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Donut Games has seemingly always had the philosophy of making small, simple games that only have a few bits of gameplay to speak of. Bubble Pig [ $0.99 ] continues that trend by having one touch gameplay that is both fun and rewarding time after time.

While pigs don’t exactly fly, their rubbery skins and rotund bodies do lend well to bouncing, and Bubble Pig’s gameplay takes full advantage of this. Bouncing the pig around each level is easy; all you have to do is tap where you’d like the pig to bounce to, and he’ll continue to bounce automatically in that direction.

One-touch controls can feel too simplistic if not done well, but this game manages to do it without making it feel like an effortless experience. As some of our forum posters have pointed out, the gameplay is remarkably similar to Bean’s Quest [ $1.99 ] or Superstar Chefs [ $0.99 ].

Making the pig bounce all around the level may be fun, but you will need to complete goals along the way to keep things moving smoothly. Using the pig, you’ll need to activate switches scattered throughout each stage, with the level completing once you’ve hit them all. What makes the stages fun isn’t just moving around and hitting the switches however, the gimmicks involved in each stage are.

Just about every level has a unique gimmick you’ll need to overcome, keeping things fresh each time you play. In one level, you may need to dodge angry foxes that threaten to slaughter your poor pig, or perhaps you’ll need to navigate a series of pipes to find all of the switches in another. Having a new type of concept introduced in almost each new level will keep you thirsty for more and more every time you pick up the game.

Also scattered through each level are various fruits and coins for you to collect. Collecting these items (especially all of them if you can) will reward you with achievements and a special star rating for each level. To further incentivize collecting, you can also compare scores with your friends to make sure you’re as hot as you think you are. Sharing and comparing is key for longevity in these types of games, so it’s nice to see the leaderboards and achievements integrated so tightly.

We’ve probably all come to expect by now that Donut has a unique style that every one of their games uses, and Bubble Pig is no exception. Each stage is colorful and the animations are incredibly smooth, keeping with the standards already set. Being a universal app also helps, as playing on the iPad makes controlling the pig a bit easier, and the colors pop just a bit more.

Bubble Pig is one of those games that achieves a great balance between being straightforward, while still managing to be challenging too. Dismissing the game as being too formulaic would be unfair, as it manages to be very fun despite its simplistic premise.

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If there were ever a genre in need of reinvention, it’s the marble shooter. As a genre it’s been around for nearly 15 years now, and the two big names, Luxor and Zuma, are pretty much indistinguishable. Swap ancient Egypt for the Inca Empire and you’ve pretty much got the same game. PopCap stepped things up recently with Zuma’s Revenge [$1.99 / $4.99 ], which added boss fights and made a few alterations to the formula. But Luxor Evolved [ $0.99 ], MumboJumbo’s answer to Zuma’s evolution, is feeling like the genre’s next frontier.

It shouldn’t be mind blowing that Luxor Evolved looks different from its predecessors, but it sort of is. Between a new setting in space and wild geometric art it hardly looks like the same game at all, making this the genre’s first serious face lift since 2003. Of course, it is the same game—it’s still about matching and destroying strings of colored marbles, and it even has Luxor’s usual ancient Egyptian theme. But this time it’s space Egypt, and space Egypt has a few new tricks.

Like the last two Luxor titles, you control a ball launcher that moves along the bottom of the screen. Strings of colored marbles follow complicated tracks toward your (space) pyramid, which is unusually prone to death by colored marble. You stop them by launching other colored marbles into the strings to match three or more of the same color. With the help of a little aim assistance, this can all be managed on a touch screen as easily as it ever was with a mouse.

Luxor Evolved has a ton going on at any given moment. Not only are you matching marbles, you’re grabbing the treasures and heart pieces that explode out of them. Treasures are tallied to unlock secret levels, and heart pieces add up into extra lives when you’ve collected a few. You also need to rock your score if you want to level up, because the better you do the more powerups you get.

