how exactly is this Zaxxon?
The iPhone’s accelerometer tends to be one of the most clumsily implemented features in games on Apple’s game machine that occasionally is used to make phone calls. It makes you look stupid in public playing anything with it, and usually the game isn’t responsive enough to reflect your strategic twitches. Cool Pizza [Free] is different. Actually, “different” is putting it rather lightly. Cool Pizza is downright single-malt deranged, has next to no story, and has the ability to turn your next commute into a fit of enjoyable seizures so violent you might look up and find yourself in a stretcher.
So, yeah, in a word, it’s fun. But this is also one of the first tilt-based games in recent memory that’s not just worthwhile, but also enjoyable. That it’s free is just a nice bonus. Then again, it might be free because it’s illegal to buy drugs, and this is about as close to a bad trip you can get without going to the bad side of town and talking to some bad people about snatching up their wares.
Here’s the deal: You play as a skateboarding chick who, if the iTunes description text is to believed, goes to the underworld to fight devils and determine whether pizza can ever be cool.
Good luck finding that out. Cool Pizza is incredibly tough, but also exceptionally easy to pick up and play. Developer Secret Library describes it as “a spastic screen-masher inspired by Space Harrier and After Burner,” which explains the stark color scheme, but to use a more modern vernacular? It’s like an over-the-shoulder Canabalt where you hit ramps to get airborne, smack organ- and bomb-spitting coffins with your skateboard, and avoid nuclear bombs. Also, you'll need to focus extra hard while a glorious, blistering butt-rock guitar soundtrack blazes in the background.
That’s the most concise way of explaining the game. And despite its kooky flashiness, its simplicity helps it shine all the brighter. Because the main mechanic, tilting, and then thwacking your thumb to attack to catch even more wicked air, is all that’s going on here. Really it’s like an old arcade game, where your biggest opponent isn’t any enemy onscreen, it’s your own skill and how quickly you learn the patterns of what’s coming up ahead. I died early and often, and then, eventually, started to die only later and slightly less often. And, believe it or not, that is an accomplishment.
Cool Pizza is a bit sized unique and kookya reminder of where iPhone games could and in my opinion should be going: Not porting yesterday’s console hits or draining your battery to render super-colorful 3D warriors that take up the entire screen trying to emulate a similar "console-like" experience.
When I was a kid, all we had to entertain ourselves with were 8-bit computers. None of your new fangled on-the-line multi-gamer consoles. Handheld game systems only had blurry black and white screens, but we were thankful for them! Oh yes.
We still had to use our imagination to see shapes in the piles of house bricks that we called pixels, but we didn’t complain. We could build entire worlds out of those colorless 2D platforms, and we were never bored. Never!
So, anyway, I look down at my iPhone ere three decades hence, and what do I see? Big blocky pixels, green-hued monochrome screens, scanlines that look like a farmer’s field and single button controls. But this isn’t technological stagnation, of course. It’s a raging river of retro regression from iPhone mini-game compendium Recess Riot [Free].
Lunar: Silver Star Story Touch [$6.99] is a port of the classic Sega CD/Saturn game, a JRPG with high-quality anime cut scenes, an unusually strong combat engine, and well-developed characters.
If you were into Lunar back in the day, or if you wanted to get Final Fantasy Dimensions [Free] but it was just too rich for your blood, stop reading and go get SoMoGa's iOS port of this JRPG classic right now.
Seriously, go, get on, shoo.... ah, wait a bit. The port isn't flawless.
There are three things that might get in the way of your enjoyment of this classic: the interface takes some getting used to, the anime is dubbed into English, and there seems to be a slow memory leak in the code.
That last one is scary, but it takes a long time to become a problem: about an hour of play on my 4th gen Touch, more like two hours on an iPad 2 (according to the forums). The result is a gradual slowdown/stutter of gameplay that gets progressively worse if you let it go.
The game lets you save anywhere, and any time but in the middle of combat, or this could be a real nightmare. A quick save, force quit and restart of the app took me less than 30 seconds, and doing that once an hour was no real obstacle to my enjoyment of the game.
