Surprise! Sid Meier's Ace Patrol [Free], that turn-based WWI aerial combat game we talked about not too long ago, is now available on the US App Store for the low price of $0. What you get with that initial download is the first handful of missions in the British campaign, one of the four campaigns in the game. For a price, you can grab the rest of that one as well as the other campaigns.

There's some other IAP goodies being offered, too, including new skins and fighters, as well as a get-out-of-jail card, in case your fighter gets captured. I'm beyond tired of describing free-to-play systems, so check out our video to see them in action. Speaking of that, here it is:

Like most of Sid Meier's stuff, Ace Patrol is pretty rad. We've been digging it so far, free-to-play and all. Give it a look.

Ravenous Games put themselves on the iOS map with their twitchy, speed-run style platformer League of Evil [$1.99 / Free] way back in March of 2011. About a year later, they released League of Evil 2 [$1.99 / Free], a sequel that went with a more Retina Display friendly art style over the original's pixely graphics. How you felt about the art style change pretty much came down to personal preference, but it was hard to argue that League of Evil 2 didn't up the ante in every other area over the original.

Ravenous has released quite a few games outside of the League of Evil games, but it seems like fans are always bugging them about when we might see a third entry in the series. (They have in fact told me that people incessantly bug them about this.) Well, today is your lucky day League of Evil fans, as League of Evil 3 is a real thing in the works and Ravenous has unveiled the very first screenshot from the game.

As you can see, this third game uses the same high resolution art style as League of Evil 2. I love pixel art just as much as the next guy, but I really love the sharp look of LoE 2 and I'm psyched to see it return in number 3. Probably the best news of all is that League of Evil 3 isn't that far off, and is planned for release in June. More details will be released leading up to that point, so get into our forums and add this to your TouchArcade [Free] app Watch List as we'll no doubt have more on League of Evil 3 in the near future.

Back in early March we told you about Zynga's upcoming Temple Run-style game called Running With Friends, which was just entering a beta period in the Canadian App Store. Early today, Running With Friends [Free / Free (HD)] bid adieu to its limited beta launch and is now available in the US App Store and internationally. VentureBeat has uploaded an official trailer, check it out.

So, endless runners, ya'll. By now you know what they are, you've likely played many different kinds, and here's a new one from Zynga. I'm not really sure what else there is to say on the matter. Running With Friends is free for iPhone or iPad, so you can just download it and try it yourself if you're dying for a new endless runner, or check out the forums for discussion.

Whoa, it's Wednesday again, which means exactly one thing: I have an appointment to get my hair cut. Oh, and a bunch of new iOS games are coming out. As of this posting, all of these games should be available in all regions including the USA. So, without further ado, here's the games you can sink your proverbial teeth into this week:

Crazy Monster Bowling

First Impressions: 'Crazy Monster Bowling' is Arcade-style Bowling with Crazy Monsters

Sometimes taking a sport and axing out pretty much any sort of realism is the key to making a fun arcade version of said sport. With Crazy Monster Bowling, as you can probably guess just by the title, this is about as far from simulation bowling as you can get.

Forum Thread: Crazy Monster Bowling (by NEONFIVE STUDIO) [Universal]

First Impressions: Smash and Grab and Smash Some More in 'Daddy Was A Thief'

The game begins with you bursting onto the rooftop of the bank and leaping to the building next door. It's here that you'll make your escape, and you do this by literally pounding through the floor of each, well, floor of the building. A swipe downward smashes your thief through the floor, and a swipe upward makes you jump. Your character auto-runs so these are literally the only controls in the game, and it works brilliantly.

Forum Thread: Daddy Was a Thief (Universal app by Rebel Twins)

First Impressions: I'm Digging 'Dig!', the Latest Game from Tasty Poison and Crescent Moon

Snark aside, you play as an aspiring archeologist in a fast-paced puzzle game with a strong nod back to games like Qix as the way you both dig up new artifacts and deal with enemies in the field is by controlling your guy to draw boundaries for the areas you're digging in. Completing levels involves managing bad guys, collecting treasure, then digging deeper

Forum Thread: Dig! - (by Crescent Moon Games) [Universal]

First Impressions: Firehose Games's PC Tower Defense Game 'Go Home Dinosaurs' Hits iPad Tonight

Go Home is a pretty standard tower defense title with a couple of notable twists. For one, you don't just place turrets, you control an autonomous one that you can move around a level freely to cover any defensive gaps. For another, the level design sorta resembles a puzzle game's. Turrets are shaped like jigsaw pieces, basically, and you can only put them where they fit. Finding the perfect spacing and locking the right pieces into each other is an essential part of the late-level strategy.

