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Bacon. Cat videos. Zombies. There are some things in popular culture that just don’t get enough attention. Luckily for us, however, the undead are getting a second life thanks to Zxh Games’ Shoot Many Zombies [Free].

Shoot Many Zombies is pretty much exactly like it sounds. In this side-scrolling shooter, you shoot zombies. A lot of zombies. It’s mindless, attractive zombie-killing mayhem, at a perfect pace: not too fast a pace to be frustrating, not so slow that you’ll try to strategize your way through it.

You have your choice of three characters to play as, which mainly depends on your playstyle. You can go damage-heavy but slow, damage-light but quick, or a balance between the two. Once you begin, you have your basic weapon which can be upgraded as you work your way through the game. You can also buy new weapons altogether, so you can customize your zombie-killin’ experience.

For a pretty straightforward concept, some things are needlessly complicated. Upgrading weapons is a necessity, but the menu doesn’t make it easy. For example, you don’t know the price of a particular upgrade unless you tap “buy,” so if you don’t have enough cash to tap “buy” in the first place to receive the confirmation, you’re not going to know approximately how much money to save up in order to get the upgrade later.

Things are repetitive and sometimes annoying. For example, there are various objects and safe rooms you tap in order to get items. It’s pretty dull popping into safe rooms in order to grab stuff, whatever it is – on an iPhone or iPod touch, the screen is too small to easily read what you’re picking up – and you have to do it a lot. There are other things that feel off too, like annoying sound effects (just wait for the shopkeep/gangster dude when you first start a new game and the “eeeeeee” noise upon reading a new diary entry) and sometimes piecemeal-feeling graphics.

Fighting specialty zombies feels a bit cheap in the sense that you need to have upgraded your weapons several times in order to have a chance. Of course, you can easily upgrade your weapons via in-app purchase (was there any doubt?), but you can also go back and replay levels to pick up more money and items.

Normally, the idea of repeating levels in order to progress would make me pretty miffed, but since every level is basically the same mindless zombie-shooting anyway, it pretty much just extends the gameplay. Additionally, I found that the in-app purchases were pretty much unnecessary because the random loot from killing zombies and exploring was often pretty good, and I never seemed to run out of cash too easily. If you feel like purchasing, however, the options aren’t bad, ranging from unlimited ammo to special (though not necessary) weapons.

There are lots of little added touches that are a nice surprise. When you upgrade a weapon, it actually changes the appearance of the weapon in-game. There are diary entries to pick up (though if you’re looking for Shakespeare, you’re going to be disappointed) that add to the overall story of the game, and it’s nice being able to choose which character best fits your style.

If you want to mindlessly mow down wave after wave of the undead, Shoot Many Zombies is a great option with enough good points to outweigh the bad. If future updates were to include Game Center, cat videos, and/or bacon, my friends, we might even have a bona-fide hit on our hands.

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Halfbrick Studios has announced that their sublime endless flying adventure, Jetpack Joyride [Free], which stars the toughest food-named protagonist that I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing, has passed the 13 million download mark since going free-to-play this past December. Combined with the downloads from the time it launched as a paid app in late August, this pushes the total downloads to well past the 14 million mark.

We were quite taken with Jetpack Joyride in our review, so it’s not hard to see why multiple millions of people are downloading the title, especially since it’s been expanded on and improved so much following its release. And that reminds me, Halfbrick also mentions that they’re scheduled to release the biggest content update that the game has ever seen sometime next month. Sadly there are no details on this update just yet, but we’ll keep our eye out for anything new in the coming weeks.

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It’s possible that Team Meat is just trolling us at this point, but it seems like it is genuinely married to the idea of bringing an actual game to mobile. In its latest burst of tweets, the two man outfit announced that it’s working on some kind of Super Meat Boy “prototype” set for release across “touch devices.”

Before you get too excited about the whole Super Meat Boy connection, do take note that this isn’t a port. “It will be a re-envisioning of Super Meat Boy remade from scratch for touch,” the studio said, and it won’t use any art or “gameplay” from the title.

A couple of tweets later, Team Meat stated that it’s doing SMB for mobile because it welcomes the challenge of a touch game. Also, it isn’t planning to release something that it doesn’t take serious… unless the game ends up sucking.

If that’s the case? Team Meat will proudly walk into the sunset and “act like it never happened and move on to the next idea.”

Team Meat hasn’t ever really ever been all that fond of the App Store. Anyone around for the Zits n’ Giggles drama certainly knows that. But of late, the studio has loosened up. Earlier this January, Team Meat confirmed that its next title would “probably” hit iOS, and well, now we’ve got this news.

