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Work with me for a second. Forget that The Hunger Games: Girl on Fire has a connection to the Hunger Games fiction. Instead, let’s just look at is as if it is a normal, everyday product that isn’t being bankrolled by a major movie studio. Let’s do this because, even in this vacuum, it impresses. Provided the final build is as good as the one we’ve been paying, it’s the kind of game we’d recommend without pause: it’s conceptually solid, it has a fantastic look, and it brings some new ideas to a genre that’s hopelessly clotted.

You could argue that Girl on Fire is a spiritual successor to Canabalt [$2.99]. It’s an endless runner that revolves around a daring escape, but it boasts some key points of iteration that change up the play in strong ways. For one, Girl on Fire boasts a regenerating health system. If you take a hit, you lose your momentum, but not the game. As a result, you get get married to sessions, and the overall runner experience doesn’t feel as hollow as it usually does.

More interestingly, Girl on Fire allows you to act on blockades. When one of the game’s huge human-sized hornets buzz into the picture, you can shoot it. There’s also an avoidance mechanic, too, that allows you to jump between the jungle world’s upper and lower tiers. Choosing when to kill and when to jump is a cool tactical layer, which brings choice to conflict. Do you jump when a conga line of hornets fly hurdle towards you, or do you stand your ground and pluck them off? When they fire back at you with their purple balls of doom-y doom, do you jump and take care of them or do you just try to avoid the confrontation altogether?

Solid controls compliment this action. Swipe to move between planes, press to aim your projectile bow weapon and fire. It’s all sharp, simple, and responsive, just like the 16-bit games that the art style and tone of the game have been modeled around. Playing this is like step back into a portal where gaming was purer and simpler.

Semi-Secret’s Adam Saltsman is one of the big independent developers attached to this project, so that’s probably why we feel the connection to Canabalt so strongly. Even if we could stop ourselves from the comparison, we’d still be high on Girl on Fire after our hour or so with it. We’ll be taking a much longer look at the final build when it hits iPhone and iPad tomorrow, so stay tuned.

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In its brief time on iOS, Radiangames has shown great skill at finding the spark of potential in games that are getting on in years. Late last year we looked at Super Crossfire [$0.99 / HD], a powered-up take on Space Invaders. Now we have Fireball SE [$0.99], a game partly inspired by Geometry Wars II and its Pacifism mode.

In Fireball SE, as in Pacifism, you fly around dodging huge waves of enemies in a top-down arena. Trouble is, you can’t shoot. Instead you lead your foes to their deaths, through bombs here, or gates in Geometry Wars. But where one was a tiny afterthought of an avoidance mode in a much bigger arcade game, here it’s been fleshed out with new rules, stages, achievements and scoring mechanics, and it’s so much better for it. It’s sort of like Tilt to Live [$2.99 / HD] without the tilt, but let’s put comparisons aside—this game is seriously fun on its own.

Fireball SE is broken down into three modes, but all three share the same fundamental mechanics. Using a truly responsive (and adjustable) virtual joystick, you pilot a fireball around the arena. Enemies spawn, starting in the corners and spreading out from there. Bombs appear. You skim by them to set them off on a short timer, or slam into them to blow them apart. If the action gets too fast, you can jam your other thumb down to activate Meltdown, which slows everything down for a few seconds while you get back in control.

The scoring is particularly intricate. Killing enemies is worth points, and killing them in combos is worth a lot more. It’s more than a linear increase, so it’s really worthwhile to string along as many enemies as you can before smashing through a bomb. When they die they drop sparks. Collecting those is worth points too, so you’ve gotta go back into your trail on a regular basis. Fireball rewards the daring.

Of course, you only have one life. Did I mention that? One little mistake and you’re dead. Waves mode counteracts this by letting you start from any wave you’ve reached, so hitting all eight isn’t obscenely hard. But your score will suffer—it carries over between waves you survive, and starts fresh when you do.

Survival and Countdown are two sides of another coin: Survival counts your time up, and Countdown counts it, uh, down. But Radiangames has done something interesting here. Both modes are split into five stages each, and each stage has a different feel. The speed is a little different, enemy spawn patterns vary, bombs appear more or less often. Part of this is about letting you find your groove, but another part is ripping you out of your comfort zone. The Game Center leaderboards for these modes track your total score across all five stages, so getting in a rut hurts.