The powerups are my favorite feature of Luxor Evolved. Every point you earn goes to filling up a progress bar after each level. Whenever it hits its limit something new unlocks. This might be a brand new powerup—and they can do a ton of things, like blow up marbles, paint them in a single color, reverse their path and so on—or it might be an upgrade to an existing powerup. They have a lot of room to grow.

The extra-nice thing about the way the progress is measured is that doing poorly on a boss level means unlocking a huge pile of things. The bosses are complicated. Taking inspiration from bullet hell shooters, they protect their weak points with huge streams of marbles. You have to clear away enough of them to reach the weapons, and then the central ring of marbles. The only problem is that they keep coming back. If you manage to shoot your way through everything you expose the core, and one more shot will destroy it.

This can all be a little challenging, especially if, like me, you aim poorly when it counts. But there’s a bonus: if you really struggle and take a long time on a boss, you’ll pick up a ton of extra treasures and hearts and points. When you finally succeed you’ll be well rewarded with a pile of upgrades and unlocks. If one of them is a secret level, you’re in for an even better reward: they’re built as homages to classic games like Pac-Man and Marble Madness.

And let’s not downplay the new aesthetic. With its intentionally retro stylings, it looks like nothing we’ve seen from any of the big marble shooters before. That new style extends to every part of the game, right down to the interface, and a collection of techno tracks really rounds out the package. For the choosy, Luxor Evolved includes a selection of aim assist options and control tweaks—all of them variations on drag and tap controls. There are multiple difficulty modes to play through, too, and the usual assortment of achievements and leaderboards.

It’s not all good, though. The game currently doesn’t work for anyone who isn’t on iOS 5 (a patch is in the works), and even there I ran into a few bad crashes. One took a good chunk of progress with it. There’s also a popup for MumboJumbo’s other games on load, so heads up to the ad averse. I’m not the biggest fan of the series of aggressive price drops that have occurred since launch either, seeing the game drop from $6.99 to 99¢ incrementally over just the first several days, but at least that means those of you hopping on now will get a great deal.

Honestly, this game surprised me. Marble shooters have a real been-there, done-that vibe for me. I love them, but how many times can you play the same game with a new name? Luxor Evolved isn’t a full reimagining, but it’s different enough to feel exciting again, and it’s hooked me thoroughly. The issues are worth being aware of, but if you’re on iOS 5 and you hop on now you should be just fine. And really, classic marble-shooting gameplay in a fresh new package? That’s an evolution I can get behind.

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Robbery Bob [ $0.99 ] has moments where you can tell it was designed by someone who cares. I’m not implying that that is a rarity, but you do rarely see the level of care that portions of Robbery Bob exhibits. Unfortunately though, those portions are few and far between, and what is in between is, well… Uninteresting.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Robbery Bob’s premise is simple: sneak into houses, steal items of value, leave without getting caught. There is a thin narrative wrapped around these acts, but this isn’t a game about story, it’s a game about the sneaking mechanic. And it is that mechanic that the game lives or, more often, dies on. Things start off real strong. Sneaking around the first few houses shows off a lot of the potential for the mechanic, but the game soon devolves into a repetitive room-by-room hunt with obstacles sprinkled haphazardly around. But, again, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Sneaking into a house is easy, the front door almost certainly is unlocked, and once inside Bob has to assess any potential threats to his mission (taking care to avoid them.). “Threats” can include dogs, cameras, old ladies, other humans, and, most importantly, the police. Luckily for Bob, there are ways to avoid these threats. Unluckily, for you they are almost all a pain to use. The methods for avoiding detection range from mundane (hiding in a planter) to the interesting (leaving doors open to pull patrolling inhabitants off their path). Each one of these methods of avoidance are fun, if not a little frustrating the first couple times, but they show their one dimension-ness and tedium by the eighth or ninth time you employ them.

