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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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Sword & Sworcery [$4.99 / Micro] is an amazing adventure with some of hippest art and sound we’ve ever seen in a video game. It’s inspirational, too, as fans of the title have demonstrated by conjuring a plethora of art revolving around the themes, music, action, and scenes in the indie darling. In an effort to generate even more awesome stuff, the crew behind the game are putting together a virtual jam to provide artists around the globe “a little bit of structure and motivation, as well as an opportunity to exhibit” their work alongside the people who made the game. This is taking place on May 11-13th, and it appears as if everything submitted will appear at the #Sworcery tumblr.

If you’d like to get in on the action, submissions can be submitted here. The page explaining what’s exactly going down is available at this address. Here’s a tiny small selection of the stuff appearing on the game’s tumblr:

“Slyve & Sworcery” – a painting by Slyve aka @c_sylvain at Capy.

“Depths of Mingi Taw” – painting by Qiqo aka @supertamago at Capy.

There’s some great stuff already, obviously. It’ll be interesting to watch this page fill. And if you haven’t played Sword & Sworcery yet, what’s wrong with you?

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On this week’s episode of The TouchArcade Show, we power through conversations about smart gyms and wearable heart monitors in order to bring the latest, greatest, and the best in iPhone and iPad. At the top of the show, we dive into oral reviews of a bunch of cool games, including Brainsss and King of Fighters 2012. Later, we ponder if the free-to-play market is about to collapse and dig into the realities of development in a market that only wants 99¢ stuff.

You can listen below via these handy-dandy links or, hey, you can subscribe to us on iTunes or Zune. The latter is the only way to get our stuff the very second it comes out and lord knows you want us immediately so do it!

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-050.mp3, 42.7MB

Here are your show notes:

GAMES

• Brainsss [$2.99]
• Flight Control Rocket [99¢]
• The King of Fighters-i 2012
• Tower of Fortune [99¢]
• DreamWorks Dragons: TapDragonDrop [$1.99]
• Junk Jack [$2.99]

JARED’S KITTY KORNER

• Cat Sliding [Free]

FRONT PAGE

• ‘Draw Something’ Is Losing Dudes Like Whoa
• Tiger Style Reveals Lifetime Sales Numbers
• Jason Citron Forming Games Studio

The original Soundtrack by Jim Guthrie (of Sword & Sworcery fame) for Indie Game: The Movie is available for pre-order now on Bandcamp and iTunes. The 24-track album featuring music from the award winning documentary chronicling the journeys of independent game developers by filmmakers James Swirsky and Lisa Pajot will be released in full on May 15th. It will also be available on double LP exclusively through Bandcamp. Pick up a pre-order copy of Indie Game: The Movie: The Soundtrack today on Bandcamp and iTunes.

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How many games does it take before you can call a developer a sure bet? Radiangames has been bringing its games to iOS like clockwork lately, and we’ve been impressed. Super Crossfire HD [ $2.99 ] and Fireball SE [ $1.99 ] are both excellent games that iterate on arcade classics, and the newest entry, Ballistic SE [ $1.99 ], also returns to a popular well: the twin-stick shooter. Like its predecessors, though, it’s a thoughtful take on the semi-stale genre. It makes up for familiarity with a heck of a lot of fun.

Ballistic SE has two big things going for it. It has a system of enhancements that let you customize your game every time you play (not unlike the Jetpack Joyride update that just landed), and it has ballistic mode, which is pretty much bullet time. Every time you fill up your ballistic meter, a button is primed. Everything slows down when you hit it: your ship, enemy orbs, even the music. As panic buttons go, it’s impressive and stylish.

The game also has a lot of amber. The color is everywhere: menus, interface elements, your ship, explosions, you name it. At the risk of dating myself, I used to play games on a monitor that looked like that; I don’t miss it. But there’s a method to this monochromatic madness. The amber is safe, your eyes drift over it. Every other color stands out, and those colors universally identify your enemies.

The enemy color coding is important enough that colorblind players might be at a disadvantage. The enemies are just orbs—some come in different sizes, but they all have the same general shape. But if you know what a given color does, you know whether an enemy is flying toward you or moving at random, whether it will dissolve before your guns or stand up to all fire. A firm grasp of the enemy colors is a good shortcut to survival.

