Early last month we first heard that developer Yoot Saito had plans to bring The Tower to the iPad. Saito is a Japanese game designer who is responsible for both SimTower and Yoot Tower (also known as The Tower II in Japan) as well as Seaman, a virtual pet game of sorts that focused on voice recognition for the Sega Dreamcast. The Tower games focus on building a skyscraper with all sorts of different facilities in it while providing as good of a living experience for the residents inside of it as possible. If you’ve never played the game before, think of it basically as a vertical Sim City.

The Tower for iPad [¥450] was just released on the Japanese App Store, and there are plans for an international English version soon. Judging by the below screenshots, quite a bit of the game is in Japanese. You could jump through some hoops to register a Japanese App Store account and figure out how to fund it with yen, but unless you speak some Japanese you’re likely going to be fairly lost when it comes to actually playing.

As a huge fan of the original SimTower, I really can’t wait for The Tower to get an English translation and show up for download in the US App Store. If you played the original game, it’s really not hard to imagine how well it would work with touch controls, as evident from the following gameplay video:

I’ve sent off an email to the developers to determine how soon they expect the English version to be released, and of course when it finally appears expect to see a full review.

Japanese App Store Link: The Tower