Korean game developer Gamevil released their latest entry in the Baseball Superstars series last night with Baseball Superstars 2010 [App Store]. According to Gamevil, the original Baseball Superstars is the best selling baseball game on the App Store, and given my experience with Baseball Superstars 2010 so far, it's safe to say they've got another hit on their hands.

Baseball Superstars 2010 is a full featured baseball game with multiple game modes ranging from simple exhibition games to full seasons or homerun derbies. What sets the game apart from the pack are the RPG elements that allow you to create your own pitcher or batter and build their statistics in "My League" mode.

Various exercises and social events are available to train your players along with items to purchase such as bats and shoes with your annual salary. Once you have built up your players (up to 4 batters and 2 pitchers), you can use those players in the full season mode where you will need to manage your team's ability to work together as well as their morale.

If this sounds crazy, that's because it is. Both Baseball Superstars games have this odd mixture of really solid Baseball gameplay and these strange RPG elements that seem silly at first but start to have the same allure as leveling up any character in an RPG. I've never really been a sports gamer, but the RPG elements in the original Baseball Superstars really sucked me in, and the sequel is doing the same.

There's an additional level to the lovable absurdity in Baseball Superstars 2010 with the included "super" players. There is a pitcher that's a robot, a batter who is some kind of nurse, and in a game I just played the opposing team's pitcher performed a super move turning all the baseballs they pitched into bombs. These crazy components to the game with the RPG elements mentioned earlier somehow really make this game appeal to me, and I'm not even a baseball fan.

Baseball Superstars 2010 also offers an interesting solution to online multiplayer. Everything is done via a asynchronous match mode where you can go online to search for teams to play. In this mode, you're essentially downloading the player statistics of the team you select and playing against them locally on your device.

Sure, it's not real-time multiplayer, but the ability to download your friend's team and play against them when you have time should fit in well with the portable gaming habits of a lot of iPhone gamers where you're only playing in small increments while you're on the go.

If you don't want to get involved in a full baseball game, the homerun derbies and missions are great for playing for a few minutes at a time. Competing in both of these game modes will earn points that you can then spend to unlock additional characters and buy items.

Gamevil released the following gameplay trailer:

[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]

Similar to how the Madden games work, Baseball Superstars 2010 is the annual evolution of Baseball Superstars. There are many small tweaks and refinements that make the 2010 edition worth owning if you enjoyed the original. If you haven't played a Baseball Superstars game, there is no lite version for 2010, but there is a Lite for the original Baseball Superstars [Free] that can give you an idea of what to expect out of the sequel.

App Store Link: Baseball Superstars 2010, $5.99

While Gameloft and EA are busy battling each other with their own respective full football games, NaturalMotion is taking a different approach in tackling the sport. Backbreaker Football: Tackle Alley is part tech demo and part physics-based mini game that takes a fairly basic game concept and turns it in to something really fun.

The gameplay of Backbreaker is structured in to a series of challenges where you run down a football field juking, spinning, and sprinting past defenders attempting to tackle you. You run by tilting your device forward, and the direction you run is controlled by tilting left or right similar to how you would control a racing game.

The different levels start simple, initially only asking you to evade a few defenders on a wide open field. Backbreaker quickly adds a twist with the inclusion of red lines on the field that you must run between without getting tackled. Step across one of these lines and you have to start the whole level over.

The red boundaries are eventually joined by zones on the field that award extra points when you run across them and during the last half of the game you will be darting all over the field both to stay in bounds and to rack up extra points.

The best (and by far my favorite) way to rack up points is by showboating. After you evade the last defender in a level, the showboat button will light up on screen. Holding this button down makes your player start one of a few included showboating animations such as spreading your arms out or high stepping. It's not that simple though, as the defending players will still chase after you after they get back up from their failed tackle.

This creates a hilarious balancing act between showboating for maximum points, but still making it to the end zone without being tackled. Since you don't have a very good view behind you, it's not uncommon to need to switch from showboating to sprinting, only to barely score a touchdown without being taken down.

Since there are only a few players to be rendered on screen at once, Backbreaker has much better player models than Gameloft's and EA's football offerings. Also, with the addition of the impressive morpheme physics engine, no two tackles are ever the same. After each tackle you're offered an instant replay, and I oddly found myself watching them quite often. Like most games that rely on ragdoll physics, there can be some funny (and highly unrealistic) anomalies, but by and large the tackle animations really are fun to watch.

Backbreaker is an unlicensed football game, so there are no NFL teams or players to be found anywhere within the game. Instead, there are a few generic teams bundled in for you to choose from. Your player can also be customized with skin color, number, and even your name which actually appears in game on the back of your jersey.

