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The latest update to Super Crate Box [$1.99] introduces a new kind of crate, developer Vlambeer told us via e-mail this afternoon. Version 1.1, which just hit, adds extremely rare, and random, golden crates. In all, there are just 100 to collect globally. Also, as if that wasn’t Willy Wonka enough for you, a rare golden enemy type is being added, as well. As soon as fans find all of the golden crates, Vlambeer plans to release the next update.

This update will also introduce two more indie characters to unlock: one from Starguard, and the other from Psychosomnium. Bug fixes, tweaks, and prep work for version 1.2 are also expected to drop when this hits. Oh! And the first person to download this will score the world’s very first golden crate. Dibs!

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In a world where trees can murder grandmothers, a lumberjack who can distort time and space takes his revenge. Welcome to the premise of Owlchemy Labs’ next absurd iPad and iPhone game, Jack Lumber. Set to hit later this summer, it’s a log slicing game with a delicious looking bullet-time mechanic. But don’t call it a Fruit Ninja-alike.

“Our goals with Jack Lumber were to create the best damn lumberjacking game this side of the Redwoods,” Owlchemy’s Alex Schwartz told us. “The scientists here at Owlchemy Labs love the Halfbrick guys with all our heart, but comparing Jack Lumber to Fruit Ninja is like comparing apples to logs. After six iterations of crazy log-cutting gameplay, we hit on something magical.”

Alex shared an… interesting play-by-play:

Logs are flying by at breakneck speed. You’re watching intently to find that exact moment where the logs have coalesced on-screen to form a perfect arrangement. You can feel that it’s the right time, so you touch your finger down. Time slows to a halt. You’re in “Lumber Time”. Thankfully, you have supernatural powers, otherwise this would be quite difficult. You draw a smooth and calculated path with your finger, swooping through logs from end-to-end along the grain, weaving, dodging, and turning with the finesse of a brutish and hairy figure skater.

You see you have less than a second of draw time left on the clock and you catch the ‘Time Extended’ bonus log and sigh a breath of relief for a brief moment, drawing onward to grab the last four logs remaining on screen. But wait! A skunk is in your way and you barely pivot around him before he releases his raunchy green ‘defensive maneuver’ on you. You successfully clip the last log and triumphantly lift your finger as your axe replays your epic path of destruction, decimating every log with the fury you reserve only for the trees that killed your grandma. Combo points explode from the madness and ‘Straight Shot’ bonuses fill the screen as your eyes tear up from sheer joy and excitement.

Also, there are flying moose.

We’ve got the first footage of the titular hero’s title just below, but you’ll also get to see it in action during PAX East at the Indie MEGABOOTH, which will feature many other games to play.

We saw a generous Jack Lumber sneak peek this year at GDC 2012, and were impressed with the iterative design on display. Most slicing games don’t bother to mix up the formula, but this does by introducing choice into the mix. You won’t just be slicing wood, you’ll be making an informed tactical decision with each cut. The game will also feature a full campaign mode with dialogue, and a progression mechanic for your axe. “You can upgrade your axes to absurd lengths,” we’re told, “to the point where you get the Canadian maple leaf axe among others.”

“Absurd” is the right word for this. We’re hopelessly stoked to see this in motion, so stay tuned. We’ll be bring you a lot more before its release.

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I’m honestly not even sure what the best way to introduce this New York Times article would be to do it justice. I read a lot (I mean, a lot.) of blogs, newspapers, forums, and everything else that could even be a vaguely relevant source for TouchArcade content, and I’ve never come across such a fantastic retrospective both on the evolution of handheld video games, but also the way “stupid games” like Angry Birds become so integrated into our lives. In fact, I’m reluctant to even sum it up any more than that, so here’s a link and an excerpt to whet your proverbial whistle:

And so a tradition was born: a tradition I am going to call (half descriptively, half out of revenge for all the hours I’ve lost to them) “stupid games.” In the nearly 30 years since Tetris’s invention — and especially over the last five, with the rise of smartphones — Tetris and its offspring (Angry Birds, Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, etc.) have colonized our pockets and our brains and shifted the entire economic model of the video-game industry. Today we are living, for better and worse, in a world of stupid games. …Read More

If you’ve got friends, family, co-workers, or anyone else who doesn’t get this whole mobile gaming thing, Sam Anderson wrapped the whole phenomenon up in a perfect little package digestible even for people who know nothing about video games. Zach Gage even makes an appearance.

