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If you're looking for an iPhone motocross game to get excited over, this very well may be it. The Quadsphere, creators of Icarus-X [$1.99] announced on our forums this morning that their next iPhone game is going to be an online multiplayer enabled motocross game called FMX Riders. We don't have anything right now other than a set of screenshots and a feature list, but FMX Riders looks (and sounds) incredibly promising.

FMX Riders will come packed with four game modes: Race, freestyle, time attack, and hotlap time attack. There will be a career mode with 9 tours and over 40 events. The best part, it will utilize Game Center for online multiplayer with auto-matchmaking. Game Center integration doesn't stop there, there's over 15 different leaderboards, achievements, and you'll even be able to save and share replays with your Game Center friends. Oh, and the cherry on top– Retina Display graphics.

We'll be closely following FMX Racers, but in the meantime, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to keep an eye on the thread in our upcoming games forum.

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Alright, so here's the story behind Skycat and The Starchildren [99¢]– Two cats who were the best of friends were just chilling outside one summer day when Fatcat (Yes, that's his name) went galavanting off and found a massive rocket that was prepared to launch. Like any curious cat, he decided to wander in and investigate. Moments later the rocket went soaring skyward, leaving Ordinary Cat (Yes, that's the other character's name) sad and without his buddy. Out of nowhere, Mother Star appears granting Ordinary Cat a magical scarf which then transforms him in to "Skycat, the star born herald of the sky."

This is all told through an incredibly cute series of animated story pages, which serve as a teaser for the surprisingly detailed graphics that encompass the rest of the game. Gameplay consists of very similar platforming to classics like Robot Unicorn Attack [$2.99 / HD] in that you're constantly running to the right and (utilizing your magical scarf) are capable of jumping and dashing. However, instead of having a button to dash, you just swipe on screen in the direction you want to dash. This allows you to dash upwards to jump extra high, as well as forwards to speed up.

The platforming in Skycat and The Starchildren is fantastic, as controlling which direction you dash really allows you to have some pretty great control over your scarf-powered kitty as shown in the above video. While you're running through the levels, you collect small stars which serve to lower your overall completion time at the end of each level. Game Center is integrated to track times against everyone online, and once you play through the game a time trial mode is unlocked to allow you to continue to hone your speed runs.

The issue with Skycat is that it is short. Nine levels in all are included, which will barely take you any time at all to complete. Now, I don't really take issue with short games, as a lot of the time a game can be short but feel like a complete experience. (No, Human is a great example of this.) However, Skycat is over before you even feel like you're getting started.

Normally I'd say that's cause to just skip a game, but what kills me about Skycat and The Starchildren is that it's really good. The controls feel right, the opening and ending to the game are great, the music is good, and both the levels and Skycat himself are animated really well. I would absolutely love to see an endless mode eventually implemented in Skycat, or more levels, or anything. If you can disregard playtime for quality, I'd definitely recommend Skycat and The Starchildren. Otherwise, this is totally a game to keep on your watch list for potential future updates.

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Earlier this month Xeis Studio released Mariachi Giro [$2.99], a universal rhythm game that abandons the predictable set list of terrible covers of hits from the 80's and 90's in exchange for mariachi music. To say the game is a little rough around the edges would be an understatement, but the novelty factor of feverishly tapping notes and switching between the various instruments of your mariachi band to nine Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlan traditional folk songs is just insane.

In the game, you take your mariachi band on the road performing at various Mexican locations that surely someone more culturally aware than myself will recognize. Once you unlock some songs, the true fun begins. A second game mode opens up where your mariachi band serenades a señorita from her window, and you're able to customize your band quite a bit. Everything from renaming them to changing their basic appearance or even upgrading their instruments. Check out this video put together by the developers:

There's a lot that is weird about Mariachi Giro, the polygon count of your band members is seriously low, and the crowd that comes to your concerts look like bouncing cardboard stand-ups. Also, there isn't really much feedback when you're hitting or missing notes, making learning the timing of the game to score well a little more difficult than it should be. Regardless, rocking out to some mariachi music is oddly amusing.

If you treasure the oddities of the App Store such as Enviro-Bear 2010 [99¢], BieberHair [99¢], Hi, How Are You [$1.99 / Free], and others… Mariachi Giro is something you need in your collection.

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Earlier today Gameloft released a teaser trailer for the sequel to their hit Halo-esque first person shooter, N.O.V.A. – Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance [$4.99 / HD]. N.O.V.A. 2 seems to feature the return of Kal Wardin continuing the adventures of the formerly retired space marine, and judging by the trailer is packed with all kinds of scripted events:

N.O.V.A. 2 is coming soon, which in Gameloft-speak usually means in the next few weeks. Also, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Gameloft takes the same awesome online multiplayer from Modern Combat 2: Black Pegasus [$6.99] and iterates it further with either more players in games, more game modes, more maps, or who knows what else. Either way, we liked the original N.O.V.A. quite a bit in our review, and I'm expecting the sequel to be just as (if not more) cool.