Forum Thread: Go Home Dinosaurs - (by Fire Hose Games)

First Impressions: Cheating Is Fun: 'Impossible Road' Invites Players To Break It

Kevin Ng's upcoming Impossible Road has the look and feel of an everyday mobile arcade game, but it's definitely not. In it, you guide a ball down an infinitely winding neon stretch of track, collecting points as you rocket through the numbered gates that line it. It's a simple, breezy task where death comes fast because the track twists, turns, and falls into itself. As you play, though, you start noticing gaps in the system. For instance, the ball doesn't need to follow the track linearly. You can let it fall off and land onto a stretch that's deeper down. You can also skip gates, too, and earn the same amount of points that a person that managed to hit them all would. Also, the ball doesn't even need to roll down. If you're a bad enough dude, you can just keep throwing it off the track and controlling its ricochet off of the curves.

Forum Thread: IMPOSSIBLE ROAD - (by Kevin Ng) [Universal]

First Impressions: Be Quick or Be Lunch in Arcade Puzzler 'Tasty Tadpoles'

In the jungle, only the strong survive. I guess that's true in ponds, too. In Tasty Tadpoles, the first solo iOS release from developer Mark White, strength doesn't mean being bigger or stronger, but rather being faster and more clever than your enemies. If you aren't, you'll find your cute little tadpole becoming nothing more than an afternoon snack.

Forum Thread: Tasty Tadpoles - (by Mark Whiteb) [Universal]

The roguelike is a timeless video game genre and helped shape the RPGs and dungeon crawlers we've known and loved for decades. But I've never played one that was a side-scroller. Not until WazHack [Free] anyway. Warwick Allison's WazHack has been around on desktop and Android for about a year, and has now made its way to iOS. I've only just barely scratched the surface of the game, but I'm already hooked.

The funny thing about WazHack is that it being a side-scroller doesn't really change its roguelike feel. You still explore a large, randomly generated dungeon; battle monsters in turn-based fashion; and collect all sorts of sweet loot like items, spells and weapons. Your overall goal is to plunge down to the bottom of the dungeon, retrieve the Amulet of Zaw (hey, that's Waz backwards!), and make your way back up and out alive.

Best of all is that WazHack is free to download and play (or free to play on the official website). Once you get to a certain depth in the dungeon, you'll be prompted to purchase a character class to unlock the full dungeon and continue on. There are four character classes (Knight, Wizard, Sorcerer and Huntsman with male and female versions of each) and each class goes for 99¢ as an IAP.

I like this system, as you can play as each of the different classes up to the cutoff depth as many times as you need, and then you can decide to buy whichever ones you really want. The free portion of the dungeon is more than enough to help you decide if WazHack is something you'd like to drop some money on, too.

I have a feeling there's lots more that I'll be discovering about WazHack in the days to come, but I was having such a good time and the players in our forums have been having such a good time that I felt the need to share it with you right away. But seriously, this thing is deep. With over 300 types of items and more than 130 types of monsters, not to mention the various unique attributes of each of the different classes, both male and female, and randomly generated dungeons, WazHack should be a very different experience every time you play.

Check out an older trailer from the desktop version to see it in action.

Something worth noting is that a couple of minor bugs are in this release version of WazHack. From the App Store description:

* Keyboard input on iPhone does not allow pop-down. This will be fixed very soon (1.1.5).
* Multiplayer does not work except by very circuitous means. This will take a little longer to get working - I may use GameCenter for this, but I would prefer that cross-platform multiplayer works, which will take longer.

Nothing major, but good to be aware of at least.

So, go check out WazHack, it's available right now and it's awesome. You can thank me later.

Sometimes taking a sport and axing out pretty much any sort of realism is the key to making a fun arcade version of said sport. With Crazy Monster Bowling, as you can probably guess just by the title, this is about as far from simulation bowling as you can get.

