If you're among the, like, 12 people who don't own Angry Birds Space [Free / Free (HD)], now's an awesome time to fix that. The outer space-themed take on the series is free to download across iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. You got zero dollars, right? Get clicking!
My favorite thing to do in Space is watch my birds helplessly orbit objects without any hope of actually colliding into something that can break. It's funny in that troll-y kind of way. These brave birds braved space and, possibly, travelled light years to do a job, but can't because their operator is a jerk. Eli, on the other hand, found a couple of better things to like about Space, including the level design.
We hear folks really like Space, so chances are the remaining 12 of you will, too. We're guessing this is free courtesy Apple's own Free App of the Week promotion, so you've got seven or so days to jump on the game's new $0 price.
Gangstar Rio: City of Saints, $4.99 - Gameloft is offering up a couple of freebies this weekend on two games which have never been free before. First up is Gangstar Rio: City of Saints [$4.99], their take on the whole Grand Theft Auto open-world sandbox game. We reviewed Gangstar Rio when it released back in late 2011, and despite some typical Gameloft-isms like terrible voice work and a paper thin story, we thought it offered up a fairly robust open-world crime game experience.
It's been pretty regularly updated too, adding in new content and most recently widescreen support for the iPhone 5.
N.O.V.A. 3 - Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance, $6.99 - The second game being offered up for free is N.O.V.A. 3 [$6.99]. Previously, the N.O.V.A. series had been mostly a riff on the Halo games, but this most recent entry more closely resembles something like Crysis. Either way, expect lots of sci-fi first-person shooting action and impressive visuals. As with most Gameloft entries, there's a robust online multiplayer offering in N.O.V.A. 3, and as such we gave it its own review back when the game released in May of last year. We also reviewed the single-player campaign, which is pretty excellent as well.
Gameloft has been flirting more with free-to-play games as of late, but both N.O.V.A. 3 and Gangstar Rio are premium-priced games that you can snag for zero dollars right now and through this weekend. Don't miss out.
Just a quick heads up that a very neat game is currently free, and worth checking out even if you miss out on the freebie. It's called Floris [Free] by Ox & Coon, and it takes similar matching inspiration from games like Tetris and Dr. Mario and blends them into an audio/visual treat that feels equal parts art and game.
To be perfectly honest, Floris seems pretty simple on the surface but it actually can get quite complex and strategic as you go. It's also one of those things that's hard to explain, but will eventually "click" after you play for a bit and from that point on Floris really begins to shine.
Floris is based around a center point with 12 extensions branching out from it evenly, like the numbers on a clock. At any given time two of the extensions are pointing towards the top of the screen, and two sets of colored dot-like petals travel down them towards the center. Buttons on either side of the screen allow you to spin then entire shape around, changing which extensions are pointing up and receiving the dropping petals. Another set of buttons allow you to swap the position of the dropping petals, and touching the center of the Floris causes your petals to fast-drop to the center. It's easier to see in motion in the following video.
Matching five of the same color on one extension will eliminate the petals in that extension, but the real fun lies in making entire circles of a matching color around the entire Floris. Again, it's tricky to explain and I'm even still trying to wrap my head around the game, but suffice to say there is a lot of strategy involved in the mechanics of Floris. You'd do well to read the developer's guide which does a great job of explaining things, as there really isn't an in-game tutorial to speak of.
There's so much more to Floris than the basics that I've covered here, and it's worth the effort to read up on and learn its ways as it really is a clever and visually striking little game. Players in our forums seem to be really enjoying it ever since its release a month ago, and you'd do well to snag Floris during its freebie sale.
While the folks over at Big Bucket Software are busy cranking away at their next project, they've decided to show a little love to their previous iOS release The Incident [$0.99] and drop its price down to 99¢. What is The Incident? Well, imagine on any random day you're outside standing on the sidewalk. All of a sudden, stuff just starts falling from the sky. And by stuff, I mean just a bunch of weird stuff. Like refridgerators, cars, foam fingers from sporting events, garden gnomes… if you can think of it, it's probably falling from the sky in The Incident.
Your job is to avoid getting smashed by this stuff, but also continually stay on top of what eventually becomes a rapidly rising junk pile. What results is a fun and challenging arcade game that has stayed on my device since its original release nearly 3 years ago.
Check out our original review for more, but keep in mind that over the years The Incident has been updated pretty frequently to keep with the times. First it received an endless survival mode, iCloud progress syncing, iPad Retina Display support, and most recently iPhone 5 widescreen support. It really is one of those cool little games that's always fun to fire up and play, so if you don't own it yet then definitely consider grabbing it during this 99¢ sale.
Heads up: SEGA is doing a sale on three of its more notable recent releases on the App Store. From now until later this weekend, you can grab After Burner Climax [$2.99], Crazy Taxi [$4.99], and House of the Dead: Overkill [$4.99] for a couple bucks off their usual listing price. So, if you want to do something with either zombies, taxis, or jets feel free to go nuts.
Here's one of those handy before and now lists:
After Burner Climax - $2.99 -> $.99
Crazy Taxi -$4.99 -> $.99
House of the Dead: Overkill - The Lost Reels - $4.99 -> $2.99
Each of these games suffer from some of the usual issues that come from ports of games that were originally on machines with buttons (or steering wheels ... or joysticks), but generally speaking, they've been received well by folks.
Rockstar Games brought a surprisingly playable touchscreen port of their classic Grand Theft Auto: Vice City [$4.99] to the App Store back in December, and for the first time since release they've dropped the price of the game from $4.99 down to just $1.99.
Vice City is the second iteration of the fully 3D, open-world sandbox GTA games and was released way back in 2002. It goes hard with its 1980s, neon, Scarface-meets-Miami Vice theme and follows your protagonist as he starts out as a low-level thug and works his way into the crime boss of Vice City.
For its 10th anniversary Vice City was released on iOS with some cleaned up visuals and some subtle tweaks to certain missions and difficulty levels. While the original Vice City is designed for the many buttons of modern gaming controllers, the virtual buttons actually work surprisingly well on iOS and we really enjoyed the touchscreen conversion in our review.
If you're a GTA fan that for whatever reason hasn't picked up Vice City for your iOS device yet, then now is your chance to grab it for more than half-off. It's fun for what it is, and it's kind of a miracle a game like Vice City can be carried around in your pocket nowadays. As always, more information and discussion of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City can be found in our forums.
Being a creep ain't all that bad. Well, at least, that's what the Anomaly series has taught me. If you're not familiar, these are tower offense games. Both have you play as the horde of dudes descending on a bunch of turrets instead of the other way around. It's a neat twist that literally turns the genre on its head. And if you haven't seen or played either, now's a good time to jump on the train. Both Anomalies, Earth [$3.99 / $1.99 / $3.99] and Korea [$3.99], are on sale for a limited time.
The reason for the sale, by the way? Anomaly 2 is coming to PC soon. In fact, it's hitting in just two weeks. Nothing like drumming up interest by basically giving away a game's predecessors.
We don't know if Anomaly 2 is coming to iOS, by the way. We've just shot over a note. Who knows! Maybe we'll see it. Until, then, though, have fun with these two games. They're both great. The first, if you remember, even grabbed our GOTY runner-up award a few years back. Ah, memories.
Long, long time Mac developer Pangea Software was amongst the first to really go full-steam into iOS development and the new App Store back in the early iPhone days. Because of that, some of their titles will always stand out to me as absolute classics for the time that they were released. Games like Cro-Mag Rally and Enigmo. Pangea has also always been really good at adopting new technology and features, often being first out of the gate to implement things like Retina Display support and Game Center online multiplayer.
So, Pangea is a solid developer with a great history, but the iOS App Store in particular has been really good to them. In an effort to thank all their fans, they've made their entire much of their iOS game catalog free for the next 24 hours. Here's a list of what's on offer, including their games which are free to begin with.
This isn't the first time Pangea has had a freebie blowout like this, in particular they did this a couple of years back for their third anniversary on the App Store, but there are some quality titles on offer here for zero dollars so if there are some games listed above which you haven't discovered yet now is a great time to check them out. Also, if you like being alerted to freebies like this be sure to have the TouchArcade [Free] app installed to get notifications when time-limited sales like this go into effect.
As we told you back in February, the folks over at Ravenous Games are prepping the release of Random Heroes 2, the sequel to last summer's action platformer Random Heroes [Free]. The original Random Heroes was pretty cool, but Ravenous is hoping to ratchet things up in the sequel with new mechanics, new enemies, and plenty of hew heroes to play as. Check out the latest trailer to see the new game in motion.
Today Ravenous announced that Random Heroes 2 is approved and set for release this Thursday, which is actually Wednesday night here in the US. In equally exciting news, to celebrate the impending release of Random Heroes 2 they've just dropped the price of their other platforming sequel League of Evil 2 [$1.99] to free for the next week. Here's the trailer for League of Evil 2 in case you want to see it in action first.
If you like fast-paced platforming with quick, bite-sized levels then you should jump all over League of Evil 2 while free, if you don't own it already that is. It's been on sale before, but this is the first time that I can recall it being completely free, so it's definitely noteworthy. Grab it while you can and keep your eyes peeled for Random Heroes 2 to drop later this week.
The retro game porting experts at DotEmu have brought all sorts of classics to the iOS platform in impressive fashion, and this past December they gave us the landmark scrolling shooter Raiden along with some of its sequels in one tight little package called Raiden Legacy [$4.99]. And for the first time since launch Raiden Legacy is on sale for just a couple of dollars, down from its normal price of $4.99.
Raiden Legacy comes with four titles in total: the original Raiden, Raiden Fighters, Raiden Fighters 2, and Raiden Fighters Jet. The original game is an all-time classic, but the Raiden Fighters series really shows the strides the shoot 'em up genre made during the '90s. I was a huge Raiden fan as a kid but never got around to playing the Fighters series, and was pleasantly surprised with just how excellent they are when I experienced them for the first time on iOS.
Of course since this is the work of DotEmu you can expect all sorts of great features and options in Raiden Legacy. Control-wise you can adjust the speed of your movement, even setting it to the arcade original. By default touchscreen controls make shooters like this easier since the ship moves at the speed of your finger, so the arcade setting is nice for purists. You can also move your bomb and fire buttons around to wherever you like or just toggle auto-fire on or off. There's also video settings including running the game in fullscreen or the original arcade aspect ratio, and a toggle for video filtering if you like your pixels smooth or crisp.
If you were a Raiden fan back in the day, or if you've never experienced the series but love yourself a good shoot 'em up, definitely jump on Raiden Legacy during this sale. Hopefully the folks at DotEmu have another compilation in the works that will include the other two games from the original trilogy, Raiden II and Raiden DX, and then I can finally die a happy man.
Landlubbers take notice: Johnny Two Shoe's awesome swashbuckling adventure Plunderland [$0.99] is currently free for a limited time. It's a side-scrolling affair that sees you controlling a group of pirates in a God-like manner as you travel the seas going port to port and pillaging everything you encounter along the way. There are tons of neat interactive elements in Plunderland, like being able to pick up people in the game and fling them about or set them on fire, swipe enemy cannonballs out of the sky, and discover treasures by tap-digging on islands.
Plunderland is unlike practically anything else on the iOS platform, and although it launched nearly three years ago it still holds up incredibly well to this day. It was even updated last fall to include some modern features like iPhone 5 widescreen support and Retina Display graphics for the iPad, in addition to some tidying up of menus and other optimizations.
You can check our original review of Plunderland as well as the details of a huge update which added a new campaign, or check out the lengthy thread in our forums for player impressions. Plunderland has only been free once before, and while we're still waiting extremely patiently for Johnny Two Shoe's upcoming epic Prevail, there's no reason you shouldn't jump all over it right now for some free plundering in the meantime.
Foursaken Media's Block Fortress [$0.99] is one of those games that could last you forever. It plops you into a Minecraft-like block-based sandbox, tasks you with creating the most impenetrable fortress possible out of those blocks, and then sends wave after wave of enemies in to see if your creation will indeed stand up to the test. Oh, and while these enemies are attacking you're thrust face-first into the action by dropping into your created map in first-person mode, allowing you to help blast away at the baddies yourself. It's pretty great stuff.
The ability to create your own levels means that Block Fortress is really only limited by your imagination (and a device's technical limits), and today Foursaken extends the game's legs even further by updating it with the ability to upload and download user-created maps right into the game.
In Block Fortress's sandbox mode, you're given basically endless resources to create the craziest fortress possible. With today's update you can now upload your creations for the world to see, as well as download the maps that other people have made to test them out yourself. A simple "thumbs up/thumbs down" rating system helps ensure that the best maps are readily visible, and already there are tons of maps available to download.
Block Fortress is awesome, but it's also a pretty complicated and challenging game. Once you get warmed up to it, though, it's an amazing experience. To help you out, we commissioned some tips from the developers, and an avid player of the game submitted his own set of tips as well. Check those out for a closer look at the strategies behind Block Fortress.
Besides the level-sharing functionality in this new update, there's also a boatload of tweaks, fixes, new block types, and more that you can read about in full in the App Store's update description. To top it all off, Block Fortress is currently on sale for just a buck, so now is definitely a good time to give it a look if you have not done so yet.
I just got the call from fellow carb-free buddy, all around nice guy, and honorary King of Australia: Halfbrick's own Phil Larsen (who was also actually on a recent podcast) to tell us that Fruit Ninja [$0.99] as well as the iPad counterpart Fruit Ninja HD [$2.99 (HD)] are both free. Originally released in 2010, Fruit Ninja quickly ascended to "classic" status along side App Store staples like Doodle Jump [$0.99] or Pocket God [$0.99] with an incredibly simple premise and controls that even your grandma can get a hang of.
It seems silly to explain the premise of Fruit Ninja, as I'd hope anyone who reads TouchArcade would already know about it, but the basic idea is fruit gets tossed up on the screen of your iOS device of choice, and you swipe it to slice it while avoiding slicing bombs. Through a variety of updates they've added new game types, fruit to slice, and have even released the movie-themed spinoff Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots [$0.99].
I figure there's a good chance most people around here already have Fruit Ninja, but still, if you don't now is a great time to snag it. Similarly, if you're a TouchArcade regular chances are you're also "that guy" who all your iPhone-owning friends ask for game recommendations, and, well, Fruit Ninja for free is a pretty solid one.
Hot on the heels of the news that Final Fantasy Vwould be hitting later this month (in Japan at least, and possibly elsewhere), Square Enix has put the first four Final Fantasy titles on sale for a limited time.
The first two games are actually ports of the versions that were remade for the Sony PSP several years back, so they include improved visuals and some difficulty tweaks over their NES counterparts (if you're into that sort of thing). The third and fourth entries are also ports of remakes, both originally releasing on the Nintendo DS after being completely rebuilt with 3D visuals. The iOS versions of these 3D remakes include higher resolution assets and a few other improvements over the DS versions.
One thing that all of these Final Fantasy games have in common is that each one will provide you with hours upon hours of content, with epic stories to unfold and countless enemy monsters to take out. If you're craving a new adventure, whether in traditional top-down 2D or full 3D, then consider one of these Final Fantasy titles while they're on sale, and we'll bring you any more news on the impending Final Fantasy V release as we get it.
A Sharp's King of Dragon Pass [$9.99], one of our favorite games about tribal politics, is now 30 percent off for the next three days. The headline gave it away, but A Sharp is doing this in celebration of selling 30,000 copies of the game on the App Store, which is a lot of shipped product for a niche game that usually sits at a very premium price of $9.99.
As we've covered in our extensive review, Dragon Pass is a deep and slow-paced strategy game where your choices actually mean something. Making a successful tribe is hard, but it's an ultimately rewarding task if you've got the patience and smarts.
Anyway, you can grab the game on the cheap for the next couple of days. If you've been wanting to play it on PC, you can swing over to GOG and grab it for $5.99. We like it on iPad the best, if you're wondering.
If you're among the, like, 12 people who don't own Angry Birds Space [Free / Free (HD)], now's an awesome time to fix that. The outer space-themed take on the series is free to download across iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. You got zero dollars, right? Get clicking! 
