Apparently it's the 16 year anniversary of the Tamagotchi, the tiny egg-shaped virtual pet keychain toys that either engrossed or annoyed practically everybody in the late '90s and early 2000s, and to celebrate NamcoBandai has released an official virtual iOS version of the virtual pet, which is almost too much virtual for me to handle. There is an Xzibit joke in here somewhere I'm sure.

As you can see, Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. [Free] is an actual digital recreation of the toy, virtual plastic egg and all. It has the same simple LCD display graphical style as the original toys, and you interact with your pet using three virtual buttons on the egg in a similar way to the toys too. It's quite the nostalgia scratcher, for sure.

However, there's also a more modernized view of your pet which you can switch to on the fly. It's more zoomed in, features some basic color for you pet, and also includes a pretty cool rock-paper-scissors mini-game you can play against your little guy or gal. Check out the contrast between the two styles in the screens below. It's pretty cool.

Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. also includes a bunch of neat fan service, like additional egg styles and LCD backgrounds to unlock and use to give your pet a personal touch, and the original batch of different pets to raise. Seeing as we all pretty much carry our smartphones around with us at all times, having a little Tamagotchi living in there seems to make perfect sense and is within the spirit of the original keychain toys.

The virtual recreation goes beyond that, though, as just like the original toys used to incessantly alert you when your virtual pet needed some kind of attention, much to the annoyance of teachers and parents everywhere, Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. delivers this same functionality in the form of push notifications. Except it feels like it's ten times worse.

I don't recall exactly how often the toys would bother you with alerts, but the iOS version sends a push notification about every 2-3 minutes, regardless of if your pet actually urgently needs something or not. It's mostly just your pet "calling you!" to say hello, or something. Either way, with each subsequent push notification my desire to let my pet just starve to death slowly increases. Yeah, that was pretty messed up, and I feel bad for saying it. Here's two different examples of Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. taking over the lockscreen in a matter of minutes.

Is my Tamagotchi trying to get my attention? I'm finding it difficult to tell. In all seriousness, though, I'm not sure if the charms of Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. are enough to overcome my intense hatred of push notification spam. Of course you can toggle them off, but if you forget about your pet for long enough and harm befalls them that's not exactly an ideal scenario either. Ideally I'd like to be able to toggle push notifications just for urgent things, and leave the rest of the responsibility of hanging out with and caring for my pet to myself.

Anyway, annoying notifications aside, the Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. app is actually quite well done, and is a cool gift for fans of the original toys. It's also free and ad-supported, so you can try it out risk-free, and if you want you can drop a buck to permanently disable the ads. Also, in a game that seems rife for IAP abuse ("Please pay 1 Tamagotchi Bux™ to feed your pet!"), it's refreshing that the ad-disabling IAP is the only thing you can buy.

Hopefully NamcoBandai can tweak the push notifications, but as it is if you're hankering for some virtual pet nostalgia checking out Tamagotchi L.i.f.e. for free is recommended.

2012 had a lot of cool surprises and good games, as you've probably noticed. But not all of those good games could be neatly categorized. This post is for the weirdos, the games that straddled too many genre lines or are members of genres that have too few rad games to sufficiently flesh out a "best of" post.

You'll see some oddities in this listing -- games that really stretch the meaning of game or apps that just have stupendous gaming elements. There's also titles that can be firmly categorized, and would have been, if there was more to celebrate.

It'll be interesting to see what 2013 will bring. Will we see way more card games than we did this year? What about open-world god games? New trends might have us re-thinking the way we categorize and the lists we bring to you.

For now, though, here's our best of the best of the rest of 2012.

Topia World Builder, $1.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - Topia World Builder has the creation and the emergent systems we look for in a solid god game, but shrugs off messy scenarios. In the game, you can build valleys, rivers, trees, and animals. Then, you can watch world you've created work. It's kinda wild.

Hatchi - A retro virtual pet, $0.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - Hatchi is a spiritual successor to the Tamagotchi. In the game, you hatch a pet monster and then care for it, subtly changing the way it grows and forms as you do so. The retro visuals and simplistic mechanics might be a drag for some, but for those of us who had a pet monster on a keychain, they struck the right chord.