Still, something that would be a rarely-noticed bug in a more quick-play game is annoying in an epic RPG, and Lunar is epic, the kind of epic that you can and will play for hours straight. Worse, a few players are reporting severe problems, finding the game to be unplayable as a result.
For me personally, the quality of the dubbing was the biggest flaw in the game, but I hate dubbed anime almost as much as I hate white chocolate. I suppose the overdubbed English performances are reasonably competent, but they sounded like so many hammed-up fingernails on chalkboard to me. To be fair, there has never been a port of Lunar with Japanese audio and English subtitles.
If you've played any of the game's previous incarnations, the menu system will be familiar. If not, save yourself a little pain and read the games short and succinct help file. The controls also take a little getting used to: there is a touch-anywhere virtual stick and a tap-to-move feature, as well as the somewhat bizarre option to play in portrait mode with half the screen taken up by a fixed d-pad.
That's a nice range of options, but none of them work perfectly. The tap-to-move feature has terrible pathfinding, pulling off "L" shaped moves most but not all of the time, and almost always failing at "U" turns. The stick is sloppy, feeling a bit like Cthulhu Saves the World's [$1.99] original swipe-to-move scheme. In portrait mode everything is eyestrain-inducingly tiny, but I used it occasionally for precision's sake in battles and in the menu screen.
The thing is, despite these flaws, I am totally in love with this game.
The game's protagonist is the classic boy-with-potential, but he comes off as a lot more real than most such protagonists, partially because of Nall, who might be thought of as Alex's daemon. Luna, his childhood friend, predictable love interest, and party cleric is similarly based on a cliche, but has a surprising amount of nuance to her character. She's tragically insecure, but that insecurity comes across as a character flaw you want to see her overcome, rather than a convenient subordination to the game's protagonist.
A large part of Lunar's appeal hinges on the likability of it's characters. They're all built on cliches, but they tend to outgrow their cliches and become surprisingly "real." A pervasive sense of humor serves to make major and minor personalities more human and rounded. That sense of humor gently introduces diversity and moral ambiguity into the game. A good example of this is the way that ordinary people (minor NPCs) have wildly varied opinions of people and places, and generally with cause.
The game's environments are varied and visually appealing, but after the storytelling, Lunar's big draw is a strong encounter and combat system.
The encounter system strikes a balance between action and turn-based RPG that works well: mobs appear on the map, and you can fight them all try to avoid them in real-time. Battles are turn-based and about as strategic as you can get without a grid or hex map, with movement factored in, and a balanced range of skills and spells to use. There's relatively little grinding and relatively little benefit to grinding, as boss fights scale to your experience level.
SoMoGa's port of Lunar was designed with pick-up play in mind. The ability to save anywhere, an auto-resume feature, and a shake-to-pause feature are all mobile-friendly. The handling of system options could be better, as shaking isn't well documented (I found it by accident) and the only way to get back to the menu is an option in the pause dialogue.
SoMoGa has plans for iCloud multi-device saves, and the devs have dropped hints about adding the Japanese audio (with English subtitles?) and other extras to future versions. One can hope that they'll root out the slowdown bug as well.
Like so many games these days, Lunar: Silver Star Story Touch hit the App Store with some some obvious flaws. The ultimate question isn't what it might become, but whether it can be recommended as-is. The short answer is "yes."
Yesterday, developer SoMoGa released Lunar Silver Star Story Touch [$6.99], a touch-centric iOS version of a classic RPG that originally graced the Sega CD and later made its way to the Sega Saturn and PlayStation systems. Impressions in our forums seem positive so far for this new release, especially if you have a nostalgic bone for the original versions in any way.
However, this isn’t SoMoGa’s first iOS release. Way, WAY back in July of 2008, they launched another port of a Sega CD RPG called Vay [$0.99], and for a limited time it’s now available for free to celebrate the release of Lunar.
