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We've posted at length regarding all the other gamebooks available on the App Store, but they all (or at least the ones I've read) are set in fantasy worlds with orcs, dragons, wizards, and other mystical things. Star Breed [$2.99], as the title may hint, is a two part episodic story with a glorious sci-fi setting. Initially, it can be run on either the iPhone or iPad with pixel doubling, but a universal update is in the works that will make it look even better on the iPad.

The developers explain the premise of the story:

By the year 2387 AD, Mankind has spread across the stars leaving a destroyed Earth behind.

A now unified human government, the United Dominion of Man (UDM), spreads unchallenged, marshaled by its most powerful agency, its Armed Forces (UDAF). The UDAF spends billions each year on weapons and technology to accelerate this colonization of the stars. Man now reigns supreme over a thriving new world, one encompassing hundreds of star systems. His progress has gone unimpeded – he has yet to come upon intelligent alien life.

Man's civilization is at its peak in this era of expansion when the game begins. The player takes on the role of an Officer in the Armed Forces. When a human survey ship operating in fringe space goes silent while exploring an uninhabited planet, the results are far-reaching and threaten to alter the course of human history forever. The player is at the forefront of the horrific turn of events that follow. The choices he or she makes will decide the outcome of the story … and the fate of mankind.

Something that's really cool about Star Breed is that dice-based challenges have been replaced with skill-based mini-games. While this is somewhat of a departure from the random nature of traditional gamebooks, it's so much nicer to actually feel like you're controlling the outcome of things instead of slowly watching a set of dice allow a pair of goblins to bring your tale to an end. Also, since this gamebook was designed from the ground up to be played on the iPhone, the decisions you make can often result in subtle differences in the story that go beyond turning to two different pages depending on which path you want to take.

I've been amazed by just how much I've found myself enjoying gamebooks on both the iPhone and iPad. Be sure to check out some of the other ones we've posted about if this is the first time you've heard of gamebooks, otherwise, Star Breed – Episode 1 is a worthy download for any fan of interactive fiction.

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If you're looking for a couple games to play over the weekend for the low price of, well, free– Here are a couple you should try.

Cubed Rally Racer – Back when this game was first released, I gushed like crazy in our review. It's an isometric 3D racer with completely randomized tracks. You can do all kinds of awesome things like endlessly generate tracks to always have something new to race on, then you can even send those tracks and your associated ghost data to any of your friends via OpenFeint. If you've got an iPad, Cubed Rally Racer HD [$1.99] is also worth checking out because the two player spitscreen mode is really cool.

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Giant Moto – We thought Giant Moto had tons of potential when it first was released, but a limited number of tracks and weird controls were hard to overlook. Since then, new tracks have been added along with OpenFeint support for some extra replay value via leaderboards and achievements. If you have fond memories of Excitebike, don't miss this one while it's free.

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Back when the original Samurai: Way of the Warrior [$1.99] was released on the App Store, we thought it was an incredible display of what the current iPhone was capable of. Awesome cell shaded graphics were combined with some of the most gory gameplay available at the time which unfortunately was sullied by a cumbersome swipe-based control scheme. However, this didn't stop Way of the Warrior from topping over 800,000 downloads and winning a number of awards including being listed among Apple's Best Games of 2009.

Samurai II: Vengeance [$2.99] was released last night as a universal app, and after putting it through its paces I can safely say that this is a worthy sequel in every regard. First off, if the cell shaded graphics of the original Samurai wowed you, to put it lightly, you ain't seen nothin' yet. The game looks great in screenshots, but seeing it running at 60fps on the Retina Display of the iPhone 4 or on the iPad is downright incredible. Utilizing the latest version of the Unity 3D engine, MadFinger Games has made the entire game world even more detailed, making me stop quite often while playing the game to just look at my surroundings to take note of just how great something like a patch of bamboo looked– Something I really can't say for too many video games, console titles included.