Magic 2013, Free - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - Magic: The Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 is a brilliant follow-up to a rad series that not only show you how to play Magic the right way, but allows you to jump in without plunking down dollars for cards. It's also nice that the core action of Magic is front and center throughout. This is truly a joy.

Zombies, Run!, $3.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - If you like jogging, but hate the tedium that can sometimes come along with it, consider giving Zombies, Run a try. It measures the distance you run and all of that jazz, but it also tells you a great survival story in the process. The audio has some neat hooks in it that gets you running faster, as well as systems that reward you for the effort.

Shufflepuck Cantina, Free - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - Shufflepuck Cantina is what happens with adventure game meets sports game. Presented as a "space western," Cantina tasks you with dominating a bar's shufflepuck table, while also learning about the world's creatures, characters, and mysteries. It's weird, but we think you'll dig the game's commitment to seeing its premise through.

Organ Trail: Director's Cut, $2.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - Organ Trail is an awesome little satire that rips on Oregon Trail. In the game, you play as a survivor of a zombie apocalypse on a journey to get his friends to a so-called Safe Haven. Along the way, you'll have to hunt for food, as well as repair your car's tires and mufflers. This is one you shouldn't miss.

Micro Miners, $1.99 - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - This is a weird one. In Micro Miners, you control a horde of little miners and are tasked with collecting every possible scrap of resource as a screen scrolls eternally downward. Solid controls bolster the experience, while a great art style really sells it.

Skee-Ball 2, Free - [Review] - [Forum Thread] - Skee-Ball 2 is, oddly, a big favorite around here. It's a Skee-Ball game through and through, but it feels remarkably good, boasts a ton of lanes and balls, as well as a good amount of collectibles to obtain as you rock out.

Those with a fondness for canines and matching gameplay can finally get in on what us cat lovers have been enjoying since March with Kitten Sanctuary [$1.99 / Free], as the dog-centric Puppy Sanctuary [Free] is now available in the App Store.

Gameplay is of a similar matching style as Kitten Sanctuary that has you completing a series of levels to rescue a poor little pup who’s caught up in a cage. Once rescued you can plop your dog down in an assortment of environments and interact with them via various items and toys.

Puppy Sanctuary is free to download and try with a limited selection of levels, and the whole game can be unlocked for the launch sale price of 99¢ from within the app itself. There are no other in-app purchases beyond that, everything is earned through playing. Also, to celebrate the launch, Kitten Sanctuary sees a price drop down to 99¢ and there’s also a lite version of that to try.

Matching games have become a hard sell in the over saturated market of the App Store, but Kitten Sanctuary was like a breath of fresh air when it launched and Puppy Sanctuary appears to continue that tradition. Definitely check it out for free.

Remember the Monster Rancher series of games? If you weren't around for the glory days of the original Playstation, the gist amounted acquiring and raising monsters which you then used to compete in various battles. Sounds familiar, right? The catch is, the original Monster Rancher, at least in the North American market, pre-dated the first release of Pokemon by nearly a year. What made Monster Rancher super cool was generating monsters was by inserting random CD's into your Playstation. The game would read the disc, and utilize the data on it as a seed to create a monster in game.

This had me raiding any CD collection I could get my hands on to try to see what monsters I could find, and better yet, a basic breeding mechanic allowed for combining of monsters to get even better monsters. Subsequent sequels expanded on this, and for systems that could read DVD media, you could even generate monsters based on DVD movies you tossed in the drive. This might not sound very amazing now, but I assure you, back in the day, it was incredible.

Mobage's My Monster Rancher [Free] just hit the App Store, and while it's nice to see a Monster Rancher game on iOS devices, it's sad to see what it has become. Basically, everything that was cool about the original series has either been replaced or augmented with social friend systems and IAP currency. There's still training and battle elements, along with a few familiar faces for Monster Rancher fans, but, man, I'd love a straight port of one of the older Monster Rancher titles instead.