Now, Vay was an old RPG to begin with, but SoMoGa did a great job at taking the original Saturn assets and wrapping them up in all the nice UI functionality that the iPhone offered. That said, it’s an old-school experience through and through, so probably will only appeal to a certain set of gamers. Also, it hasn’t been updated in quite some time so it’s missing some of the bells and whistles that you might expect from newer releases. Here's an original hands-on video we took of Vay when it first launched.
Still, despite its quirks, Vay is an awesome game if you like classic RPGs, and it’s a great game to have in your pocket. It’s always been $4.99 and this marks the first time ever it’s been on sale, so whether or not you will like it can easily be discovered risk-free by downloading it and trying it out for yourself. SoMoGa also hints that some update love might be in the works for Vay, so chances are it will be brought more up to date sometime down the line.
At any rate, it's a great freebie that you should jump on while you have the chance, and check out our original review for even more information on what Vay is all about.
When Ivanovich Games released Time Geeks [$0.99] back in 2010, we were fans of how the title took hidden object games to the next level with a unique and highly stylized look combined with a cool aura. With the release of Time Geeks & Friends [Free / $2.99], Ivanovich has upped the ante with the inclusion of asynchronous multiplayer. While Friends adds more of everything that made the original popular, the multiplayer is the real star, and makes this game worth checking out.
If you haven't played Time Geeks before, feel free to check out our review. In short, Time Geeks is a pixel-art based hidden object game that has you traveling back in time to various eras searching for specific people. At the beginning of each match, you're given the era, map, and targets. Your goal is to tap on all the targets before the timer runs out. Matches are scored based on how many targets you find as well as how fast you find them. Power-ups such as added time, cloud removal (which partially obscures parts of the environment) and power scope (which lets you easily find targets for a few seconds) offer aid for those that need it. Each power-up (as well as matches themselves) require coins that are replenished over time.
Last week we shared news of the coming Vectrex Regeneration, a universal iOS app that emulates the beloved Vectrex game console of the early '80s, with its entire original game library bundled in. It's news that got this retro gamer extremely excited and, judging from reader comments on the post, I'm not alone in this.
Today, The Penny Arcade Report posted a great piece detailing various aspects of Vectrex Regeneration, written by Anton Faulconbridge himself, director of the project over at Rantmedia Games. In the piece, Anton does a great job of explaining just why the Vectrex was such a special console, reveals a bit of behind-the-scenes technical hurdles the developers have had to face, and spectacularly explains just why it is that we retro game nuts are...well...retro game nuts.
People often make the mistake of thinking that the reason people like retro games & consoles is because of nostalgia. That rose-tinted, ‘things were better in my day’, loved-my-childhood kind of nostalgia. That’s only true in a very small sense. The reason that people like retro games & consoles is actually because (lots of) the games are so incredibly playable!
There’s a freaky logic in that – the ROMs for the Vectrex games weigh in at a heady 4-8K. K as in Kilobytes. Every email I send is bigger than that! Clearly, with severe limitations on CPU and graphics (CPU ran at a massive 1.5 MHz) you’ve got to find another way to make a good game, and that was ‘Game play’!
Have a look at a couple of MineStorm screenshots generated by the game's still-in-progress renderer.
Stay tuned for more details on Vectrex Regeneration as they unfold, and a full review when the game goes live in the App Store.
You know what? I like this whole ‘DotEmu porting old SNK NeoGeo titles to iOS’ thing that’s been happening recently. First we get Metal Slug 3 [$3.99], a fan favorite in the series and a game we truly enjoyed in our review, though we did wish for an auto-fire option and a way to not cover up the action with our thumbs while we played. Then, about a month later, DotEmu releases an update addressing both of those exact things. Thanks for listening, DotEmu.
Now today an update has hit for another NeoGeo port called Blazing Star [$2.99], a side-scrolling shooter that we also really liked but felt it had a couple of minor issues. Namely, lack of auto-fire and a sluggish feel to your ship’s movement. Lo and behold DotEmu is here again with an update addressing those very issues.
