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Last October, indie developer Bertil Horberg released Helium Boy [$1.99], a colorful 3D platformer about a boy and his balloons. Helium Boy was a pleasant surprise with its cheery visuals and gameplay that revolved around filling up balloons in order to float the protagonist around each of the game’s levels. Unfortunately, an awkward camera made it difficult to properly navigate the terrain, which led to us being hesitant about fully recommending the title in our review.

Still, Helium Boy had flashes of brilliance, and we really wanted to enjoy it more. Now, Bertil is taking another stab at a platforming game with the upcoming Gunman Clive. This time around he’s sticking with a more traditional 2D side-scrolling gameplay while still retaining 3D visuals. Gunman Clive also has a really interesting sketchbook-style look, which you can see in the trailer (it’s also pretty darn funny).

Bertil says his main influences for Gunman Clive were Megaman and other classic platformers of that ilk, and he’s aiming for a more straightforward platforming and shooting game as opposed to the kind of gameplay that was in Helium Boy. I’m pretty much a Megaman fanatic, so hearing this really has me excited to see how it turns out. Look for Gunman Clive to launch with the usual slew of new releases later this week.

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Finnish studio Futuremark Games Studio has a new owner: Rovio Mobile, the creators of Angry Birds. In an announcement today, Rovio announced the acquisition of FGS, but it didn’t disclose what the studio will be doing for its new owner. It also didn’t talk about what it paid, though that’s pretty standard.

This is an interesting buy on a couple of levels. Futuremark was once a two-studio company. One was a 3D benchmarking studio, the other made passable games like, say, Unstoppable Gorg [$4.99 / Free]. Rovio has acquired the latter as opposed to the former, and its allowing the main arm retain all of its game studios’ known IP. Futuremark will be able to make sequels, then.

The PC version of Unstoppable Gorg.

In a press release, Rovio says that this is all just a part of its “rapid expansion in entertainment, publishing, animation, and retail.” Rovio plans to “continue to focus on seeking out the world’s best talent to join its team.”

Futuremark, by the way, will continue with benchmarks. In a statement we received, Futuremark says that it will churn out a new version of 3DMark this year that will “allow a direct comparison of gaming performance across” various OSes and form factors. That sounds… fun.

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One of my favorite aspects about iOS gaming is being able to check out games that are so outlandish in design that they probably wouldn’t be made on any other platform. Dreamy Goat [$0.99] is one such game, telling the tale of Goat as he wanders from dream to dream eating random items and jumping on dream entities.

With trippy visuals and catchy tunes, Dreamy Goat is a short but intense experience for gamers willing to forego traditional gameplay for something different.

Let’s get one thing clear: Dreamy Goat is less of a game and more of a visual experience. Players can embark on seven different levels each with their own visual and auditory styles along with their own items for Goat to eat and jump on. Goat walks on his own through each level with your only control being a tap that causes him to jump as much as you want.

Each level is fixed in length, and when you’re finished you go on a wild ride on top of a space whale that eats stars while teleporting you to the next dream (I swear I’m not making this up). Players are free to simply play each level in succession, moving to the next for as long as you wish.

Dreamy Goat defaults to ‘Zen’ mode, which allows you to do whatever you want in each level without repercussion. Switching to ‘Sun’ mode turns on a scoring mechanic that forces the player to pay attention to collectibles, as the level will end if you don’t eat enough items. While Sun mode actually provides a goal and challenge to gamers, it really doesn’t add much to the actual gameplay.

For that matter, there’s very little in terms of any gameplay. There are no achievements, or leaderboards for the ‘Sun’ mode. There’s also no additional mechanics other than being able to make Goat (and the space whale) jump. This really shouldn’t be a surprise for anyone familiar with artistic games such as this, but deserves mentioning nonetheless.

Where Dreamy Goat is intriguing, however, is in its visual presentation. The graphics are simultaneously its most striking feature as well as the element that’s hardest to describe. Many portions of the graphics are simplistic hand-drawn pieces. Yet, all the visuals tie together and simply look and feel right together.

I don’t know if it’s the fact that everything is just so bizarre or if the developers have conjured up some magical spell of fascination involving goats. Regardless, when you combine the visuals with the musical scores (which range from serendipitous to heavy metal), it all just melds together into an interesting experience.

