Those of you who were turned off by the Here and Now Edition of Monopoly that had been in the App Store will be pleased to find out that EA has finally released the Classic version.

Monopoly brings the classic Monopoly board game to the App Store. The game offers a somewhat gratuitously 3D view of the game and even offers internationally localized versions of the board. The game seems to pull your iPhone's region settings (see here) to present the proper board. The game comes with 3 levels of difficulty against AI opponents and also offers local Wi-Fi, Bluetooth (2 players), and Pass & Play for your friends.

There also appear to be plenty of rule customizations to give you the game you're used to (Auction option also available, but cut off on screenshot):

The game is embellished with 3D graphics and animations of your pieces moving from one place to another, and the game also allows you pick one of several 3D rooms in which to play the game.

App Store Link: Monopoly, $4.99

Dungeon crawler fans that like to equip an iPhone or iPod touch when it comes time to hew a row of ogre necks are in for a real treat in a coming iPhone remake of a true classic of the genre. Jeff McCord at age 17 originally wrote Sword of Fargoal for the Commodore PET — in BASIC — in 1980. Two years later he teamed up with Epyx and released the game commercially for the VIC 20 (still in BASIC). The following year, Jeff and friends brought the game to the newly-released Commodore 64, and the rest is history.

Sword of Fargoal is one of the best loved roguelike games ever to light up a CRT. In its 1996 anniversary issue, Computer Gaming World listed the game as #147 in the "Top 150 Best Video Games of All Time." It has been inspiration for many dungeon crawlers created since, and has itself been remade for various platforms.

In a nutshell, the game places the player within the top level of a deep series of dungeons with the quest of seeking out the legendary "Sword of Fargoal" and escaping with it from the depths of said dungeons. Complicating matters is the fact that the layout of each dungeon level is randomly generated when the player enters it, and that the dungeons are all initially bathed in darkness, revealing themselves only as the player explores. Those lucky enough to locate the sword have only 2,000 seconds to find their way out of the dungeons which, even on the way up, are randomly generated…. Not a proposition for the meek.

Along the way, the player encounters a vast array of enemies, both human and not-so-human. Battling these enemies, the player builds experience points which allow the character to level, increasing his fighting abilities and hit points. As well, various spells can be found throughout the dungeons that aid the player in completing his quest: Invisibility, Drift, Light, Regeneration, Teleport, and Shield.

Now, the astute reader might be asking themselves just how well a game written almost 30 years ago in BASIC for a 1MHz, 50 lb computer suits the iPhone. The answer is, in fact: quite well. As the game moved from PET to VIC 20 to C64 to PC it has certainly evolved graphically, but never moreso than in its latest jump to the iPhone. Jeff and his partner in this effort Paul Pridham (who brought us Saucelifter) have done an excellent job with this remake.

The iPhone version, with which I've spent notable time this weekend, features completely redone graphics utilizing OpenGL ES to add depth to the stony visuals. It allows for pinch-and-spread zoom control to focus on the action at hand and features an optional on-screen mini map to aid in negotiating the twists and turns of each dungeon level. What's more, Paul has implemented a full, real-time music synthesizer system for the game which delivers sound that, while ringing of retro, surpasses the quality of the C64's SID-based score.

But, really, what makes the game so well suited for the iPhone is its casual nature as compared to the typical roguelike. And that's not to say the game is shallow or light on dungeon crawling action, but rather I feel it's simply a bit more accessible to the typical gamer than, say, Nethack, Moria, or Rogue thanks to an economy of controls, spells, and the like. Those who've never played a dungeon crawler before might just find themselves drawn in to Sword of Fargoal.

Have a look at the developers' trailer video for a glimpse of the action.

[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]

Sword of Fargoal will be submitted to the App Store sometime next week and should go live in early to mid December at a one-week introductory price of $2.99 (regular $4.99). After the game goes live, the developers plan to release a series of free, episodic updates that will introduce new game elements, level types, and the like. Additionally, new graphical tile sets will eventually be made available as in-app purchases for those wanting to apply a whole new look to the game.

