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One of my favorite things about the App Store is this massive surge of indie development that has brought us, well, more fantastic games than I could even begin to list. If you haven’t heard of it yet, Indie Game: The Movie is currently in the process of sweeping various film award festivals. While it doesn’t specifically pertain to iOS development, what I’ve seen so far seems to perfectly capture the spirit of the whole indie game developer movement that’s taken the App Store by storm.

Check out the trailer:

Another thing that’s awesome about this whole project is that it features a soundtrack by Jim Guthrie, the same mastermind behind the music of Sword & Sworcery [ $4.99 ]. It seems we’ve got a ton of Guthrie fans around here (ourselves included), so here’s a quick heads up: The soundtrack the Indie Game: The Movie is now up for pre-order on Band Camp. You get four tracks right away, with the rest coming on the official release on May 15th. It’s even available on vinyl as a double LP, if that’s your kind of thing.

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Trilobyte’s The 7th Guest [ Free ] was among the first full motion video-centric PC games released following the dawn of the CD-ROM drive era. I had a horrifically underpowered Mac at the time that just barely stuttered through the game, but doing so is a gaming memory I’ll never forget. Gameplay focuses around exploring the dark and mysterious puzzle-packed mansion of Henry Stauf. I don’t want to spoil too much of it, since the whole experience is so much better if you manage to go into it fresh.

If you’re already familiar with the game, you can check out our review where I get into some additional nitty gritty details. But, really, you should just skip all that noise and download the game anyway- Especially while it’s free. As an additional bonus, The 7th Guest [ Free ] is also free on the Mac App Store. If you get stuck in either version of the game, give the Book of Secrets [ Free ] a look.

In our original review of T7G, we were a little bummed that the notoriously difficult microscope puzzle was nowhere to be found. The good news is Trilobyte later released this puzzle as a standalone game called The 7th Guest: Infection [ Free (HD)] which is also free as part of this promotion. We posted some more details about Infection here.

Go go go! Grab these games now!

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“Chariots of the Dogs,” [$4.99] the fourth episode in the Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space series is easily the best one so far. The Sam & Max series has always been tightly written and designed, but “Chariots” does two things remarkably well: it matches its narrative hook to its mechanics, and it ties the entire series together.

If nothing else, “Chariots” is remarkable for the way it brings almost all of the big questions from the first three episodes and ties them together: the Bosco and Stinky subplots are advanced, and previously off-screen bit roles come forward as major players in the series. This feels satisfying and rewarding for longtime devotees, and Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space’s episodic structure lends itself to weaving these disparate narrative threads together. Even the intro sequence feels tighter and more cinematic, suggesting a series that is maturing with each episode.

Episodes one, two, and three were generally self-contained, but “Chariots” provides the most solid narrative link in the series thus far: it picks up the immediate aftermath of “Night of the Raving Dead” [$4.99]and ends on a cliffhanger that propels the story into episode five [$4.99]

The Sam & Max series has always been, at its heart, based on inventory items, but Beyond Time and Space seems dedicated to refining and twisting that formula as much as possible: “Moai Better Blues” [$4.99] used portals to great effect; the previously mentioned “Raving Dead” included several dialogue trees and ambient aural puzzles. Without spoiling anything, “Chariots of the Dogs” focuses on time travel.

Incidentally, the time travel mechanic was first introduced in episode one, “Ice Station Santa,” [$4.99] when Sam and Max have to appease the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present and Future. (The Ghost of Christmas Future section actually foreshadows the end of “Chariots,” if you’re paying attention.)

The beauty of “Chariots” isn’t just that it’s an adventure game with a time-travel story; the time travel conceit shapes and informs every puzzle, becoming the tentpole mechanic in its own right. A lazier game would use time travel as a plot device and build a standard inventory game around it. “Chariots of the Dogs” focuses not just on matching certain items with certain solutions, but in exploring their effects through time. Like its predecessors, “Chariots” does a good job matching its story hooks with its mechanics, which makes each relatively short episode feel distinctive and full-featured.

The logic employed in “Chariots” is relatively straightforward: the Freelance Police can move forward in time to gather clues, which in turn allows them to travel backward in time to affect the future. There’s a nice gameplay loop there, and the game as a whole feels holistic and natural, each puzzle mechanic and story arc syncing perfectly.