Especially on the Retina Display, Samurai II: Vengeance looks like a comic book in motion and the game's camera always makes sure you're focused on the action. For instance, when you're fighting an array of enemies, it will pan in and out whenever you're executing any of the varied combo finishing moves. When you get a hang for the combo system, this results in an incredible display of swords flying, blood splattering everywhere, with the camera zooming in to show the blood spurt emanating from a decapitated foe, then (if you can keep it up) repeating the whole thing on the next enemy– Only this time, you might slice them in half.

All of these combos are reasonably easy to pull off too, since the convoluted swipe system of the original has been replaced with a much more sensible virtual joystick and array of buttons. One could argue that the swipe system made it feel more like an iPhone game, and to some extent I agree, but actually being able to pull off the moves you want instead of what the original Samurai thought you wanted to do makes playing the game a lot more fun. Also, with your hands fixed in one position, you can actually enjoy the graphics and overall mood of the game instead of constantly obstructing the screen with wild swiping and tapping motions.

Unfortunately, with all this awesome comes a bit of, well, not so awesome. Samurai II: Vengeance is an extremely linear arcade style brawler to its core, which is great if all you're looking to do is slaughter wave after wave of baddies, but not so great if you like games with a little more variety than just repeating your most effective combos over and over. Some light puzzle elements are included, and there are a few gauntlets of fairly menacing traps you'll need to navigate, but other than that, it's just straight up bloodbath action which could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. Personally, I found myself getting bored at times during the game especially early on before you see a little more variety in enemies and have some upgraded combos.

Speaking of upgrading, Samurai II has a barebones experience point system of sorts that allows you to buy new combos, upgrade existing ones, and add some extra pixels to your health bar. The rate that you unlock new things seems pretty good, but again I found myself wishing there was more you could do to customize your character. In comparison, Gameloft's Hero of Sparta 2 [$6.99 / Lite / HD] offers a silly amount of character customization through various unlockables.

The difficulty level of Samurai II: Vengeance, even when playing on normal, can be a little too challenging. There's no way to heal aside from when you're refreshed when battles are over, which can often result in an incredibly frustrating series of do-overs especially later in the game with some of the gauntlets of enemy warriors Samurai II throws at you. Also, instead of any kind of tutorial to speak of, the game begins with a completely overwhelming four screen slideshow detailing every function of every UI element. While this might not be an issue for the hardcore gamer types that populate the TouchArcade forum, I'm not sure how well it will go over with the general populace.

If you are the hardcore type, you'll be happy to know that the endless survival mode dojo has made its return, complete with Game Center-powered leaderboards. Also, each of the seven chapters has its own leaderboard, and if achievements are your thing, there are a bunch of those as well.

While Samurai II: Vengeance isn't going to knock Epic Citadel [Free] off its throne of having the most jaw-dropping graphics available on the platform, this is an actual game, and is a must-have if you're looking for another way to show off the Retina Display. I'd love to see more variety in the gameplay, upgrades, and a more forgiving difficulty mode, but otherwise Samurai II: Vengeance is everything a great sequel should be.

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If you're looking for an iPhone motocross game to get excited over, this very well may be it. The Quadsphere, creators of Icarus-X [$1.99] announced on our forums this morning that their next iPhone game is going to be an online multiplayer enabled motocross game called FMX Riders. We don't have anything right now other than a set of screenshots and a feature list, but FMX Riders looks (and sounds) incredibly promising.

FMX Riders will come packed with four game modes: Race, freestyle, time attack, and hotlap time attack. There will be a career mode with 9 tours and over 40 events. The best part, it will utilize Game Center for online multiplayer with auto-matchmaking. Game Center integration doesn't stop there, there's over 15 different leaderboards, achievements, and you'll even be able to save and share replays with your Game Center friends. Oh, and the cherry on top– Retina Display graphics.

We'll be closely following FMX Racers, but in the meantime, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to keep an eye on the thread in our upcoming games forum.