We’re huge fans of Team Meat and would love to see its talent actually go into a real, totally playable game on iOS. Here’s to hoping this prototype ends up becoming a game and that we all get to see it this title in the near future.

We know how these guys have felt in the past, though, so prepare for the worst.

[Via Shacknews]

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So, I have a confession to make. I was prepared to dislike Baseball Superstars 2012 [Free]. You can blame Homerun Battle 2 [$4.99/Lite] for that one, as it had left me deeply distrustful of freemium sports games. Nonetheless, driven by Air Penguin [99¢/Lite] inspired optimism and the extravagant amount of praise that had been lavished over the franchise, I ended up downloading it anyway.

I’m glad I did. Though not what you would call ‘your must-have game in the event of a zombie apocalypse’, Baseball Superstars 2012 is still kinda awesome. Depending on how much you like your baseball, it might even be extremely awesome. There’s a part of me that wants to be the cranky curmudgeon and witheringly observe that Baseball Superstars 2012 is, while a competent product, just a souped-up version of the one from the previous years, but I can’t. The rest of me is too busy cultivating my digitized athletes.

Baseball Superstars 2012 is engaging in all the right ways. The core gameplay mechanics are incredibly easy to learn, but not so easy to master. As the batter, you’ll basically have to ensure that your batting reticule is within the general vicinity of the ball before you smack it with all your virtual, training-augmented might. Here, you’ll have the option of choosing between the usage of the D-PAD or the device’s accelerometer; I personally recommend the latter. Things are even easier for the pitcher. To lob your balls, you swipe your finger across a grid-like area on the screen. Different pitches will naturally require a different set of motions.

Strangely enough, what makes Baseball Superstars 2012 work is the metaphorical packaging. For example, while the various modes are little more than different ways of approaching the aforementioned elements, there’s still an ungodly amount of things to do. Want to be be a batter? Fire up ‘My Batter’ and enjoy a ten-year career. Prefer pitching instead? Load ‘My Pitcher’. Would you rather micromanage a coterie of little athletes? ‘My Team’ will be your game mode of choice. The list goes on. You’ll get to also dive into challenges, missions, engage in asynchronous multiplayer battle royales and fine-tune your little league of winners.

Visually speaking, Baseball Superstars 2012 is definitely the best-looking of the pack. The resolution is higher, the interface is cleaner and the sprites look like they were manufactured by a man-hwa artist. The writing, unfortunately, still leaves much to be desired. Aside from the overall aesthetics, one of the biggest changes here is the inclusion of the overworld. No longer will you be trapped in the stadium at large. Now, you’ll be able to roam the somewhat scenic-looking town that rings in. In between matches, Baseball Superstars 2012 will allow you to do everything from engage in a fortune-telling session to helping out in a hospital to training in the park. Some of these activities will decrease or increase various statistics, others will add to your modest bank account.

Along the way, you’ll also bump into an assortment of big-breasted characters, many of whom will engage you in peculiar conversations. To be honest, few of the encounters made any sense to me. What do aggressive female characters with a penchant for romance books have to do with baseball? While I appreciated the effort, this aspect of Baseball Superstars 2012 felt tacked on and a little awkward.

That aside, there’s not much to dislike about Baseball Superstars 2012. Heck, even the IAPS are not constantly forced down your throat, something that is a rarity with this business model. Gamevil has done a fine job improving on each iteration. Baseball Superstars 2012 might not redefine mobile gaming but it’ll certainly be a worthy addition to your collection of games.

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This is neat. Double Fine, the creators of Brutal Legend and, most recently, a swarm of lovable and unique downloadable titles like Iron Brigade and Costume Quest, is asking its fans via Kickstarter to donate a total of $400,000 towards the production of a brand new point-and-click adventure title that’ll be created by “a small team” and one of the adventure game genre’s most influential developers, Tim Schafer.

The fans have answered, too. In under ten hours the project has received well over half a million dollars in backing. And with over 30 more days to go still, you almost have to assume that Double Fine will be forced to use dollar bills as toilet paper to rid itself of all the extra cash it’s going to receive.

The project doesn’t have a real name yet. It also isn’t exactly slated to hit iOS — the initial pitch was for the development of a PC point-and-click “utilizing modern touch technology.” Double Fine says that if it raises more than what it’s asking for, as the project has, it might put the game on Mac or iOS.