I admit without shame that I was a huge Poké-nerd back in Pikachu's heyday. The explosion of Pokémon's popularity coincided with my sophomore year of high school, and being nerdy enough to know my cool-kid rep was in the negatives even before I started lugging around a Pokédex with my textbooks, I wore Pokémon t-shirts and evangelized the games and cartoon without a care. I also saw new Pokémon movies on opening night and, surrounded by squirmy kiddles and their irritated parents, broke out in wild applause and cheers when the Nintendo logo appeared on the screen, which prompted all the kids to whoop and holler along with me (and the parents to stare at me with such loathing that I wanted to crawl into the nearest Poke-ball).

There is, however, one immediately noticeable difference between MonTowers ~Legend of Summoners'~ [Free] critters and Nintendo's kid-friendly goldmine. Amid the fantasy- and horror-themed creatures you will amass, you'll also accumulate anime girls so scantily clad and busty they make Lara Croft look like a teenie bopper who has only just started to blossom. Fortunately, unlike the milky-white flesh of your personal monster-hunting assistant (and what soft, creamy, heaving flesh it is), there is much more to MonTowers than meets the eye.

(more...)

TouchArcade Rating:

Bandai is looking to fuse the world of smartphones and virtual pets in a big way with their just announced "smart pet", as reported by Macotakara. Some details are a bit fuzzy due to translation issues, but from what I can tell the smart pet sounds like a pretty interesting idea. An app is downloaded to your iPhone or iPod touch, and that acts as the face of your virtual pet. Your device then sits inside a robot dog body and connects to it through the headphone jack, allowing the two pieces to act as one so you can interact with the smart pet.

The smart pet uses the front facing camera on the iOS device to recognize and react to certain gestures, and there will be over 100 different kinds of expressions that the pet can make. There will also be support for importing your own photos of your pets (or whoever you want, really), and there will be some sort of Bluetooth connectivity to allow multiple smart pets to interact with each other. And, perhaps most important of all, your smart pet comes equipped with the ability to sneeze. Sounds adorable.

The smart pet app is on course for release in Japan on March 31st, and will be a free download. With just the app you'll still be able to begin training and interacting with your virtual puppy, and it sounds like it will be a complete Tamagotchi-like experience all on its own even if you don't spring for a plastic robot dog body. If you must have the full experience, the smart pet body will be available about a month after the app, but no details on pricing as of now.

Neither the app or the body have been confirmed for US release just yet, but we'll keep an eye on the situation for our own curiosity, and so we can be prepared once the robot dogs decide to turn against humanity (you know it's bound to happen).

[Via Macotakara]

Games like My Little Monster [99¢] are nefarious. In spite of being a largely thankless collection of repetitive chores, they have this way of making you fuss over them constantly. They're like kids except without all the collateral benefits. Just ask anyone who has ever owned a Tamagotchi or any other of those 'virtual pet simulator' things.

I use the term loosely, by the way. My Little Monster isn't exactly what you would call a Tamagotchi, though the simplicity of the gameplay here is definitely on the same level. At the beginning of every in-game day, you'll be given the opportunity to decide whether you want to purchase new hats, upgrade one of your three skills or improve various statistics. This, in turn, is accomplished by spending the currency you earn from your daily fights.

(more...)

TouchArcade Rating:

It's expensive to buy and maintain a real horse, but now you can download a virtual one instead from the App Store-- What a world we live in. My Horse [Free] from NaturalMotion Games and MunkyFun is a realistic horse simulation game, which allows you to groom, feed and reward your very own horsey, without ever leaving the couch. Although the true cost of the virtual horse depends on whether you choose to invest in the optional in-app purchases.

The developers goal was to create a horse which is realistic enough for the player to form a bond with. And they've managed to successfully achieve this as the horse graphics and behavior is pretty realistic. It flicks it's tail, grazes, looks around, trots, bucks, walks backwards and neighs. There's no obvious repeated animation loops, or cartoon graphics. You're caring for a real-looking virtual horse.

(more...)

TouchArcade Rating:

Yesterday at GDC we sat down with Brian Robbins of Riptide Games who took us through their latest release, Shadow Ranch [link] (with an "HD" version for iPad [link]), an iOS adaptation of Her Interactive's highly popular Nancy Drew Adventure series.

In a departure from the PC and console originals, the iOS Nancy Drew mobile mystery takes the form of an interactive book that works much like one of the old Choose Your Own Adventure stories. The primary portion of the experience is reading the story presented, eight chapters full of illustrations and media-enhanced hyperlinks. The other part of the app consists of three different kinds of mini-games. The outcome of a variety of hidden object games, word games, and horse racing games determine the path of the story and bring achievements. Several sideline mimi-mysteries are also included.