Otherwise Fireball SE is comfortably familiar. There’s a good beat in the background and art that’s stylish in a very blue and orange sort of way. There’s a whack of achievements to earn. There’s even an easy mode that accounts for its lowered difficulty with similarly lowered scores. The package is nothing all that special, but what’s inside is quite cool.

In a time where we spend a lot of energy weeding out clones and lousy rip-offs, it’s great to see a game that lands on the good side of imitation. Fireball SE has a lot in common with other titles, but it builds on that foundation. We end up with a game that captures something fun that has been left fallow elsewhere, one that turns a small spark of inspiration into a solid, well-rounded new form. So give it some love, and swing by our forums to share what you’d like to see from it next.

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I can hardly believe it’s been almost one year since the release of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. Since that time, Sword & Sworcery has earned more accolades than I can shake a stick at, including our own Game of the Year award for 2011, and it redefined what we can expect from a melding of video games, music, art, and storytelling on the iOS platform.

Basically, if you somehow haven’t checked out Sword & Sworcery yet, you can currently get either version of the game at a discount in order to celebrate the one year anniversary of its release (and the vernal equinox, of course). And by either version I mean the iPhone/iPod touch-only version which is on sale for 99¢, or the Universal version which will set you back $1.99 during this one day price cut.

If you don’t currently own an iPad, but are having thoughts about picking up one of those fancy new iPads, then I’d just go ahead and jump on the Universal version. The folks behind Sword & Sworcery note on their website that they’re fully aware of Apple’s latest touchtronic device, and will be announcing something on that topic soon. I drool at the thought of a Retina iPad version of Sword & Sworcery, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Also, you can’t really mention Sword & Sworcery without mentioning Jim Guthrie who did the amazing soundtrack for the game. He’s all over this sale business too, and you can currently purchase the Sword & Sworcery soundtrack in digital form for whatever price you feel like paying. If you’re a collector type, you can also get the album on limited edition vinyl with original artwork from Pendleton Ward (seen above), or as a limited edition cassette tape. That’s right, a cassette tape! All of this is available at Jim’s Bandcamp page.

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I have to admit, I wasn’t sure what to think about Picnic Wars [$0.99 / HD], a castle crusher showcasing the epic feud between vegetables and fruits (which somehow takes place during a picnic). Yet, despite the absurd story, what follows is a decent take on the genre with a good amount of gameplay variety that unfortunately suffers from a lack of content.

In Picnic Wars, you take the role of either fruits or veggies as they seek to destroy the fortresses of the other. You accomplish this by flinging various units at the castles, causing as much mayhem and destruction as possible. Truthfully, I have no idea what picnics have to do with the story, but seeing how zany the concept is I didn’t bother thinking about it.

Gameplay is a bit more complicated than simply tossing fruits or veggies at the opposition. Players take control of up to five different launchers on an isometric grid by moving them up and down the grid to aim. Each launcher can also be upgraded, with some units being more effective when fired from a certain launcher. Meanwhile, the opposition is throwing utensils at your launchers which can damage and eventually destroy your weapons. Combine this with a countdown on each mission, and gameplay in Picnic Wars becomes a bit more fast-paced than other similar games.

However, before you can throw your units, they must first be grown with seeds. Each unit takes a certain amount of seeds and time to grow depending on its strength. In addition, you start with a limited amount of seeds but can obtain more by aiming your allies at scattered seed bags located within the enemy castle.  Plant projectiles have lots of different strengths and attributes, such as the garlic that turns into a group of mini garlic grenades to the cabbage that acts as a delayed grenade. Players are scored based on speed, item collection, and total destruction.

I thought Picnic Wars did a good job creating a fun, varied gamplay foundation. There are a ton of different fruits and veggies to grow, and almost all of them are viable through the majority of the campaign. I also really enjoyed the isometric view which provides a bit of strategy as to where you want to launch seeing as how you may not be able to see some enemies until you take out certain sections. Controls, however, can be a pain as the same isometric view also leads to situations where you have to move some launchers just to tap on others, wasting precious time.