Whether you’re playing Waves or Challenges, you’ve gotta survive. Waves pits you against ever-increasing waves of enemies, grinding you down over time. Challenges are a more vicious sort of play, with your choice of five pre-set combos of enemy types designed to take you out in short order. The one thing that can help stave off the inevitable? Your selection of enhancements.

Enhancements pretty much make the game. That’s not to say it isn’t good otherwise, but throw in enhancements and you essentially have a leveling mechanic that opens up a huge variety of play styles. You can speed up your ship, drop bombs in your wake, alter your shots, or speed up your ballistic meter. You can even pump points into your score multiplier if your confident that you don’t need any other boost more. It’s a fantastic little system.

Both modes give you access to enhancements, but they differ in how they present them. When playing a challenge you can pick ten enhancements right off the bat, and you’ll live or die by your choices from then on. In Waves mode you’re given a single enhancement point each time you hit a new level milestone. You power up over time based on your picks.

In practice, Ballistic SE plays out pretty simply. You have two sticks (with customizable positioning). One aims your guns, the other aims your ship. Standard twin-stick stuff. Aside from your ship there are three things on the field: enemies, of course, that come at you in waves, immovable bombs that destroy enemies when you hit them, and starbursts that increase your score multiplier. Deciding when it’s best to fly through the bombs is almost as important as learning to avoid and shoot down the enemy orbs. Knowing when to trigger your ballistic meter is another vital skill for long-term survival.

Long-term survival is, in fact, the name of the game. You get extra lives for hitting score milestones, so playing better means living longer and longer. The waves get ridiculous pretty quickly, but there’s salvation to be had with checkpoints that unlock after ever-increasing numbers of waves. You can restart from these checkpoints, but there’s a catch: the further in you start, the more your score will suffer. If you want to remain competitive on the Game Center leaderboards, you’ve gotta start from scratch.

None of these things are revolutionary; Ballistic SE doesn’t rewrite the twin stick shooter or bring us a brand new perspective on the genre. Instead, it’s an incredibly solid, well-balanced game that makes up in entertainment for what it skips in flash. Radiangames is carving out quite the niche on the App Store, and Ballistic SE does it proud.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Zombie games are still a big deal and it continues to blow my mind that this is the case. What hasn’t been done in a zombie game? Think about it. We’ve shot zombies and we’ve cut zombies. We’ve set zombies on fire. We’ve run over zombies and cured zombies and beat zombies with baseball bats. We’ve even participated as part of the horde in games like Valve’s Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. Over the last few years, there’s not much we haven’t done to or with zombies across multiple genres, including puzzle and even tower defense. This thought has crossed my mind several times: what can a brand new zombie game even offer outside of a slight twist on what we’ve done before?

And then Brainsss [$2.99] shambles along and shatters this idea in my head that zombie games are lame because there’s just nothing left to do in them that we haven’t done trillions of times in a billion different games. Brainsss offers something new in the space, and its core action is rich enough for me to give it a solid recommendation, despite cooling on this zombie … craze we’re still in.

Brainsss is a top-down strategy game where you control a horde of zombies on quests to assimilate people into your horde. In order to do this, you’ll need to treat the ever-growing horde like a fleet, splitting it up into pieces so you can trap victims spread across the game’s myriad of labyrinthine levels, which are often brimming with helpless survivors who are ready to bolt the second they see snarling beasts approaching. As you convert more people, you’ll be able to meaningfully split your horde into even more groups.

There are a few change of pace design elements that compliment the strategy. The “RAGE” meter in particular is hip. As you do damage, you’ll be able to enter into a berserk mode that ramps up your horde’s speed and intensity. On the other hand, the mission design is sharp, too. In one level, you might be stopping survivors from feeling to a helicopter. In others, you’re chomping on scientists who were incredibly fleet of foot before running into your horde. Another neat twist: Brainnsss also rocks NPCs that can harm your horde, like police officers and backyard pugilists that you have to disarm in specific ways.

Brainsss biggest problem is probably its habit of skewing casual. You’re not going to feel like you’re the smartest undead general ever while trapping dudes. The controls can be a bit spotty as well. To split your horde, you need to “paint” over part of it, and then point to a new location in the level. Grabbing a specific amount can be a hassle if your horde is bunched tightly. Otherwise, the point-and-paint controls are bliss: this is a game that feels like and operates like a game designed for iPad and iPhone.

