There's been a lot of talk about the possibility of some sort of physical game controller for the iPhone and iPod Touch. While there have been a few announcements, none of the projects have ever come to market. We never heard for certain, though we'd heard suggestions that Apple might not have previously been allowing official SDK-supported versions to be approved.

22moo seems confident that they will get approved and recently released a new rendering of their planned game controlled hardware add-on. The redesigned device is said to include stereo speakers, omni direction mic, built in lithium battery, and 30-pin connector. More exciting is a note from Manomio's Stuart Carnie that they are working with 22moo to support the Gamebone in their C64 emulator in the App Store — and according to Carnie this will be an official solution that does not require jailbreaking.

There is some ongoing debate about the point of such controllers for native iPhone games. Why do you want to carry an extra accessory around with you? But I think emulators are a clear use example as people do want to relive their emulated games without working with touch-screen controls,

While out in San Francisco covering GDC 2010 I saw many games for many platforms, the iPhone among them.  And I'm happy to report that I didn't encounter a single "bad" iPhone game at any point during the week. The trip reinforced the fact that iPhone gaming is just huge — and it's growing. And iPad gaming, based on what I saw from numerous developers, is going to be amazing.

But of all the solid titles I spent time with, the one I'm most excited about is Sword & Sworcery EP which we took a brief look at earlier in the week. I've given the game a great deal of thought since we saw it at GDC and wanted to go into a bit further detail and share some additional thoughts on it for our readers.

Sword & Sworcery EP recently won an achievement in art award in the IGF Mobile 2010 competition. It's a stylized, artistic adventure developed by Superbrothers + Capybara Games + Jim Guthrie that dazzles with its rich and mysterious atmosphere established by a unique pixel art graphical presentation, an ethereal soundtrack that sets the mood for every screen, and sparse instructional cues on the outset that make you, the player, feel like a truly small entity in a large, alien world.

The designers call it "i/o cinema."

Right now I can't fully setup the scene for you, as the whole of the scene is still in the minds of the game's creators, not yet entirely implemented on the iPhone. What we were shown at GDC 2010 was meant as a teaser, a taste of the world that will be fully realized in the estimated three months between now and the game's App Store release. But what we did see was, in a word, moving.

In Sword & Sworcery EP, you control a female character exploring a mysterious world. Armed with sword and shield, you begin to explore your edenesque surroundings, tapping and holding in the intended direction of travel. You walk along paths, climb up and down stairs carved into the landscape, wander into the depths of the backdrop — even walk upon water. Brush a finger across a tree or bush and it responds to your touch.

But why are you here? What is your mission?

As you wander about this strange world you hear the chirping of insects, see various fauna dwelling in the bracken. Before long you encounter a strange being of obvious intelligence peering out at you from the wilderness. It retreats in response to your chase and gives little indication as to whether it is friend or foe. Eventually you follow it into its lair and are challenged to a fight. As you rotate your iPhone to enter the game's fight mode, you begin exchanging blows with this curious character. With some savvy you bring it to its knees, rendering it helpless, waiting for your final blow.

But…do you end this creatures life? Will you deal out death upon this helpless being whose world you have infiltrated? Or will you show mercy?

I will tell you that, in playing the game for less than five minutes, my feeling was that this strange creature was not an enemy. When it came time to deliver the killing blow, I very much felt that it would be wrong to do so. In the interest of fully demonstrating the game, however, I went ahead and ened its life. I regretted having to do so and found that, for hours after I set the game down, I felt guilty for having slaughtered what may have been a peaceful and benevolent creature. The experience absolutely saddened me.

This, from about four minutes of gameplay in a title that presently exists only as a teaser that presents but a portion of the creators' total vision. I consider my reaction to this experience to be highly telling. I honestly can't recall ever playing a game so emotive, so affecting.