It’s no surprise, then, that “Chariots” feels intuitive and fun throughout. Making its players feel smart has always been one of Sam & Max’s strong suits, but every episode until now has had puzzles that feel arbitrary or unfair. Generally speaking, the broad strokes of each puzzle or story arc are easy to grasp in “Chariots,” even if the step-by-step puzzle solution requires some tinkering and mental elasticity. For my money, this installment strikes the right balance of deductive reasoning and old-fashioned observation.

This is, I’m assuming, another of episodic game development’s bounties — after four games (not counting Sam & Max Save the World, the previous series of episodic Telltale games), it’s no surprise to find the writers and developers zeroing in on smart, intuitive puzzle design.

“Chariots of the Dogs”  is smoothly and tightly paced, and nothing feels misplaced or kludged together. It’s a charming, warm, and funny game, and it’s the best episode in an increasingly good series.

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We’ve been following F5 Games’ upcoming social RPG Pocket Heroes since we first saw it back at last year’s E3. The idea behind Pocket Heroes is to let players around the world build up a party online and play through an RPG-style game, taking turns asynchronously. For simplicity’s sake it’s been described as Dungeons & Dragons meets Words With Friends, which sounds like an exciting proposition.

In early April we got an update on the progress of Pocket Heroes which pegged the release date as May 10th for a price of $1.99. Well, in a new post on the developer’s website we get a bit of a good news/bad news scenario. The bad news is that Pocket Heroes won’t be hitting its intended May 10th launch date, but on the bright side the team feels confident that they will still see a release sometime during May or shortly after.

The good news is that the extra time has gone into making some significant improvements to where Pocket Heroes was previously at. First off is a huge overhaul of the UI, including getting rid of the placeholder font seen in the game’s preview trailer, which was a point of contention from some. As you can see in the following screens, the new UI is much more visually appealing while also allowing you to do more. It will also change dynamically to display the pertinent information to whatever you’re currently focused on.

Also seen in the screens above is the new chat interface in Pocket Heroes. It drives me nuts when online multiplayer games – especially turn-based ones – don’t have some sort of chat functionality. In an RPG however, discussing situations and strategizing with your party members will likely be a crucial component of success, so it’s nice to see it being handled well here.

Besides the new chat and UI work, the team has also been endlessly tweaking, balancing, and fleshing out the many details in Pocket Heroes to make sure it’s the best it can be. They sound confident that the game will be launching in May, and we look forward to checking out the full version then. Be sure to hit up our forums for even more discussion on Pocket Heroes.

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A couple of weeks back we told you about Galcon [$1.99 / Free ] creator Phil Hassey’s latest project titled Dynamite Jack. You play as a captured Space Marine who is forced to work in a dangerous place known as Anathema Mines. Of course, being a bad ass you decide that working for “the man” against your will just isn’t for you, so you set out to escape from the depths of the mine.

In a recent blog post, Phil noted that a fellow developer suggested that the deaths in Dynamite Jack lacked a certain impact. So drawing inspiration from the awesome death sequences for Roget Wilco from the classic Space Quest series, Dynamite Jack now features plenty of awesome ways to die, as you can see in this new video.

Since death comes often during the course of playing Dynamite Jack, there will be an option to turn off the death animations if they grow tiresome, but they’ll be on by default. Part of the leaderboard tracking will include how many times you bite the dust as well. Dynamite Jack is scheduled for release on Mac and PC May 10th, and will be coming to the iPad within a couple of months after, hopefully around July 1st if all goes according to plan.

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A couple of months back, Tiger Style Games released Waking Mars [ $2.99 ], the follow-up to our 2009 Game of the Year Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor [$0.99 / $0.99 (HD)], and we thought it was an incredibly unique and enjoyable experience in our review. About a month ago, Waking Mars was updated for the new iPad’s Retina Display, and we noted that the visual improvement really had a big impact on a game that is so much about creating a moody atmosphere.

But wow, as good as we thought the game looked after that last update it turned out to be just a partial Retina update and just a taste of what was to come. Today Tiger Style has released another new update which adds full Retina Display support for Waking Mars in addition to a set of new jetpack types for your character to zip around Martian caves with. Check out this screen from the new iPad, which Tiger Style has cropped in close in order to show off how much detail you can see.