A hard mode is also available, which allows you to play through all the levels again with different units. Hard mode also increases the likelihood of catapult destruction and also removes the targeting sights, making it a bit tougher to accurately aim your shots. I personally loved hard mode, as it provided the perfect amount of difficulty that was missing from the easy mode.

Visually, Picnic Wars boasts a colorful, cartoony style that works well for the content. The game looks great on retina-iPhones, but not so much on the new iPad yet. The music also reflects the quirky feel of the game, although I wasn’t a fan of most of the sound effects (too annoying for my tastes). Strangely enough, the game also had load times between levels that, while not excessive, were still long enough for me to notice.

While Picnic Wars touts a total of 64 levels, in reality you’re getting two campaigns of the same 32-levels with the only difference being that you play as fruits in one campaign and veggies in the other. Each campaign has its share of different units, but the actual maps are the same, offering little in variety to players that have already completed one of the campaigns. Considering how swiftly you can get through the ‘easy’ campaign, you’ll be hurting for more rather quickly.

I’m a bit disappointed at how little there actually is. When you take into account the decent gameplay mechanics and visuals, Picnic Wars ends up feeling like wasted potential. If you’re willing to check it out I have no doubt that it should provide some enjoyment. However, be advised that enjoyment will be short-lived.

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I genuinely have no clue how we missed this the first time it hit the internet (in late 2011), but Lego’s Life of George [Free] just blew my mind. This is everything I wanted and more as a Lego-loving child. Check out the video:

In a nutshell, utilizing the Life of George ($26.99 on Amazon) Lego set, the app challenges you to build different Lego objects, then take a photo of them using the camera of your iOS device. The game scores you based on how long it took you to build the object, and a recent (Well, “recent” as in Christmas!) update added 30 new challenges and 45 new models to build.

Has anyone out there tried this? Looking at the charts, Life of George seems to have had some pretty dismal download numbers, peaking at #57 in the family subcategory. That’s too bad, since this is the exact kind of stuff I like seeing the iOS camera doing.

Thanks Marcos!

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The Walking Dead season two finale put a big, fat dent in our love of the property in all of its forms, but just like that, Telltale restored our faith. Late this afternoon, the studio posted the first teaser trailer for its series based on the grim and violent world Robert Kirkman has built, and boy, is it awesome.

There’s still a lot of stuff we don’t know about the games, like, say, how they’ll play or when the iPad or iPhone versions are due out. Word on the street is that we should be expecting the games to release across iOS in April, perhaps a little after the XBLA, PC, PSN, and Macintosh versions launch. Fingers are crossed on that, for sure. Stay tuned to us as this stuff gets hashed out.

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When you talk to Simogo, you get the sense that it burns through prototypes just as fast as we churn through toilet paper. In our big article highlighting what the studio does, we talked about a few of its prototypes that weren’t turned int actual games. Over on the studio’s blog, it’s highlighting another one: 16 Games.

Simogo’s Simon Flesser describes it as a “neat little two button punk thing” that offered a variety of simultaneously playable mini-games. It had a punk look and a chip-tunes soundtrack that went alongside its insane play style.

Below is one of three promotional images Simogo has unveiled. It should give you a sense of what it was shooting for:

Interestingly, the failure to get 16 Games out of the door made Simogo switch its focus to Beat Sneak Bandit [$2.99]. Good call, right?

Check out the rest of Simogo’s post for some links to its music and a look at its other promotional document.

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So here’s something cool you may not have noticed about the new iPad: If you’re playing an iPhone game (or using an iPhone app) that has Retina Display assets for the iPhone, it will use the higher resolution set of assets. On previous models of the iPad, this functionality required the jailbreak utility Retina Pad. It actually makes a massive difference.

It’s a little hard to do that accurate of a comparison without just looking at both devices side by side, but I’ve doubled the resolution of the iPad 2 screenshots on the left to be the same size as the new iPad on the right. It may seem exaggerated, but the difference is even more noticeable when you’ve got a game like Flight Control running on two iPads side by side.

