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. A curious mix of games today, friends. I felt like checking in on some games we don’t usually look at to see what was going on with them, and I found plenty. 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!
Sneaky Sasquatch, This game has gone to the dogs… literally! Ha ha, there were so many movies and TV shows that used that exact joke in their marketing when I was young. We really got a kick out of dogs doing stuff they weren’t supposed to. But in Sneaky Sasquatch‘s new update, it’s more about a Sasquatch doing what it isn’t supposed to. The Sasquatch can now adopt a dog! There’s a pet shop, some dog furniture, tennis balls you can use to play fetch, and even dog bags for picking up poop. That’s doggone good! That one also appeared a lot. Wild times to be working in advertising, I have to believe. Also in this update: a valet duck. What?! My hand has been forced: this is the winner of the coveted UMMSotW award this week.
Disney Sorcerer's Arena, Free Raid battles have arrived to the Sorcerer’s Arena, with the very first being a mega-battle against the wicked sea witch Ursula from The Little Mermaid. She’s just one of the new characters from that game, with King Triton and Prince Eric also stepping up. Club Conquest has seen some improvements to its mechanics, and the campaign now has more nodes to battle on. Some new abilities have been unlocked for various characters as well. There sure are a lot of Disney games about Disney characters battling other Disney characters!
Star Traders: Frontiers, $6.99 Mmm, this is sure to be a good one. Yes, yes it is. A new Map Seed now creates fresh, bigger, and better maps to play on. Endless new map variety and better balance all through the magic of improved procedural generation. Of course, you can still keep playing maps from the original Map Seed if you want to. Other map-related good news: there’s a map preview feature that lets you check out a map before you play it, showing you starting quadrants and zone data. There are a few other things not related to maps, but who cares about that stuff? Someone, that’s who. But they can find out that stuff on their own, because they are a proper self-actualized human being just like you and me.
Real Racing 3, Free Real Racing 3 has had quite enough of 2020, and who can blame it? Thus, it is ushering the year out with as much force as it can muster. The Aston Martin Valkyrie hits the road in a special event, and if you want the fastest road car in the history of the game, you’d best do what you can to nab it. There are also two new F1 Grand Prix Special Events at Yas Marina and Catalunya, the final leg of the NASCAR Cup series, a Real Racing 2 10th Anniversary event, and a whole lot more. It seems like there’s always something going on in this game, so make sure to fire it up and check it all out.
Meteorfall: Journey, $3.99 Meteorfall is a real cool game, isn’t it? Put me down as a big Liker of Meteorfall. I don’t even care who knows? Ah, I feel so refreshed after doing something so brave. Now let’s check on this update. A new card has been added for Rose called Perseverance, and that name more or less expresses what it does. A little extra oomph when you need it. Aside from that, Charismatic won’t show up to the Battle Royale anymore, which the update notes is calling an improvement. Finally, there are some bug fixes. I think we can all agree those are improvements, unless you are in fact a bug. And not a bzz-bzz bug, but a software bug. In which case… why are you sapient? This is startling information and I don’t know who to call about it.
Shadow Fight 3 - RPG Fighting, Free It’s like, I’m all about telling people about big events for fun games like Shadow Fight 3, but also it would be really nice if the update notes helped out a little more. You dig? Well, I can only do what I can. Shadow Fight 3 is somehow celebrating its third anniversary, and it’s having all kinds of celebrations in honor of that. A cool minigame, some special activities, and of course gifts a-plenty. I hope you haven’t missed too much of that yet, but it’s very possible. Oh, the weakness of a round-up that looks at the past. Would that I could ascertain the future so that I could tell you about those updates instead. But I cannot. Just hop into the game and see what’s still going on, I suppose.
World of Tanks Blitzâ„¢, Free I guess this is called World of Tanks Blitz 3D MMO now, which is a very peculiar title for a game that is decidedly not MM at all. I mean, it’s not even double the number of people that could play Quake at the same time! Oh well, that’s the title. Nothing we can do about it. So what’s in the update? A new pack of maps for Skirmish, with some permanent avatars for both modes. Clan missions with some cool weekly rewards. Shot results will now be displayed with a comment and an icon, presumably to make it clear that you brought the noise and/or the funk. And depending on when you read this, there may be some Black Friday sales still kicking around. Take a look, I suppose.
Circulous, $1.99 This game is always adding new content, so it’s a bit hard to stay on top of it. Especially since its notes regarding that stuff in particular is a bit wanting. Oh well. What I can tell you specifically about this update is that the iCloud save system has been improved, making multiple saves and allowing you to choose which one you want to restore from. I wish every game with iCloud saves would do something like that. Anyway, this should make it easier for players to poke around at alternate content and try to knock out those last few achievements, if nothing else.