While playing Robbery Bob, I couldn’t help but think about Shaun Inman’s brilliant The Last Rocket [ $2.99 ]. Inman, like the team at Level Eight, had to stretch a simple mechanic over 60+ levels, while keeping it interesting the whole time. He succeeded by not only developing interesting level mechanics, but also by weaving those mechanics together. If you’ll forgive those cliche, by the end of The Last Rocket, you had a veritable symphony of mechanics woven together beautifully. Robbery Rob goes half way in that endeavor. The mechanics themselves are interesting (seeing, for the first time, the way a camera interacts with open doorways was what inspired the review’s opening sentence), but when those mechanics are just dropped into the level without context, they lose almost everything they have going for them. They don’t work together, they don’t play off each other, they exist only as a standalone obstacle, forgotten as soon as you pass them and move into the next room.

Again thinking of The Last Rocket, another thing it did so well was instilling the notion that once you figure out the puzzle, you could move through it with nothing but grace and ease. Unfortunately, Robbery Bob never seems to get to that point, and therefore you never feel like you could replicate a victory. The last levels of any particular area (of which there are 3) feel like a crap shoot with your victory being tied more to chance than to skill. I, just now in fact, went back to try and finish the last level of the first area again and failed 3 times before I was able to do it.

While the game offers plenty of gameplay for the price, including encouraging you to go back and perfect all the levels (ala Angry Birds), it never hooks you like a game of that ilk should. It is a game where the potential is sky high, but you feel like the game itself stayed on the ground, only looking up every now and again. It fails to make a promising mechanic interesting.

Robbery Bob isn’t bad by any stretch of the imagination, it just isn’t good.

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Does the name Remedy ring a bell? They’re the Finnish developers behind Alan Wake and Max Payne, but before all that, they released a top-down combat-centric MS-DOS Racer called Death Rally. (Oh, and, Max Payne [ $2.99 ] is also now available on the App Store, check out our review.) Anyway, a little over a year ago the greatly enhanced iOS remake of Death Rally hit the App Store.

To create the game, Remedy partnered up with Mountain Sheep, who is likely best known around these parts for Minigore [$0.99 / $1.99 (HD)]. Minigore saw tons of updates, so, I’m not sure anyone was surprised when Death Rally got similar treatment. Since its initial release and our original review, they’ve added all sorts of unlockables, character tie-ins (such as a guest appearance from the one and only Duke Nukem) and even full online multiplayer.

Yes, the game has been free before, and one could argue that it’s only “free” with air quotes as there’s a variety of optional IAP to be had. Regardless, if you missed the last Death Rally promotion, be sure to hop on this one. Even if all you do is tool around in a few single player races, it’s still totally worth the download.

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Does the idea of yet another farming game sound exciting to you whatsoever? Your answer would likely be a resounding no, unless you’ve seen that there are still plenty of seeds to plant with Tractor Trails [ $0.99 ], the farming game that is not only fun and exciting but plays more like a puzzle game rather than the next FarmVille [ Free ] clone.

You see, Red is a tractor that needs to plant seeds on his maze-like farm so he can grow fruit trees. Your (and Red’s) goal is to earn a three star rating at the end of the level by planting as many trees as possible (filling the entire board if you can), collecting the groundhog, and doing it all in the fastest amount of time you can. Earning stars allows you to unlock more level sets, with five in all. Controlling Red is incredibly easy, only requiring that you swipe where he needs to go on the farm so he can plant trees and collect the groundhog along the way.

While controlling Red may be easy, the challenge does ramp up quickly meaning you’ll need to learn fast to stay ahead. The initial levels are pretty much on auto-pilot with little or no chance for error, while more advanced levels will all but require plenty of plotting ahead to make sure you’re going to be able to plant as many trees as possible. In fact, a stage not too far into the game left me puzzled for more than fifteen minutes before coming up with a working solution.