It features many, many, many different kinds of monsters which act as the bowling balls in the game. You'll hurtle your monster ball down one of many different kinds of lanes, typically in an environment that's filled with many objects and hazards that you'd never find on the pristinely polished lanes of a normal bowling alley.

Playing is super simple. Just swipe to send your monster ball down the lane, and continue using swipes as it rolls to steer, speed up, or slow down. There's 3 stars positioned along the lane which you'll want to collect to maximize your score, and once you reach the end you'll smack into 10 "pin" monsters in an effort to knock them all down.

There's only 5 "frames" during each game, and you only throw your ball once per frame. So if you fail to knock all the monsters down don't expect to pick up the slack by getting a spare.

Those aren't negative things, though. In fact it's the oversimplification of the bowling mechanics which I'm finding the most fun about Crazy Monster Bowling. It's a very arcade-y experience. Just flick your ball, steer it a bit, avoid (or aim for) the crazy obstacles, and smash into a bunch of monsters as hard as you can. It's surprisingly awesome.

Also, in case it wasn't obvious with my overuse of the word many, a key element in Crazy Monster Bowling is variety. There are tons of monsters and a decent amount of lanes to slowly unlock using coins earned during play (or bought with IAP, naturally). So far the unlock prices seem to be pretty reasonable compared to what I've been earning through just normal play, and in addition to the free version of the game there is a paid version which starts you off with a very generous amount of 50k coins.

I sort of rolled my eyes when I first saw Crazy Monster Bowling as the App Store is littered with cutesy, shallow games and this looked like yet another. But in the hour or so I've been playing the game I've been eating those initial impressions and having a blast doing so. There's something very satisfying about the wacky bowling and it's oddly fun collecting and naming all the little monster variants.

And hey, it's free to check out, so cruise by the forums for some discussion and Watch List this bad boy in your TouchArcade [Free] app to get an alert when you can try it for yourself later tonight.

International App Store Links:

Crazy Monster Bowling, Free (Universal)
Crazy Monster Bowling - PRO, $2.99 (Universal)

Heard about Tetris Blitz yet? In a nutshell, it's an arcade take on the title that has you dropping blocks and creating lines in a two-minute rush to get the sickest of sick scores. As you can imagine, it's flashier than regular Tetris. Provided you've got the coin to buy them, you can deploy power-ups that jumble, explode, or even remove blocks. And if you're making lines fast enough, you can activate a frenzy mode that, basically, turns most of the board into TNT. It's sorta like Bejeweled Blitz, except with Tetris. Simple enough.

Tetris Blitz hit the Canadian App Store today as part of seems to be a soft launch for the game. Eli and I took a look at it, mainly because we've been hearing a lot of junk about its free-to-play-ness.

As you'll see, it's loaded with ads, as well as those weird "take a survey" or "sign up for such and such" opportunities. You can also buy the game's currency for real money, and if you're feeling froggy, buy a couple of spins on the game's slot machine mechanic, which hands out random power-ups and coin allotments.

Surprisingly, Blitz isn't as aggressive as we though it would be. The game doesn't beat you over the head about what you can buy, at least. But, some of the power-ups do give players better pieces, which could certainly up their score pretty artificially.

One thing for sure, though: this game actually plays pretty good as far as Tetris games on iPhone and iPads, go. A neat prediction mechanic outlines where you can drop a piece, so all you have to do is tap instead of endlessly rotate your piece and follow it down. It's a neat touch. Also, there's the whole Tetris thing: this game, despite how old it is, continues to hold up as a great puzzle game.

Blitz should be out in the coming weeks. We'll keep our eyes on changes, as there will presumably be a few during this launch phase. Check out our video if you want to see it in action, by the way.

International App Store Link: Tetris Blitz, Free

In the jungle, only the strong survive. I guess that's true in ponds, too. In Tasty Tadpoles, the first solo iOS release from developer Mark White, strength doesn't mean being bigger or stronger, but rather being faster and more clever than your enemies. If you aren't, you'll find your cute little tadpole becoming nothing more than an afternoon snack.

The goal in Tasty Tadpoles is to collect 3 stars and make it to the exit without getting eaten. Tap anywhere on the screen and your tadpole will zip right to that spot. You'll need to collect the first star before revealing the location of the second, and then collect that one to reveal the location of the third.