[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]

Five different sets of challenges are included, with 10 waves of defenders in each challenge. Bronze, silver, or gold helmets are awarded depending on your score, and you can revisit challenges as many times as you'd like to get gold helmets in everything. Once you complete the challenge mode, you can take a crack at endurance mode where you have to run through all 50 waves of defenders for one score total. There is allegedly some secret content that is unlocked when you beat the endurance mode, but I've been unable to successfully do that yet.

So I suppose the inevitable question here is whether or not Backbreaker is worth owning if you already have Madden 10 or NFL 2010. I think there is room for both (or all three) on your iPhone if you're a football fan. While EA and Gameloft's offerings provide a more complete football experience, Backbreaker is a fun mini game with cool graphics and animations that seems more accessible for playing in short bursts due to the simplicity of the game.

The best way I've come up with to describe Backbreaker is that it's the Doodle Jump of football. There isn't anything overly technical about the gameplay, but it has a strangely compelling aspect to it, especially as you're high stepping to the end zone.

Backbreaker Football: Tackle Alley has been submitted to the App Store and should be available soon.

Gameloft's Real Soccer 2010 is now available both Internationally and in the U.S. The game first appeared in international App Stores just a few days ago as Real Football 2010 with the U.S. version finally arriving tonight. The game, of course, is a followup to Real Soccer 2009 which was well received at the time. Gameloft has since added more content, better controls, online multiplayer and YouTube uploads of replays.

The early impressions from International adopters of the game found that the controls were indeed much enhanced, but early online multiplayer games have been laggy, from Metzas:

-The game is indeed improved from last year, but not in a major way. It is still in essence a dumbed down PS1-era Pro Evo clone.
-The controls are greatly improved. No fixed digital controls any more, the players run accordingly depending on the position of the analog stick and in all they feel smooth.
-The online experience so far has been disapointing. Having played 3 matches so far, each and every one of them had so much lag it was practically non playable (at least not enjoyable) so at this point at least, I wouldn't position the mode as a counterpoint to other app store offerings.

We'll have to spend some time with the U.S. version to see if this issue persists with the online play in the U.S. A sample of the uploadable YouTube replays can be seen here:

App Store Links: Real Soccer 2010, $6.99 (U.S.), Real Football 2010 (International)

Everyone loves a freebie! If you don't already own these four games, their respective developers recently released lite versions for you to whet your appetite before jumping in to the full version:

Lion Pride Lite, Free (Lion Pride, 99¢) – A neat spin on line drawing games, Lion Pride has you taking control of lions and chowing down on the various prey of the African wild. Utilizing a Draw Race-like system where the speed of the line you're drawing determines how fast you move, Lion Pride is a great addition to the somewhat crowded line drawing genre. We enjoyed the full game in our review, and Lion Pride Lite is really worth checking out.

Uno Free, Free (Uno, $4.99) – What even needs to be said about this? If you've ever played the XBOX Live Arcade version of the game, the iPhone version is very similar. If you haven't, just imagine the classic game of Uno playable against AI opponents as well as friends or complete strangers online, all without needing to carry around a deck of Uno cards.

Dungeon Defense Lite, Free (Dungeon Defense, 99¢) – Dungeon Defense is similar to a tower defense game, except instead of building towers you position guards in a number of predetermined points on the map. You have a variety of units that can be placed such as swordsmen, archers, or axemen, and you need to fend off waves of attackers. The lite is worth checking out if you're a fan of the tower defense genre.

NFL 2010 Free, Free (NFL 2010, $2.99) – If you're looking to find out how a full-on football game works on the iPhone, give NFL 2010 Lite a try. We thought NFL 2010 was impressive in our review, but since then, Madden NFL 10 has also been released. Gameloft has attempted to make the decision between which game to get a little easier, recently dropping the price of the full version to $2.99.

It's hard to describe the Madden series of games as a franchise anymore, they've been around so long it seems that a more appropriate way to describe the games would be the "Madden dynasty." The first Madden game appeared on the Apple II all the way back in 1989, it wasn't until Madden '94 that the real NFL teams were included, and sports gamers would have to wait another year until the real players were added. When you look back at the 20 years these games have been around, constantly improving each year, it's no surprise that Madden NFL 10 [App Store] is as good as it is.

Madden NFL 10 was one of the titles we previewed at PAX and spent some time with EA who highlighted the many features from the game.

First and foremost, Madden NFL 10 includes all of the NFL players, teams, and stadiums. Around 2000 players are in the game in addition to 200 free agents, and all of these players can be freely traded between teams. Whether you want to follow the real NFL trades and move players around based on the official rosters, or just turn your favorite team in to a dream team of the best players, EA says Madden NFL 10's team management can handle it.