Brian also showed us Mini Monster Smash! [App Store], the fruit borne of Riptide's all-night coding frenzy at November's 360iDev Game Jam. The goal of the game is to smash a cute little red monster with a flyswatter to get it to fly as far as you can. Along the way the monster will bounce off of trampolines, bombs or float in bubbles.

And, finally, we had a look at an upcoming title called My Pet Zombie, which is being developed jointly with Recharge Studios. It's one for the virtual pet fan who also has a thing for zombies. The game puts a cute little zombie in a graveyard setting on your screen for you to love and nurture. It even dances. But don't take care of it and it's one more tombstone in the graveyard. The game also features social aspects, such as freinds' zombies going on a date, etc.

Shadow Ranch and Mini Monster Smash recently went live in the App Store, and My Pet Zombie is expected in late April or early May as a freemium release.

Ngmoco has just released Touch Pets Dogs 2 [Free], the follow up to last year's popular virtual puppy game. The original Touch Pets Dogs [Free] was generally well received by gamers barring one major issue – the constant need to feed your puppy. A bowl of food was required in order to get a small amount of playtime from your doggy, and if he or she went unfed then you were unable to do anything with them except stare at them sleeping. Of course, food bowls were available as IAP for those willing to pay to play with their virtual puppy, but the value of purchased food was pretty thin. There's no sense in playing a virtual pet game, even an attractive and entertaining one like Touch Pets Dogs, if said virtual pet is a borderline narcoleptic.

Luckily Ngmoco realized this, and Touch Pets Dogs 2 doesn't implement any cruel restrictions that prevent you from playing with your pet, rather it more closely resembles their recently released feline-themed virtual pet game Touch Pets Cats [Free]. And when I say resemble, I mean that it's practically identical. Touch Pets Dogs 2 gives you the ability to personalize your living space with a plethora of different kinds of furniture and items. These can then be “searched” by your pet which will net you some coins that can then be used to purchase more items. Coins can also be earned by taking care of your puppy and completing other types of goals in the game.

The catch is that the frequency with which you can search furniture is time limited, with longer wait times resulting in more coins. The IAP in Touch Pets Dogs 2 comes in the form of dog bones which can be used to speed up the wait times of coin collecting. You can also feed the bones directly to your dog which will send it into a state of excitement, similar to catnip in Touch Pets Cats, that will allow him/her to collect even more coins. There are other time limited events as well, like daily goals that can be completed, which can also be sped up with the use of bones. Unfortunately, when the time limits have been reached for coin collection you'll need to act quickly otherwise they will expire.

While I'm not really a fan of games that require you to keep a constant watch in order for your rewards not to expire, there are some really nice things about Touch Pets Dogs 2. The game supports the Retina Display on newer devices and the graphics have been much improved over the original. This is a very sharp looking game, and your puppy's mannerisms and personality are just adorable. There is also a staggering amount of different items to collect in the game, such as furniture, toys, clothing, and more. It's actually pretty fun to decorate your house and upgrade to premium items as you collect enough coins to do so.

If you aren't bothered by Ngmoco's freemium model and have enough free time to keep a vigilant eye on your game's progress, then you'll find a lot to like about Touch Pets Dogs 2. Honestly, I enjoy the game a lot, but I just can't get behind the limiting factors associated with playing. At the very least it's worth a download to check out Touch Pets Dogs 2 since it's free to do so, and you can leave any comments in the discussion thread in our forums with your own thoughts on the game.

Free is a good thing. If I didn't dig around in Salvation Army dumpsters, for example, I wouldn't be wearing these hip and slightly soiled boxer shorts right now. The App Store is kinda like a better version of my SA dumpster. The smell is superior, no doubt, and more to the point, the App Store offers better and more useable free things. And since it's been awhile since we've last gave you a rundown of what's out and free, I'd go ahead and write something up today. Maybe you'll find something that tickles you as much as these boxers tickle me.