Now, I don't mean to sound like an elitest gamer, or one that looks down my nose at other players, but if all you are interested in is button smashing and explosions, then Sword & Sworcery EP is probably not for you. (And, mind, I do, myself, enjoy a great many button smashers.) But if you are open to a game that can take you on an emotional journey, cause you to examine your own system of morality, and deliver an experience quite unlike anything you have known before, then Sword & Sworcery EP is probably worth your while. (And this is a game, not merely an artistic curiosity — discussion with the designers about what's to come assured me of that.)

The comment thread trailing from our initial look at the title is lengthy and rather polarized. People seem to either love what we've shown of the game, or hate it. The love points mostly mirror my own, presented here, while the hate points bemoan things like "unsightly", pixellated graphics, "lack of visuals", obviously "boring gameplay", "rehashed crap", and a misspelled title.

The pixel-art graphics serve a two-fold purpose, in my opinion. Use of such a graphical presentation necessarily adds a certain degree of vagueness to what the player is able to know about the onscreen avatar. This vagueness forces the player to become closer to the main character because the image of just what the character looks like exactly involves a bit of imagination on the part of the player. Additionally, the graphics style is a clear nod to Eric Chahi's 1991 classic Another World (a.k.a. Out of this World) which delivers a somewhat similar play atmosphere and was a major inspiration for this title, as designer Craig Adams of Superbrothers revealed to me. And so, if there's any "rehashing" going into Sword & Sworcery EP's equation, it's of Another World, which few would call "crap." And that's not to mention the fact that, as far as pixel art goes, in Sword & Sworcery EP it's original and very well done.

Wanting to share a bit more of the title than is revealed in the two videos released this week by the developers, we recorded some gameplay on the expo floor at the Superbrothers + Capy + Jim Guthrie booth in the IGF Mobile area. Thanks to Craig for the fingers.

All of us here at TouchArcade find Sword & Sworcery EP to be an amazing piece of work and are extremely anxious to get our hands on the final version in order to discover more about the nature of this mysterious game world. And, if you think what you see here holds little interest for you, well — you may be right — but if ever there was a game that might just take you by surprise, I'm guessing this is it. It's a situation that really makes me hope that the developers offer a free, lite version so the haters can at least give it a shot before passing it by.

At any rate, we'll take a very close look at Sword & Sorcerer EP when it hits the App Store mid-summer and let you know what we find.

Apple has started accepting pre-orders on the Apple iPad for delivery in April. The Wi-Fi version of the iPad will be the first to ship by April 3rd while the WiFi + 3G versions will follow in late April.

Apple announced the iPad originally in January and represents a larger tablet-sized device running Apple's iPhone operating system. The iPad has seen a lot of excitement among developers with several planned game launches designed specifically for the device.

XS Games, a New York based publisher, announced Friday that they plan to release an iPhone and PSPgo port of “The Red Star” early this spring. The Red Star was a popular shooter/action game for the Playstation 2 that was based off the graphic novel of the same name.

The game was a blend of top down shooting and side scrolling beat ’em levels. It also had some RPG elements, with characters being able to upgraded abilities at the end of levels.

Here is a trailer for the PS2 version:

XS Games says that both the PSPgo and iPhone are the perfect new home for the game. They say by releasing the game on these platforms it will allow them to improve the game play and graphics of the game while keeping the price fair. We will have to wait till spring to see if they deliver.

Screenshots of the iPhone version:

Earlier this year we posted screenshots of Zen Bound 2 running on a 3GS with very little details about the finished game. The new screenshots we were sent today only show the iPad. At this point it seems like they are focused on the iPad version for launch, with iPhone version possibly coming at a later date.

What we do is know, the new version will include upgraded versions of the levels in the last game and brand new levels with new kinds of gameplay. It will also include the same great sound track from Ghost Monkey with a few new songs thrown in. You can listen to one now on sound cloud.

They plan to have the game ready in time for the iPad launch in April. There has been a lot of discussion in our forums about this highly anticipated game.