I've enjoyed recent dialog with both Jeff and Paul as they've introduced me to their upcoming iPhone title and we plan to post an in-depth interview with the developers in the next week that takes a closer look at the game's history, the iPhone remake, and iPhone development in general. Accompanying the interview will be a detailed gameplay video that should give prospective buyers a solid look at Sword of Fargoal for the iPhone.

There are few things on the App Store (Short of maybe Edge [$4.99 / Free].) that have as much drama surrounding them as Manomio's C64 [$4.99]. All the way back in June we originally reported on its existence along with the sad news that the fully licensed emulator was rejected by Apple for violating the terms of the SDK regarding installing and launching executable code.

In September, the C64 emulator was finally approved by Apple, and available for a short period of time. Just a few days later, it was pulled from the App Store because the BASIC interpreter included was not removed, only disabled, and reactivating it was extremely simple.

Manomio once again submitted an updated version of the emulator to the App Store, and it was finally approved this afternoon. Aside from (hopefully) removing all the things that Apple didn't like, it also sports up to a 30% performance improvement, onboard instructions for each of the included games, and three new games: International Basketball, International Baseball, and International Tennis.

[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]

Following its initial rejection, we did a full hands-on preview, and aside from the improvements and changes mentioned above the emulator seems quite similar to its original release. Since C64 has had such a torrid history of being pulled from the App Store and then taking months to reappear, if you've been waiting to grab this fully featured emulator, I wouldn't hesitate for long.

App Store Link: C64, $4.99

Fans of Rogue Touch or other roguelike games may be interested to see Tecmo's latest App Store release, The Isle of 8-bit Treasures [link], a turn-based adventure.

The Isle of 8-bit Treasures is more or less Rogue, wrapped up and packaged with a retro look and feel that seems more at home on an NES than an iPhone. But whereas Rogue is entirely set in a dungeon world, The Isle features a number of environments to play through, including dungeons, caverns, forests and ruins, across more than 60 missions. It has a feel that's somewhat reminiscent of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon.

The game lets you choose between three different characters — Swordsman, Witch and Hunter, each with their own gameplay characteristics. Different areas of the island game world are accessed from a central map, some areas and weapons of which are randomly generated using songs in your iTunes library as seeds. The various play areas are full of roving creatures with which you must do battle, and three different types of objects — stones, powders and crystals — that can be collected to enhance your capabilities.  Each game area is completed when the heart shaped Valor icon is collected from the area's final floor.

The Isle brings an interesting twist on the weapons systems of most games of its sort. To the right of the on-screen play area is your vertical Weapon Reel. The Reel contains a light smattering of power icons by default and scrolls downward with each attack you perform. If a power icon appears in the window at the bottom of the Reel during an attack, your weapon delivers more damage than normal. Crystals collected along the way can be dragged onto your Weapon Reel to deliver a series of high-damage attacks in battle.

The game features colorful, whimsical, retro-inspired graphics and feels very smooth to play.  But don't let the graphics fool you, this is a rather difficult / challenging game.  Many's the time I've found myself slaughtered by a cartoonish enemy after just a few minutes of play. And while this presents a notable challenge, some readers in our forums lament the small number of floors in some of the levels (some just 3 or 4 deep), as compared to Rogue's far deeper dungeons. More troublesome, perhaps, is the lack of a mid-dungeon save feature. Tap out to the home screen or get on a phone call and it's back to the island map.  Hopefully Tecmo will address this unfortunate omission in a future update.

Despite its shortcomings, early adopters are enjoying it on the whole. The Isle of 8-bit Treasures is an interesting new take on a solid formula and should appeal to many iPhone adventure fans. Let's hope an update will make things less frustrating for an interrupted gamer.

See our brief video of very early stages of several game areas to get a feel for the game.

[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]

App Store Link: The Isle of 8-bit Treasures, $4.99

Gameloft's iPhone adaptation of The Settlers has already appeared in the App Store. The $4.99 real time strategy simulation game started out as an Amiga game back in 1993 and has since evolved through multiple iterations.