This seems like a big deal for Double Fine: it’s a small, but notable studio that’s triumphantly shedding the typical publisher / loan shark model that it usually uses to make something that it has complete creative control over. But, this is also a studio that has been OK with funny funding deals. It let a dude pay for several PC ports in the past, and it’s apparently currently in talks with Minecraft creator Notch about funding Psychonauts 2.

So, when will you be able to play this game? It’ll be awhile. Provided everything goes as planned, it might appear on Steam as early as October 2012. However, backers will see the game as it’s being developed — this entire experience will be documented by 2 Player Productions and private videos will be released on an ongoing basis.

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Yesterday, Gameloft announced the release of a standalone app for their online gaming network Gameloft Live for Android devices, with the app scheduled to hit the iOS App Store in the near future. In case you’re unaware, Gameloft Live is a service baked into all of Gameloft’s games that allows for persistent tracking of achievements and leaderboards, as well as a friend list and social features, across their library of titles.

While I prefer Game Center nowadays as it’s the Apple standard, I’ve always felt that Gameloft Live provided one of the strongest 3rd party social gaming networks. Perhaps true to Gameloft’s form, Gameloft Live reminded me a lot of the Xbox Live service on consoles. The standalone app will allow you to access Gameloft Live from outside of a game, and looks to offer a lot of new features. You can meet up with friends in the app and chat, check out each other’s gaming progress, and of course play games together. Check out some screens below from the Android version.

You’ll be able to create an avatar and customize its appearance with a bunch of clothing items and accessories, and Gameloft says there will be ways to earn such items as gifts through continued activity in the app and with their games. It looks like you’ll even get a little house for your avatar to live in, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s items to deck that out too.

Obviously, you will also have access to Gameloft’s entire library from within the app. But it sounds like they’ll be offering exclusive promotions from in the app only, and they’ve stated they’ll eventually be releasing new game information in the app first as a reward for active users.

Much like the Gameloft Live service itself, the app reminds me a lot of the recently released My Xbox Live [Free] app in terms of some of its functionality and purpose. With 7 million users on Gameloft Live, I can see this type of app being pretty handy if you’re heavily into Gameloft games. At the very least I’m interested to check it out, and we’ll let you know if we hear word of when it’ll be hitting the App Store.

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Last month Taito announced that they were bringing a port of Dariusburst – a recent entry in the classic Darius series of shooters that was released in arcades and on PSP in Japan – to iOS. While it’s a bit of a straggler behind the normal round of new weekly releases, Dariusburst SP [$10.99] is now available on the App Store.

Originally Dariusburst was a PSP game, and featured the familiar horizontal shooting and brutal difficulty that the Darius series was famous for, but with beautiful 3D visuals. It was then released in arcades about a year later as Dariusburst Another Chronicle, and came with additional features not found in the PSP game as well as a crazy double wide screen.

Dariusburst SP on iOS is mostly based on the PSP version, but with some nice iOS-specific enhancements. It features the entire PSP campaign, an additional playable ship named Assault as well as two boss battles from the arcade version, an SP Mode with remixed enemy patterns and boss encounters, and some brand new music. Plus, it’s crazy customizable, with several options for screen position and size, the ability to reposition the virtual buttons, options to adjust the amount of lives and continues, and 3 difficulty modes.

I’ve spent a good amount of time with Dariusburst SP already and I’m totally digging it. The controls are tight, and there’s a cool upgrade system as well as a burst special weapon which can be used to counteract enemy fire and boost up your scores. There’s four different ships (two unlockable) and a branching level progression that lets you choose which path to take à la OutRun or Taito’s own Bust-a-Move games.

But really, it’s all about the graphics. The graphics in Dariusburst SP are bananas. The frame rate is silky smooth, and the 3D backgrounds are whizzing by while moving in all sorts of directions. It makes you feel like you’re moving really fast, and enemies often appear from the foreground or background, adding a feeling of depth to the levels. Boss characters fill the screen with their size, and are intricately designed and equipped with heavy firepower. Everything is crisp and high resolution, and along with the buttery frame rate it makes for an especially attractive game.

We’re gonna spend some quality time learning the intricacies of Dariusburst SP, and will report back soon with a full review. My gut instinct so far though is that if you’re into shooters you won’t want to miss this. I know Taito has you nervous because they released RayForce for $11.99 last month. Personally, I totally love that game and didn’t mind dropping the coin, but I could see how a fairly straight port of a nearly 20 year old game with very little enhancements might not be something everybody wants to pay at the higher end of App Store pricing for.