The real challenge in each stage is trying to determine where exactly to send Red without screwing up. Sending him down the wrong path means you have to start over, so planning ahead is best when coming up with solutions. Combine that with the time bonus that’s riding on each stage, and you’re in for a brain buster if you’re not in the correct mindset. The more you play though, the more the mechanics begin to click, and you’ll find yourself having fun without too much trouble. On top of that, the payoff of finishing each stage is satisfying, rewarding you with much-needed stars and achievements for completing stages as efficiently as possible.

Spicing up the gameplay in Tractor Trails are the power-ups you can purchase with the corn you collect (or purchase through IAP). You can buy upgrades such as a queuing system, which is a bit of a saving grace to the gameplay (which can be a bit slow once you get the hang of it). Other power-ups include undo and speed upgrades. These don’t do as much to change the gameplay but can help out if you’re finding some stages a bit too challenging. The problem (albeit minor) with these upgrades lies in the pricing system, as you will have to continually purchase most of these items over and over again with increasing prices after each purchase.

Each set of levels does appear to have its own distinct theme, with its own color scheme to go with it. For instance, the first set of levels has a distinct shade of green, meant to represent a sunny, summer style. In the second set, you’ll be seeing a lot of brown as the theme is meant to represent autumn. After spending a good amount of time in each level set, your eyes will welcome the change of scenery each time it happens. The graphical tone seems to borrow a bit from Triple Town [ Free ] but there was never a vibe of ripping off, although the similarities are clear.

Where Tractor Trails really nails the fun factor is in its simplistic, yet rewarding gameplay. A game that you can pick-up and play for a few minutes or up to a few hours is still rare, so it’s nice to see that Tractor Trails stays as fun as it should long after you’ve started.

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From the very first time I launched Pandemic 2.5 [ $0.99 ], I was out to obliterate humanity. My implement of destruction was a virus I called “Iloveyou”—named for a classic. Iloveyou started its life in South Africa, a humble disease with a single carrier. He probably didn’t even know he was sick. At first, we were asymptomatic.

Iloveyou had room to evolve, with 8 EvoPoints to grow into. I spent them carefully. I enhanced our heat capacity, so we wouldn’t die out in the desert. I developed our first symptom: rhinorrhea, the runny nose. A little mucus can go a long way toward spreading a cold, I reckoned. I hoped to spread out to insects, but we weren’t yet advanced enough. I threw in dysuria and photophobia for good measure—not enough to kill our hosts by far, but enough to cause a little discomfort and hopefully improve our spread.

Then we began. The number of infected grew quickly, then stalled out. I had a few more EvoPoints to work with at this point, so we brought in our insect friends. Even with a few more symptoms, Iloveyou didn’t make it much further than that; we were too slow and our infection vectors just sort of got better. But I learned from that first experience. On our next outing we made it to the next tier of symptoms, picking up a cough. Then our victims began to suffer fevers. We lost a few of the infected early on, but we were finally on our way.

And so it went. At first we refrained from killing our victims. Hosts are more important than corpses. We spread across borders before anyone knew to shut them, took out hospitals before anyone knew what was going on. Once most of the world was within our grasp we took the next step and became fatal.

When people started dying, they knew they had a problem on their hands. They mobilized quickly, developed a vaccine almost before we could react. It was too late for most of them, but it was also too late for us: the people that were left were cured, and we would never see our dream of total global destruction come true. Granted, it was quite the morbid dream. It made me a bit queasy to see the number of living humans dwindle, sure. But it’s never nice to lose.

If all this sounds familiar, it might be because you’ve played Pandemic 2. The Flash game has been around for years—it even has its own popular meme. Pandemic 2.5 is a complete overhaul for the mobile crowd. With a new interface and a few improvements, it’s decent port of the desktop classic.

Decent, mind you, but certainly not great. There are little problems, like awkward text fields and introductory text that flows right off the screen. Bigger issues include things like a complete lack of tutorial, and a news ticker that flies by too quickly to read if the game is in anything but full-on sloth mode.

