It’s Wednesday again, which for me means another week where I debate drafting up a template to use for these weekly New Zealand release posts instead of coming up with something new each week. Work smarter, not harder like Scrooge McDuck always says… But, I digress. This week’s releases include a couple highly anticipated HD versions of iPhone games, as well as Army of Darkness Defense which, like all things to do with Bruce Campbell, seems almost too awesome for words.
If this is your first Wednesday with an iOS device, or if this is the first Wednesday that has come since you discovered TouchArcade, the App Store works a little something like this: Developers can set a specific release date for those apps, and they then get released worldwide in each region as it becomes that day in that particular region. New Zealand is the region nearest to the international date line, so they get their games first. What does this mean for us Americans? All of these games should be available at 11:00 PM Eastern tonight:
Army of Darkness Defense, 99¢ / HD – Forum Thread – I’ve had a preview version of this game on my iPad 2 for a couple weeks now, and if you’re even close to being an Army of Darkness fan, or just a general Bruce Campbell fan, you need to buy this game the instant it appears. It’s a hero-based castle battle game, and while the gameplay is fairly run of the mill for the genre, Backflip Studios have basically redefined fan service in an iPhone game. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that a good 90MB of the 100MB file size consists of movie quotes and other official sound effects.
Bee Farm, 99¢ – Forum Thread – There have been line drawing games that put you in charge of managing all kinds of things from planes, to boats, and now bees. Even though it seems like there’s a million of these games out there now, I still like trying out new ones to see if they’ve managed to add anything new or exciting to the genre. And hey, who doesn’t like honey?
Bohnanza, $3.99 / HD – Forum Thread – I’m woefully naive of a lot of crazy board and card games, so it didn’t really surprise me to find out just how popular Bohnanza actually is. There’s an entire Wikipedia article on the game which details the ridiculous amount of expansions it has had. I’m not sure Bohnanza will be a mass-market success on the App Store, but like most of these semi-obscure board and card games, I’m sure it’s release will make some people very happy.
Catch The Candy, 99¢ / HD – A fun little physics game we got a sneak peak of a while ago puts you in charge of a curious little purple creature with a long tongue that’s used to reach candy. 53 levels are included, with more on the way via updates.
Chromanoids, 99¢ – [Forum Thread] – The iTunes description of Chromanoids is fairly vague, but I’m intrigued by the screenshots. I’m making an educated guess here in that the gameplay might involve some kind of color-coded Missile Defense-like gameplay. Am I wrong? Am I right? I suppose we’ll know in a few hours.
Golden Axe 3, $2.99 – Forum Thread – Same old song and dance here from Sega. Golden Axe 3’s release makes for an App Store trilogy of Golden Axe games, which is great if you’re just mad about Golden Axe. Hopefully once Sega gets releasing all of these arcade-style games out of their system they get back to releasing some more RPG’s from their insanely massive back-catalog.
HECTOR: Ep1 HD – We Negotiate with Terrorists, $6.99 – Forum Thread – We like the iPhone version a lot in our review, and this seems to be the same game, just up-scaled to the iPad. I’ve greatly preferred these kind of point and click games on the iPad, and Hector is a great one. Hopefully this leads to those followup episodes fans of the iPhone game have been waiting on…
Spoing, 99¢ / HD – Forum Thread – This game looks a lot like Parachute Ninja, except you can control where you put the various slingshots to shoot your dude around. The trailer has definitely piqued my interest, and I look forward to giving this game a spin.
StarFront: Collision HD, $6.99 – Forum Thread – We had positive first impressions of the iPhone version of StarFront, and we’re expecting the iPad version to be even better since the increased screen real estate really lends itself to an RTS game. As an aside, am I the only one who is amused by the fact that Gameloft not only has cloned StarCraft, but they’re also duplicating the commentary-laden game replays like the above video? Alright, I admit, I’m totally stoked to fire this game up on my iPad 2.