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With the rise in popularity of free-to-play social games – whether through various online outlets, playing games over Facebook, or indulging in one of the many freemium titles available on the App Store – this new style of play model has carved out a significant market in pursuit of gamers' attention. The news last week that Japanese social gaming giant DeNa acquired iOS developer Ngmoco to the tune of $400 million dollars has pretty much sealed the deal – love it or hate it, freemium gaming is here to stay.

This makes the recently announced freemium social game Lil' Pirates significant in a number of ways. Lil' Pirates is a collaboration between developers IUGO Mobile Entertainment and Capcom Mobile, neither of which are especially known for having casual free-to-play titles. IUGO has dabbled with many different approaches to selling games on the App Store, from ad-supported versions of their games to freely downloadable trials with more content available as IAP, but never a fully featured free game with optional purchases to enhance the experience. Capcom is treading in even more unfamiliar territory, as they are widely known as one of the more "hardcore" game developers on practically every gaming system for the last few decades. For both of these devs to be entering into the casual freemium market with Lil' Pirates says a lot about how big a deal this business model has become.

As for the game itself, Lil' Pirates is a colorful pirate themed adventure with a huge focus on customization. You'll start out as a small-time scallywagger with just a basic pirate ship, and you'll import your friends from Facebook to amass a crew. Sending your crew on various types of missions will result in loot that can be spent on tons of different items to customize both yourself and your pirate ship. These missions are limited by timers that only allow you to complete them every so often. This of course adds the element of being "patient to see a payoff" that is the core of freemium games, and there will be ways to spend real life money in Lil' Pirates in order to speed up the process of getting bigger and better items. Your crew also operates on an energy system that can be replenished by completing various minigames on your ship. This process can also be bypassed by purchasing special Root Beer items in the game.

Another interesting part about Lil' Pirates is an island called Treasure Island where you'll be able to bury items from your inventory. These items will increase in value the longer they remain buried, but take heed as your friends also have access to this island and can sneak in and dig up the items that you've placed there. All is not lost though, as there is a chance that the item that replaces your stolen one will actually be of higher value than the original. This adds a neat risk/reward aspect to the game, as well as giving you an opportunity to playfully mess with your friends by stealing their items (and vice versa).

It's hard to get too terribly excited about most of the freemium games that get released, as they all seem to feature many of the same type of gameplay with just minor theme changes. Lil' Pirates actually looks a bit more interesting than most, and features an excellent art style and some novel game concepts. The ability to import friends from Facebook and have them join your crew could be fun for those that use Facebook for their gaming needs, but IUGO has told us that logging in will not be required to play Lil' Pirates and there will be an offline component to the game as well. We'll take a closer look at Lil' Pirates when it launches for free sometime next month.

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We've been following Tasty Poison Games' Pocket RPG thread in our forums for quite a while now, and Crescent Moon Games just announced their intent to publish the game. Crescent Moon has quite a bit on its plate right now with a massive list of both recently released games and upcoming titles, but it's hard to not get excited over the potential of Pocket RPG, especially with the Crescent Moon team onboard.

The name of the game in Pocket RPG seems to be complete randomization, and is designed for games to have between 20-30 minutes of randomized dungeon crawling before starting over again. Three classes are included, each with a different play style and user interface. The Blade Master turns the game in to a melee-heavy hack and slash, the Dark Ranger behaves more like a dual stick shooter, and the Battle Mage plays similar to Solomon's Keep [99¢]. There's a combo system with damage bonuses that stack as you slay more and more enemies, and I've been told there is tons of looting.

The loot you equip changes your characters stats and weaponry, resulting in tons of different possible combinations. An example we were given includes a Blade Master picking up a fire sword with a vampiric ring, a ring of strength, and a ring of cone damage. After placing a rune of speed on the fire sword you would be swinging like a maniac, spewing fire everywhere, doing extra damage, and sucking hit points with every attack… That is, until you meet up with a fire monster. Then, attacking will heal them.

Pocket RPG, oddly enough, will likely launch first for the iPad. According to the developers, iOS 4 on the iPhone 3G caused too much of a performance hit for them to release the game without further optimization. Regardless, both versions of the game are still in development and they hope to launch before Christmas. I love randomized games like this, and really can't wait for the discussions on our forums regarding which magical effects are best to stack for each class.