The biggest issue of all is that the game can be agonizingly slow. It’s simply not ideal for a mobile platform in its current state. Playing Pandemic involves a lot of waiting, especially if you’ve already lost the ability to win and just want to get your final score. Normally I’d pull out my phone while the slow parts passed, but, well, you can see the problem with that.

Here’s the thing, though: Pandemic in this form is just as compelling as it’s ever been. Some of the bigger problems with the Flash game have even been worked out. The meme is outdated, as Madagascar is no longer ludicrously paranoid unless you’re playing at the top tier of difficulty. There are also traits (and associated achievements) you can unlock by completing hidden requirements, something that builds a sense of overall progression. If you can ignore the interface problems, this is the best take on the subject matter yet.

So consider this a cautious recommendation. If you can stomach the mild horror of obliterating humanity, if you can handle a somewhat clunky port, it’s pretty great to have Pandemic on the go. It sounds as though Dark Realm Studios is already working on fixing some of the game’s problems, too. Me, I’m working on a new strategy. With luck, we’ll take the island nations, wipe ‘em all out before they know what hit them. Awful to contemplate? Sure. But Pandemic makes a convincing argument: isn’t it time we gave the bugs their turn?

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While dwindling on consoles, RPGs of all shapes and sizes are flourishing on mobile devices. There have been some truly creative and unique RPGs released in the past few years, and perhaps none is capable of tugging at your heartstrings and pushing you to fight just one more battle than Game Stew Studio’s new iOS game, Tower of Fortune (ToF) [ $0.99 ].

Like Puzzle Quest and Sword & Poker before it, ToF infuses a basic role-playing game with mechanics drawn from a completely different genre entirely—in this case, slot machines.

The premise of ToF is pretty simple. You’re a hero. You’ve a lady to rescue. You need to gather coin, get loot, and defeat evil incarnate. A “game of the year”-winning story, this is not, but the simple framework provides enough context to the game to make it work.

Before you even get to the gameplay, though, you’ll be hard-pressed to ignore ToF’s eye-catching retro art style and ear-pleasing chip tunes. Both the game’s quirky, NES-era visuals and strong selection of catchy music make the game visually and aurally simplistic and yet undeniably charming, like the greatest Gameboy games of yore.

Presentation is all well and good, of course, but how does the game actually play? Surprisingly well. ToF succeeds in blending the requisite RPG features with the mechanics of a slot machine, albeit with only one truly noteworthy quirk.

Currency is central to ToF, and it’s what powers all of the game’s subsequent systems. To progress through the game’s world, you’ll need coin. To battle, you’ll need to spend (and potentially lose) coin. To upgrade your hero, you’ll need coin. To heal after battle, you’ll need coin. To buy items… you get the point.

There are two ways to earn coin in the game: through fairly nonintrusive microtransactions or by fighting monsters. Given that the combat is the star of the show, most will be content to get their hands dirty and earn money the hard way, and it’s not hard to do so willingly as prices aren’t as exorbitant as they are in similar games.

This is where the game’s slot system comes into play. When you enter combat, you’ll be greeted with a simple one-line, three-reel slot machine. The reels are filled with icons that represent doing damage, taking damage, gaining XP, and gaining coin. Whatever icon appears on the left-most reel determines what happens during the turn, and the more like icons matched, the more significant the effect. In addition, the effect is multiplied by repeat matches, so if you get XP one spin and XP again the next, you’ll get an XP bonus.

One more level of both gambling and depth is added to the battle system by way of a simple “Bet” button. Prior to a spin, you can bet your coin to enhance the effects of the spin. Every effect is doubled after a bet, so you’ll be crossing your fingers in hopes of avoiding taking damage icons and screaming in joy when you hit a full three-match of XP or coin. This becomes critical as bad guys get harder and have more health.