Lil' Pirates from Capcom Mobile

Lil' Pirates [free] is an isometric loot-snagging game. You play as a boat's captain, and it's your job to assemble a crew, take charge during pirate ship attacks, and upgrade your boat and crew. I can't think of a direct point of comparison for this game, but within minutes of play, I think I can see the freemium catch: you need doubloons if you don't want to wait for tasks to complete, and you'll be needing to raid ye' old Capcom store for more.

Touch Pets Cats from ngmoco

If you've played Touch Pets Dogs [free], you'll be right at home with this one. In Touch Pets Cats [free], you're a proud owner of one of five adoptable breeds of cat. And as this owner, you'll be responsible for petting, feeding, and cleaning up poop, as well as decorating your own house. Touch Pets Cats has an in-game economy like most freemium titles, and for a price, you'll be able to increase the amounts of coins you receive by purchasing catnip.

Trade Nations from Amplified Games

Trade Nations [free] is your basic simulation / town romp, with the added bonus of a cool art style. In the game, you're responsible for a village that will eventually grow to a town via your purchasing and decision-making prowess. You can buy buildings and decorations, make villagers perform jobs that make your economy roll, and you can even specialize and sell off your resources at a premium to other nations.

Gun Bros from Glu Games

Gun Bros [free] isn't new, but I thought you'd like to know that a new update is available. Version 1.1.0 adds Game Center leaderboards, supports retina display, and addresses several bugs that plagued the original release. If you ran in to any issues that made you fed up with Gun Bros, it might be worth a second chance.

Two of Ngmoco's recently announced titles have made their debut in the Canadian App Store as of yesterday afternoon - Touch Pets: Cats and We City. As with most of Ngmoco's games that are hosted over online servers, they have released these games in the limited market of Canada in order to test them out and make tweaks to the system before readying a worldwide release. During a Ngmoco media event at WWDC in June, we took a look at both Touch Pets: Cats and We City and determined them to be pretty much in line with previous Ngmoco releases. Although the apple doesn't fall too far from the proverbial freemium tree that is the Ngmoco business model, both games offer up a nice free-to-play experience in their respective forms of virtual simulation.

---

Touch Pets: Cats - While retaining many of the same general concepts of its canine predecessor Touch Pets: Dogs, this feline-themed virtual pet game does away with the food bowl mechanic that was the bane of many Touch Pets: Dogs players and replaces it with catnip. In Touch Pets: Cats, you can play with your kitty at any time, and the catnip merely allows you to gain coins and experience at an accelerated rate. Playing with and caring for your pet is largely similar to Touch Pets: Dogs, and there is an emphasis on collecting items to customize your living spaces. You can visit your friends houses and pets as well using the Plus+ network, and can purchase additional catnip through IAP if you choose. Further information and a discussion of Touch Pets: Cats can be found in our forums.

---

We City - Following in the footsteps of We Rule and We Farm, We City takes many of the same mechanics from those titles and places them in a modern metropolis setting. You'll build your city from the ground up by placing buildings, streets, grass, and other infrastructure on a starting plot of land. As your city flourishes, you'll be able to expand the area where you can build and unlock more items and buildings for your city. The main focus in We City is on industrial production, and you'll need to build factories and stores that can produce goods and services for your citizens and those of your Plus+ network friends. This process can take time, however, and if you're feeling impatient you can use in-app purchasing to buy ZAP that will speed up your rate of production. As always, a discussion of We City is taking place in our forums if you're looking for more information and player impressions.

---

There's not currently a set US release date for Touch Pets: Cats or We City, but both titles are free to download if you happen to have a Canadian iTunes account. For those that don't, you can most likely expect to see both titles in the US App Store sometime before the end of the year.

Early this summer we posted an exclusive sneak preview of NimbleBit's upcoming frog management title Pocket Frogs, which is something of a follow-up to their popular Dizzypad. The developer has recently posted a video showing the game in action and provided us with additional screenshots.

Pocket Frogs is a game of raising, breeding, and trading frogs. Each of your frogs will have three specific genetic traits that they inherit from their parent frogs, which according to NimbleBit will result in "many thousand possible emergent species." There are going to be multiple customizable habitats to raise your frogs in, and players will be responsible for keeping the frogs healthy, happy, and well fed by taking them out to explore the Pocket Frog pond.

