We sat down with the guys from The Binary Mill late Friday evening at GDC to check out their upcoming shooter, Assault Squadron. The most immediately noticeable feature about the game is the insane frame rate it all runs at, and the developers insist that it even runs at a solid 60 FPS even on the 1st generation iPod touch. These performance levels are important, especially as the game increases in difficulty and you find yourself in "bullet hell," as the developers put it.

The twist of Assault Squadron comes from the two gameplay modes the various levels alternate between. While playing through the game, you'll go through a level where it plays like a vertical shooter with your phone held in portrait mode. Following that, the game might alternate to a horizontal side scrolling level. With each transition you see different sides of both your ship and enemies, and the gameplay feels slightly different as well.

Other than that, Assault Squadron comes with everything you could possibly want in a shooter. There's a crazy scoring system with multipliers galore (and online leaderboards via Crystal), four different ships that all handle differently with their own unique weapon systems, upgrades everywhere, and best yet– Control options that should satisfy everyone between the on-screen touch controls, a virtual joystick, and tilt.

Take a look at the recently release gameplay trailer:

The developers have mentioned they still have balancing a bug fixing to do, but hope to have Assault Squadron on the App Store sometime this spring. For more information on the game, take a look at the thread on our forums which is home to quite a ton of Assault Squadron media.

To say details are sketchy right now on this game would be an understatement, but what we do know is that Japanese developer Media Vision has a job posting [Translated] up looking for developers for a new RPG for the iPhone coming in 2010.

French Final Fantasy fan site, Final Fantasy Ring via Famitsu noted the game is called Chaos Ring and also in their story [Translated] mention that the team behind it also created the Playstation RPG Wild Arms, a personal favorite of mine.

That's all we know right now, the rest is open to speculation. There is an awful lot of time left in 2010, and if Media Vision is only looking for people now, we might have a long wait in front of us to get our hands on Chaos Ring. Regardless, we're anxious to hear more on the game and will post whatever we can dig up from our Japanese sources.

In the meantime, you can swing by the Chaos Ring thread on our forums and join in on the excitement.

Back in October we covered the 360iDev Game Jam, an all-night coding frenzy that challenged developers to create a playable (and, hopefully, interesting) game in just 10 hours. The results were impressive.

One of the developers who took up the challenge was Owen Goss of Streaming Colour Studios. Owen labored through the night and came up with an interesting title called UpDown.  As Owen described the game,

UpDown is a puzzle game. To complete a level, all pieces must be raised or lowered to level 0. However, you can only raise or lower pieces in the patterns dictated by the brushes. Strategy and intuition are required to master this simple yet challenging game.

While graphically sparse, the game was maddeningly difficult. What Owen had come up with was such a challenging formula that, when we spoke with him about the title last year, he indicated that he was considering building the prototype into a more complete game and releasing it through the App Store.

At GDC 2010, I sat down with Owen and he showed me LandFormer, his upcoming puzzle game that is the evolution of UpDown. And trust me, it's still maddeningly difficult.

The included screenshots show rather clearly how the game has evolved. LandFormer presents a five-by-five game-world grid with five different terrain levels for each block. The goal is to alter the terrain such that all blocks form a flat plane (the blocks with the little villages on them). To do so, you must pick a brush along the side of the playfield, tap a block on the playfield at which to center the action, and carry out a two-finger swipe up or down to indicate the desired direction of change.

If that sounds easy to you — well — it's not. The effects of one move are layered upon the next (and upon the next, and so on…) in such a way that you can pretty quickly develop a dread sense of having painted yourself into a corner, in a manner of speaking. I was having difficulty with the easiest few levels and could feel a growing desire to send Owen's test device into the wall of the Marriott lobby. But, despite my own frustrations, Owen assures me that all of the levels in the game can indeed be completed.

To enable players to torture their friends, the sinister developer has included a level editor that allows for the creation of custom maps, built using the same brushes used for standard play (so that all levels will be solvable). User made levels can be shared with friends via a web-link system, where all the data needed to describe the level is present in the link's CGI variables.

Puzzle addicts who enjoy having their brain crushed will want to run, not walk, to the App Store and grab LandFormer when it makes its debut in April. The game will be a free download including about 10 tutorial-difficulty levels (which is what I was playing at GDC…) and the aforementioned level editor, with additional levels available as in-app purchases.

The developers behind Ravensword [$4.99] are very active members of our forums, and aside from constantly answering questions in the thread for Ravensword, they also recently used our forums to post the first images from Ravensword 2. Obviously it's hard to discern much about the actual gameplay at this point just by looking at character models and concept drawings, but I really liked the original Ravensword in our review, and there's not much reason to think the sequel wouldn't be just as good– If not better.

These details were revealed a few days ago, but due to the madness that was GDC, we're just catching up on it now. Here's what we know so far:

The Ravensword team is hard at work building a "massive library" of art assets, and with the help of Dicework Games are going to flesh out many of the RPG elements that the original Ravensword was missing. Ravensword 2 isn't coming out anytime soon, but they expect to have it on the App Store sometime this year.

They've also got a secret project in the works that is going to be announced soon, and you can expect to hear about it as soon as we find out more details. In the meantime, check out the Ravensword 2 thread where the Ravensword 2 team have posted a ton of images and have been actively answering questions from forum members.

Out at GDC 2010 last week I had a chance to sit down with Wes Paugh of Dinofarm Games to get a bit of hands-on time with their upcoming iPhone roguelike, 100 Rogues, which we covered, most recently, last month.

