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. Last week, I was a bit too exhausted from the Tokyo Game Show to put an article together, but we’re back in the saddle this week with a bunch of… well, mostly familiar faces. That’s how it goes, I guess! 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!
Jetpack Joyride, Free If I wanted to be a sassy-pants, I could put some jokes here about the new update’s inclusion of a cow jetpack and milking and so on, but let’s be honest – the jokes write themselves here. Still, new content for Jetpack Joyride has gotten pretty rare as its publisher has slowed down somewhat, so I suppose we take what we can get here. And what we can get appears to be a cow-shaped jetpack and a new background with a serene-looking pasture where a cow jetpack might enjoy grazing on grass, perhaps with each blade of grass fitted with its own tiny jetpack. I don’t know how the rules work, friends, I just enforce them.
MARVEL Avengers Academy, Free Marvel is rising! It… it seems to try to rise every year. It doesn’t usually go well outside of the movies. But whatever! It is rising now, thanks to a new animated series that features some of Marvel’s young superheroes like Ms. Marvel, Squirrel Girl, Patriot (the newer one), and so on. To go with that, Avengers Academy is running a three-week event that brings back some characters and introduces some new ones. Newcomers include the aforementioned Patriot, Inferno, and Speed. Returnees include Squirrel Girl, Spider-Gwen, America Chavez, Captain Marvel, and others. Throw in some new costumes and I suppose you’ve got an event!
SlimeRoom, Free What to do, what to do? Five new levels is certainly meaningful content, but it’s really hard to write a paragraph about five new levels when that’s really all you have to go on. It’s even harder when this game has been updating pretty frequently with new levels, so I can’t even rely on my trusty boilerplate without my terrible flaws shining through like light through a rotted shed. My only hope is that no one stops to read this paragraph all that carefully, simply seeing the chunk of text and nodding in acknowledgement that all is well in the world as long as there are words to scroll past. Yes, that’s the plan. Just write whatever, and make sure to finish it off by saying SlimeRoom has five new levels to play in its latest version, along with some bug fixes!
A Story of a Band, $1.99 Okay, technically the big update here is more than a week old, but we didn’t do a column last week and this update is pretty significant, so whatever. It’s here, deal with it. A Story of a Band is a pretty old game in App Store terms, and until very recently it hadn’t been updated since 2013. The year 2013! How I pine for its sanity. Oh well. The game looked like it was down for the count, then BOOM! Comeback tour! So you’ve got a rebuilt game engine with spiffy new visuals, and new content for miles. The game now starts in 1965, there are four new genres and forty new sub-genres, you’ve got stadium tours, a new end-game challenge, some mini-games, new items, and more. Wow! Is that worth a coveted UMMSotW award? You betcha!
Candy Crush Soda Saga, Free While not every King game manages to become a success, there’s definitely strong evidence to support that slapping the Candy Crush name onto a reasonably well-made matching puzzle game will lead to good results. Soda Saga is probably the most successful of the Candy Crush spin-offs, and we can see it continue to trundle along here. The latest update adds 15 new levels, as usual, for those who have managed to finish all of the existing levels. And there will be more in a week or two! Don’t slack!
The Sandbox Evolution, Free Also continuing along at a fairly steady pace is The Sandbox Evolution, which just keeps on piling on the toys to play with in your little sandbox. You can now add low gravity to any world, mess around with the new controllable astronaut hero, commandeer the new Lander vehicle, use new elements carbonium and moon rock to create alien landscapes, and naturally, deal with some new enemies. Alien enemies! Whew. So if you’ve got a hankering for some space adventure, go in there and, well, make it yourself. C’mon, it’ll be fun.
Angry Birds POP!, Free Rovio’s attempts to reshape themselves into the form of a King-like company have not been an overwhelming success, but I guess it’s going well enough given that no one will pay any attention to their games unless they have Angry Birds plastered all over them. So yeah, here you go. The Angry Birds knock-off of King’s witch-flavored knock-off of Puzzle Bobble has 40 new levels and some new events to play while you wait for the inevitable next update with 40 more levels. 40 is more than 15, checkmate, quote-unquote KING.
Dash Quest, Free It’s been a while since the last update to Dash Quest, but it looks as though the game isn’t ready to stop dashing just yet. You like how I tied my sentence into the name of the game? That’s the quality you get around here, folks. Thank you for all your support. Anyway, it’s a new dungeon that’s the order of the day today. It’s the Ghost Ship dungeon, and if you think you might find some cool new gear in there, you are very good at this game and I’m probably willing to hand over emcee duties to you when I choose to retire. Which will be when I’m dead, judging by my retirement savings thus far. Ha ha, poor planning!
Fortnite, Free Oh, hello there, Fortnite. How nice to see you, Fortnite. The more I say Fortnite, the higher chance some random person will come here to see something about Fortnite, which decreases my chances of getting canceled. So let’s all enjoy the Fortnite updates, everyone. Like this one, which is a Fortnite update that kicks off Fortnite Season 6. It’s all Halloweeny, and it adds pets to the games for those who level up their Fortnite Season 6 Battle Pass. What does Halloween look like in Fortnite? You’ll have to play Fortnite and find out! Fortnite!
Minion Rush: Running game, Free You wouldn’t figure the Minions would be all that interested in money, but here’s the thing: bananas aren’t free. Well, I guess they kind of are in this game, but follow me for a second. Minions want lots of bananas, and you generally need a bit of scratch to buy produce in those quantities on a regular basis. So the Minions are out there now trying to earn treasure in the new Ancient Trove mission, and also accepting money in exchange for shooting people into space in the Ticket to Space mission. But who would trust such shifty folks with their money and just believe they’re going to get them to space? Lo, a mystery!
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!