Madden NFL 10 was specifically designed by EA's mobile team, which means it plays nicely as an iPhone game. If you get a phone call, need to answer a text message, or quit the game for some other reason, Madden NFL 10 saves the play you were on and reloads right back at the start of the play without any fumbling around with menus, intros, etc. EA also says they have really put a lot of emphasis on play time. Every cut scene, non-essential player animation, or instant replay can be skipped simply by tapping the screen. While there is a lot of fluff in the game, it's all quickly and easily skipped.

While behaving as a good iPhone app is nice, there were two other feature that I thought really stood out: Action Control Time and Hot Routes.

Madden's "Action Control Time" seems to work so well it wouldn't surprise me if we see a lot more sports games imitating it:. When you're playing regularly, the game runs at normal speed, and while on offense you have buttons to sprint and spin. With Action Control Time enabled, however, the game slows down, and additional controls appear allowing you to do things like juking to the left or to the right. The ability to slow things down allows for extremely precise player movements and changes the game from being action oriented, to a more tactical experience as you're able to avoid tackles exactly when you need to, as well as make for the clearest path you can see to the end zone instead of just catching the ball, running forward, and mashing spin as many times as you can.

Playing defense in Action Control Time works just as well, and with it enabled you can jump for balls, dive tackle, or even go in for a big hit– A move that has a high risk of missing, but offers a higher chance of the opposing player fumbling. Again, slowing things down allows for a much more precise defensive attack instead of just switching to whatever player is closest to the one with the ball and mashing tackle.

The other cool feature of Madden NFL 10 is "Hot Routes". Before the snap, you can press the Hot Routes button and redraw the path of any of your players with your finger on the screen, you can even make nonsensical zigzags and they will follow your every command. This takes the 300 included plays and lets you customize them any way you want.

Passes are controled by tapping on icons appearing above your receivers heads that range from red to green depending on how open they are. When it's time to kick, the kicking controls work just like swinging in Tiger Woods PGA Tour [App Store]. A kicking interface appears on the right hand side of the screen, you drag your finger down to determine the power, then swipe back up to determine the accuracy of where you aimed. All of the player AI, detailed player attributes, and all the other inner workings are in place to allow you to do things like simulate games when playing in season mode instead of playing through each game yourself. And If you're a football statistics nerd, there are a stupid amount of different statistics being tracked with every play you make in Madden NFL 10.

My brief time with Madden NFL 10 was spent on an iPhone 3GS, though I was assured that they've developed the game to run well across the entire iPhone and iPod Touch family. Madden NFL 10 doesn't require 3.0, although you do need it if you want to access your music from inside the game.

Here's our hands on video with the game from PAX:

We'll have the opportunity to spend more time with the game now that it's been released, but it's overall a really impressive package that we expect football fans will love. EA has also announced that a soon to come update will support "multiplayer". Madden has been launched at $7.99 as a one day sale, and will go up to the full price of $9.99 on Thursday evening.

App Store Link: Madden NFL 10, $7.99 (for one day sale).

NaturalMotion announced their upcoming football game, Backbreaker Football: Tackle Alley a few days ago. They provided us a few screenshots that many were skeptical were even actually taken on an iPhone, insisting that they must have been prerendered. We received visual confirmation this morning that all of these screenshots are in fact real with the following trailer:

Backbreaker Football runs on top of the "morpheme" engine which boasts the ability to "produce animation of a quality not seen before on the iPhone and iPod Touch providing the on-screen characters with a fluidity of motion rivaling that experienced on home consoles." Likening the animations to home consoles might be a lofty comparison, but the way players are moving in the trailer certainly does look much more natural than most of the other sports games on the App Store.

Backbreaker Football is not a full football game, and instead is just a game of running down field and avoiding waves of defenders by sprinting, dodging, and spinning to rack up combos and score multipliers. Backbreaker Football is due to be released soon, and we will post more information as we receive it.

As if you needed one more difficult decision to make today, you can now either get a Subway $5 foot long sandwich, or five games that all have recently been dropped to 99¢. As strong as the allure of the meatball sandwich is, given the original price of some of these games, now is the time to buy if you've had your mouse hovering over the buy now button in iTunes in the past.

Castle of Magic, 99¢ – A really neat platformer by Gameloft, Castle of Magic has a level of detail seldom seen in iPhone games. Fun level designs, cool boss encounters, and a magical game world make for a highly enjoyable game. There is a down side to the amount of visual flair in the game, as Castle of Magic does have significant load times on older devices, so you might want to check out Castle of Magic Free [App Store] first.

Rise of the Lost Empires, 99¢ – Gameloft's real-time strategy game that takes place in a fantasy setting with two included campaigns, one for both orcs and humans. Colorful graphics and loads of voice overs make for a pretty fun game, but if you're the kind of person who sits down and plays through entire games in one sitting, Rise of the Lost Empires can be beaten in a matter of hours. If you're more of a casual player who plays games in small burts, the game should keep you busy for quite a while. Rise of the Lost Empires Free [App Store] is also available if you want to get an idea of how the game plays before purchasing.

