Hello everyone, and welcome to the week! It’s time once again for our look back at the noteworthy updates of the last seven days. All sorts of interesting games had updates this time around, from paid RPGs to free-to-play shooters. Math puzzles? Yes. Bizarre humanoid animals who are obsessed with ordering you, the only human, around? Uh-hunh. All that and more, friends. Of course, you can keep an eye out for updates yourself using AppShopper or by participating in the TouchArcade forums. This weekly summary is just here to fill you in on the things you might have missed. Let’s dig in!
The Quest, $7.99 Expansion time! Kind of. Sort of. So as you may or may not remember, the game currently known as The Quest is in fact an HD remake of sorts. It looks nice and is universal so we all like it and will invite it to our birthday parties. But it’s not compatible with the expansions for the old version, so the developer of most of those, Zarista, has been remaking those expansions between making new ones. The latest to return is Heroes of Lukomorye 3, and this update facilitates that expansion. And adds an item to a shop. That’s the size of it.
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, Free This is a modest but welcome update for Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. Hardcore players will be happy to see that the maximum Friendship rank has been increased, giving you an excuse to call up your old favorites and shower them with fruit and fish. The rest of the improvements are mainly with regards to the UI. Item lists are easier to use, the contacts list is a lot less kludgy, you can now skip dialogue if you want, and some of the HUD elements have been wiggled around a bit.
MARVEL Avengers Academy, Free Well, there’s a new Marvel movie out, so you can probably guess the shape of this update along with the ones for every other Marvel app last week. Recruit Ant-Man, Rick Jones for some reason, and if you’re very lucky, Hope Van Dyne. Battle the same AIM bad guys you’ve been thumping on for years now. Farm like heck to try to unlock some costumes. It’s the whole Avengers Academy experience, but this time the heroes are as small as your chance of pulling anything useful out of a random capsule!
Meganoid 2, $1.99 Orangepixel has been quietly going about the business of updating all of its iOS games in recent months, and Meganoid 2 is the latest to get the treatment. In this game’s case, you can look forward to MFi controller support, iPhone X support, and naturally compatibility with the latest versions of iOS. It’s great to see older titles like this still getting support, so if you haven’t picked this up yet and want to show some love to a great dev, here you go.
Knights Chronicle, Free Knights Chronicle is pretty new, so this is its first update! We used to give buttons for that, but time are tough everywhere now. We’ll have to settle for a quick summary of what is new. Let’s see here… well, the Dark Forest has been unlocked. That’s nice. Rune transformation has been added so that you can transform any runes you have laying around. The in-game chat has been improved? How, by deleting it? Ha, just joking, please don’t throw tomatoes at me. Other than that, you’ve got some UI improvements that should be agreeable.
Zero/Sum, Free Zero/Sum is kind of a weird game, but it seems to have struck a chord with plenty of people. Enough people that the developer has been getting a lot of feedback, at least, and with this update he seeks to address some of it. The new version of the game now automatically saves your progress with every puzzle. If you want to reset a puzzle, you can do so at any time through an option in the pause menu. There’s also a new feature that allows you to skip cut-scenes if you want. That’s a good thing to have in a game like this, even if those cut-scenes are pretty darned fun the first time you see them. Add in some bug fixes, and that’s the lot. Nothing else is grabbing me, so I guess this game can have the coveted UMMSotW award this time.
It's Full of Sparks, Free Those wacky folks at Noodlecake are at it again, all… updating their games and stuff. PINATA! Oh no, I spoiled it all. Maybe no one saw. It’s Full of Sparks has a new game mode, and it’s all about PINATAS. Please pretend there is an appropriate mark above the ‘n’ there. I can’t find it on a Japanese keyboard. Anyhow, you have to break pinatas and collect candies in the correct order to reach the water. Don’t worry about your fuse, as it lasts FOREVER. That’s a long time. The exact same day the Final Fantasy 7 Remake releases, I believe.
Mr. Crab 2, Free Let’s face it – it’s not hard to find ways to get crabby here in the heck-scape that is 2018. If you feel like treating your crabbiness by playing a video game where you are a crab, you could do a lot worse than Mr. Crab 2. There’s a new crab available in this update, described in the update notes as the fairy-candy Crab Lolly. I, uh, think the developer may not be aware of the other meaning connected with a homophone of that word, but oh well. The other big change is that you can now watch an ad to try out a premium level before you buy the pack. Hopefully that will help people see if the premium levels are something they want to part with their money for.
Crossy Road, Free Roads don’t get much crossier than this. Hm, it could work. I’m just brainstorming tag-lines for the inevitable Crossy Road movie, don’t mind me. This update takes Crossy Road under the sea with 12 new figures to unlock. What might those figurines be? I have no earthly idea. They don’t even give hints in the update notes anymore, and no one is really documenting this game the way they used to. So that just means you’ll have to get out there and find out for yourselves. And they said there are no more new frontiers out there. Pfft.
Guns of Boom, Free I was sitting here trying to figure out why the characters are using finger-guns in the icon for Guns of Boom when I remembered that weird Apple maybe-rule about guns. So that’s probably that. As for this update, wow, it has a lot. A new type of resources called scraps which can be used to buy cosmetics, some new costumes and masks, some new stuff for sale in the shops, and a bunch of improvements to the visuals. This is a pretty popular game, and it’s not too hard to see why. Fun gameplay and fairly solid support, with plenty of new stuff coming.
That about wraps it up for last week’s significant updates. I’m sure I’ve missed some, though, so please feel free to comment below and let everyone know if you think something should be mentioned. As usual, major updates will likely get their own news stories throughout this week, and I’ll be back next Monday to summarize and fill in the blanks. Have a great week!