Seriously though, take ten minutes out of your day and give it a read.

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Hero Academy [Free] is now a Universal app. Last week, Robot Entertainment spilled the beans on the update, confirming its existence and detailing one of the more exciting additions: a new team called “the Tribe.” It also announced the inclusion of a new game board and two new mechanics that accompany its arrival: barbed crystals and Resist boost squares. Lead designer Marcin Szymanski breaks down why these are important to the game on its blog:

Barbed Crystals are quite a departure from our board designs, giving the units responsible for our victory condition a way to fire at the enemy! We actually started off with some passive boosts for crystals on this board, such as innate damage reflection, but the active ability easily won out in playtesting. And, the new Resist boost premium square complements the Defense boosts that is already in place on other boards. On paper, it is a small change, but it actually changes various match-ups quite significantly.

This update isn’t without the usual glut of fixes and balancing tweaks. Robot has laid out everything on its blog, so if you’re into the nitty-gritty, go check it out. Also, take note that this version of the game now has an “undo” mechanic. Starting now, you can undo a single action with a tap of the AP wheel. Neat!

Hero Academy, by the way, is a fantastic turn-based strategy game. If you haven’t picked it up alongside most of the known world, you should. Our review is available for your reading pleasure here.

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Like any studio, PikPok has a usability team that monitors the development of a new title and watches out for any potential pitfalls. It’s a thankless job since we tend to not moan whenever a game feels intuitive or a layer of UI makes sense. We also don’t get to meet these dudes very often, which is what makes the new usability editorial on the studio’s web site notable. In it, we’re introduced to an integral piece of PikPok’s internal testing pit, Hadley Bellam.

Bellam is allowed to be involved from the start of a new game, which undoubtedly helps the entire usability testing process. Here’s a snippet of what Hadley has to say about what he does in early production:

“Outside of UI considerations, early usability is usually focused on input methods and camera/orientation, which are closely related. Whether the game uses landscape or portrait orientation will affect how the user interacts with the device. We need to consider left and right handed players as well as players who play with their finger(s) or thumb(s).”

“Will the game require users to play with multitouch or will it be playable using only one digit? Will input work as well on tablets as it will on phones? These are accessibility questions we aim to answer early to ensure playing the game is not uncomfortable for users. You may notice many PikPok games can be played with a single digit, thumb or finger, on either hand.”

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, definitely go give the blog a visit. It’s a fun read that gives you a small sense of why PikPok is able to churn out solid game after solid game.

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Last year at E3, we got our first taste of F5 Games’ upcoming Pocket Heroes, and we were definitely intrigued by what we saw. Pocket Heroes looks to take a party-based adventure RPG and give it the asynchronous multiplayer treatment. In fact, it’s strictly online-only, with each player controlling a party member in the game and taking turns making moves asynchronously, with push notifications letting everybody know when it’s time for them to go.

It’s been described as Words With Friends meets turn-based RPG, and is probably best understood by watching the trailer below.

So, as you can see from that video, Pocket Heroes is a really cool idea. Since we first saw the game at E3 last June, F5 has been continuing to toil away at the project, and we got another chance to see where it was at during GDC last month. It had come a long way since E3, and actually looked very close to finished.

Earlier this week, the game’s publisher Ayopa Games posted the official game page for Pocket Heroes along with an official release date and pricing info. We can expect to get our hands on Pocket Heroes May 11th for the reasonable price of $1.99. Sweet! You can also see some brand spanking new promo art for the game and learn more about the different classes by visiting our forums, and we’ll definitely have more on Pocket Heroes as it nears its release next month.

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When you’re playing Coco Loco, [$0.99] it’s important to remember that you’re rescuing your marshmallow brethren from chocolate guardians. You’re absolutely not rescuing your eggs from pigs. Sure, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably Angry Birds, but Twiitch deserves credit: this particular physics puzzler with slingshot mechanics is actually pretty great.