If you’re still into zombie games, or just need to check another thing you’ve done with zombies off of your mental checklist, feel free to check this out. Brainnsss strategy and action feel pretty unique in a space that’s been done to undeath, and they probably really pop outside of this vacuum. I can dig it, at least.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Contre Jour [99¢] and its Universal HD brother, Contre Jour HD [$2.99], has always been a looker, but it’s now even more impressive on new iPad. Thanks to a late (but welcome) retina update, the HD version puzzle game is fully embracing Apple’s new high pixel density screen. As you’ll see below, this version is sharper and crisper and cleaner than it ever has been, which is saying something since it looked great pre-update anyway.

No update for a puzzle game is complete without new levels. A brand new jungle-themed chapter has been added to both versions of the game, ushering in some twists on the game’s pre-existing moveable tentacle and platform mechanics. Also, a new “bonus” ending has been added for those who can collect the game’s (now) 300 lights. Sounds like you’ve got some work to do, guys.

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A couple of months back, Tiger Style Games released Waking Mars [ $2.99 ], the follow-up to our 2009 Game of the Year Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor [$0.99 / $0.99 (HD)], and we thought it was an incredibly unique and enjoyable experience in our review. About a month ago, Waking Mars was updated for the new iPad’s Retina Display, and we noted that the visual improvement really had a big impact on a game that is so much about creating a moody atmosphere.

But wow, as good as we thought the game looked after that last update it turned out to be just a partial Retina update and just a taste of what was to come. Today Tiger Style has released another new update which adds full Retina Display support for Waking Mars in addition to a set of new jetpack types for your character to zip around Martian caves with. Check out this screen from the new iPad, which Tiger Style has cropped in close in order to show off how much detail you can see.

In a blog post detailing this latest update, which is called the May Day Update by the way, Tiger Style notes that the iPad’s beefy hardware generates the 3.1 million onscreen pixels at 60 frames per second, and that all of their artwork had been drawn at an incredibly large scale to begin with so adding support for the new iPad resolution wasn’t terribly difficult. Screens don’t really do it justice though, you have to see Waking Mars running on a new iPad in person to fully appreciate just how gorgeous it is.

In addition to the update for Waking Mars, Tiger Style has also updated the iPad version of Spider with partial Retina Display support. Only select assets have been upgraded, but Spider is still one of the most beautiful games around. Also, all 3 of Tiger Style’s games are currently on sale for a limited time. Waking Mars is down to $2.99 from $4.99 in its first ever sale, and both the iPhone and iPad versions of Spider are just 99¢ each. Finally, you can grab the excellent soundtrack to Waking Mars for just a buck on its Bandcamp page, down from $5.

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This just in: people like Angry Birds. In a new blog post on developer Rovio’s site, the studio announces that its latest Angry Birds jam, Angry Birds Space [$.99 / HD], has hit 50 million downloads within 35 days. Rovio says that this is the “fastest growing mobile game yet,” and it is shattering all of the studio’s previous records. No-one could have predicted this. No-one.

In all seriousness, though, Space is easily the best entry in the franchise so far, so we’re guessing the download numbers are only going to get crazier as the game receives more support down the line. And speaking of that actually, Rovio teased something interesting in the post: a new “bigger” thing is on the way.

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It was just last Wednesday that we expected a huge update for Junk Jack [ $2.99 ] to be hitting soon, and in this case soon meant over the weekend. This massive content update gives the game long-awaited Universal support, and let me tell you it is a dream playing on the larger screen of the iPad. Unfortunately though, there’s no Retina support, but it still looks quite good with its simplistic pixel art style. Check out the new trailer showcasing the version 1.1 update features.

Universal support is just one of the many, many new things in this latest Junk Jack update though. More enemies, items, an entire farming system, tons of food recipes and a ridiculous amount of tweaks also grace the game. You can check out the exhaustive list (literally eye-tiring) in the App Store description, but all you really need to know is that Junk Jack continues to significantly improve with each new iteration and looks to continue that trend well into the future.

Note: For some reason the lite version of the game is no longer in the App Store. We’ll get to the bottom of this and update the post with a link or a reason for its disappearance as soon as we find out.

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