A few notable Lite demo versions of games have appeared in the App Store over the past couple of days.

Armado Lite

This impressive 3D platformer offers the first three levels to try before buying the full version:

We hope you enjoy this free “lite” edition. It’s a fully featured game with three levels to begin your journey. Get a feel for the controls, visuals, sound, and if you’re good enough you may earn a spot on the leader-board!

App Store Link: Armado Lite, Free

Paradox Lite

We previously highlighted the full version of this game and found it to be a high quality variant of Pipe Dreams in which you rotate individual pieces to connect the entire board together.

In Parardox Lite there is one available mode of play aptly named “Puzzle Mode”. Set to a chilled-out groove, “Puzzle Mode” is relaxed and methodical while offering challenging puzzles to excercise your brain muscle. Paradox Lite is a fun, inventive, and an entertaining version of its big brother “Paradox 3000″.

App Store Link: Paradox Lite, Free

Powerboat Challenge Lite

A reasonably well implemented powerboat racing game.

The lite version takes you immediately to the action: Manoeuver your tuned powerboat around the buoys against your rivals and fill up your boost bar to power ride on the water with insane speed!

Powerboat Challenge Lite, Free

The long awaited release of the first true First Person Shooter has arrived. Cube [App Store] has finally made it into the App Store after a lengthy approval process.

Cube is an open source multiplayer and singleplayer first person shooter game built on an entirely new and very unconventional engine. Cube is a landscape-style engine that pretends to be an indoor FPS engine, which combines very high precision dynamic occlusion culling with a form of geometric mipmapping on the whole world for dynamic LOD for configurable fps & graphic detail on most machines. Uses OpenGL & SDL.

The iPhone port is described as a technology demo that supports all the functionality of the desktop version, though they warn that some of the features are impractical on the iPhone. Indeed, early impressions of the game show framerate issues on many of the levels, but should be a fun distraction and a prelude to what is to come in the future for iPhone gaming.

The developers report that they are working on getting version 1.2 submitted to Apple to address many of the known bugs — including the compressing of many of the textures to make them load faster and take less memory.

App Store Link: Cube, Free

In 1979 game desginer Warren Robinett created the world’s first action-adventure game.  It was called Adventure.  It was released for the Atari 2600 game console.  It was historic.

And thanks to Peter Hirschberg (of the Luna City Arcade!) it is now available for the iPhone [App Store]. And it’s free.

The player’s goal is simply to find the enchanted chalice and return it to the gold castle. The player character, represented by a square, explores a multi-screen landscape containing castles, mazes, and various rooms. Hidden throughout the world are a sword, keys to unlock each of the three castles (gold, black, and white), a magic bridge which allows the player to travel through a wall, and a magnet which will pull any of these objects toward it.

This truly is an historic arrival on the iPhone platform, but be forewarned: as the game features authentic Atari 2600 graphics–rather primitive by modern standards–only true retro gaming fans will likely find this to be an unavoidable App Store download.  That said, we encourage gamers with even a causal fondness for the retro to check it out as well because…well…it’s free and it’s a great game.

App Store Link: Adventure, Free

BusinessWeek recently took a look at the world of iPhone gaming in their post “Apple: Soon to Be a Mobile Gaming Force” and decided that Sony and Nintendo might have something to worry about.

I didn’t expect much from games on the iPhone. I had visions of casual games, perhaps a fancy take on solitaire or a version of poker that takes advantage of the handset’s touchscreen. Surely not a true mobile gaming experience.

Boy, was I wrong. For the last few days I’ve been sampling some of the games available from the iTunes Store on the iPod Touch, and I’ve been stunned at how elaborate and involved they are.

In the four months since iPhone 2.0 and the iTunes App Store arrived, the App Store has grown to 1,500 games.  Compare that number to the total 300 titles available for the Sony PSP and 600 titles for the Nintendo DS and the case becomes stronger.  Granted, most available games aren’t AAA blockbusters, but the titles that are available cost far less than the typical PSP or DS offerings.  And every iPhone game is set to easily receive free updates from the developer through iTunes.  And, again, we’re only four months into it.

Apple has been on a roll of late and is on track to sell 40 million devices a year that are capable of playing games.  Will it handily take control of mobile gaming?  BusinessWeek’s Hesseldahl is optimistic.