In a blog post detailing this latest update, which is called the May Day Update by the way, Tiger Style notes that the iPad’s beefy hardware generates the 3.1 million onscreen pixels at 60 frames per second, and that all of their artwork had been drawn at an incredibly large scale to begin with so adding support for the new iPad resolution wasn’t terribly difficult. Screens don’t really do it justice though, you have to see Waking Mars running on a new iPad in person to fully appreciate just how gorgeous it is.

In addition to the update for Waking Mars, Tiger Style has also updated the iPad version of Spider with partial Retina Display support. Only select assets have been upgraded, but Spider is still one of the most beautiful games around. Also, all 3 of Tiger Style’s games are currently on sale for a limited time. Waking Mars is down to $2.99 from $4.99 in its first ever sale, and both the iPhone and iPad versions of Spider are just 99¢ each. Finally, you can grab the excellent soundtrack to Waking Mars for just a buck on its Bandcamp page, down from $5.

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2009 was a weird time for the App Store. Free to play games were building steam on other platforms, but the way Apple originally structured the in app purchase mechanic prevented it from being used on anything but paid games and apps. This policy was reversed in mid-October, and only a few hours later ngmoco announced that their (then) upcoming online first person shooter Eliminate would be free.

The game was released a few weeks later, and we posted an extensive guide on it. In a nutshell, Eliminate was a four person first person shooter with a free to play twist. In order to earn credits to buy armor and weapon upgrades, players needed to use their energy supplies. Energy depleted as you played, and, obviously, an in-game store sold all the energy that players could ever need if they didn’t wait to wait to recharge.

Being among the first free to play games available, and actually being the first gamer-centric freemium game on the App Store, Eliminate seemed to spawn a massive community of players overnight. In fact, the Eliminate thread on our forums is still amongst the most popular TouchArcade threads of all time, running closely behind the Street Fighter IV Volt thread and the Pocket Frogs trading thread.

A TouchArcade reader sent a tip in over the weekend that not only had Eliminate been pulled from the App Store, but launching the game now results in the above popup. On May 25th, 2012, Eliminate is going offline. It’s sad to see not only this game, but also ngmoco as a company coming full circle. We’ve been covering ngmoco since their inception, as it seemed to many (myself included) that they were the most promising contender to be the premiere iOS-exclusive game developer.

In early 2010 the company then picked up some additional financial steam and bought Freeverse, which was yet another incredibly promising iOS developer that has since vanished. Later that year, Japanese social gaming giant rolled ngmoco up into their proverbial katamari at the potential price of $400m… Then things started to take a slide.

The Epic Wars series of games were the first projects to be shut down by ngmoco, leaving faithful players (who potentially invested heavily into the game) in the cold. News of games releases, or really, any activity from the company dried up until earlier this year we heard the company was hit with layoffs. Inside Mobile Games even suggested that they missed the financial targets of the $400m buyout, putting the bulk of that purchase price in jeopardy.

If nothing else, the shut down of Eliminate is yet another reminder that the money you spend on these server-centric free to play title is buying you things that only persist as long as the developers keep the game online. If you’ve dumped cash into Eliminate, be sure to get your money’s worth playing the game before it goes offline next month.

Thanks Payam!

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If there’s anything that could completely wreck my plans and productivity, it would be a Super Crate Box [$1.99] RPG. I’d say a quick prayer of thanks to Vlambeer for not going forward with that idea, but it’s too late. FireFruitForge and Everplay Interactive have something against letting me work in peace, I guess, because Spellsword [$0.99] is that perfect storm of quick, one-more-try gameplay and RPG mechanics I can completely lose myself in.

Spellsword isn’t a clone of Super Crate Box (thankfully—Vlambeer really could use a break), but it has a similar starting point. It’s an arena game that’s designed around rapidly collecting weapon spawns to kill baddies. But where Super Crate Box focuses tightly on that mechanic to the exclusion of everything else, Spellsword takes a more expansive road. Along that road you’re going to find levelling, loot, and a lot of new ways to play.

As a result, it’s not quite as clean as Super Crate Box’s more minimalistic approach allows. It has a few problems, and things get sloppy from time to time. I’m not saying you shouldn’t play it, though. It’s crazy-fun, and you really shouldn’t miss out.

