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As I write, I often consider whether or not my take on a game might be biased. For instance, I am clearly going to adore the idea of a game where I get to pilot a flying catmobile that spits screaming mice at grumbly enemies over a real-time war simulation. On that note, Don’t Run With a Plasma Sword [$0.99] is clearly the kind of game that I gravitate towards — its comic-inspired, it features an alien invasion, I’m basically running around with a lightsaber, and its got that modern retro feeling. In other words, I’m already smiling at the prospect. Biased? Maybe just a bit.

That being said, if a game sucks, it doesn’t get my stamp of approval no matter how many hallmarks of my tastes it contains. I’m happy to report that Don’t Run With a Plasma Sword not only features really cool, kitschy themes and humor, but it’s actually a hell of a lot of fun to play as well.

You play the role of Cornelius in this side-scroller, a comic store employee who is suddenly faced with an alien invasion. What better time than now to fulfill his dream of becoming a hero? And so, trusty plasma sword in hand, he goes bounding through the world taking out robots and saving the world. Not such a bad career, although the pay is more about looking cool than rolling in the greenbacks.

The game is on rails, so your only responsibilities will be to make Cornelius jump, slide and swing his sword as he runs through each level. Doing so is very pleasant as the buttons along the sides of your screen are very responsive, and you’ll lose yourself right into the action as you jam out to the appropriately wacky “alien invasion” music. Each level has lots of stuff to dodge and also lots of cool powerups, which will you give you powers like a shield so you can take an extra hit or a sword powerup that lets you fling a charge attack at the robots.

By adding levels and bosses to the basic endless running formula, Don’t Run With a Plasma Sword turns out a pretty appealing package. As you make your way through the city and the factory levels to finally reach the mothership , you’ll collect stars which give you XP (along with killing enemies and completing levels). When you finally die, you will get a chance to use the XP points you earn to level up your skills, unlock story and endless levels early if you like, or even buying snazzy clothes for your character. This system gives you a bit of a reward after you die, so instead of that feeling of drudgery you get when playing other running games and dying over and over, this one weathers that out well by giving you a little break before you get back to it.

In-App purchases are also an option, but they are in the game in a very low key way (they are accessible in the same menu where you can buy power-ups with your XP). What I liked most about the way this was presented was that you didn’t feel like you were losing out if you didn’t spend real life money, because in the same menu there was all this other stuff to choose from that you could earn from actual gameplay.

Now, that’s just Story Mode. Endless Mode is also available, and adds in little missions that challenge you to run a certain distance or that sort of thing. I had more fun in story mode, but overall I still found this mode challenging and worthwhile as well. Don’t Run With a Plasma Sword is also compatible with OpenFeint, Game Center, Facebook and Twitter, so you pretty much have every way you can possibly think of to share your scores with your friends at your fingertips.

From presentation to gameplay to overall fun factor, Don’t Run With a Plasma Sword simply shines. It’s got distinctive character and a great sense of humor. It’s also a treat to look at — great design, excellent color. Do I sound biased now, or what? Seriously, though, that whole Mars Attacks formula really works here, especially with a dash of comic book inspiration thrown in. I have a feeling you’ll be enjoying this title for some time, and it’ll be one of those that you keep on coming back to.

TouchArcade Rating:

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The Humble Indie Bundle and other gigantic collections of PC indie titles are all the rage nowadays for a lot of reasons, but starting now, there’s a feel-good App Store equivalent. A collection of twelve developers have come together for “12 Indie Apps For Christmas.” It’s “slightly different,” but the bottom-line is that 25 percent of each individual sale of one of its games, post-Apple cut, will go to Child’s Play or Doctors Without Borders throughout the rest of December.

The official rundown is available on the event’s web site, so do check that out if you plan to get your humanitarian on. The developers involved are all pretty hip, and the games are pretty bangin’, too. Here’s a break-down:

Christmas Air Hockey, $0.99 – [Forum Thread] – This is what you think it is — no surprises, it appears. On the other hand, this is definitely festive Air Hockey at its finest, as it includes tons of Christmas trimmings including snowmen, snow, and Santa sounds.

Galcon Labs, $1.99 – [Forum Thread] – Galcon, a real-time space strategy game fusion, has received a ton of updates over its life. At one point, Penny Arcade said that it’s a “must,” and we basically agree with that sentiment.

Harbor Master, $1.99 – [Forum Thread] – Harbor Master was one of those titles original that kinda validated the App Store game section, and it still rocks. Direct boats, move them into port, and get them away safely — this is a “light” strategy game that moves pretty fast, but does require a careful eye.

Smiles HD, $3.99 – [Forum Thread] – Smiles HD incorporates two different matching and strategic puzzle games. It probably won’t blow you away, but it’s a sharp and well-designed package that has a ton of charm

Disc Drivin’, $1.99 – [Review] – [Forum Thread] – Turn-based racing sounds a little abstract, but Disc Drivin’ is a fantastic time-waster that pairs hardcore flick action with asynchronous play. The Bearded One enjoys this so much, he’s practically physically bonded with it.

Full Deck Word Games, Free – [Review] – [Forum Thread] – If you’re looking for the next Words With Friends, you won’t find that depth of multiplayer here. But as an inexpensive way to entertain yourself while chatting with a friend, Full Deck Word Games will more than do the job.

iBlast Moki, $2.99 – [Review] – [Forum Thread] – iBlast Moki is a fun, high quality physics puzzler with intuitive controls and a full level creation and online sharing system. We highly recommend it, and people still seem to love it.

Red Nova, $0.99 – [Review] – [Forum Thread] – Red Nova actually does quite a few things to set itself apart from the pack. It has an interesting premise, one of the smartest control schemes I’ve seen, Game Center integration for high score bragging rights, and above all else it’s just a blast to play.

Sword of Fargoal, $1.99 – [Review] – [Forum Thread] – But, really, what makes the game so well suited for the iPhone is its casual nature as compared to the typical roguelike. Those who’ve never played a dungeon crawler before might just find themselves drawn in to Sword of Fargoal.

Tilt to Live, $2.99 – [Review] – [Forum Thread] – It is said that the best ideas are often the most simple ones, and there doesn’t seem to be anything quite as simple as the dot. Developers One Man Left seem to agree, as they’ve staked their entire game, Tilt to Live, on the premise of our beloved period; albeit the rapacious, hell-bent variety.

Trainyard, $0.99 – [Review] – [Forum Thread] – This, unsurprisingly, is a game about trains and routing them. And while that premise is simple, don’t let that fool you: this is one of those deceptively complex games with some mind-bending puzzles and a fantastic user-creation element.

Velocispider, $1.99 – [Review] – [Forum Thread] – If you’re anything like us, the thrill of fighting off waves of aquatic-robot monsters with a well armed half-spider, half-velociraptor Araknasaur makes Velocispider an extremely easy buy. Fortunately, it’s also a challenging top-down shooter that’ll keep you scrabbling for a high score.

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The App Store is home to a ton of unique ideas, and we’ve seen all sorts of games come along that started out one way and evolved into something entirely different due to content updates that are often spurred by feedback from gamers in our forums. It’s one of the neat aspects about iOS gaming, and something that sets it apart from most other traditional gaming platforms.

However, Bryan Perfetto, creator of the awesome endless high scoring game Kitty Up [99¢] (the second title this morning that has previously been featured on the Kitty Korner segment of our podcast) is taking the app updating facet of the App Store to the extreme. He has just released Rocket Bits [Free], his latest game that’s not really much of a game at all… yet.

The idea behind Rocket Bits is that he’s soliciting any and all ideas from users and will try to implement them into the game the best he can. Right now, the game isn’t much more than an extremely basic cave flyer with very little to do. You can control the dual thrusters of a tiny rocket by touching either side of the screen, and putt around an expansive randomly generated map, bumping into walls and… that’s about it.

But just because there isn’t much to do in Rocket Bits doesn’t mean it’s not off to a pretty good start. The thruster controls feel great, the retro-styled pixel art is quite nice, and the chip tunes in the game are fantastic. Since the game isn’t much right now, it’s being offered for free, and eventually after some updates have fleshed out the experience then Bryan plans to raise it to “the outrageously expensive price of one dollar.”

If the concept of Rocket Bits intrigues you, you can send your game ideas via email to bryan@regularkid.com, on Twitter at @RegularKid, through his website www.regularkid.com, or just blurt them out in iTunes reviews for the game. The plan is to update the game weekly, though that will depend on how difficult the ideas are to implement and Apple’s review process. If he uses your idea, you’ll get your name forever emblazoned in the game’s credits section.

It’ll be interesting to see how Rocket Bits shapes up over time, and how well the developer will be able to use the ideas given to him. We’ll keep our eye on its progress, and there’s no reason not to grab the game for free to check it out and send along some ideas of your own.

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Restaurant games on iOS tend to follow a certain template. They’re time management titles, all about organizing customers and orders for maximum profits. Sometimes they’re freemium, sometimes not, but they all fall in line, and that line is getting a bit stale. They are certainly not about wildly flinging knives at customers to spear ingredients for their meals in midair. And yet here we find ourselves with Mad Chef [$0.99], a frantic, imaginative take on the restaurant gig from Foursaken Media, the folks behind the outstanding Bug Heroes series.

Mad Chef doesn’t quite meet the epic scale of Bug Heroes, being both far more casual and far less strategic, but it exhibits the same thoughtful design and attention to detail we’ve come to expect from Foursaken Media. The game centers around frantic tapping, so you’ll have to get behind that mechanic in a big way. Once you do there’s a boatload of entertaining content to work through.

I can’t be sure if this game is going for the stereotype of the slightly unhinged artist, or if you’re intended to be in charge of someone who poses a significant danger to others. As your customers (who hunger for dishes like Pigeon Pot Pie and Ratwurst) line up, your sous chef tosses out a huge assortment of ingredients. Your job is to tap the ingredients needed for each recipe and throw knives at them. If you miss, you stab your customers or sous chef instead. Is this where our craze for creative food carts has gotten us?

For the most part, though, your customers are into it. It’s a rough life building your way up in the restaurant scene with nothing but Roach Bran and willpower, but each time you play you make yourself a little more money and hopefully earn a bit more reputation.

Once you hit certain reputation milestones, you can open four more restaurants, each quicker and harder to play than the last. That doesn’t mean you’re done with the old ones, though. Managing a culinary empire requires a personal touch. But the more restaurants you have, the more money you earn while you’re away — a mechanic that translates nicely from the freemium market to this premium game.

Mad Chef takes another step into freemium-style with purchasable packs of cash and reputation. They’re not necessary, by any means. You can work your way through the game normally, playing at your own pace without ever making a purchase. But the early restaurants are easy, and earning enough rep to open the later, more difficult restaurants takes either a lot of grinding or reasonably large cash investment. I can’t help but feel like the difficulty curve would have been better had Foursaken Media not been planning for an IAP option.

Thankfully, this is balanced by an upgrade system that does a great job of making the grind feel a little less grindy. As you earn cash, you can invest it back into your restaurants. You unlock new recipes, an improved sous chef, and more. These improve your returns, and your customers grow more demanding. The food cart, for instance, starts off slow — one order to fill while ingredients meander their way across the screen. By the time you max it out, you’ll be managing four simultaneous orders with an ever-changing list of ingredients, and you’ll also have to watch out for spices that increase the bill. It’s frantic, and each restaurant gets more and more insane by the time you reach their top ends.

There’s only one problem with that — the time the knives take to fly to their targets, and the related trouble of hitting overlapping items. The game is generous about awarding you hits for the right item if it can choose between one right and one wrong, but if both options are valid you might end up tossing knives at multiple ingredients only to have the game choose something unexpected, messing up the other knives you have in the air. It’s only an occasional problem, but in a game that rewards perfection it’s a frustrating one.

If you want to mix things up a bit, you have options. The Take Out restaurant is always available, and it offers an endless mode that has you toss knives at ingredients by category. It’s a good way to earn a little cash in a hurry. Every so often, you’ll also get a rush of customers. For these Rush Hour specials, you can forget about recipes — it’s all about spearing every ingredient that flies across the screen for huge combos, and hoping you don’t end up spearing a customer.

Mad Chef is an immense game, once you settle in and look around a bit. It’s also lovingly crafted. Take a look at the in-game achievement system if you want to see why I say that: the Game Center achievements are presented as awards on the wall of your home, and the more you earn the nicer your digs get. It’s a little, unnecessary touch that makes progressing all that much more rewarding, and that’s reflected in the rest of the game. There is often unexpected charm to be found.

In the end Mad Chef lives or dies on the joy of tapping. It does a great job with its simple mechanic, veering away from simple spamming to something that takes a lot of thought and attention. And, you know, crazy-fast tapping. It’s a lot of game for your buck, so check it out. Then swing by our discussion thread to let us know what you think.

TouchArcade Rating:

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In the world of iOS platformers, there are many games that pique my interest and might keep me entertained for a while, but there are few that end up remaining on my device for good. One of the ones that made the cut and has achieved that prestigious status on my iPhone is The Adventures of Timmy: Run Kitty Run [Free] by CB Labs.

We quite enjoyed The Adventures of Timmy when we reviewed it in October, and later that week it reached the pinnacle that all cat-related games strive to achieve when it was the Kitty Korner game of the week on our podcast.

For a limited time, you can grab all of this platforming, loosely cat-related goodness for the low price of free. Follow Timmy as he goes on an adventure (duh) and tries to rescue his crush who has been kidnapped by an evil bully. Timmy is normally a timid fellow, but when he dons his cat suit it gives him the courage to stand up for himself and get back his future main squeeze.

The Adventures of Timmy is so successful because it keeps the game mechanics simple and the controls nice and tight, but creates a wonderfully moody world to explore with the fantastic artwork and story. Speaking of tight controls, recently the game was updated with an option for fixed directional arrows in addition to the default analog stick. I still prefer the analog stick, but it’s always nice to have the option of both.

The Adventures of Timmy: Run Kitty Run is a great little platformer to add to your collection, and there’s really no better time to do that than right now while it’s free.

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In BigBot Smash [99¢], the universal game from Ayopa, you get to totally smash up a city using a giant metallic robot.  You can demolish entire city blocks building-by-building by walking into, jumping at or shooting the 3D structures. Concurrently, you blast police cars from your antenna, stomp on the puny humans below, escape from tanks and generally create havoc in three different game modes.

The main campaign sends you to over 20 cities / levels (San Francisco Los Angeles, Mexico City, etc) to recover the parts of your robotic love-interest. She was shut-down, dismantled and scattered around the world by the nasty humans. Each level involves searching for and destroying the red buildings which contain her hardware (and the locations change if you replay the current level).  You can also smash up other buildings for points, parts and pure destructive pleasure. Meanwhile, the humans try to destroy you.

Once you complete a city level in Campaign mode, the next city level starts, however you’re unable to replay the completed levels, which is a shame because it stops you from gathering more parts to upgrade if you rushed through the early levels without collecting parts. Also, although each level in the campaign is set in a city , the levels all look very similar. However, on a positive note, the background music is specific to certain levels / cities, such as Australian didgeridoo music playing during the Sydney level.

In ‘Speed demolition’ mode the aim is to destroy a certain percentage of the buildings within a time limit, without being destroyed yourself.  While ‘Survival’ mode throws increasingly difficult waves of attack at you, to see how long you can last. Game Center is used for high scores and 48 achievements.

You can choose from three different robot chassis.  The blue “Blockbot” is slow, but tough. The “Grimbot” uses hover-jets to jump or fly, but is poor at stomping, while the “Cyclobot” rolls on one wheel, with extendable buzz-saws for hands. There are three game slots, so you can save your progress separately for each type of robot. And each robot handles quite differently.

There are 13 temporary power-ups to collect from the ruins of destroyed buildings. This includes repairs, extra energy, increased speed / jumps and bonuses for damage caused.  In addition to power-ups, you can collect parts from destroyed buildings to build hardware upgrades like: Anti-matter pulse weapons, death rays, fusion reactors and even 1-million hamsters on a giant wheel as an energy source.

The graphics are reasonable, but not breath-taking. When buildings collapse, they turn into unimpressive triangular debris. However I didn’t notice this too much as I was too busy destroying stuff. Some graphical clipping occurs, with the robot moving through intact buildings and some of the text messages display upside down (probably confused by the tilt controls).  And the humans are so small that sometimes they kill you before you notice them.

The two control options should have been named: “Reasonable touch controls” and “Nasty tilt controls”.  The touch controls are not typical controls, but work fairly well. You swipe the background to make the robot walk, tap the robot to jump, or swipe from the robot to jump in a particular direction. By tapping the screen, you can shoot your weapon at police cars, tanks, buildings or crowds of humans and a tutorial walks you through these basic controls. There’s a button to change the camera perspective, which is useful when you’re between buildings.

Whereas, the alternative tilt controls are not particularly intuitive. If you tilt your device left, the robot walks right which feels strange, but there’s no option to invert the controls. And if you want to turn, you must rotate your device orientation, which sometimes involves rotating it completely around. An option to change the camera angle by tilting is provided, but it’s awkward to use in conjunction with touch controls. The good news is that you can simply choose the touch controls to avoid the tilt controls altogether and then there’s no problem!

To recap: The gameplay, music, robot hardware upgrades, power-ups and touch controls are all good and destroying the city is fun, especially with a faster robot. However, the graphics are just okay and the tilt controls are not recommended. BigBot Smash was over-shadowed by some big-name releases, but the top-down urban robotic rampages offer destructive fun, especially if you love big bots (and smashing stuff up!)

TouchArcade Rating:

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On this week’s TouchArcade Show, we power through a meaty discussion of WWE 12 and how we’d love our lives to be like a wrestler’s in order to bring you the latest, hottest, and bestest in iOS. At the top, we praise Infinity Blade 2 and pan Judge Dredd vs Zombies. Later, we dig into discussions about third-party controllers, companion apps, games that fell off the radar, and “high” game prices. I think we all really dug this week’s show, so hopefully you will, too.

If you’d like to listen, go ahead and do so via these handy-dandy links. If you’d like to subscribe, do it up on iTunes and Zune Marketplace. Subscriptions, by the way, are totally worth your time — you get our latest episodes the second they’re uploaded!

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-028.mp3, 44MB

Here’s your show notes:

NEWS

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When Call of Duty: Zombies hit the iOS app store way back when we praised it for what was, at the time, a great adaptation of the console secondary game mode. Now, over two years later, the zombies have finally returned with Call of Duty: Black Ops Zombies [$6.99], the first true sequel to iOS CoD Zombies (strange psuedo-sequel notwithstanding). While Black Ops Zombies does succeed in providing improved visuals and extra variety in the addition of the excellent Dead-Ops mode, a frustrating selection of controls, spotty multiplayer, and a very limited map selection on the onset may make some fans hesitant to purchase now.

For the uninitiated, Black Ops Zombies is a first person shooter zombie survival game based off of the survival mode found on some console versions of Call of Duty. Zombies is map-based, with each map typically featuring numerous rooms and weapons that must be unlocked in order to provide the player with better weapons and defense. There are some small secondary objectives, but the primary goal of each play through is to simply survive as long as you can. Zombies come at you in waves, and you earn money for each one you take down, giving you the currency needed to unlock everything. There are also power-ups, such as extra ammo or double currency, which can randomly drop from the slain undead.

If you do a side-by-side comparison between Black Ops Zombie and its predecessor, you’ll see a definite upgrade in visual quality and presentation. The graphics look much better, especially on the most recent iOS devices. Even the menu system looks great and offers personality that isn’t normally found in something of that low a priority in game design. Granted, it’s certainly not the best looking game we’ve seen on iOS, but it’s an improvement nonetheless. Surprisingly, I did encounter the occasional slowdown on my 4S, which seemed odd.

One of the most important questions in my book in regards to first person shooters is its controls. Black Ops Zombies adds additional control functions, such as crouching and sprinting into the mix. In addition, Black Ops Zombies brings back the same three control options (joystick, swap, and tilt) from its predecessor. Each one offers some advantage over the other, but I never found any of them to fully satisfy my expectations and not make me feel like I was compensating for playing on a touch screen. Extras such as various difficulties and auto-aim try to alleviate the problem, but it doesn’t fix it all the way. Also there were some questionable design decisions, such as not having a fire button on the screen and forcing the players to double tap to fire. While this may work on paper, I can’t count the amount of times I wasn’t able to fire my gun when I wanted to.

Another design choice I really don’t understand is the limited map selection in Black Ops Zombies.  Basically, as of release, you have access to one map, Kino Der Toten. While it’s certainly a good map, the fact that players only have access to one map at the onset is a little ridiculous. We have confirmation that there is at least one more map coming in a future update to Black Ops Zombies, but until then, expect to get tired of Kino Der Toten until that happens.

Thankfully, some of the potential tedium is addressed with the inclusion of Dead-Ops Arcade mode, a top-down arcade shooter with dual stick controls. The premise is very simple in Dead-Ops: enter rooms, kill zombies, collect weapon upgrades and score enhancing gems, move into next room, repeat. Even still, I had a blast with Dead-Ops and thought it was a perfect game fit for iOS controls. The weapon variety, fast paced gameplay, and nice graphics all work in tandem to create an incredible experience. In fact, with some modifications, it probably could have survived just fine as a standalone release. Still, I appreciate that it was included with Black Ops Zombies, especially with the current lack of map variety.

Finally we get to the multiplayer, which really is the main draw for Call of Duty zombie games. Black Ops Zombies brings back four player coop mode and ups the ante with support for voice chat. When you manage to get a game going and everything is smooth, multiplayer simply increases the amount of fun exponentially and is well worth the ticket price. Unfortunately for me, I found the majority of my games to be filled with lag and frame rate jerkiness, even when lowering the detail slider. I know it has something to do with the net code, because as soon as my companions would inevitably drop out, the game would run fine. Lag on its own wouldn’t necessarily be a big deal, but when you combine it with the spotty controls, the problems just seem to compound. The included voice chat is nice, but in practice I’d usually end up muting my companions because I would just hear a lot of loud noise and static coming from their end. Dead-Ops multiplayer fared somewhat better, but I still encountered some significant lag, which is disappointing.