If you remember, back when the iPad was first released to make up for the complete lack of iPad-specific apps, Apple added the pixel doubling functionality to allow iPhone-specific apps to run full screen. The results were always a pixelated mess, and while it worked, it was a pretty terrible overall user experience. Now, with (almost) every iPhone app coming bundled with Retina Display assets, this new fullscreen functionality actually results in surprisingly decent looking upscaling.

Of course, iPad apps and games that are actually designed for the Retina Display of the new iPad look tons better, but now you don’t need to essentially write off any non-universal app as being a huge pixel party.

UPDATE: Here are some shots of Real Racing 2, an iPhone-only game with Retina Display assets as well as Real Racing 2 HD which is optimized for the Retina Display of the new iPad:

iPad 2 running Real Racing 2 pixel doubled:

New iPad running Real Racing 2 utilizing iPhone Retina Display assets:

Real Racing 2 HD running on iPad 2:

Real Racing 2 HD running on new iPad:

There are differences in lighting between the screenshots since each version of the game seems to render the scene at a different in-game time of day. Also, the iPhone versions running full screen on the iPad have a slightly different UI so I tried to line things up as close as I could. Regardless, the jump in quality is just astounding, and it seems like the image quality between iPhone Retina Display-ready games and non-Retina Display iPad games is pretty similar.

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Alright, I’ll come clean. When I saw OMGPOP’s Draw Something [99¢ / Free] glued to the #1 positions on both the free and paid charts I assumed it was yet another flavor of the week flash in the pan freemium game. Then I tried it, and wow is this game good. I’m not quite sure how they did it, but Draw Something is a perfect witch’s brew of Facebook integration, word scrambling, and asynchronous two-player Pictionary.

It works a little something like this- You start a game with someone (I’ve found games with people you actually know via Facebook seem to be the most fun.) and are given the choice of three words of varying difficulty. You choose one, do your best to draw it, and hit submit. Your friend gets a push alert, sees your drawing, and is given a array of scrambled letters to spell the word with. If they guess correctly you’re awarded between one and three coins, they take their turn, and the process repeats.

The free to play mechanic is actually sort of neat, as you can play the free version for eternity with ads and a limited set of colors to draw with. Alternatively, you can spring for the 99¢ ad-free version. The coins you earn are used to either buy bombs which nuke some of the letter tiles which don’t go to the word you’re supposed to guess or buy more colors to paint with. Sure, you can just do your drawings in the few colors that everyone gets, but to really tweak out your illustrations you need at least a few more paint sets.

The rub of the coin system is that actually earning enough coins by playing to buy bombs and unlock paint sets takes forever, which means you basically have to buy them unless you’re way more patient than I am. But, at the end of the day, I’m having a really hard time getting that worked up over the IAP as the game is worth every penny worth of the $4.99 bucket of coins I bought to unlock a bunch of paint (and the 99¢ I dropped to get the ad-free version).

Recently, the game was updated with additional words, and complete support for the Retina Display of the new iPad. In fact, my original intention of this post was just a quick news article on that fact, but I just can’t help but gush all over this game. Everyone I know is playing it, and recently taking my turns in Draw Something is both among the last things I do before I go to bed and the first things I do when I wake up every day.

So, I’m tagging this as a review, giving Draw Something five stars, and telling you again: Download this game.

TouchArcade Rating:

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At an event that was supposed to revolve around World of Warcraft’s upcoming expansion, Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard producer John Lagrave revealed that the studio is flirting with the idea of taking the still-popular MMO to iPhone. “We won’t do it until we think it’s decent,” Lagrave told Eurogamer in an interview. “But it’s interesting and the world is evolving towards that little handheld device.” He added that Blizzard would be foolish not to consider a port.

Lagrave pointed out a few key reasons why we haven’t seen WOW mobile yet, the main one being that it doesn’t have a good idea for it at the moment. As far as fundamental problems are concerned, that strikes us as a pretty big one. Still, it’s nice to know that Blizzard is thinking about us phone-shackled folk. If this ever happens, hopefully Blizzard sticks to its guns and offers up with something much more clever than these guys, who put the entire game on iOS via Vollee.

[via Eurogamer]

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