However, this isn’t that. This is a full blown PSP game that was previously only available in Japan, with enhanced visuals and additional features for iOS. This is the sort of release that we shouldn’t mind paying the extra money for. You can find more player impressions in our forums as we get back to diving into the nitty gritty of Dariusburst SP.

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We’ve been covering the existence of ngmoco since the very beginning in mid-2008, back before they dropped the extra colon from their logo even. A month later, we were on top of their initial round of funding, and with the launch of nglabs and other amazing future promises, quite a few people (myself included) thought ngmoco was going to become the unquestionable king of iOS game development.

It’s been a long four years since then, and while we once knew ngmoco for releasing absolutely classic must-have games like Rolando [99¢], Rolando 2 [99¢], and Star Defense [99¢], they switched gears to championing the free to play game market in a major way in late 2009. We were blown away when it was announced that Eliminate [Free] was going to be free, and We Rule [Free] was equally popular around here as ngmoco made a splash on the App Store with one of the first available free to play Farmville-like building games.

Since that original free to play explosion in 2009, Ngmoco hasn’t done very much to interest our community. They’ve seemingly stopped both publishing and releasing games, with the last major release that made much of a splash around here being Godfinger [Free], another free to play building game which hit the App Store in late 2010. Even more confusing is what in the world ngmoco has been doing with Freverse, the beloved former Mac developer, since they were acquired.

With Freeverse onboard, ngmoco’s proverbial financial katamari was large enough to lure Asian gaming giant DeNA was acquiring ngmoco for $400m, and since then it seems they’ve fallen even further off the map. Not even people familiar with the situation have been able to explain what ngmoco has been up to in the last two years aside from pushing hard into the Android world with questionable success utilizing their cross-platform game engine Mobage (which is pronounced MOH-bah-GAY, if you were curious).

Throughout all of this, it seems that ngmoco has been hiring all sorts of people, and still are, if their positions page is any indication. Sadly, TechCrunch is reporting layoffs at the former iOS gaming giant:

Ngmoco recently had a round of layoffs — maybe somewhere above 30 people, according to one source. The number isn’t huge, but among the departed are senior leaders including a director of platform tech and the chief marketing officer, this person tells me. One game has apparently been shut down, while another has been pared down, with some engineers remaining to see it to launch.

Ngmoco CEO Neil Young was quick to respond, making it sound as if they layoffs are a result of Ngmoco and DeNA merging, eliminating any duplicate positions leftover from the restructuring process:

“Armed with the insights we’ve gained from both the Western and Japanese markets and after completing the integration of a series of key acquisitions, we’ve organized our global operations to best support and deliver on our mission to build the leading Global Social Mobile Game Platform company.”

To add another interesting wrinkle to the potential fate of Ngmoco, Inside Mobile Apps is reporting that Ngmoco has missed their first earnout date, putting a large portion of that $400m acquisition amount in jeopardy if ngmoco (assuming this report is true) has been unable to meet the agreed upon performance milestones.

It’s hard to say what this all means for the future of ngmoco, but as a fan of all of ngmoco’s pre-freemium titles, it really saddens me to look on what the company used to be (and the promise they represented to iOS games) and what they are today. The weird thing about all this to me is that ngmoco championed the free to play model, then sort of just disappeared to build mobage while other developers went on to become overnight millionaires utilizing it.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what, if anything, they do next.

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There’s a reason MMORPG players use the term “trash” to describe the stuff that leads up to raid bosses: it’s missing all the great rewards, and it’s almost always lame. It’s junk, in other words, junk that pads the time between the good parts. Red Zebra Games clearly knows the score, because Raid Leader skips right past the trash to bring us nothing but the good stuff—intense, white-knuckled battles.

As we pointed out in our preview, the big picture will look familiar to Battleheart [$2.99] fans. But it’s the little details that get this recovering World of Warcraft addict’s heart a-fluttering. There was a time when damage number spam, health bars and massively telegraphed attacks were my bread and butter, and boy do they come out in force here.

Before I get your hopes up, though, let me be clear. This isn’t the next Battleheart, and it’s not raiding in World of Warcraft. It’s far, far simpler than either. If you’re looking for a deeply strategic RTS-RPG, this might be a bit casual for your tastes, but it’s a potent combo for those of us nursing fond memories of raiding.

Raid Leader lacks Battleheart’s big list of classes, levels and loot. Instead it has bosses, and the three things any proper team needs to defeat them: a tank, a DPS class, and a healer (in the forms of the Knight, Hunter and Priest). Each of them has a bevy of skills to unlock and choose from, and choose you must, because each character can only bring two skills into battle. You might want to deal damage, snare and buff with one character, but you have to pare that down to the skills you really need. That’s half the game’s strategy right there.