You’ve arrived in a wondrous place populated by Romans, Vikings and Mayans competing or cooperating to reach a variety of goals. These goals include occupying land, ensuring the supply of raw materials, or simply trying to create the most beautiful settlement. There is more than one path which leads to success – you can engage in trade, forge alliances, or lead your army into battle.

Gameplay is described by Gameloft:

• Gather resources and build a lively and bustling town in an ancient world. Your decisions and skill in managing and protecting your settlement will determine its fate.
• The strength of your units depends on how effectively you have built up your settlement and paid attention to the economic relationships within it.
• Three nations to govern: Conquer new territories, defeat rival armies, and establish an empire with your warriors that encompasses lands and continents.
• A huge number of parameters to manage: Dozens of building’s types, settlements, soldiers, raw materials, and much more.
• An accessible game for everybody, thanks to extensive tutorial missions and multi-touch gameplay, ideal for strategy games.

Early impressions are starting to trickle into the discussion thread on our forums with some positive first impressions. One forum member mrbass posted an extensive gallery of screenshots of the gameplay and tutorial screens. We'll provide a more in depth look of the game in time.

App Store Link: The Settlers, $4.99

Namco's Garters & Ghouls made its way into the App Store last night and is the latest twin stick shooter to arrive on the scene. You play as the freshly reanimated Marie Dupois fighting against an evil force known as "Thrum" who has caused the dead to rise under its control. It's your task to close the portals of the underworld that spawn the various zombies, werewolves, and demons that are rampaging across the countryside.

The game plays a lot like iDracula and other similar games, with two virtual joysticks that control your movement and shooting. Along the way you come across different weapons and powerups, and throughout the land are shops run by the "Steam Queens" where you can buy upgrades for your character's health, movement, weapon damage, and other things.

The main content difference between Garters & Ghouls and similar iPhone games is that the gameplay is structured around 25 distinct and large levels and framed in a slowly revealing storyline.

The task for each level, however, remains the same throughout: you must destroy the enemy-spawing portals strewn across the map. Still, going into a level with a specific number of portals to destroy gave me a greater sense of purpose than other pure survival shooters. There is some very light planning involved in avoiding getting caught in the crossfire between demon-spawing portals, and there are a variety of enemies which do get more difficult as well as a number of weapon upgrades.

The game's difficulty, however, ramps up slowly, so it can feel like you are just grinding your way through the game. And if you listened to our last podcast, you would have heard that Eli Hodapp's issue with the game was the repetitive and lengthy nature of the levels. While I don't believe its any more repetitive than many of the existing survival shooters we've played before, I had also hoped the levels would provide more variety in gameplay.

Meanwhile, a number of other factors keeps the game squarely in the "good, but not great" category. The controls and animations are adequate, though not especially smooth, and the targeting of the enemies and portals requires you hitting just the right spot. This gives the enemies a 2 dimensional feel. The 1.0 version also suffers from some occasional crashes, though if this occurs only your in-level progress is lost and you can resume at the beginning of the level.

Further discussion and opinions of the game can be found in our forums

App Store Link: Garters & Ghouls, $4.99

TouchArcade Rating:

Despite the release of Tap Tap Revenge 3 with in-app purchases, Tapulous is still releasing specially themed versions. The latest band to get this special edition treatment is Metallica.

The game includes new Hard and Extreme landscape modes with 4 or 5 tap rails, respectively, rather than the usual 3. List of tracks included are:

• For Whom the Bell Tolls
• Fuel
• King Nothing
• Sad But True
• Some Kind of Monster
• Enter Sandman
• One
• Seek & Destroy
• All Nightmare Long
• Master of Puppets

App Store Link: Metallica Revenge, $4.99

Following Kolonists' apparent removal from the App Store, Catan [App Store] fans were left without an outlet for their need to build roads and settlements along with gathering various resources on the go– That is, until USM and Exozet Games' recently released official Catan hit the App Store.

Catan for the iPhone is a faithful reproduction of the board game, which was first published in Germany in 1995 and has sold over 15 million copies worldwide since. The game is played with up to four players (or more with expansions not present in the iPhone game) on a board game with 19 hex tiles that randomly go together to create a different layout for each game played.