Dumb Ways to Die, Free And here it is, our first Christmas update of the season. Maybe? Actually, I think there may have been one a couple of weeks ago. Okay, one of the first! It’s for Dumb Ways to Die, which if you ask me is just about any way. One time I almost died because I wanted curry rice and bicycled hard to the curry house in 40+ degree Celsius weather. I got heat stroke and actually passed out, and as I was slipping into unconsciousness all I could think was what a stupid way to die it would be. Oh, I didn’t die though. Please don’t worry! Anyway, this update just has a bunch of Christmas minigames and decorations for you to mess around with. Have fun virtually dying in festively idiotic ways!
Toon Blast, Free Heck… I almost forgot to do the obligatory free-to-play matching puzzle game update of the week. What’s laying around here? Oh hey, Toon Blast just got updated today. That will work. Apparently this one has something to do with Kung Fu Masters? I hope they avoid the obvious panda lest they get visited by Christmas lawyers. Easily the worst kind of lawyers, if I may say so. Hey, do you think WB would get litigious about someone ripping off Hong Kong Phooey? They’d have to be aware they own him to do that, and I’m not sure anyone there even remembers he exists. Food for thought.
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!
Uh. It’s certainly an almost coherent article almost devoid of bloated, almost inaudible “Here we fucking go again” commentary.
...
Hire another writer to do these articles. This one reads like a very, very burned out and tired (SO VERY TIRED) fella.
You must be new here.
Not really. Even if I was and this was my reaction, then I suppose I should be reading about these things elsewhere. Except mobile gaming news is hard to come by and some sites are written worse than this one (Pocket Tactics became trite as fuuuuck for example, Pocket Gamer has a little too much free to play articles). I’m just saying it’s really not a good thing to sacrifice quality over tone.
If you have other mobile gaming news with good reviews of recent premium games, I’d go for that. Sometimes I go to App Unwrapper and read some reviews, that’s a good site that reads like they’re still excited about being alive.
I really just meant that this weekly article is kind of an inside joke between Shaun and our regulars. Originally these articles were just an easy way to stick popular free to play game names into a headline for Google fodder. I mean obviously not JUST for that, as we'd include cool updates for actual good games too, but like does anybody really give a shit about the 9000th new level being added to Candy Crush? No.
But like I said, our site depended on articles like that and then we'd use the traffic from those to pretty much subsidize the stuff we really cared about that normally has zero return on investment, such as reviews of premium games. So yeah, if you've been reading these articles every Monday for the past 6+ years then Shaun's tone and humor is probably more understandable.
I've basically stopped caring about traffic and have just accepted that each night when I go to bed I know I might wake up to TouchArcade closing down. Honestly I'd rather that than do what would really need to be done to keep the site alive, which is basically a non-stop deluge of these types of Google fodder articles and obnoxious take-over-your-screen ads. See: 90% of Pocket Gamer's output.
He's been pretty strictly on the Switch beat for the past few years, but if you really question Shaun's quality, go ahead and click on his name and read through some of his past mobile game reviews or especially the RPG/Classic Reload series. It's far and away some of the best mobile games writing done anywhere. Sadly those types of articles are money losers.
Oof.
I wasn’t really bashing on the writer, Jared. I’m just feeling the tiredness a little bit more so here as opposed to the other articles. Shaun’s writing is good. Touch Arcade and Pocket Gamer are really the only other places I go to regularly for news. Pocket Tactics used to be cool but COIN MASTER. EXTRA GEMS. Death.
I may have just gotten a bad whiff of extra sadness here that the humor in this article didn’t affect me in the way it used to/was supposed to. It really wasn’t my intention to throw a molotov at the article, the writer or the site (ok maybe a rock. A pebble).
*sigh*
It just sounded sadder and tireder than usual. Maybe I saw it that way because I was tireder and/or sadder than usual that day.
In any case, sorry man. And thank you so much for engaging with me. Truth be told I’ve really always liked Touch Arcade’s articles. Thank you for keeping the site alive and giving people actually looking for decent articles and reviews something meaty to read.
Stay safe and keep up the good work.
also @Shaun I really wasn’t bashing your stuff bro. Keep putting out the good stuff. Don’t mind me. 👌
Heh. Yeah sorry for launching into a big diatribe. I didn't take offense to your original comment but I do tend to get overly defensive in general. My original comment was meant as a lighthearted quip. I think one thing we could both agree on is that lingual subtlety is all but impossible on the internet.
Thank you for reading the site and providing feedback, even if in a sort of roundabout way. It is also entirely possible that Shaun was extra curmudgeonly that day and it came across in the writing. But that's also why we love him.