Wes explained that 100 Rogues is designed to be approachable by adventure gamers that aren't necessarily hardcore roguelike aficionados. The game features a modern, enhanced graphics set that should appeal to players more than the fairly sparse presentation of most roguelikes out there. Certain options and items have been kept more basic, as well, in the name of keeping things straight forward for the player. For example, there are only two character classes: Fairy Wizard and Human Crusader, and there are a good number of items to collect and equip along the way, but not the thousands of obscure scrolls found in the more traditional roguelike offerings.

100 Rogues, a name inspired by the SNES title 100 Worlds Quest, features not only an array of dungeon enemies, such as Bats, Rats, Skybabies, Gypsies, and Bandits, but also the occasional boss enemies, including a Genie and even Satan himself. A tap-based inventory and attack menu system designed to be quickly accessible on the iPhone has been implemented.

The initial release will feature two game worlds, with four to five additional worlds to be made available down the road through updates.

Have a look at the brief gameplay video we were able to capture during our meet.

The iPhone is happily host to several excellent roguelike dungeon crawlers, including Rogue Touch [$2.99] and Sword of Fargoal [$4.99]. Based on what I saw of 100 Rogues at GDC, Dinofarm's own take on the formula is sure to be listed among those of quality.

100 Rogues is set to appear in the App Store in just a couple of weeks.

Gamenauts has been a game developer since 2005 with titles for the PC, DS and Wii. The company, however, is about to make their first move into iPhone gaming with a brand new title called Stickbound.

The game centers around a new gameplay mechanic where the character extends a stick to pole vault themselves throughout the level. The came consists of a series of platforms that must be navigated as you try to get as far as possible.

As you can see from the video, tapping on screen extends the stick in that direction. Well timed and placed taps will keep your character in motion as you try to make it farther. Falling in between the platforms results in your demise. The game is expected to have global high scores, unlockable characters as well as mini achievements. Stickbound is due later this month.

Autralian-based iPhone developer The Voxel Agents were also present at GDC 2010 and gave us a preview of their next major update to Train Conductor. Train Conductor is a chaos management game that was originally released in December. We reviewed the game and found it to be fun and frantic. The main criticism of the game has been a lack of endless or survival mode — but readers should be happy to know that this mode will be added to the coming update.

The other big feature for the new version is the addition of new America map and levels (shown above). The new levels we were shown were based on the Grand Canyon and New York City Subway. See our hands on video to see them in action.

The update will be free and due in late April. The current version of Train Conductor remains available for $1.99.

App Store Link: Train Conductor, $1.99

Back in May of last year a mysterious video appeared on YouTube showing a surprisingly full featured port of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 for the iPhone. The next day, the developers clarified that while the game was running amazingly on the iPhone, it was unlikely to ever see the light of day. Disappointed, we eventually just gave up on waiting for Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 to be released.

Here is a copy of the original Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 video, although since it was ripped from YouTube and re-uploaded, the quality seems to have taken a substantial hit:

As you can see in the screenshots, it seems that the controls have seen a major overhaul following the initial release of the video. According to Tony Hawk's twitter feed, the game is real, and is going to be available soon.

As someone who played the original Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 until I broke my Nintendo 64 controller, I cannot wait. We will post any other details we're able to dig up on the game in the future.

At GDC 2009 we had chance to sit down with Engineous Games and have a look at their in-development iPhone game construction set, Sketch Nation Shooter.  The system was in a very early stage back then and has evolved notably, since.  We posted a demo video the developers released back in December.

Sketch Nation Shooter, as Engineous describes it,

…allows users to create their own games by drawing a player, enemies and a level on a piece of paper and taking a picture of the drawing with their iPhone camera. Users can then share their creations with their friends and other users. Our unique image recognition technology automatically detects the objects drawn and calculates collision boundaries. Sketch Nation Shooter is the only game to incorporate the iPhone camera in such a way. iPod Touch users can import their drawings through the Photo Library. After the drawings are imported into the game, users will be able to place enemies and powerups as well as set their properties in our easy to use in-game editor and then play with their unique creations.

Here at GDC 2010 a year later we had a chance to meet up with the developer once again and were shown a rather impressive demo of the app in its current state, in which he created a simple game in under two minutes and took us through the paces of several more complex games. Once created, users can share their games with other players online through their Facebook login and compare global high scores.

Have a look at the video we captured that demonstrates the system in action.

It's an impressive piece of work and we're anxious to see how much gaming goodness iPhone gamers can create with the system. Sketch Nation Shooter for the iPhone is expected to arrive in the App Store in early April. The developer indicates that an iPad-specific version down the road is likely.

Gameresort showed us their latest game here at GDC. Downhill Bowling 2 provides a sequel to their strangely fun bowling mashup.

Like regular bowling… except you control a bowling ball as it charges down some crazy slopes with jumps, coins, bombs, cannons, speedups, sheep, grow and shrink pickups and mushrooms. Did we mention the raccoons?

The sequel offers the same downhill action but in 3 different environments with 10 levels each. It also introduces a jump button which adds a bit of platforming action to the mix as well as the ability to equip powerups at the beginning of each level.

Here's the sequel in action:

Downhill Bowling 2 is expected for release in summer. In the meanwhile you can still play the original on the web or from the App Store [Free / $2.99]. Gameresort has also been busy over the past year with a casual free bowling game Doodle Bowling [Free] which has gained a huge audience.