Aside from breeding frogs, players will be able to get new frogs by ordering them in-game as well as trading frogs with friends via Plus+. There are also plans to have various challenges to breed certain frogs which rotate on a weekly and monthly basis and the frog store will rotate on a daily with new frogs to buy with in-game currency. NimbleBit is still hashing out plans on exactly how they're going to monetize Pocket Frogs, but have assured me that players will be able to access absolutely everything in game for free and whatever in-app purchases they finally decide on will be intended for serious frog breeders and otherwise entirely optional.

Pocket Frogs will be a free download, available for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, and will take advantage of the iPhone 4's high-resolution Retina display. The game is slated for a September 15th launch, and those who download the title in its first week will receive an exclusive frog, the 'Black Floris Tribus'.

Back in June at Apple's WWDC, we visited ngmoco's San Francisco studios and spent some time with the gamemaker's upcoming TouchPets: Cats, a virtual pet title that follows the studio's earlier TouchPets: Dogs.

Not simply a reissue TouchPets: Dogs -- but with cats -- the upcoming title takes a different approach to the virtual pet experience in a number of areas. Perhaps most notably, the feed-to-play mechanic of the earlier title is gone, so you need not feed your pet every time you want a few minutes of playtime. In its place is catnip, which can be used to jack your cat up in order to get it to perform certain actions, like collecting coins from the sofa cushions, in order to further the game. You can read more about what we found in our time with the game in our hands-on article.

Ngmoco has recently released a new gameplay video that should give readers a clear look at the play mechanics found in TouchPets: Cats.

TouchPets: Cats is expected to arrive in the App Store later this year.

Initiated to pop-culture by the mid-90s Tamagotchi device, pet-sims have really taken off on the App Store, but there are surprisingly few that stand out. Fortunately, developers Tasty Poison Games have given us something to talk about with the release of their full 3D dragon-based pet game, Dragooo [App Store].

Dragooo differs in presentation to other pet-sims in that the game world is rendered in fully navigable 3D. Your focus point is always your dragon pet, who starts out as a fledgling and grows over 3 stages to a teen-sized dragon (think more Spyro and less Smaug), with wings large enough to finally fly.

Flying is ultimately the end-goal to your dragon's growth in Dragooo, and getting there requires the usual tasks of feeding, nurturing and exercising your pet. This is quite easy done with a little exploration of the great-looking subterranean lair that is your dragon's home.

Negotiating your dragon around his lair feels natural. The camera is controlled by simply swiping on the screen, and your dragon can be moved around by tapping at the desired location. An on-screen button lets you switch between interaction and navigation mode, the former of which lets you pat your dragon and begin to teach him to fly by dragging upwards with your finger. By moving towards other objects in the lair, such as the pond or to the fireflies or fruit-bats, interaction mode is activated automatically. This enables you to feed your dragon by dragging a critter to his mouth or motioning him to drink.

After nurturing your dragon for a while (30 minutes or so) he'll have grown into a dragon able to finally lift-off. This unlocks the racing option, where your dragon enters a mini-game where he careens through one of three maps to collect as many gems as possible. In this mode, he will also need to use several abilities (such as fire breathing) to get through the track. Gems collected can then be spent on items to customize your dragon and improve his attributes and skills.

Though this sounds comprehensive on paper, in practice all the above is a very straightforward and simple affair, able to be reached in an hour or two at most. And thus we arrive at our major criticism of Dragooo-- it is far too light on content at present. Flying is all there is to do once you have raised your dragon (other than continuing to nurture him) and though it looks terrific, it's not executed particularly well; the overly sensitive tilt controls being the only real challenge to each race.

There are also no social features to be found, despite all your races being timed and seemingly ripe for a high score table. That's not to say the developers have skimped on the game entirely, as the 3D engine does look amazing (and even though it was purportedly optimized only for the 3rd gen devices, some readers have had luck installing it on their 2G devices). We just think that in its current state, it is more a foundation for future content. If this content arrives and adds to the gameplay, Dragooo could well be terrific. As it stands though, Dragooo is an entertaining but very brief distraction.

App Store Link: Dragooo, $2.99.

TouchArcade Rating: