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When you’re looking for a simple, compulsive time waster, do you look for something that lets you grind to your heart’s content, or a game where you can dominate a high score board with skill alone? This is an honest question. DogByte Games’ 8bit Ninja [Free] has a free-to-play model that doesn’t get in the way of simple good times, but it pretty much throws the whole leaderboard thing out the window if you don’t want to pay. Other than that little problem it’s a great way to lose a few hours to that good ol’ craving for just one more game.

Consider 8bit Ninja a companion piece to Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja. In that game, you are a bodiless ninja with a sword and a penchant for murdering fruit. In this game, you’re a nearly unarmed ninja with a good reason to fear bouncing produce. One’s about the thrill of the attack, the other’s all about avoidance. They make a great pair, but where Fruit Ninja is a one-and-done sorta game that focuses on hitting peak performance, 8bit Ninja holds its big rewards back for the patient player who puts time into its substantial upgrade system.

If you have a weakness for levelling things up, 8bit Ninja is going to eat you alive. Just playing lets you level up your ninja, improving his special ability and shrinking its cooldown. You also pick up coins while you play, and those can be used to unlock and upgrade a whole list of powerups. You can equip three of those powerups in a given run. Eventually you can unlock new ninjas with better abilities and level them up too. It’s the sort of grind that goes straight to your head.

The game is simple: run left and right dodging increasingly aggressive bouncing fruit. Every so often a powerup drops from above. Depending on what you’ve equipped it might give you a few coins or boost your XP, or it might slice up some fruit. Splattered fruits drop coins and the occasional coveted egg.

As we mentioned in our preview, the IAP system is largely inoffensive if you just want to play. You can get by without ever making a purchase and never know the difference. Coins and eggs can be earned by playing, but eggs are quite rare and are more easily acquired with IAP. Purchasing any egg pack has the side effect of removing ads. So far, so good.

You can use eggs then to unlock new ninjas and scenery. They add small bonuses, but nothing outrageous. You can also use them to level up your ninja faster, or swap them for coins to upgrade your powerups. That’s getting a bit dicey from a high score point of view, but you’ll earn your way up there eventually. Things get messy with the last option, though. You can use eggs to purchase one extra life each round if you’re willing to keep plugging in dollars. That’s a pretty big hit to your potential if you don’t want to pay up.

Assuming you’re cool with that situation, 8bit Ninja is otherwise pretty solid. The only real problem is, as with most linear arcade titles, that the early part of the game gets dull and runs get uncomfortably long as you improve. But the game is extremely accessible and its touch controls are great. Between the thrill of random egg drops and the desire to level up and score higher, it’s probably going to get a hold on you.

So ask yourself what you’re looking for. If you want serious competition without hitting the IAP, this probably isn’t the game for you. If you want an entertaining time waster with cute pixel art, go nuts. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when you’re desperately hunting eggs in the hope of catching up to the rest of the pack.

TouchArcade Rating:

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I am undoubtedly a cat person. Although I only own one, I have some close friends that own six, and going over to their house is always like a peek into some magical wonderland I wish I lived in. Suffice to say that any game featuring cats is bound to catch my eye, so when a colleague poked me and said, “There’s a new puzzler called Kitten Sanctuary [$1.99/Lite], and you need it!”, I figured I could be in for something good.

At a peek, it looked like a cute match three puzzler, but after spending some time with the game, you get to see that while the game is simple, it’s really got quite a bit more to it than your average match three game.

Rather than go with the bare bones approach that many iOS puzzlers seem to favor, developers Clockwork Pixels decided to go with a different type of experience, and I really like it. Of course, the heart of Kitten Sanctuary is still a match three. But imagine that cloaked in something like a Nintendogs lite, and you’ll start to get an idea of what to expect here.

In story mode, Kitten Sanctuary brings you to “Kitten Island,” where you must progress through a series of levels to rescue 50 kittens that have been kidnapped by aliens. In each level, you’ll play the match three game to accomplish this rescue. However, the items you match are actually resources, which you will amass on the left side of the board. The goal is to rescue each kitty by making matches over a set of red background tiles, clearing them in the process. Once you’ve cleared the entire pattern of red background tiles the level is cleared, and you can bring your furry friend back to the sanctuary.

You’ll visit your secret kitten hideaway at the end of each level, and when you do, you’ll meet the cat you just rescued and learn something about him or her. This is where the game really shows off its charm. With not only a description of each cat’s background but a funny likes and dislikes list, you really feel like you are building a little family.

The sanctuaries create some depth to the game, and can be a lot of fun to interact with. You can get toys to play with your cats to keep them happy, and you will often find as you complete puzzle levels that an event has happened in the sanctuary, like the cats have colds or need general cheering up. You can check their mood points at anytime by tapping each cat. If they seem down, you can play with them by buying toys from the shop to keep them stimulated.

This would have been an ideal place to throw in IAP, but the game opts to let you earn money in-game instead by matching coins during the puzzle levels. I don’t mind paying for some in-game items from time to time, but I certainly appreciated it here that I didn’t have to spend any real world money to keep my cat family happy.

In addition to toys, you can also earn enough money to add decor to the sanctuary if you have enough. Secret bonus gifts are also available for a higher price, should you want to do some saving.

As far as modes go, you can adjust Kitten Sanctuary to be as easy or as hard as you like. In Easy mode, there is no timer and matching multiple tiles will win you powerups in the puzzle levels. In Normal, you are timed, and in Tricky mode, you have more red tiles than usual to match, but a longer time limit. If you don’t find enough to challenge you there, you can also aim to earn all seven trophies, some of which are very challenging.

Kitten Sanctuary is a very sweet game, but beyond that it’s well-crafted, and the attention to detail shows. For $1.99, it’s simply packed with things to do and feels anything but bare bones, and there’s even a lite version to give you a taste of what you’re getting. It’s a breath of fresh air for a matching game, especially if you want something with a little more to it (but that is also fun to play). The only downside I can think of is if you don’t like cats. Luckily, there’s a dog version for PC, so you’re covered either way.

TouchArcade Rating:

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On this week’s episode of the TouchArcade Show we power… actually, we stay pretty much on topic. At the top, we address a pressing bit of user feedback before jumping into the latest, hottest, and best in iOS. Fibble and On the Wind lead off our games segment, and then we gleefully dive into a bunch of news-y subjects after the break. Topics include the latest rash of 3rd party peripherals and EA being voted the worst company in that one Internet poll.

Feel free to join us. You can listen via one of the links below, or hey, subscribe to us on either iTunes or Zune. If you like us, subscribing is the easiest way to get our new podcasts the second they hit the web.

Also, don’t forget to rate us and be sure to denote your team affiliation.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-046.mp3, 36.8MB

And now, the show notes:

GAMES

• On The Wind [$1.99]
• Towers N Trolls [$.99 / UHD]
• Fibble [$1.99 / HD]
• Sky Gnomes [$.99]

JARED’S KITTY KORNER

• Super Catrio I [$.99 / Lite]

FRONT PAGE

• Controller Round-up: Apple’s rumored device, the BladePad, and An Interesting Camera-Enabled peripheral
• EA Voted Worst Company In America
• Square Releases Puzzling New Game

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PlayGround States logo, as it appears on Facebook.

“It’s been an amazing experience,” Double Fine founder Tim Schafer told fans via a live stream that celebrated the closing moments of Double Fine Adventure’s success on Kickstarter. The project generated over three million dollars worth of donations in a month. Double Fine had asked for $400,000. It wasn’t just amazing. It was magical.

Not every studio sees this kind of outcome. Lead artist and the brains behind Playground State, Barry Collins, is walking us through what his studio looks like, and what has happened to his game, after his project failed to receive funding.

Playground State was founded two years ago by Barry and his brother Brad to explore and express the ideas that Barry has had floating around in his head since childhood. If you look closely at its web site, you’ll notice that there’s no physical address. It’s just a collective “willing people” across the globe coming together to build a series of sci-fi titles called Knights. A PC title called Knights: Spiral Islands was to be the first.

Spiral Island became a known project thanks to Kickstarter and a warm reception by PC enthusiast web site Rock, Paper, Shotgun, which featured it in an editorial in February 2011. Spiral Island is described as an episodic online action-adventure game in which you, as a knight in the game’s sci-fi universe, battle evil across the cosmos. Its hook, outside of its UDK visuals, is its lack of boundaries: in one mission, you’ll be hacking and shooting Vikings, in others space bees, mushroom zombies, robots, and large crabs.

Concept art of a playable Knight. You'll see other Knights in the upcoming preview game.

It has the look and feel of something incredible, especially if it were to be expanded as planned. Spiral Island was pitched to potential donors as game design in motion, as it would have seamlessly integrated new scenarios and enemies in a constant steam.

For whatever reason, it didn’t receive sufficient support. The Kickstarter effort ended with a thud later that April. Playground was looking for $10,000. A hair over $1,500 was pledged across 36 serial donators. One pledger, for example, has backed 48 other projects.

It’s easy to see this as a knockout shot, but to Barry, it’s just a glancing blow, and now the team is looking to iOS and its vast audience to continue.

“The lack of funds was frustrating, but it didn’t really kill our ambitions or desire to make this work,” Barry tells TouchArcade. In the ultimate show of confidence, the studio grew. It picked up an artist, a musician, a sound designer, and a couple of programmers following the failed attempt at funding.

That Playground is reacting in the exact opposite way you’d expect isn’t lost on Barry, and he explains that the reason is tied into how deeply his core team believes in what the studio is trying to accomplish.

“It’s our baby,” Barry tell us. “Amazingly, after maybe an hour or two of rambling with the various team members, they all irrevocably become hooked on the concept and what it has to offer, and slowly but surely begin to own it. Right now we have a team of guys all on the same page and all excited about the small steps as much as the bigger one that will come later — Knights as a whole.”

The crab monster we originally fell in love with, but now fewer polygons for mobile.

While the team grew, so did Knights. It’s now more than a game: it’s a series of mobile titles based in the same universe that spans multiple platforms and genres. Barry has an idea for several projects, some of which are in early stages of development. The most important is an Epic Citadel-like preview title, built specifically for iOS to show off what his team can do.

But even though the team is growing and excited about the games Barry wants to make, it has a horrible issue: it’s hemorrhaging programmers. It can’t keep one on staff, and this is putting a kink in the size and scope of the Knights games Barry wants to make. Barry says they’re in a spiral of simplification, as no one has the expertise to implement complex content into builds. The lack of a revenue stream is undoubtedly one of the culprits here. It’s also the reason why it’s bothering with a showcase project in the first place, and opening its doors for outsourcing work.

“This constant tug of war is what pushed us to our current goals of producing a very basic, free to download visual demo — a means of walking around a crazy environment full of eye candy and talking to basic scripted actors within the world. This will lay the ground work for follow-up episodes to come afterwords,” Barry tells us.

That Knights is blowing up, too, isn’t lost on Barry. He says this game has two goals: to nab exposure and be a launching board. Barry believes it’ll generate new ideas for future Knights games, and argues that the scope in this game is much more manageable than the one he put out there with Spiral Island.

This is how Playground wants to tackle on-screen FPS controls.

Another game is another iPhone and iPad-specific title called Knights: Arena. This is also a victim of the rotunda of programmers cycling through the studio. It’s an FPS that revolves solely around online play: team deathmatch, capture the flag, and so on. Barry, with a lengthy Internet sigh capping off what he tells us about Arena, says the studio’s goal is to establish a revenue stream as quickly as possible. It needs to hire at least one, dedicated programmer. “But that in itself is a Catch 22,” he says. “Need a programmer to make revenue, need revenue to get a programmer.”

Playground State’s ability to keep its legs churning in the mud seems unreal, but it’s a human reaction. With a teeth-gnashing kind of pride, Barry plans to continue marching on beyond his studio’s funding failure. He doesn’t just want to make games — he wants to see his dreams realized.

“I don’t quite know how we managed to grow in quality, strength, and numbers. Faith in Knights among the team is stronger than ever today, despite everything,” he tells us.

“Knights is one of many projects I dream of making. So this is the blood, sweat, tears part of paving the way to eventually being able to produce these with a real budget and fully paid team. This is it. This is what I love. It’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

That’s why Barry is up for using Kickstarter again. He has at least two in the works right now. One is for an extensive indie bundle that features developers in the Vancouver area. The other is for Knights: Arena or a single-player variant of that idea, which he wants to launch “at the same time that we launch the free demo, so people can see or play it and discover it that way.”

Barry talks about Knights: Spiral Island in his Kickstarter promo.

Spiral Island’s crowd-funding failure didn’t come without costs in terms of people and revenue. There were lessons learned, though. The first was scalability. “No need to come out of the gate with a massive universe to embark on hundreds of small stories in other universes. A single story is good enough, or if finances and or programming get in the way, as we are discovering, there are still options,” he tells us.

“We did not go into this expecting it to be quick and easy, and it has not been quick or easy either,” he says.

And let’s say these Kickstarters don’t pan out? Barry isn’t worried. “We will keep pushing along until we are earning revenue on our own, find the right investment deal or get the attention of a publisher that wants to work with us.”

“But no matter what, this project will see the light of day, and as a series of mobile games to start.”

Towards the end of our Barry conversation, we pressed “pause” so we could ask what makes him so idealistic. His vision for these Knights games still seems almost too ambitious considering the lack of funding. The risk of what will happen if these ideas die could be monumental to the studio’s future and Barry. These games are the realization of his dreams, after all.

Honu are a species you'll be able to talk to in a preview. Here's one in a warrior outfit.

“Knights in general is an extremely ambitious concept,” he says. “It started big and the scope of the games we want to tell based in this setting have been cut back for the sake of getting something to market sooner. “

“The concept of Knights being so grand just means we always have room to grow. We realize that we may only ever produce the Knights preview or only ever get as far as Knights: Arena because there’s a real possibility that Knights is lame and we are all crazy people working away on an idea nobody else likes. “

“For me this would just be a continuation of exactly what I have done for 11 years, which is to just hire myself out to whatever studio wants to pay me, and doing so in mass with others is old hat. The grind of tracking down clients and deadlines, milestones, massive delays in payment and so on… it’s all a part of the job. But, Knights, to me, is a way out of this, to finally get all the ideas my brother and I have been brewing up for decades. It’s time we produce things we want rather than the things that pay the bills.”

Barry says that he likes to focus on what could happen with some success. He could hire programmers, no more lost time on contract projects, and the people he’s surrounded by could be supported.

“I just really hope people want to play a game about the Knights — the ultimate saviors of all things, the definition of heroic. Not a bad bone in their bodies, watching them take on any bad guy we can dream up and throw at them, across all history in any universe and time. I really want to play that game.”

When a Kickstarter fails, it’s not necessarily a catalyst for disaster. Barry is idealistic, and maybe too ambitious, but he’s not a quitter. He’ll keep creating. The success of Double Fine was magical, but the intensity of at least one man who didn’t win big is special, too.

While Barry’s story stands on its own, we are covering something larger here. This is part one of a two-part series of articles. In the next, we’ll introduce you to three more studios who haven’t had the greatest experience on Kickstarter. We’ll also discuss why we don’t normally cover games on the service and why we’re not certain of the long-term viability of crowd-funding sources like Kickstarter.

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Into the whole Chthulu mythos but not that interested in obscenely lengthy, difficult board games? Then this is the perfect time to hop in to Elder Sign: Omens [$3.99 / HD]. The dice game made its original transition to iOS with only one Ancient One, Azazoth. As we mentioned in our review, Azazoth has a habit of devouring the lives and sanity of every team of investigators you bring in until you happen on a great team and some good luck.

This week’s long-awaited update brings in two new Ancient Ones. The rather unimpressive-sounding Yig is included, and Cthulhu is available as an in-app purchase. Yig gives players a better starting point. He’s much less malevolent than Azazoth, both easier to seal away and quicker to wake. He also brings with him a few monsters and adventures that are a little less likely to leave your investigators inconsolable, mindless wrecks, or, you know, dead.

For those already adept at putting down Azazoth, you might want to do it again: you’ll unlock a new investigator that should add a little more variety to your playthroughs. Then you can grab the Call of Cthulhu campaign for a much bigger challenge.

The new campaign takes you back through the museum, but this time with a new goal: discovering the intent of some mysterious intruders (they probably want to raise Cthulhu, just sayin’). Once you do that, it’s off to the Pacific Rim to search for the lost city of R’lyeh and prevent the rising of Cthulhu. You do this by collecting extra investigation tokens, so you’ll have to balance succeeding at adventures and hoarding your tokens.

There are 30 new adventures to be had in the Call of Cthulhu campaign, each more horrifying than the last, no doubt. There are also four new investigators that you can use in any of the campaigns, and a fifth that’s unlocked when you complete Cthulhu. That’s a lot of new ways to play, whether it’s solo or pass-and-play with friends. And as usual, this update brings with it all sorts of fixes and tweaks that should smooth out the cultist-hunting experience, like skippable scene transitions and lowered memory requirements.

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In a day of iOS gaming news that just doesn’t stop, let’s add this to the dog pile: Word just hit the streets that Max Payne will be arriving on the App Store on April 12th. Details are vague right now aside from mention of “renovated graphics”, Social Club functionality, and the ability to customize the controls.