With various kinds of enemies swimming around, there's almost a puzzle-like aspect to Tasty Tadpoles as you decide the best path and timing to take to collect all the stars, as well as make it to the exit safely. Different kinds of enemies have different attacks, and some special items, like a protective bubble, will need to be utilized to be successful.

One thing worth mentioning is that Tasty Tadpoles is a GameSalad game. That used to mean an instant skip from me, but really GameSalad has come a long way the past year or two, and some developers are able to utilize the tool extremely well. In terms of visuals, sound, and presentation, you wouldn't even know that Tasty Tadpoles is a GameSalad game. Everything is top-notch.

However, the one thing that is driving me nuts is the loading. GameSalad loads often and slowly. On some of the later, trickier levels you'll be dying incessantly as you try to figure out the right solution. Having to wait for the game to load for a few seconds every time you retry wears thin quickly. It's a minor annoyance, but I could definitely do without it.

Other than that, though, Tasty Tadpoles seems like a cute arcade-puzzler. The beginning levels are kind of a breeze, but it ramps up nicely in terms of difficulty as you go, and a few of the later levels have been rather tricky. It'll be launching later tonight for a buck, so check the early impressions in the forums for more and add it to your Watch List in the TouchArcade [Free] app to get an alert when it releases.

International App Store Link: Tasty Tadpoles, 99¢ (Universal)

It seems like the longer you play Magic: The Gathering, the more massive your collection of cards inevitably grows, and the greater the urge is to somehow digitize it all becomes. Whether it's because you've got tens of thousands of dollars of cards you want record of for insurance purposes, a neurotic need to catalog everything, or maybe just to quickly view your mana curve in a deck, that itch is definitely there. The problem is, every other app I've tried that serves this purpose has involved loads of typing. It's just the nature of any data collection app, as the first step of analyzing any data is actual often irritating data entry.

CardSplice [Free] aims to change all that. Using technical wizardry that straddles the line between optical character recognition and feeling like straight up black majiks when it's working properly, all you need to do is wave your cards in front of your iPhone camera to enter them in to the app. Admittedly, it's far from perfect, and there's a bit of a learning curve in regards to how you need to hold your phone in relation to the card, how ambient light needs to be hitting the card, and other finicky things that makes the card recognition stop working.

The good news is, the developer is totally on top of this with two options for making papercraft stands for both your iPhone and the cards themselves. Whether you fashion this apparatus via elaborately folding paper or the (seemingly much more simple) cutting a few junk Magic cards up, removing all the variation of holding the phone, holding the card, and making sure the image isn't blurry seemed to make things go substantially better.

(more...)

Sometimes a game just feels right on the iPhone, and that's totally the feeling I'm getting with Daddy Was A Thief, the latest game from Crumble Zone [$1.99] and Night Flight [$1.99] developer Rebel Twins. In it you play as a thief (duh) who has just robbed a bank, or if not a bank, some other building with giant dollar signs on the side of it. Pretty sure it was a bank, though.

The game begins with you bursting onto the rooftop of the bank and leaping to the building next door. It's here that you'll make your escape, and you do this by literally pounding through the floor of each, well, floor of the building. A swipe downward smashes your thief through the floor, and a swipe upward makes you jump. Your character auto-runs so these are literally the only controls in the game, and it works brilliantly.

The different floors in Daddy Was A Thief contain various items or people that can affect your downward journey. Smash up an electronic appliance like a TV or refrigerator and you'll zap the entire floor below your feet, disintegrating. Hop into a bathtub and you can take a free ride through several floors at once, with the bathtub protecting you from any hazards you might hit along the way. Run into a granny and she'll give you a proper kicking, sending you up a couple of floors and potentially knocking you into a hazard that you so carefully avoided the first time through. Of course it could be worse, though: run into a police officer and he'll waste no time literally turning you into a pile of bones.

Occasionally you'll run into a Casino floor, which contains a Pachinko-like set of bumpers and a group of green orbs. Bounce your thief off the bumpers and collect the green orbs and you'll be rewarded with a handsome cash prize. It feels sort of like the bonus stages from the original Sonic the Hedgehog, which is not a bad thing at all, and the Casino mini-game breaks up the smash-through-every-floor-of-a-building gameplay nicely.