Players then build settlements, cities, and roads as they gather resources and settle the island. To win the game, you need to have a certain number of victory points on your turn which are earned by meeting various goals within the game. In the iPhone version, victory points are configurable from 8 to 12 along with a few other options to customize gameplay to both make it harder for veteran players and easier for new players.

If this is the first you've heard of Catan, you will be happy to find out that the game has a remarkably full featured tutorial included that covers nearly every aspect of the game. Catan, like most strategic board games can be somewhat intimidating to new players, but the tutorial does an excellent job of starting with the basics and teaching you everything you need to know to be a proficient settler of Catan.

The thread on our forums about the game is filled with great feedback and reviews. INCyr, a fan of the board game, posted a review and thinks its a great game with a few issues keeping it from being perfect. Forum member Farnsworthiness had never played Catan before posted his thoughts and agrees with me on the strengths of the game's tutorials but mentions that the game is a bit of a battery hog.

I've been having a great time with Catan, although I was disappointed with the lack of anything other than hot seat multiplayer. Having spent so much time playing Words With Friends [$2.99 / Free] lately, I really wish more turn-based games adopted a similar push-alert powered asynchronous multiplayer mode.

App Store Link: Catan, $4.99

TouchArcade Rating:

We first got a look at Sniper Vs Sniper: Online [App Store] back at PAX, and it was clear then that the game had as much potential as their previous online multiplayer title, Homerun Battle 3D [App Store] once it went live and the online community started to grow.

The most succinct way to describe Sniper Vs Sniper is Where's Waldo? with guns. The gameplay involves scanning various buildings with binoculars to scout out enemy snipers, quickly switching to your rifle, and taking them down before they take you down. It's a fast paced hybrid between a sniper shooter and a hidden object game, playable online against other players.

The online component consists of two game modes, 1 on 1 sniper battles and cooperative levels. When playing against another player, you will both be randomly positioned in opposing buildings at the start of each round. As quickly as possible you tilt your phone to move your viewpoint around to find the person you're playing against, who will likely also be looking around with their binoculars. While you're doing this, you will be able to choose from a series of ridiculous taunts which all play different quotes like "What would you like on your tombstone?"

Once you find your opponent, you need to take your rifle out and shoot them, but there's more to it than that. Both of you have life bars, and the match is over when you run out of life. Like most video games, head shots do more damage so accuracy is key when it comes to actually firing your rifle. Once you damage your opponent, a new round starts and you both get new positions in the buildings.

The catch is, if you shot your opponent in the previous round, they get a hint showing where you are in your building. Winning online matches usually requires being fast enough at scanning the other building to be able to find the other sniper before they (much more easily) find you.

If competing against other players in the 1 on 1 mode isn't your cup of tea, the cooperative mode will pit you and another player against a building loaded with snipers. Whoever shoots more of these AI controlled snipers wins the round. This is also how the single player mode of the game is played, although given how full featured the online component is, single player feels significantly less entertaining in comparison.

Just like Homerun Battle 3D, online play is ranked on global leaderboards and you have a list of friends that you can challenge. There's even a lobby you can chat in between games. Com2Us also deserves some kind of merit badge for being one of the only game developers that includes a toggle in the game's options to disable the intro movie.

Sniper Vs Sniper is such a strange combination of gameplay elements that put together just work. It's part hidden object, part shooter, with a rich online component that is rivaled by few other games on the App Store. If the community takes off like it has with Homerun Battle 3D, I could see myself getting far too involved in competing online in Sniper Vs Sniper.

App Store Link: Sniper Vs Sniper, $4.99

TouchArcade Rating:

Rake in Grass recently released their latest iPhone game Undercroft, an old-school styled turn based RPG. The game has been receiving only positive comments in the release thread.

The developer describes the game:

Undercroft is a dazzling, epic adventure set in a fantasy world full of magic and monsters. It combines the atmosphere of classic role playing games with plenty of new features, and brings it all together with cool graphics and sophisticated level design.

The game features multiple environments, hundreds of items, and over 20 hours of gameplay. The developers have provided a lite version to try which will give you a feel for the game before committing to the full version.

App Store Links: Undercroft Lite, Free, Undercroft, $4.99