My calendar is telling me that April 12th is next week, so, I’m expecting Rockstar to tease out some more details on Max Payne in the not too distant future.

[via The Verge]

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So, what’s Chair Entertainment been up to, you wonder? Well, at least part of the studio has been busy designing and implementing Infinity Blade 2’s [$6.99] long-awaited, and awesome-sounding, ClashMobs feature. IGN Wireless just posted a short hands-on piece that details its functionality and otherwise shows off the new-look element.

From what we’re gathering, the early promise of ClashMob has been realized: in it, you and thousands of others take turns beating the crap out of one really big monster in an epic attempt to gather exclusive loot. The challenges come in the form of skirmishes, and seem like they’ll have a mini-game sort of feel to them. One type skirmish has you doing the most damage to a monster that you possibly can within 30 seconds, for example.

IGN details some of its social hooks:

The more connected friends you have participating in ClashMobs, the better benefits you’ll be eligible for. Bonuses like additional combat time, bonus victory cash and extra ClashMob attempts will be awarded to players with more MyMob members.

ClashMobs are due out as part of a larger update next week. Expect new equipment, new monsters, a new gem interface, and “a gem forge” feature. Check out IGN for more info because, man, this sounds like the greatest thing ever.

[via IGN]

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Hello Games’ Joe Danger will be making his debut on mobile in the near future, and it won’t be a port of the Xbox Live Arcade or PSN version of the title. In an interview with Gamasutra, Hello co-founder Sean Murray noted that the upcoming iOS and Android takes on the title will be very platform specific, written from the ground-up for iPhone.

Here’s what Murray had to say about his studio’s approach to controls, iOS in general, and what this new Joe Danger will bring to the table:

I think games that people love on the iPhone have something in common, their controls are made for the device. Swiping in Temple Run, slashing fruit in Fruit Ninja or pulling back a catapult in Angry Birds are controls that are best on a touchscreen. I hate the virtual d-Pad, it never feels right to me. It feels like something that only exists to make porting games easier.

Joe Danger is a game with a lot of depth to the controls. We want to make very much an arcade game on your mobile. You swipe the screen to make Joe wheelie, you nudge him in the air to affect his gravity, you can flick a barrier out of the way, or wrestle with the shark in the shark tank. You have such control that levels that would be impossible on console are much easier on the touchscreen.

Murray expressed that Hello isn’t one percent locked-on to what it’s doing right now. In fact, it’s using the playable build that it’s bringing to PAX East to gather feedback and assess if this is something it still wants to pursue.

We’ll definitely be keeping our all-seeing eye on this, so buckle up.

[via Gamasutra, Thanks Chris!]

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Well, this was unexpected. A day or so after launching a restaurant simulation game on Android, the simulation gurus at Kairosoft stealth-released Epic Astro Story [$3.99] across the iPhone and iPod Touch. From the look, it appears as if it’s melding the action-y soccer part of Pocket League Story with the city-building of its other recent releases, Oh Edo Town and Venture Town. The key exceptions being that it’s dripping with sci-fi buildings and homes, and the action-y part are actual battles with cutesy aliens.

We’re giving it a spin right now and will definitely deliver you something a little more specific in the near future. If you’re a Kairosoft fan, however, this appears to be the change of pace game you’ve been craving since the company began releasing its city building games on the App Store. Fingers crossed for awesome!

[Thanks, WakeBoardMan10!]

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Alright so I just screamed like a teenage girl in the front row of a New Kids on the Block concert. This morning Wizards of the Coast announced that a new installment of their Duels of the Planeswalkers series of Magic: The Gathering games was coming. Granted, this isn’t much of a surprise since Duels has historically been incredibly popular, so much so that quite a few people (myself included) directly attribute the game to the resurgence in interest in the physical Magic: The Gathering card game. What is surprising is that among the announced platforms, Wizards also dropped the bomb that the game will be coming to the iPad.

Details beyond that are basically non-existent, but it’s safe to assume that Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 will play just like its predecessors, except with the inclusion of new cards from this year’s sets. I’m stoked as hell, not only because I’ve been playing M:TG basically my entire life, but because I think there’s lots of interesting things that can be done on the iPad with the IP. For instance, a Magic Online client for the iPad?

Just take my money Wizards, take it all.

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