The new options are available right there on the mode selection screen so you can toggle them easily. With auto-fire on your ship just constantly fires, and you can hold down the button to charge your attack like before. The new control option is called Fast Touch, and makes your ship move at just about a 1:1 ratio with your thumb movement. I can’t even tell you how much of an improvement this is, I finally can enjoy the game without worrying about cheap deaths due to my ship reacting so slowly.
Listen up, DotEmu and SNK. Keep this up. It’s clear that you have the technical prowess to bring these ports to iOS with flawless performance, and your willingness to listen and act on player feedback is totally appreciated. And there’s a huge backlog of great NeoGeo titles, so get to work (please). And while I’m at it, this really gets me even more excited for the Raiden Legacy collection that's coming to iOS soon, also handled by DotEmu.
As TouchArcade's resident retro gamer, I'm quite pleased to see so many great retro remakes and retro-inspired original titles in the App Store. Yes, despite my Retina displays, most of the time there are jaggy pixels on my screen. And, like many other gamers who fancy a trip back to the 8-bit era, I keep a few consoles from decades past all hooked up and at the ready for when the mood strikes me. But, none of them is so lovely to fire up and give a go than the Vectrex.
News of an upcoming retro classic-gone-iOS has recently landed, and it should put a smile on the face of gamers that have been around for the long haul. Famed Amiga-era game studio Cinemaware has announced that King of Chicago, originally released in 1986, will soon be coming to the App Store.
The game, set in the 1930s, is an action adventure that puts the player in Capone-era Chicago on a bid to become the mob-boss of the city. Gameplay involves plenty of illicit activities such as gambling, payoffs, bombings, and gang-land drive-by shootings. The iOS title is being put together in-house at Cinemaware and consists of the original Amiga version of the game wrapped in Manomio's iAmiga emulation system.
Cinemaware has also been in the news lately for their recently launched Kickstarter campaign to develop a complete HD remake of their highly popular 1990 action game Wings. The campaign is targeting a set funding goal of $350,000 to develop Wings: Director's Cut, at title to feature actual 3D models, completely redone visuals, and a re-scored soundtrack, to iOS, Android and Windows PC. Cinemaware notes that if higher funding levels are achieved, they will additionally add "new missions, new diary entries and story elements, new landscapes, more & better animations, additional music tracks, and maybe even more combat sequence mini-games..." The studio is offerings a wide array of swag for many different levels of funding, but it looks like they've got a good way to go before hitting the minimum funding level by the deadline of Sept 11. And we would remind readers that, as with all Kickstarter campaigns, there's a chance things may not go quite to the funders' liking, as the project organizers modify their pitch to try to generate more interest and hit their goal.
Cinemaware's Kickstarter news prompted me to check in with the man behind iAmiga, Stuart Carnie of Manomio, who put together last year's release, Defender of the Crown for iOS [$2.99], in conjunction with Cinemaware. We knew that Stuart was working with the studio to bring the original Amiga version of Wings to the App Store, utilizing the same core features of his iAmiga technology that were used in Defender of the Crown. Stuart assures us that classic Wings is still on the way, as a separate item from the Wings: Director's Cut effort.
We will keep readers in the loop on these coming titles, with more details as they hit the App Store.
You miss a lot of video games when you're a twelve-year-old kid with a paper route. You miss even more games when you have a mother who insists on sticking half your paycheck in the bank, leaving you roughly $30 a month to divide between Batman comics and cartridges for your Super NES that ran between $60 and $80 apiece. (In fairness, Mom's lesson stuck with me. Did I appreciate Street Fighter II after three months of chucking papers at customers finally earned me a trip to KB Toys? You better believe it.)