Screenshots:

Though our early impressions of Raging Thunder 2 were very positive, it already seems Deliverace is set to impress us just as much, if not more. Pixelbite recently released a trailer that showcases an amazingly rich and extraordinarily detailed graphic engine that seems to trounce nearly anything we've seen on the AppStore to date. The developers have provided a summary of the game's features in our forums as follows:

"The game is a classic top-down racer, but with modern physics and amazing graphics. Naturally we also have multiplayer support over Lan and Internet, online leaderboards, several control options, ghost cars and much more."

Though the trailer convincingly sells itself, the impressive list of features available right off the bat has cemented Deliverace as one of our more anticipated titles. Deliverace is slated as 'coming soon' in early 2010 with no price point currently fixed. Pixelbite really seem to be making a name for themselves in the racing genre, and we can't wait to see what they have in store for us this time around.

Be sure to keep abreast of our Deliverace discussion thread for further updates and media releases by the developer.

Tilt to Live is at its core, an object-avoidance game wholly utilising the accelerometer of the iPhone or iTouch to maneuver your arrow around the battlefield. I say battlefield, because that's exactly what is going on here– the dots are out to get you and will stop at nothing. And it is remarkable just how much personality One Man Left have managed to inject into such a straightforward concept. These are certainly no ordinary dots– these perilous periods make a point (ha!) of chasing you around the screen; coalescing into arrows and other shapes then hurling themselves at you at breakneck pace, or circling you like vultures, slowly closing in until it is impossible to escape. Make no mistake, touch even one of the hundreds of dots on screen at once, and you are history.

Sounds mind-numbing? Fear not! Our arrow protagonist has a range of very awesome weapons at his disposal to send these dots back to whence they came. Your arsenal really defines Tilt to Live because it shows an attention to detail and knack for the inventive that escapes many games we see on the AppStore. You start off with just a few basic powerups floating around the screen waiting to be collected. The most basic is a nuke explosive (Yes, a nuke is standard fare in Tilt to Live) but you also have a dot-seeking multi-rocket powerup and a haduken-style fireball which clears a portion of the screen in the direction you're facing. Each of the weapons require a different strategy to operate effectively and are useful in varying situations.

This thoughtful design factor continues through to the unlockable weapons, too, where eventually you'll unlock weapons such as a spike shield that lets you hurl yourself at dots as they literally cower away in fear or a vortex attack that sucks all nearby dots (and you if you're not careful) into a black hole, to name just a few. But it's the manner in which they're unlocked that I appreciated the most. Tilt to Live uses the AGON platform to deliver its achievements and leaderboard results. But, it takes the system one step further– integrating in-game rewards for unlocking achievement points– namely in the form of additional weapons. I'm ordinarily not one for achievements, but the added incentive of new weapons was enough to get me to actually pore through the list and attempt most of the nefarious challenges, a fact I found pleasantly surprising.

Tilt to Live is a game that draws you in with its edgy personality and inescapable 'just one more go' gameplay. It is gorgeously crafted and presented and has a wicked sense of humor to boot (just take a look at the loading screens to see what I mean). Completing its challenges and unlocking weapons has the added benefit of enabling you to achieve even higher scores and multipliers, meaning even those not normally counting themselves as completionists may be eager to experience the width and breadth of what Tilt to Live has to offer. This is one game that will remain a fixture on my iPhone for a long time to come.

As expected, impressions coming in from our readers are overwhelmingly positive. Be sure to check out the developer's YouTube trailer above for a preview glimpse of Tilt to Live.

App Store Link: Tilt to Live, $1.99.

The sequel reveals a more polished title than the original, discarding the hand-drawn art and instead drawing heavily from the steampunk genre to create a rich game world of oiled cogs and shiny bronze contraptions. It is thanks to these machinations that the gameplay in Ragdoll Blaster 2 does vary a little to the original, if still sharing that same overall feel of blasting (and resetting) over and over again until you reach your target in as few shots as possible.