As many other similar games have shown, that sort of experience is only as much as the player makes of it. I also have no doubt that a lot of gamers will simply glance over this game for its lack of gameplay. However, the sheer psychedelic nature of the game is worth noting and at least struck a chord with me. If this sounds appealing, then I encourage you to partake in Dreamy Goat.

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The little things matter in flight games. When you crank up an engine, you want the jet exhaust to grease up the screen. You want to hear the thick, thunderous crack of a sound barrier break. And you want to feel like the world is insignificant as you slice through the air at 1500 MPH while a song that vaguely sounds like the one from that weird Cruise flick pounds in the background. Namco Bandai’s Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy [$4.99] nails a lot of these little things, and while the premise sucks and it occasionally doesn’t look so great, few iOS games deliver as consistently as this one.

Backing up, Sky Gamblers is an arcade flight game that feels pretty similar to the Ace Combat series. It plays it loose with things like, say, physics and reality, but doesn’t try to pretend to be anything else other than an insanely fast-paced, action shooter in the air. It’s really good at leveraging these aspects, too: the sense of speed is fantastic and the maneuvering and shooting components feel blessedly fluid. These things define the experience.

A good chunk of Apple’s faithful should know this game already. It was one of the two titles given a substantial demo at the new iPad press event. As expected, it delivers on a visual level. The assets, and particularly the planes, are rendered with a healthy respect for the new iPad’s higher resolution screen, and most of the environments look alright, too. It also boasts a ton of atmospheric and effects touches that bolster the pace-pumping, action scenarios that dot its content landscape.

But while it nails a lot of the little things, it flubs a few, too. In particular, some of the texture work on ground details and buildings and infantry are straight up ugly, and don’t reflect the work put into the rest of the title. The tutorial in particular is a mess, and the voice acting isn’t so good, either.

The thing that it gets the most wrong is its own story. Told through a jumble of comic book-style entries as if it were a Max Payne, the premise is a mess of poorly constructed context and devices. From what I can gather, you play as a hotshot pilot who, suddenly, finds himself without an army to call home. After a canyon run, you meet up with a group of lovable mercenaries and then join up.

There’s just enough reason in its madness to justify the fact that you’re in a plane and charged with killing people — a lot of people, in fact, across a campaign that tries to feature every environment, objective, enemy type, and color in the Game Design Handbook.

In the first mission, for example, you’ll fly alongside a squad on a quest to kill enemy fighters across a field and over the top of a city. Later, in a dessert level, you’ll be asked to rip through enemy fighters while bombing ground infantry shortly before moving to a Bomb the Base objective. These layers and the sheer scale of each level hammer home the sheer speed your craft can go, and that adds a palpable thrill to each confrontation or traveling section. Dogfights on the other hand reinforce the gracefulness of flight, as you’ll need to spiral or otherwise dance away from lock-ons, circle for position, and hunt your prey airplane-style.

The latter is an important point: since Sky Gamblers doesn’t care about natural laws, there’s a distinct, teeth-rattling speed inherent in the combat design. Fights are all about how many bullets you can let loose while doing crazy stuff, like, say, flying upside down with the throttle all the way up. The same old flight game strategies still apply: you do want to get behind the enemy and execute successive passes, but the way you go about it in Sky Gamblers gives it an awesome edge. Everything just feels so fast; it’s bliss.

Flight games, strangely, have found a home on iOS. The controls seem to work, and this is no exception. The casual pro scheme in particular is great; the d-pad that controls the movement is robust and floats, and the pitch doesn’t get in the way. You can also use accelerometer controls, but those never clicked with me.

If the campaign doesn’t do it for you, then there’s a bounty of bonus modes and missions to check out. Team Deathmatch, Bomb the Base, and several survival modes are all ready to be played from the get-go. You can take these online, too, and the component seems, surprisingly, solid. I’ve yet to experience lag and the matchmaking is sharp.

If you have a new iPad, this is clearly one of THE games to get, as its boasting some of the best 3D, high resolution visuals at the moment. If you dig explode-y things and moving really fast, you’ll probably want to give this a look, too. Smart design bolsters both of these aspects. Check it out.

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Nowadays there is a veritable smorgasbord of excellent iOS platformers, but it wasn’t always this way. Virtual controls have always been a sticking point with platformers on a touch screen, rarely offering the type of precision needed in such a game. One of the games that managed to nail the control problem early on, back in October of 2009 to be exact, was Touch Foo’s Soosiz [$1.99/HD].