Some of Coco Loco’s levels could be pulled straight out of similar games—let’s just say there isn’t much difference between an egg-shaped mallow and an egg-shaped bird. But those structural similarities surround cunning levels designed for more than brute-force thinking. The formula takes another sharp turn with terribly entertaining liquid dynamics. It plays like a brand new game, even if it doesn’t look much like one.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the Marshies were enjoying a simple dip in the hot chocolate springs when the cocoa guardians took them prisoner. Now it’s up to you to get revenge, rescue your pals, and free them from their, err, celebrity-costumed captivity. That sort of quirkiness gives Coco Loco a fresh angle to build on, and it extends through every bit of the game’s visual design.

From there it’s a matter of differentiating itself through gameplay. The liquids make up a big part of that: the Marshies can be freed by being swept up in cocoa, and the chocolate guardians can be melted away similarly. Many levels will see you redirecting cocoa, breaking through dams and barriers and generally splashing around.

Lest I give the impression this is just a damp Angry Birds (probably an obvious mashup in this post-Where’s My Water world), I should emphasize that the level design in Coco Loco is very, very good. Rarely are you left to smash down a structure with however many projectiles you feel like using. Instead, you’re often given exactly what you’ll need to solve a puzzle, one with moving parts, flowing liquid and tight corridors to aim your way through.

The tools you’re given are a good mix of familiar and new. You’ve got your standard Marshie, the one that knocks over the things it hits. Another one explodes on your command. But there’s also one that expands into a gelatinous wall on demand, and another that shoots cocoa out of a cannon, amongst others. Combined, they can pull of some excellent tricks.

You have to be creative when using them, as much as you need to be precise. Most of Coco Loco’s 75 levels are set up for specific solutions: toss this dude at that spot to clear the way for the next guy to knock over the cocoa just so, and the whole thing comes together. Or take each of your Marshies and land them in just the right places all over the screen. You’ll need to use your brain more often than you will your pixel-hunting skills.

I just wish the same creativity that’s been brought to bear on the level design had bumped into the rest of the game at some point. We have the three star rating system, “Fluffy,” the IAP that finishes any level for you, extra points for having Marshies left over, and that’s just scratching the surface. Coco Loco is strong enough to stand on its own, and hanging a lantern on its similarities to Angry Birds does it no favors.

Just don’t let that stop you from checking it out. Coco Loco isn’t a strikingly original game, even without the checklist of familiar interface elements, but it is one of the most thoroughly solid and entertaining physics puzzle games I’ve played in some time. Taken in a vacuum, it could have blown me away. In the context of the rest of the App Store, it’s still a heck of a lot of fun. Don’t just give it a look, give it a play and you might be impressed.

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We told you back in February that the newly-formed development studio Ninth Ninja in connection with Pom Pom Games was busy porting the popular PC title Mutant Storm to the iOS platform. Mutant Storm, in case you didn’t know, is a Robotron-esque arcade shooter that originally released for PC and Mac but is probably more widely known for its enhanced re-release as an Xbox Live Arcade title back in 2005 under the name Mutant Storm Reloaded.

While Mutant Storm coming to the App Store is exciting enough in and of itself, yesterday we learned via Twitter that Crescent Moon Games has jumped on board to publish the title. Also revealed is that Mutant Storm is running at 60 frames per second on the new iPad, and digging into the game’s forum thread developer Ninth Ninja goes into even more detail stating that it runs at 60fps on the iPad 2 and a respectable 30fps on the original iPad.

Considering how many crazy graphical effects can get going in Mutant Storm, that’s pretty darn good, and for new iPad owners the iOS version of the game will use the high resolution assets from the PC game to take advantage of the Retina Display screen. You can actually see comparison shots of the game at normal iPad resolution on the left and the Retina Display resolution of the new iPad on the right.

Mutant Storm for iOS is in the final stages of development, so it shouldn’t be much longer before the final version hits. Hit up the forums for some discussion and keep your eyes on this space for any more news related to the impending release of Mutant Storm on the App Store.

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