It could have been worse. I could have set my sights on the Neo Geo AES, or Advanced Entertainment System, a home console based on Neo Geo's arcade hardware, giving literal meaning to the term "arcade perfect." (If you're too young to know what that means then get out of my article and off my porch. I also propose a haircut.) The $650 AES was a jewel for wealthy collectors, but unattainable to a humble paperboy. Plus, the cartridges went for $250 each. Each. No wonder Neo Geo's mascots never caught on in the living room like Super Mario and Sonic. Fast forward to today and you can splurge on an AES and must-haves like Blazing Star [$2.99] for... well, right around the same price. Or, iOS gamers can snag the game from the App Store for three bucks. Welcome to the future.
Way back in 1991, a little UK shareware studio called Team 17 released a top-down, space-themed shooter for the Amiga platform. Dark and highly atmospheric -- downright scary, actually -- Alien Breed and the enhanced Special Edition '92 version that followed, were soon hailed as bringing some of the best shooter action that Amiga gamers had ever seen. So popular were they that, to date, eight sequels have followed, half of those for modern consoles. And now, Alien Breed [$0.99] has come to the iOS platform.
Alien Breed drops you, the player, into a classic space marine type scenario. The year is 2191 and the galaxy is at the brink of war. You've just finished six months of dead-boring patrol duty around the Intex Network and were glad to be heading home. That is, before orders arrived to check out a remote Space Research Center which had gone silent on the Federation wavebands. As you approach ISRC-4 near the red giant Gianor, you notice an eerie silence surrounding the station. Something is obviously very wrong…
As we mentioned earlier this month, Team 17 will soon be releasing an iOS conversion of their highly acclaimed, Alien-inspired top-down shooter Alien Breed into the App Store. Originally released in 1991 on the Amiga, the game places you in a multi-levels space station overrun with hideous xenomorphs, on a solo mission to wipe out the alien intruders and, ultimately, survive.
We're happy to report that Team 17 has provided us with the release version of the iOS title a few weeks before it's set to go live and I've begun putting it through it's paces. And, while we'll save a truly in-depth look for our review, which will be published as soon as the game hits the App Store, I can share some initial impressions (and screenshots) with those who've been waiting for this one.
The original Alien Breed was followed up by the extremely popular Alien Breed Special Edition '92, an expanded version of the original that sat on the UK charts for over a year. The new iOS version includes the full original title, the special edition, and a new four-level campaign that, while shorter than the two original scenarios, provides content that's new to even seasoned veterans of the originals. Additional content is planned for release down the road, as well.
When Activision did the unthinkable and shut down Project Gotham Racing developer Bizarre Creations early last year, the pool of employees from the talented studio split off into smaller groups and went on to form a bunch of brand new companies. Two of those companies, Muffin Games and Lucid Games, have teamed up once again to bring the classic Bizarre Creations Dreamcast title Fur Fighters [$0.99] to the iPad.
Fur Fighters was a 3rd person shooter set in an ultra-colorful world inhabited by adorable animal people. But don’t let the cuteness fool you, as Fur Fighters maintained a high level of action and violence, and had a sort of twisted sense of humor and a ton of personality.
The iPad version is called Fur Fighters: Viggo on Glass and appears to be a fairly faithful port of the original. There’s all 6 original playable characters, each with their own unique abilities that must be used thoughtfully if you’re going to complete all 30 levels. The game is iPad only, and supports the Retina on the newest iPad, though overall it’s still a pretty dated looking game. Dated, but charming.
It seems to be a good port so far, but the controls are leaving a lot to be desired. I’m loving the personality and charm, though, so I’m going to continue plugging away despite the finicky controls. If you have fond memories of Fur Fighters, chances are you’ll have no problem dropping a couple of bucks to have it on your iPad, and you can head over to our forums to talk more about Fur Fighters: Viggo on Glass.
This past June Stainless Games announced that they would be releasing the cult-classic vehicular combat game Carmageddon to the App Store this year as a side bonus of their successful Kickstarter campaign for the upcoming franchise reboot Carmageddon: Reincarnation. We went hands-on with an early version of Carmageddon for iOS just last month, and felt that it was a faithful port of a game that hasn't exactly aged gracefully in many ways, but is still highly entertaining.