You start out as a quippy hero with a spellsword. It’s not worth much on its own, but it can be enhanced with cards that litter the arena. Each one powers up the sword in some way—with fire, ice or poison damage, for starters—and each one also sets off some sort of effect. The ice card sends out wheels of ice, the fire card launches fireballs, and the poison card poisons every enemy on screen. And that’s just the start.

So while you can certainly run around killing things with your sword, it’s dangerous. Better to collect every card you can, and lean on those one-time effects to do the killing for you. This is where the game feels most like Super Crate Box, dodging enemies to get to the next card and never stopping to rest. Still, the differences are pretty huge.

For one thing, enemies drop rupees. In fact, the whole game is pretty much built around the rupee economy. Play well to earn more rupees, which you can use to level up your cards, your sword, and even your rupee drop rate. You can also use them to buy gear that adds to those same skills. And before you ask, no—there isn’t any IAP.

Mission mode is another big difference. Each of the three current arenas come with 20 missions. These ask you to do a bunch of different things. You might need to survive some waves, kill some baddies or collect some cards. In exchange you’re given big payouts of rupees, new cards and the occasional piece of gear.

Endless mode is more familiar, with nonstop waves of baddies until you burn through all your hearts. There are three difficulty tiers of endless mode for each arena. In them you’ll grind rupees, and you’ll also find the leaderboard competition.

When it comes to the little things, Spellsword goes the distance. The look is great, very much like Terra Noctis [$0.99], FireFruitForge’s other big title. The sound is no slouch, but it doesn’t really stand out. Love it or hate it, the real flavor rests in the hero’s quips. There’s one for every mission, and nearly ever single one is a reference to a show, game, or movie. They run the gamut from modern and obvious to old and seriously obscure. Me, I find ‘em charming.

As I mentioned, there are also some problems. The controls aren’t great, and on iPad they’re worse. There’s already a fix incoming for that—along with adding new control types, it will let you reposition the iPad controls. There’s also some clumsiness in the arena design. It’s easy to get caught on edges, or mess up platforms. There are also ways to abuse positioning and let enemies wander off to their own deaths. These things aren’t remotely dealbreakers, but they can be irritating.

Overall, though, the game is outstanding. The RPG mechanics add a whole new layer of compulsion to an already inviting sort of game. It’s not easy to call it quits, especially when there’s one more level to earn, or one more piece of gear you can almost afford. Those things make it less of a pure skill game—you’ll need to put in a bit of a grind to cap out— but they also add a bit of strategy. There is real value in carefully choosing your gear and putting your rupees to good use when leveling.

With some elbow grease and a good once over, Spellsword could easily earn a permanent spot on my iPhone. It’s really that good. And Everplay Interactive seems dedicated to hitting those heights, if the developer’s comments in our discussion thread are anything to go by. I don’t see how you could possibly go wrong here. This a game that’s fun, full-featured and ridiculously cheap, with a developer that’s working hard to keep fixes and content coming. Looks like a winner from here.

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On April Fool’s Day, Team Meat teased that its upcoming Super Meat Boy game for iPhone and iPad game will use new art, new sound, and new mechanics. In other words, it’s not going to be a port of Super Meat Boy. Speaking with The Verge today, Team Meat revealed that it wants Meat Boy iOS to be twitch-based platformer like its big brother, but plans to tone down the memorization part of that original experience for the mobile crowd.

“[The original] Meat Boy was a twitch-based game about memorizing things,” said Edmund McMillen of Team Meat said. “[iOS] Meat Boy is the opposite. That’s the foundation of its design. But it’s also on a touch device, so there’s that as well. We want to make a twitch-based platformer that’s not about memorization.”

With a fuller picture of what this game is now in our minds, we’re imagining that this version of will have the spirit of the original Meat Boy, minus some of the pain. It sounds almost… enjoyable. We’re scared. Should we be scared?

[via The Verge]

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This just in: people like Angry Birds. In a new blog post on developer Rovio’s site, the studio announces that its latest Angry Birds jam, Angry Birds Space [$.99 / HD], has hit 50 million downloads within 35 days. Rovio says that this is the “fastest growing mobile game yet,” and it is shattering all of the studio’s previous records. No-one could have predicted this. No-one.

In all seriousness, though, Space is easily the best entry in the franchise so far, so we’re guessing the download numbers are only going to get crazier as the game receives more support down the line. And speaking of that actually, Rovio teased something interesting in the post: a new “bigger” thing is on the way.

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