Soosiz was a bright and colorful 2D platformer built around an interesting gravity mechanic and levels made up of tiny planet-like platforms not totally dissimilar from the Super Mario Galaxy titles. Soosiz was pretty well-loved by gamers and critics alike, and served as an early benchmark for how virtual controls should work in a platformer.

Since Soosiz, however, Touch Foo has been quiet on the App Store front, and I’ve caught myself wondering just what the team might be up to for their follow-up release. Last week, they announced in our forums what that follow-up title is, and they’ve sent word today that we won’t be waiting long to try out the game for ourselves as it will be launching this Thursday.

The game is called Swordigo, and it’s another platforming game but looks to be quite a departure from Soosiz. It’s a 2.5D game, meaning the visuals are made of 3D graphics but the gameplay itself is strictly classic 2D. There is a bigger focus on action and battling enemies this time around, and there will be RPG elements that let you level up your character, weapons, spells, and items.

Check out the awesome trailer below to get a good idea of what’s in store for Swordigo:

Swing back by later this week when we do our weekly roundup of new releases to get your own hands on the game, which will be launching as a Universal app at the $1.99 price point, and we’ll put Swordigo through its paces once it’s released and bring you a full review soon too.

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Way back in October of 2010, Goodhustle Studios released Beast Boxing 3D [99¢/Lite], a first-person arcade style boxing game that we thoroughly enjoyed in our review. It utilized pretty simple boxing mechanics, but had intuitive controls and a fantastic art style. The campaign was a bit short, but this was rectified pretty well through an update the following December that added two additional characters and a survival style Endless Mode.

There hasn’t been much activity with Beast Boxing 3D since then, but a brand new update has just been released that addresses two of the biggest requests from users since the game came out: high resolution visuals and Universal iPad support. A lot of the artwork in Beast Boxing is hand drawn, so there isn’t a lot of impact on the Retina Display or the iPad screen, though it does look much cleaner. However, it makes a big difference in the text as well as the actual 3D character models, both of which are razor sharp now.

Check out the comparison screens of the non-HD visuals on the left and the updated screens on the right (click for full size):

There are some other minor fixes in this latest update too, like improved UI elements and issues related to Game Center achievements unlocking. Also, the characters themselves have been given additional sound effects and animations, giving them all a bit more distinction to their personalities.

Beast Boxing 3D has remained one of my favorite games since it came out, and I’m really happy to see such nice improvements so far beyond release. If you hadn’t checked it out before, the lite version has received the same Universal and HD treatment so you can see what you’re getting into without risk. If you like the lite, the full version is currently on sale for 99¢.

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On the Wind is an eye-catching game. The interplay between the light, floral art and the chunky pixelized interfaces just begs for attention. t’s hard to tell exactly how it plays from the trailer, but the gist is this: the screen scrolls by, getting faster and faster as you progress through the seasons. You control the gust of leaves with your fingertip, moving it around obstacles and through other leaves that scatter across the field. It feels a bit like a wire loop game with added speed and less sadism.

At first glance it’s easy to assume that thatgamecompany’s Flower is the obvious source of inspiration, but developer David Buttress says it didn’t much factor into his design. Instead, he looked to The Helicopter Game, a classic Flash-based cave flier with simple, one-touch controls and a rather brutal difficulty curve. The idea for the leaves and flowing motion came from a more esoteric source: a in-depth look into Boids, an early artificial life program that models flocking behavior. He was particularly fascinated by the idea that such complex and beautiful motion could be created from a few simple rules, and he is bringing that organic motion into play in On the Wind.

Buttress is new to the iOS development world, having just recently launched his one-man studio, Don’t Step On The Cracks. But he’s coming from a long background in game development at Rare. Working with the other creative-types at the studio was often inspiring, but he had few chances to work on the small, creative ideas that cropped up. As with so many other developers moving from the console space, he found that iOS offers a great opportunity to play around with the concepts that had been building up while he put his time into larger projects like Conker: Live and Reloaded and Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts.

Buttress reached far and wide for inspiration while developing On the Wind. The silhouettes that make up the environment were initially inspired by Limbo. Rather than taking a similarly dark and pensive approach, he built on the idea, letting in riotous color for the leaves, flowers and backdrops. The sparseness of the sound is another carefully considered choice, like the auditory atmosphere in Shadow of the Colossus, which was usually formed only by the sound of the wind and the hooves of your horse.