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This isn't the first time that the soundtracks from iPhone games have been sold on iTunes, but this is the first compilation of indie iPhone music that I've seen that has been sold as an album. Atomicon's 1337 Mobile Game Music! Volume 1, aside from having some seriously awesome album art, also has some pretty great tracks:

1. Rocket Ride from Spazzle II
2. Battle Against the World from StarDunk
3. Galcon Theme from Galcon
4. iBlast Moki Theme 1 from iBlast Moki
5. Abduction from Marblenauts
6. Compression Theme from Compression
7. GeoSpark Theme from GeoSpark
8. iBlast Moki Theme 2 from iBlast Moki
9. Lift Me Up from Super 7
10. Pork Pie In The Sky from Spazzle II
11. Training from StarDunk

All too often it seems that we just take the background music of these games for granted (or just flat out play with it off), and it's cool to see the musicians of these indie iPhone games getting a little extra recognition. The whole album is available on iTunes for $9.99 or as individual tracks for 99¢.

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In late August, first time iPhone developer vol-2 released their first game No, Human [$1.99] on the App Store. No, Human is a fun physics-based puzzle game where you harness the power of flaming asteroids to rid the universe of humanity. This clever premise is matched with loads of style and gameplay that kept me playing through the whole game in one marathon session. As I mentioned in our review, really the only down side to No, Human is that it only had 50 levels. An update which just hit the App Store mere moments ago adds an additional 30, making it even easier to recommend.

Check out the trailer if you haven't seen it before:

If you've since removed No, Human from your device, sync it back again to give these new levels a try. If you hesitated on purchasing while you waited for additional content, now is the time to slam your finger down on the "Buy Now" button if physics puzzlers are your cup of tea.

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Gendai Games recently announced some drastic changes to the way they license GameSalad, a simplified game development tool that allows the creation of games without a single line of code. Previously, developers had different options on how to license the GameSalad SDK ranging from a $99 to $1,999 yearly subscription which then allowed developers to export binaries to then upload to Apple for approval to be sold (or given away) on the App Store under their own name. At GDC Online in Austin, Texas earlier this month, Gendai Games revealed that they were doing away with this subscription model and instead would be positioning themselves as a publisher of sorts. Per a FAQ posted later, the SDK will be completely free to download and instead all games will be published under the GameSalad name (similar to how Chillingo and other publishers work) with a revenue sharing agreement.

When existing GameSalad subscriptions expire, several things are going to happen: First off, all developers will be forced to publish their projects under GameSalad. This means they lose a great bit of their identity, have no control over promo codes, and will need to work through GameSalad instead of with Apple for any App Store issues. Secondly, all existing GameSalad games won't be able to be updated since currently there's no way to move an existing App Store listing to a different publisher and the new free version of the GameSalad SDK won't export a binary that can be sent to Apple to update the existing game. As of this writing, no program has been announced to allow existing developers who have invested in GameSalad to be grandfathered in to a program that will allow them to continue independent GameSalad development.

Max Vector, a GameSalad-powered shooter.

Needless to say, this change of events has stirred up quite a bit of unrest in the GameSalad development community. A blog (and forum) called I Just Wanna Make Some Games has sprung up detailing the GameSalad saga and offers some assistance for developers looking to migrate to similar tools without forced publishing. Quite a few developers seem to be jumping ship to Ansca Mobile's Corona, a similar tool that leverages the Lua scripting language. If you've dabbled in GameSalad in the past, or are looking to start, it might not be a bad idea to see how this all plays out before getting much more involved.

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Back in June we caught up with Venan Entertainment at E3. At the time, they showed an ad-supported free version of Space Miner [$4.99 / Lite] called Space Miner Blast that took the core shooter gameplay of the original and applied it to a fast-paced arcade style mini-game.

Space Miner Blast will be supported by unobtrusive in-game advertising, with optional DLC which will add features to the game and disable advertisements entirely. Most of the original Space Miner has been stripped out in favor of a quick survival game with a very basic upgrade system. All you do is see how big of a multiplier you can keep going by blasting as much ore as you possibly can (while defending against enemies of course). Here is a few minutes of gameplay:

Back at E3 they were reluctant to get specific on the release date of Space Miner Blast, but assured me it would be available "soon". Recently Venan posted a bit of an explanation on their blog, and like quite a few projects that were in the works at the time by other developers, both iOS 4 and the iPhone 4 threw Venan a curve ball. Aside from apologies, a few interesting tidbits come out of the blog post. First off, Venan has developed a system to download high resolution assets from within their games while still staying under the 20mb ceiling of over the air downloads. With any luck, their implementation of this system will inspire other developers as how to support the high resolution displays of both the iPhone 4 and iPad while staying under the over the air download limit has been the topic of discussion of quite a few iOS developer threads.

Venan provided the following high-res screenshots of Space Miner Blast:

Also, Space Miner will be getting some Retina Display love:

Space Miner Blast is nearing submission to Apple, and next up is a Space Miner sequel. I loved the original Space Miner, and really can't wait for both Space Miner Blast, and Space Miner turning in to a proper game series.

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