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. Ah, the awkward period between Halloween and American Thanksgiving. For games running end-to-end events, it’s hard to think of something to jam in between those. We’ve got a few games giving it a go in today’s article, along with some other titles that do not kneel to our feeble human calendars. 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 go for it!
Marvel Contest of Champions, Free Hulk has been killed! Wow, did not see that coming. Isn’t he kind of… unkillable? I feel like there’s some adjective he’s been rolling around with lately to that effect. The only clue as to the murderer’s identity is an arrow, which in any normal universe would not be much of a clue at all. But in the Marvel Universe, such evidence really narrows things down. Well, if you’ve kept up on your Marvel comics you know what this is all about already. An Immortal Hulk event is on the boards, offering up all kinds of gamma goodies for those who collect enough Gamma Gauntlets. There are a few other balance tweaks and bug fixes in here, but those are less interesting than HULK SMASH stuff so I’ll let you seek them out on your own.
Disney Heroes: Battle Mode, Free A modest update, to say the least. But we do what we can with what we’ve got here, don’t we? And what we’ve got this time around is one new character. It’s Disgust, from Disney and Pixar’s Inside Out. In Japan, that movie is known as Inside Head, which is one of the more subtle title changes for a Pixar movie in this country. Certainly more so than Remy’s Delicious Restaurant, or Old Man Carl’s Flying-Through-the-Air House. Still quite on-the-nose, I suppose. Anyway, apart from the new hero, this update includes some improvements to Friendships and Invasion along with some bug fixes and performance improvements. Trivia saved the day this time, friends.
MARVEL Strike Force: Squad RPG, Free There’s sort of a pattern to this update if you squint hard enough. Four new playable characters join the roster: Stature, Ghost, Yellowjacket, and Doctor Doom. All of those characters have some kind of connection to Scott Lang, though Doom’s is a tenuous one. With them comes a new campaign chapter titled Doom War Chapter 2, which sees the heroes going behind enemy lines to try to take down Doom’s forces. There’s also a Stature event, a new Dark Dimension, and a raised maximum Commander level. Some UI improvements and a bevy of bug fixes round this one out.
Fire Emblem Heroes, Free If you watched the latest Feh Channel update, you probably have a good idea of what’s new and what’s to come. If you didn’t? Well, a brand-new event called Pawns of Loki will be starting quite soon, and all of the necessary bits were added in this update. There are also some new weapon skills for Fae and Elise. Rounding things out is a new data-quality option. Want something a little lighter on the data quantity? You’ll like the new Recommended option, which trades a bit of quality to take up less space than the High Quality version. Okay yes, this update isn’t all that exciting until the Pawns of Loki stuff starts. What can you do?
Gardenscapes, Free Our obligatory free-to-play matching puzzle game update of the week is Gardenscapes, because I can’t get enough of that Austin Stuff. A new team event will be kicking off soon, tasking you with collecting seashells to help Austin decorate his garden with sea treasures. Austin, you decadent philistine! There’s also a big Thanksgiving event coming up soon where you have to decorate the dining room in anticipation of a peaceful evening with family and friends at the end of the month. Yeah, like that’s happening this year. Or any year. Some new story content has been added which sees the introduction of a new character, the businessman Harry Grubbs. That name does not bode well, if you ask me.
Merge Dragons!, Free Well, let’s look in on Merge Dragons! again. As usual, there are a few events on deck to keep players busy matching things to match other things and so on. The first is a Halloween event that may have actually wrapped up by the time you read this. Time is a weird thing. The other event should be okay, however. The Sweet Surprise event is a romance-themed affair that offers up some special items and creatures for you to collect. Seems a little out of season, but you know what? Love is always needed. Yes, even Dragon Love. For all that is good in the universe, do not search that phrase on the web.
Star Traders: Frontiers, $6.99 This update to the constantly-evolving Trese Brothers space epic has plenty of good stuff to offer. The biggest new addition is a new type of mission. Salvage missions take you to zones with Salvage Rumors. These are multi-step affairs with high rewards in exchange for some deadly risks. To go with these updates, some new Scavenger traits have been added. Beyond all that, this new version has some bug fixes and UI improvements to make things work that much better.
AFK Arena, Free This game is just all over the place these days. The marketing budget must be bananas. That’s not to say that the development budget isn’t getting its fair share of the pie, as this new version will attest. To start with, there’s a new Wilder hero in the form of Pippa: The Muddled Magician, who is available to test play. Pippa’s Bountiful Trials comes with the new character. Along with all of that, there are some new adventures, tons of optimizations, and balance adjustments galore. I’m sure we’ll be seeing this game swing back around again soon.
ANOTHER EDEN, Free Let’s check in on another frequent guest of this feature, the excellent Another Eden. You can look forward to a new Mythos called Song of Sword and Wings of Lost Paradise. Accompanying that new Mythos is a new character named… hookay, the name is Thillelille. I’m not sure how that is said, but I do know that if you want to spell it in Scrabble you’d better have a lot of Ls. Foran (Another Style) is available as an encounter, as the Star Dream Encounter is available as a paid one-time only thing. There’s also a new Fateful Encounter, as well as Encounters with Melina and Rosetta. Whole lot of encountering going down this week.
FINAL FANTASY IV (3D REMAKE), $14.99 A rare update to a Square Enix game that does more than just fix some bugs, though you probably shouldn’t expect as many goodies as the PC port got in its recent update. The opening cutscene from the Nintendo DS version, which had been cut from the mobile port due to app size limits back in the day, has been added back in. The game properly supports bigger screen sizes now, which is great news for anyone who bought a new phone in the last few years. There are also a few bug fixes, which hey, I’m not going to complain about. Since I love this game and I rarely get a chance to praise it formally, I’ll award it the coveted UMMSotW award for this week.
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!