This is all just through the first 100 floors or so, which is currently as far as I've managed to make it in Daddy Was A Thief. As you get deeper in the building, more items and dangers appear and things get much trickier. I have a feeling that even 100 floors in is just scratching the surface, and there's even more items and personalities to encounter waiting for me beyond that point.

As much as I love sining my teeth into big, meaty games, I also love those games you know you can jump into on a whim, spend any amount of time with, and know you're going to have a good time. I think Daddy Was A Thief is one of those games. It should be dropping later tonight around 11pm EST, so toss it on your TouchArcade [Free] app Watch List and we'll send you an alert when it hits the US App Store. You can also read more early impressions from players in our forums.

International App Store Link: Daddy Was A Thief, $1.99 (Universal)

Kevin Ng's upcoming Impossible Road has the look and feel of an everyday mobile arcade game, but it's definitely not. In it, you guide a ball down an infinitely winding neon stretch of track, collecting points as you rocket through the numbered gates that line it. It's a simple, breezy task where death comes fast because the track twists, turns, and falls into itself. As you play, though, you start noticing gaps in the system. For instance, the ball doesn't need to follow the track linearly. You can let it fall off and land onto a stretch that's deeper down. You can also skip gates, too, and earn the same amount of points that a person that managed to hit them all would. Also, the ball doesn't even need to roll down. If you're a bad enough dude, you can just keep throwing it off the track and controlling its ricochet off of the curves.

I thought I was a crazy person when I started noticing this, but sure enough, Ng notes in the app description that this is a game about exploitation. "And when you learn how to cheat the game and you discover that it is rewarded not punished," the description reads, " the leaderboards will belong to you."

As far as physics and feel go, Impossible Road is hard to measure. I mean, as an arcade line game it feels OK. I mean, you can keep the ball on the track and it has a decent amount of weight and predictability behind it. But, the point seems to reside in breaking the game part, letting the ball tumble and roll and bounce off lower swathes of track -- you know, stuff that you're typically not supposed to be doing. Does it feel a little funky as a result? Sure, a little.

Strangely, Road also has that one-more-time thing going for it. I'd still be playing if I didn't NEED to stop and let you guys know about it. Does this say something about how much fun subversive play can be? I don't know! But since I plan to go back and keep racking up my sick scores that I totally broke the game for, may it does.

Impossible Road will be out tonight at around 11PM EST. You can add the game to your Watch List on our app [Free] and get a notification whenever it makes it over alongside the rest of tonight's releases.

International App Store Link: Impossible Road, $1.99

We've been following along with the development of iMech Online [Free] since its first unveiling at WWDC last year, and over the weekend the game quietly launched for free in the App Store. Actually, to back up a bit, iMech was a game originally released way back in 2009 and was among the first iOS games to feature full competitive online multiplayer for up to 8 players. It was extremely impressive for the time, and iMech accumulated a dedicated fanbase of online players.

As can happen, the original development team broke apart and eventually iMech was removed from the App Store and its servers were shut down. A phoenix rose from the ashes in a sense, though, as some of the original team banded together and purchased the iMech IP and set forth to revamp and rerelease the game. And that's where we're at now with the release of iMech Online.

It's free to download and try iMech Online, and there's really no reason why you shouldn't. It has a fairly robust selection of mechs to choose from as well as a ton of customization options so you can trick them out with special abilities and weapons. It's a free-to-play title, though, so expect to need to grind away to earn some of this stuff or pony up some real dough to do it more quickly.

However, the game's new developer Mobula has tried to ensure there's nothing that's "pay-to-win" about their upgrade system, so even if you are new to the game and not quite fully-equipped just yet you can still match up well with those who are. Also they're using a League of Legends-inspired rotating system which gives you a selection of different mechs to try out each week, so you can check them out before committing to investing time or currency into them.

So far I've only spent a small amount of time with iMech Online, but it feels like there's a lot of potential here. I like the amount of different mechs and customization options, but with just one arena and a simple deathmatch game type it feels very basic. We'll see how it continues to evolve, but for free I think it's definitely worth the time to check out. Also, there's a discussion thread in our forums if you want to drop your own thoughts or suggestions on iMech Online, or just find some folks to frag.