The new objects you'll come across include teleporters, additional cannons, objects that adversely affect gravity, ice blocks and mechanical arms to name a few, along with the expected array buttons, cogs and switches. All in all, levels feel more purposeful thanks to the new mechanics, and we're confident that the 150 levels that make up Ragdoll Blaster 2 will continue to be interesting (and undoubtedly difficult) and show the same attention to detail throughout as the ones we've played up to now.

Backflip Studios have also made the decision to incorporate the Plus+ platform in Ragdoll Blaster 2 to provide high scores for each of the nine 'rooms' which theme the levels. Both a Par score and Best score is displayed at the end of each room as a target to beat for those competitively inclined.

We're enjoying our time with Ragdoll Blaster 2, though it does still feel very familiar. Certainly, if you're a fan of the first title, we see no reason why you shouldn't thoroughly enjoy the new features on offer. (And if you haven't had a chance to try the first, we highly recommended it) Impressions from our readers are collecting in our discussion thread and to date seem largely positive.

App Store Link: Ragdoll Blaster 2, $2.99.

Doodle Jump

This new Doodle Jump update adds in a brand spanking new theme, a Jungle level in this case. The new theme is free to download and will be the third alternate theme added to the game. Lima Sky describes it as "THIS IS OUR MOST AMAZING UPDATE EVER!"

Glyder 2 [App Store]
Current Version: 1.2.1
Our Review
Forum Thread

If you're like me, every time you've booted up Glyder 2 in the past you've thought to yourself "what this game really needs is an Isle of Friendship!" Lucky for us, Glyder 2's developers have heard our call, and now players can earn friendship points by simply adding "Glyder friends." These points can be spent to unlock new wings, outfits, and other secrets, the latter of which probably isn't that exciting if they didn't name it explicity in the update description.

Eliminate Pro [App Store]
Current Version: 2.0
Our Coverage
Forum Thread

New multiplayer environments, new gear and enhanced matchmaking. The best news is that all of this is 100% compatible with Eliminate's soon to be released Co-Op mode. This update of Eliminate Pro comes Al Gore-approved, as you can now recycle extra gear for credits.

Jet Car Stunts [App Store]
Current Version: 1.3
Our Review
Forum Thread

Jet Car Stunts just got even more awesome. You can now engage in some friendly "ghost racing" through challenges and replays. Even better, replays can be downloaded directly from leaderboards. The menu system got a much-needed reworking as well, so this game is going to feel pretty fresh the next time you boot it.

Compression [App Store]
Current Version: 1.2
Our Review
Forum Thread

Compression is a great game, but even I'll admit that I was getting a bit bored its mechanics after playing the game for hours on end. The new "Blocked" mode is absolutely pefect for me, as it adds in a ton of variety in the form of obstacles and bombs. The game plays significantly differently in this mode, so everybody who thought they were done with Compression needs to go give it another run.

The original Plants vs. Zombies [App Store] release for the PC was PopCap's fastest-selling video game, and per a press release this morning, the iPhone release is performing just as well.

Since its release, there have been over 300,000 units sold on the App Store, making Plants vs. Zombies the highest grossing launch in App Store history. PopCap is no stranger to greatness on the App Store, as Bejeweled 2 was the first paid app to reach 3 million downloads, and they're responsible for three games that have been #1 on the paid app charts as well: Bejeweled 2, Peggle, and obviously Plants vs. Zombies

If this is the first you've heard of Plants vs. Zombies, you absolutely must check out our glowing review:

The 88 Metacritic score of the original Plants vs. Zombies (complete with 100's from multiple sources) just goes to show how great this game is. The iPhone port is absolutely phenomenal, and even though it's lacking a few game modes, there's always hope for them to be implemented in the future either via an update or a DLC add-on. There isn't a lite version, but there is a free Flash demo that I highly recommend trying if this is the first you've heard of Plants vs. Zombies.

Now that Plants vs. Zombies has decimated App Store sales records, hopefully PopCap will throw iPhone gamers a bone and somehow implement the missing game modes found in the PC version. I've still got my fingers crossed at least.

App Store Link: Plants vs. Zombies, $2.99