World at War Zombies was simply revolutionary for its time and, while Black Ops Zombies certainly improves on nearly every aspect of its predecessor, our expectations of what makes a great game have certainly changed. It’s not enough to simply add a new map and a better visual paintjob and call it a day. Yet, outside of Dead-Ops, that’s the sort of feeling I get while playing Black Ops Zombies. I think this feeling would have been far less prevalent if the game launched with just a bit more content than one map or if multiplayer wasn’t so laggy. In any case, if you were a fan of World at War Zombies, and you’re willing to be patient with content releases, you’ll love this sequel. For others looking for improvements in the general gameplay (or control schemes for that matter), you may want to wait for a content update or two.

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As a lot of you are already aware, Infinity Blade 2 [$6.99] has some crash issues on iPad and iPod Touch. Thankfully, Chair Entertainment and Epic Games have already identified the culprit and are speedily working on a fix to address the problem. “For some users, IB2 seems to be running out of memory on heavily-laden iPad and iPod Touch devices,” Epic’s Mark Rein wrote on the publisher’s message board. “We’re working on a quick fix and will submit an update to the store as soon as possible,” he continued later.

Rein explained that the game wasn’t tested on machines with a “massive” amount of apps. He suggested a user-end fix for the meanwhile. “When apps run out of memory at loading times, that is something often fixed by restarting your device. I recommend that people try restarting their device to see if that solves it for them.”

We touched on this very topic on this week’s show. We’re all pretty confident that an update is barreling down the pipeline as we write this — Infinity Blade 2 is going to get its share of promotion from every side, so it needs to be fixed very soon.

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You know, I’ve got to hand it to EA. They’re really really good at making money. The latest cash cow they’ve set loose on the App Store pasture is the updated version of Tetris [99¢] which as we mentioned last night isn’t an update to the existing Tetris. Instead, it’s a new app that everyone will need to purchase, even owners of the original Tetris if they want access to the (admittedly really cool) new features.

Aside from a massive visual overhaul, Tetris now comes with a “one touch” control mode which greatly simplifies playing the game on iOS devices. When a new piece appears, you’re given all the locations that you could drop said piece, and instead of steering the piece into place yourself you just tap where you want it to land. It works great, and effectively puts an end to those annoying moments that every single Tetris player has experienced where you drop a piece one block off from where you wanted it, ruining your perfect line-clearing setup.

Unfortunately, for all the cool new additions to Tetris, which would have made the asking price of 99¢ for the upgrade fairly easy to stomach, EA decided to throw in a ridiculous amount of in-app purchase options which weren’t initially apparent when we previewed the game. Also, like seemingly everything these days, there’s an entirely superfluous leveling up system that rewards you with coins, and challenges that encourage you to round up as many of your friends as possible through Origin.

Coins can be spent on unlocking power-ups as well as new groupings of challenge levels. (Or, “planets” inside of the Tetris “galaxy” as the game refers to them.) Low on coins? No problemo! EA has your back, with bundles of coins that you can buy from 99¢ all the way up to $99.99.

But wait, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “You know, buying coins doesn’t really appeal to me, but what I always thought Tetris needed was some kind of vague Call of Duty Elite-like service I could subscribe to!” Well, we’re on the same page, and thankfully, EA is as well. It’s called the “T-Club”, and members can join for $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year. Doing so will reward you a permanent bonus of earning 15% more coins and lines in game, as long as your subscription is valid. EA has also made mention of “exclusive discounts and content” for T-Club members as well.

This just seems to be the near-perfect representation of everything that is wrong with gaming these days. Tetris is an absolute classic of the highest order, and throughout my lifetime I couldn’t even begin go estimate the hours days worth of play time I’ve sunk into the game. To take such a timeless game that has always (save a few spinoffs) been about simplicity and adding all of these extraneous systems to juice more money out of the player just feels incredibly wrong.

I guess the good news is that all of the IAP, as well as the Origin integration does seem fairly optional if all you want to do is play the classic game of Tetris, but still. This trend of taking a game, releasing a barebones version of it, and giving players the ability to spend an unlimited amount of money through IAP and now subscriptions is a trend that really, really needs to go away before it gets even further out of control.

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