The other half is the battles themselves. There are fifteen levels in total, with 2 arenas, 8 original bosses and a powered-up heroic version of all but the last. These have minions, lasers, death zones and many other familiar tricks, requiring priority targeting, clever positioning and quick reflexes. Lest you think I’m being irresponsible with my WoW comparisons, by the way, one of those bosses is nearly a one-to-one clone of Karsh Steelbender from the most recent expansion. Not that I mind. It just feels a little too much like coming home, if you know what I mean.

Your survival depends on two things: how well you’ve chosen and upgraded your skills, and how well you can pay attention and perform. It also helps to have a basic understanding of MMORPG-style battles. You’ll have an easier time if you already know that the tank should keep the enemies’ backs to his team, or when to toss a heal-over-time and switch targets. Admittedly, though, knowing too many tricks takes a little fun out of figuring out the right strategies for each fight, especially when kiting works so effectively.

Because of this, the game sometimes fails to straddle the line between too easy and too hard. Executing a strategy is often fairly simple, because the bosses never have more than three or four plainly timed and well-telegraphed abilities. You’ll never have serious trouble figuring out how to handle an encounter when anything tricky is explained on screen.

You’ll still run into plenty of difficulty, though. Two things will conspire to stop you no matter how well you can plan. The first is the somewhat-awkward touch controls. Like in Battleheart, you drag one hero to another to heal or attack, and drag your heroes around the screen to move them. Because those two actions are so similar, you may occasionally find the game mixing up your intent. Worse, though, is the way the controls sometimes lead to deaths-by-Notification-Center. Those probably can’t be helped, but that doesn’t keep them from being frustrating.

The second big roadblock is the enrage timer most bosses sport. This isn’t a problem, it’s a classic MMORPG mechanic. Three or four minutes into a fight, the boss becomes immensely more powerful. This isn’t designed to kill you instantly, but it does keep you from flinging yourself at a boss for ages if you’re not powerful enough to defeat it. In Raid Leader, you’re not going to run down the clock because you haven’t leveled enough or hit the right gear level. Instead, it’s your skills that can fall behind.

The three classes each get eight or nine skills to play with. These include a healthy mix of class-appropriate heals, attacks, buffs, debuffs and so on. You can pay out the coins you earn from defeating bosses to upgrade them up to four times each. If you’re a better player than I am you might be able to get by with nothing more than the coins you earn from each boss. I rather doubt it, though. It gets seriously tough to pump out enough damage to beat the enrage even when you’re doing well. If you hit a wall and decide you need more coins, you have two options: grind or pay.

It’s kind of a lame choice. Grinding is actually fun in Raid Leader, but it’s hard to turn down the comparatively massive number of coins you can get by putting down an extra dollar or two. If you do, you can earn a decent rate in two arenas fighting waves of minions, or you can replay completed boss fights. You can earn Game Center achievements and leaderboard rank for beating bosses quickly, so this isn’t a bad way to go.

I just wish there was more of everything. I want a reason to pull out more skills and level them higher. I’d dread putting hours into WoW at this point, but the few brief hours I put into Raid Leader left me craving a lot more. That’s not a bad thing, assuming there’s more to come. While we’re talking updates, Red Zebra, could you work out the spelling errors and put some clothes on the poor Hunter? She’s literally fighting in a bikini. Not even a chainmail bikini, just a few flimsy scraps of nothing.

Raid Leader isn’t perfect, and it’s not perfectly original. That said, it sure is fun. Any recovering raider will find plenty of great nods and familiar concepts, and anyone who’s wondered why folks make such a fuss about raiding will get a low-impact introduction. Drop by our discussion thread to let us know what you think, and point out how much you want more levels while you’re there. For me. Because even though I can quit any time, I really don’t want to quite yet.

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Rebuild [$2.99] for iPhone and iPod Touch is actually happening — and soon. Tomorrow will see the debut of the post-apocalyptic strategy title on smaller devices, courtesy a big-time Universal update for the iPad versions of the game. Developer Northway tells that the update will also roll in retina support, too.

This is easily one of our favorite strategy games on the App Store this side of Civ Rev [$6.99 / HD], and we’re stoked that a “maybe” porting scenario as of a couple of months ago has become a reality. If you haven’t read anything about Rebuild check out our review. Or just pick it up on the App Store at its sale price of $.99 starting tomorrow through this Sunday.

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