It’s enough to make me wonder whether Apple is on its way to conquering yet another sector of the consumer-technology business from out of nowhere. We’ll certainly know more after the holiday season, but if I worked for the Sony or Nintendo handheld gaming divisions, I’d be watching the holiday sales figures closely.

Mobile developer ZodTTD has announced that his free iPhone port of id’s classic first person shooter, Quake, will be available through the iTunes App Store in the next few days.

I recently submitted a free port of Quake to Apple’s AppStore. It is compatible with the iPhone and iPod Touch of all versions/firmwares 2.0+. Here is a video of it in action!

At first accelerometer support was included, but it is very hard to play the game while maintaining the positions needed for Quake. So it has been disabled in this revision.

It usually takes between 2 to 5 days to get an app approved (or rejected) for AppStore. Once/if approved for AppStore, it will be updated to include network play, mods / downloadable content, and more!

As you can see and hear, this version has sound support and uses a landscape orientation.

Please support my efforts on bringing this awesome title to AppStore, and leave a comment…

Both Quake and Quake 3: Arena have existed in the iPhone jailbreak community for some time.  It’s great to see an App Store version made available to those beyond the relatively small jailbreak community.

Update: id contacted us and said this would be an illegal port not sanctioned by them, so they it will, of course, not be allowed.

[ via Mobiriot ]

PerBlue has launched Parallel Kingdom [App Store] this morning for free. Parallel Kingdom is a location-based role playing game that we’ve previously discussed. The game is a unique in that it uses your geographic location as the game’s landscape:

Parallel Kingdom is a role playing game that uses GPS (or WiFi locate) to overlay the virtual world on top of the real world. In the Age of Exploration, there will be items, creatures, and other players in the world to use and fight with. Enjoy unique creature personalities, items to upgrade, players to chat and team with, and a global player ranking list to see how you compare to your friends.

The first version of the app is being distributed for free.

App Store Link: Parallel Kingdom, Free

iPhone developer Niklas Wahrman has dropped the price of his Asterope [App Store] to Free. So for a limited time, you can get the full game for no charge.

The game normally costs $2.99 and offers a unique gameplay in which you launch a grappling hook on passing rocks in order to change your direction.

While the gameplay is unique, we’re not sure if it’s enough to base an entire game around. The game, however, has been well reviewed by an Pocketgamer.co.uk and is certainly worth giving it a try for free.

The gameplay video gives you and idea of how the game is played. As an extra bonus the Asterope developer has posted extensive details about the game’s development process.

App Store Link: Asterope

Disney has released a free game called RhinoBall [App Store] for the iPhone and iPod Touch as a promo for their upcoming animated film Bolt.

The game is an accelerometer based game in which you control the character of Rhino (a hamster in a ball) to find Bolt (a dog). Naturally, you tilt your iPhone to collect the lightning bolts as you race to the end of the level. The game is somewhat simple, but does serve as a good tie in to the movie.

It’s a fun diversion with some amusing clip scenes, though be warned that the clip scenes + trailers bring this app up to a chunky 94.4MB size.

Storybird has just released an update to and changed the name of it’s Arkanoid-style ball and paddle game, Ikanoid.  The new name of this updated version is Space Buster [App Store]–and “for a limited time,” the game is available as a free download to mark the update and name change.

Ikanoid Space Buster was the favored title in our early Arkanoid / Breakout game roundup.

With its excellent sound effects and responsiveness, it really provides a solid arcade feeling.

The availability of power up capsules are abundant, but aren’t so powerful that they necessarily detract from the basic gameplay.

The latest version features the following updates:

• 45 new levels (total 100)
• Bug fixes
• Faster engine
• Better physics
• Smoother framerate
• iPod background music support
• New background music tunes
• New product name
• New warp effect
• New loading screen

Fans of the genre may also want to see our recent Super Breakout vs. Block Breaker Deluxe 2 faceoff.

Electronic Arts has released a free, one level trial version of the iPhone game Spore Origins [$7.99 App Store]: Free Spore Origins LE [App Store].

Get to know a few of the iPhone/iPod touch amazing features without commercial interruption!

• Tilt, turn and twist your way through the primordial ooze with your motion-sensing accelerometer.
• Pinch, pull and poke your creation in the Creature Editor, customizing the texture, shape and body parts to fit the way you want to play.
• Personalize your gameplay by skinning your creature with pictures from your device’s Photo Albums.

We reviewed the Spore Origins (with video) back in September.