Smiles, 99¢ – If you have room on your iPhone for another match three game, Smiles has more variety in it than most other similar games. Featuring 14 different game modes and 3 themes, Smiles has been well received by the iPhone gaming community and was even a finalist for the best mobile game at the Independent Games Festival Mobile Awards. If you want to see what all the fuss is about, Free Smiles [App Store] will let you get your feet wet.

Silent Scope, 99¢ – Originally a awesome arcade game, Silent Scope for the iPhone has the same wacky premise of you playing as the world's top sniper trying to rescue the President and the first family from terrorists. The controls make some of the boss encounters and tracking moving enemies fairly difficult, so the $5.99 original price point was hard to swallow because of that. At 99¢, Silent Scope is worth a try if you've found yourself enjoying the other sniper games on the App Store.

Power Touch Pros, 99¢ – An immensely popular series in Japan, Power Touch Pros is an arcade baseball game with a ridiculous amount of customization to it. You can play exhibition games, entire seasons, change the overall difficulty, enable or disable errors, and even change whether or not there is wind in the game. Gameplay can be as simple as tapping or extremely complex depending on how far you delve in to the options available.

NaturalMotion once again asks the eternal question of "Are you ready for some football?" with the announcement of Backbreaker Football: Tackle Alley, an iPhone game based on a mini-game from Backbreaker, a game currently in development for the XBOX 360 and PS3. The game takes advantage of "morpheme", NaturalMotion's iPhone graphics engine which allegedly "produces animation of a quality not seen before on the iPhone and iPod Touch providing the on-screen characters with a fluidity of motion rivaling that experienced on home consoles."

The iPhone version of the game is being developed by Ideaworks3D, the company behind Airplay SDK, a cross-platform environment that enables high-quality 3D graphics across a ton of mobile devices including the iPhone. The list of mobile phone games they've been involved in is pretty impressive and includes titles such as Dirge of Cerberus Lost Episode – Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid Mobile, and Project Gotham Racing among others.

In the game, players use the accelerometer and on-screen buttons to control their player through waves of defenders. You will be able to sprint, dodge, and spin past your opponents to rack up combos and score multipliers making your way to the end zone. Also included is Facebook integration to broadcast your high scores to your friends. Backbreaker Football: Tackle Alley will be available on the App Store sometime this fall.

Here is a trailer for the console version of Backbreaker:

While EA may have a complete monopoly on NFL games on home consoles, the App Store is wide open for competition between industry giants Gameloft and EA who both have rights to the complete NFL franchise on the iPhone. In what quite obviously is a warning shot across the bow of the U.S.S. Madden battleship, Gameloft sent us these screenshots this afternoon complete with some details on what is coming in the next NFL 2010 [App Store] update that should be live in the next one or two weeks.

The official NFL RSS feed has been integrated in to the main menu, it's also aware of what you set as your favorite team in the options and will show you news about that team along with general NFL headlines. While I don't see too many people launching NFL 2010 to get their football news for the day, it's nice to see games doing more with the internet connectivity of the iPhone than online scoreboards.

Player head shots have been added, along with improvements to both the offensive and defensive in-game AI, along with some difficulty balances adjusting how the game handles interceptions, passes, coverage, and other things like that. There will also be a new playbook with additional basic plays.

The NFL players database has also been updated to add Michael Vick to the Eagles and Bret Favre to the Vikings. This update is a nice turn for Gameloft who historically has not released content updates for their games and instead just focus on updates to improve performance, compatibility, or provide bug fixes. Gameloft seems serious about holding the line on NFL 2010 with the impending release of Madden 10.

This update alone would be substantial enough, but there's also a second update in the works with a release date that has yet to be announced which will add:

• Online, Bluetooth and WiFi Multiplayer modes.
• The ability to upload your best replays to YouTube.
• A special Zombies vs Skeletons match.
• Gameloft LIVE! compatibility.

While it remains to be seen how this battle between the App Store titans of the will resolve, these updates may make a decision to hold off buying until Madden 10 more difficult to stand by.

App Store Link: NFL 2010, $4.99

Since the announcement in late March, sports fans have been anxiously anticipating the Madden series jumping to the iPhone. We still don't know when it's going to be released outside of sometime in September, these three screenshots should whet your appetite:

We will post more information on Madden 10 as it becomes available.

Update @ 12:53PM CST (Thanks, TGR):

EA posted what appears to be the iTunes description on their Facebook page. Looks like they're going to have all 32 licensed teams with "life-like" players and real stadiums. Also included is the exclusive ability to draw your own plays using the touch interface, adjust the speed of the game, assemble your own teams, and even play in season mode with in-depth trades and other goodies. All of this wrapped up with the real voice commentary of John Madden, Tom Hammond, and Cris Collinsworth.