I’m not much of a gambler, and random elements in games tend to annoy me to no end—here’s looking at you, Crisis Core. But after hours of playing, I’ve found that ToF manages a fine balance between feeling cheated and feeling lucky, and hard battles are nail-biters as a result. As you begin to fight more difficult monsters, the high wrought by a good string of luck and the stomach-sinking disappointment wrought by a bad one make the game quite compelling.

In practice, the system works surprisingly well. This is largely thanks to the game’s simple loot and upgrade systems, which allow you to upgrade your character periodically with simple items and stat boosts, you can do a decent amount to prepare for battle and tip the tide in your favor.

If there are any complaints to be had, they would revolve around the game’s sense of progression. Progression is a critical component of any RPG: it’s what keeps the genre’s fans playing, even when everything else—from storyline to graphics and beyond—may falter. ToF struggles a little bit in this regard, as progression is too random and too fleeting to feel rewarding in the long run.

Moving through the game from area to area requires paying escalating “unlock” fees. This means that you’ll need to amass a substantial purse. This in-and-of-itself wouldn’t be that bad, but when combined with the game’s rougelike treatment of death, you can find yourself frustrated.

Should you die, you’ll lose all the equipment, levels, and upgrades you earned as you play—you keep only your unspent coin. As a result, some may beat the game in a day while others could theoretically play it indefinitely and never see the end.  This near-complete randomness makes it hard to feel any sustained, substantial, and satisfying feelings of progression.

In spite of this issue, though, the game never stops being fun to play. The game’s ability to produce such a wide spectrum of emotional highs and lows is no small feat for a game, and additional elements, like the game’s fun mini-quest system that introduces small objectives that reward XP when completed, do wonders at keeping things fresh.

Ultimately, Tower Of Fortune may not have the progression elements, compelling story, or depth of its meatier RPG brethren, but it has all the stats, levels, loot, triumph, and tragedy a RPG fan needs for on-the-go gaming.

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One of the great indie success stories on the App Store was last year’s mega hit Tiny Wings [ $0.99 ] from lone developer Andreas Illiger. While the core gameplay hook wasn’t entirely unique, it was executed to perfection, and literally anybody who was capable of tapping a touch screen could pick up Tiny Wings and get hooked. Beyond just the gameplay though, Tiny Wings had that special, indescribable “something” that allowed players to connect with it on an emotional level, something we noted in our review of the game.

The kind of overnight success that Tiny Wings saw must have come as a pretty big surprise to Andreas Illiger, who seemed to shy away from all the newfound attention. He released several updates for Tiny Wings during the course of the year, but remained mostly silent about any future development plans.

Recently during the A Maze Festival in Berlin last month, Andreas chatted candidly with fellow developer Flow Studio in an interview the company has posted on their blog. In it, Andreas talks about some of the inspiration behind the creation of Tiny Wings, how its sudden rise to the top was actually very scary, and how becoming an overnight sensation hasn’t really changed him. Andreas sounds like a very humble, artistic individual.

Also mentioned in this interview is that Andreas has been hard at work for the last 10 months on his Tiny Wings follow-up, and that it is just a few weeks from being finished. It will again be an iOS title and again he’s developing the game all on his own, but beyond that he isn’t divulging any details about what the game is.

We’ll be waiting anxiously for any more news regarding Andreas Illiger’s latest release, which sounds like it will hopefully be soon, but in the meantime check out the short interview for some insight into one of iOS’s most beloved titles Tiny Wings.

[Via Flow Studio Blog]

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Do you like tacos? How about star fields, spaceships, and throwback games that trade polygons for pixels and full orchestras for beeps and bleeps that hearken back to the glory days of the Atari 2600? Developer Taco Graveyard serves up generous helpings of those elements and more (even the space tacos) in Omegapixel [ Free ], a fast and furious action game that throws in a fair bit of puzzle solving to keep you on your toes.