Nintendo's Wii U launched late last year, and so far it doesn't seem to be doing so hot. It's missed its original sales projections, and it seems like Nintendo is scrambling to try and right the ship. A similar thing happened with Nintendo's 3DS handheld too, and after dropping the price significantly shortly after launch and speeding up the delivery of some highly-anticipated titles the platform is finally starting to show some life.

According to a report in the Japan Times as noted by Polygon, Nintendo is hoping to pull of a similar turnaround with the Wii U by making it easier for developers to port their existing mobile titles to be playable on the system. The Wii U, in case you didn't know, features a tablet-like controller with a large touchscreen, so existing smartphone and tablet games would make sense on the console. Nintendo is reportedly offering developers special software which would allow them to port existing games to Wii U as well as build games from the get-go with the Wii U in mind as one of the target platforms.

The consensus surrounding this news seems to be that most people would rather Nintendo put their focus in the opposite direction: port their existing library of first-party titles to smartphones and tablets. I mean, touchscreen controls aside you can't deny that a Super Mario Bros. or Legend of Zelda port wouldn't immediately top the App Store charts, even at the higher price tiers. If Nintendo's goal was strictly to make boatloads of money, I think they would already be doing this.

However, Nintendo is a proud company and I think they'd rather have their latest system tank than put their beloved franchises on different platforms. Increasing pressure from shareholders and fans may change that sometime down the line, but I wouldn't bet on it in the near future. As for porting mobile titles to the Wii U, I think there's greater problems at play here than a dearth of downloadable games, but it will be interesting to see how the initiative shakes out nonetheless.

[Polygon]

One big thing that has held iOS gaming back compared to dedicated handheld game systems is a lack of a way to manage save game files. Sure, a great deal of mobile games are fairly disposable experiences that don't require tracking progress, but plenty of others are full, robust games that can take many hours to complete.

If you're an app addict like most of us here then chances are you'll need to play the make-space-on-your-device shuffle from time to time, meaning you might have to delete a hefty game and potentially all the progress you've made in it, never to get it back again.

Apple's iCloud has been a decent solution… when it works, that is. Sadly that seems to be a pretty rare occurrence. Admittedly it's getting better, but iCloud does not feel reliable enough yet to put my precious, precious game saves in its hands just yet.

Rovio is concerned with this problem as well, and as iMore reports they're working on their own save game solution to work in their stable of games. Using the new Rovio Account feature, which requires just an email to sign up for, game progress will be uploaded and saved on Rovio's end and can be transferred across devices, Rovio explains on their blog.

What's still not clear is just what devices this will work for. Since just about every Rovio game has a separate iPhone and iPad version, will my iPhone Angry Birds progress sync up with Angry Birds HD on the iPad? Will this work cross-platform for Android versions of the game?

I'm sure we'll find out all the details soon enough. Currently, Rovio Account is available in globally in Rovio's The Croods [Free] and regionally in Poland and Finland for the original Angry Birds on iOS. The service will roll out gradually to other regions and titles, and I'm actually pretty curious to see how it ends up panning out.

[iMore]

Because we're always scanning the scene for games with sickest of sick tricks, Eli and I decided to give Djinn Works's Stick Stunt Biker 2 [Free] a shot. By titling alone, you probably already know what to expect. Yes, it's a stick figure game. Yes, it's physics-based. And yes, it has sick tricks. But here's something you might not know: it also doesn't have a rigid progression structure. Once you get access to a world, you can play every level in it, regardless if you manage to get one or even zero stars in a given level. Each win or loss is met by a loading screen that instantly sucks you into the next level, which is a nice pacing touch. A lot of these games make you retry and retry the same stuff over and over again, which for us tends to cause a lot of fatigue.

In this look, you'll notice that we can't quite pull of a sick trick. I swear, I could almost write a guide about how NOT to play this game. I'm pretty bad at it. Oh god, is this becoming a theme in TA Plays? It is, isn't it.

Anyway, you can grab Stick Stunt Biker 2 right now if you'd like. And if you still dig these kinds of physics games, you should consider doing so. The rapid-fire progression is a nice touch, plus the physics keep your bike really rounded to the ground. It just doesn't feel as loose and insane as its brethren, which is cool.