For now, On the Wind is a concise experience meant for on-the-go play, one that runs through the seasons in short order before ending. Buttress is considering an update with an endless mode and powerups in the future, but for now he’s happy to launch with a still-pure experience. Between the procedurally generated world, leaderboards and a series of clever achievements, though, fans should find plenty of reasons to keep going. We’re certainly looking forward to playing more, having had a taste of the game. We’ll be sure to let you know when it lands, hopefully in a handful of weeks.

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Way back in 1984, English teacher-turned-game developer Mike Singleton released a vast and innovative adventure gamed for the ZX Spectrum home computer called The Lords of Midnight. The game was extremely well received and garnered high praise for its gameplay, the expansive world in which it is set, and its use of a clever graphical technique known as “landscaping” to render the scene with pre-scaled sprites. The Lords of Midnight turned out to be Singleton’s most well respected title and is considered by many to be one of the best video games ever created.

Versions of The Lords of Midnight were soon released on a few other (mainly European) platforms of the day, and in 1991 DOS PC versions of the game and its sequel, Doomdark’s Revenge, were released, originally developed as reverse engineered fan conversions by Christopher Wild. (Singleton gave his stamp of approval to Wild’s conversions — see Wild’s 2004 Retro Gamer two-piece article / interview with Singleton.) Not long after, Wild began thinking about doing Windows versions of the games and thus began his work on The Midnight Engine, a system that would allow the Midnight games to run under modern operating systems and, thanks to data abstraction, would also allow new games to be created under the same framework.

At this point, the astute reader has probably figured out that I am not just waxing nostalgic for the simple fun of it. No, I am happy to say that there is reason for my taking a few moments to bring the uninitiated up to speed, here, and that reason is a project that has been underway for over year now to bring The Lords of Midnight to iOS.

In January of 2011, original author Mike Singleton reached out to Christopher Wild, suggesting a collaboration to get his 27 year old classic in the hands of a new audience. Since that time, at a varying pace, the project has been underway.

Wild has been posting progress updates to his blog throughout the year, and indicates that it is definitely the intention of both he and Singleton to do this conversion just right.

Let me firstly assure you that we are not developing a freeform, realtime, 3d game. We are not developing [the less well-received sequel to Doomdark's Revenge] the Citadel. We are not going to f*** it up!

Lords of Midnight is about the landscaping. It’s about those 2d panoramic views. It’s about moving some characters and pressing night and the end of the turn and waiting for the dawn to break to find out what happened.

So, the landscaping stays. Yes it will get an update. Graphically we will try a few things to help us justify bringing a 27 year old game back to the future. If you’ve followed the history of [The Midnight Engine] with the Lords of Midnight and more importantly Doomdark’s Revenge, you’ll have an idea of some of the things that means.

We’re going to make a few changes to the AI. Nothing drastic. This is not about turning Lords of Midnight into the style of RPG/Adventure games that are currently available. The AI in lords of midnight works – it’s a little simplistic, but it’s perfect for the style of game. However, there are a few little things that no longer sit comfortably, and to be fair, probably didn’t when Mike originally coded them. So there will be a couple of tweaks and additions.

The affect of these additions is that the game will not play like it used to. In spirit it will be the same, but don’t expect to be able to fire up the emulators and watch the old spectrum game play exactly like the new one. There will likely be some surprises, but I think everyone will enjoy.

Wild also indicates that certain AI changes will be made to facilitate multi-user gameplay and that it will remain turn-based like the original — not real-time. The picture that he paints of the conversion goals should appeal to those iOS gamers who loved the title in decades past.

The iOS conversion of The Lords of Midnight is being developed under the Marmalade SDK (née Airplay SDK), will run natively on both the iPhone and the iPad, and should make its way to various other platforms, as well. Doomdark’s Revenge will also be brought over, some time after The Lords of Midnight arrives.

The team has just posted a demonstration video, albeit preliminary and somewhat rough, of the game running on iPad hardware.

That a whole new generation of gamers will have easy access to such a rich classic is wonderful news, and rest assured we will keep readers apprised as progress on The Lords of Midnight for iOS marches on.

( Embedded screenshots are from the ZX Spectrum original and graphics in the demo video are placeholder — not final versions. )

[ via Gaming on the Go, thanks @gnomeslair ]

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