The first time you load a mission, Omegapixel might remind you a lot of Geometry Wars [ $0.99 ]. Using a virtual stick, you control a small space rig that zips around the cosmos and battles enemy ships. Unlike Geometry Wars, though, you barrel into enemies kamikaze-style instead of blasting them with lasers. While you’re floating like a butterfly and stinging like a battering ram with thrusters, enemies pour onto the screen in greater and greater numbers.

Enemy ships come in several varieties—some that make a beeline for you, others that converge on the pixel. On one stage, I flew around smashing into red ships that targeted the Omegapixel while blue pyramids followed my space vessel in tireless pursuit. Suddenly a vertical yellow line came sliding across the screen like a barcode scanner laser. If the line touched the pixel, I lost a life. Ignoring the red destroyers and blue pyramids for the moment, I flew to the far side of the yellow wall and tapped the lower right corner of the screen, which instantly swaps your location with the Omegapixel’s and vice versa. Teleporting put the pixel safely on the far side of the wall, but right in range of the red ships I’d let live to deal with the wall.

The key to victory lies in shielding the pixel from its enemies, while using it to shield you from yours. To get rid of the blue pyramids that zero in on my ship’s location, I had to lure them into the pixel’s fiery maw by either putting the pixel in between me and them, or waiting for them to draw close enough to touch before teleporting, which dumped the pixel right where I’d been drifting a second before. Easier said than done, especially with bouncers knocking the pixel every which way, red ships spiraling toward it, new purple walls that harmed me instead of the pixel sliding into view, and asteroids that, while harmless, distract you by stealing your attention away from real threats.

It’s stressful, but the kind of stress that leaves your senses crackling from adrenaline. Cobbling together a plan and pulling it off in a matter of moments never failed to invite a thrill of accomplishment. The game almost becomes more of a twitchy puzzler on later levels, forcing you to remain aware of the pixel’s location at all times and pull each enemy type from your memory log the moment it comes into view so you can react to the new threat appropriately.

As you play, you’ll collect credits you can use to deck out your ship: explosive teleports, extra armor plating, defense mechanisms for the Omegapixel, a line of energy that flares between you and the pixel when you teleport, incinerating anything it touches. You can earn credits the old-fashioned way by clearing Story and Arcade missions, picking up credit packs that randomly appear during play, or just drop real money on IAP credit packs and splurge on upgrades.

Like all games that control with virtual sticks, Omegapixel’s controls suffers from minor virtual-stick touchiness, but my fried reflexes cost me more missions than occasionally spot controls. Other than said spottiness and grating music (the sound effects are the right kind of bleepy retro, but the soundtrack, which you can disable, sounds like an 8-bit game that froze right in the middle of a high chord) Omegapixel is a ton of fun, and especially shouldn’t be missed at its current price of free.

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Long-time TouchArcade readers might remember an upcoming title that we were really excited for called Galactic Keep: Dice Battles. The premise of the game was to take dice-based tabletop RPG mechanics and translate them into video game form on the iPhone, while keeping a heavy emphasis on the storytelling aspects of classic Dungeons & Dragons games.

We first learned of the game way back in July of 2009, and got to see a playable version in person at Pax East the following March. Since then however, as more than 2 years have gone by, things have been extremely quiet on the Galactic Keep front.

After successfully launching another of their long-awaited title called Skull Smashers [ $0.99 ] last month, developer Gilded Skull Games has once again jumped into Galactic Keep development. In fact, as they note in our forums, they made a decision to hit the reset button on the project since it was so badly outdated, and just start over from scratch.

It sounds like a crazy idea for a game that’s already been in development for years, but this way they can take everything they have learned thus far and build the game with newer hardware and features in mind, like Retina Display and Universal support. The screenshot above is the first glimpse of this revamped take on Galactic Keep.

No word on just how long Gilded Skull is expecting the rebooted project to take, but just knowing that Galactic Keep is still alive and kicking is sure to warm some hearts.

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