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In a somewhat surprising move, Gameloft released its space combat game Star Battalion [$6.99] to the App Store earlier today. While Sunday releases aren't generally common, another interesting thing about Star Battalion is that it is the first game that I know of to offer online co-op using either Apple's Game Center or Gameloft's own Gameloft Live! service. Strangely, the local and online multiplayer options only extend to co-op play, as there is no option for head-to-head battles in Star Battalion.

The single player campaign features multiple missions of interstellar conflict, all of which can be played online with another player. When playing by yourself, two AI controlled wingmen play through the game with you. The usual gamut of Gameloft features have made their way into Star Battalion, including Retina Display graphics and gyroscope-enabled controls for 4th generation devices. Onscreen gestures perform barrel rolls and backflips while in the midst of battle, and there is an option for virtual control stick controls if you're not a big fan of tilting.

This lengthy preview video of the Japanese version of the game from AppBank gives you a great idea of the kind of gameplay found in Star Battalion:

Lots of player impressions have been pouring into our forums throughout the day. So far the major points covered are that the actual combat in the game is really fun and feels a little bit like Starfox (though not on-rails); the online co-op is cool but the lack of a versus mode is disappointing; the voice acting is painfully bad; and the overall game is fairly short clocking in at about 3.5 hours in one gamer's experience. However, the replayability is naturally a bit higher than this due to the online multiplayer, achievements, and leaderboards. If you're in the mood for a new space combat game with impressive graphics, and an interesting online cooperative component, then take a look at Star Battalion and be sure to share your thoughts in our forums.

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Typically I'm not a big fan of the sim-management type games. Back in the day I was hopelessly addicted to SimCity on the SNES, but future iterations of that game and of similar franchises just never appealed to me. They all seemed a bit too complicated, or required a hectic style of time and resource managing that turned me off to them, and nothing has quite captured the particular mix of simplicity and subtle depth from that classic SNES title. That changed yesterday when I discovered Kairosoft's Game Dev Story [$3.99] on my iPhone. It offers a sim-management experience that's not overwhelmingly complex, but at the same time has a lot of different elements that meld together well to create compelling gameplay. Plus, it's just a ton of fun to create your own games and see them go on to be huge successes (and sometimes total flops).

In Game Dev Story you'll play the president of a fledgling game development company as you direct your crew of designers, artists, and coders in an effort to create a string of successful video games over a 20 year time period. Beyond just making games, you'll need to grow your own brand name by running a game convention booth, attending awards shows, advertising, and managing an ever-changing fan base. As your company expands, you'll have the opportunity to move into larger offices and hire a bigger team of employees, all of whom can be leveled up and trained (at the expense of  higher salaries) so as to create better games. If you really become a big company, and have employees with the right skill sets, you can even create your own console and compete with the well established big boys in the hardware game.

To start off, though, you're just a tiny company with a few employees and a small amount of start-up capital to work with. You can choose to make games for home consoles or PCs, but each console requires you to purchase a license before you can develop games for it. To earn some extra funding for licenses or projects, outside contract work can be accepted. It's not the most exciting work, but it will pay the bills and help you earn enough money to make games of your own. Once you have the money to make a game, you'll choose which platform, genre, and style of game you want to make. Your own employees can be used to create the story, graphics, and sound, or you can source out that work to other professionals for a fee. A number of factors can affect how your game sells, including your fan base, what time of year you release (holiday season is best), and how the media reviews the game.

One aspect I especially liked about Game Dev Story is how it parodies every major console released for the last 20+ years, and loosely mimics their individual success levels. So when Intendro introduces the first portable game system the Game Kid, you can bet it will be a really popular system to support given the Game Boy's history. However, when they come out with the newfangled Virtual Kid, with its headache-inducing 3D goggles, you'll see it disappear from the market fairly quickly. These are the types of things that you must consider before shelling out the dough for a console license, although one extremely popular game can rewrite the history of a failed console as well.

While the gameplay in Game Dev Story is fun and engaging, the overall presentation falls a bit flat. The 16-bit style pixel graphics are charming and certainly get the job done, but they are a far cry of what is capable from even the oldest iOS devices. The screen size is also oddly small, with plenty of wasted space on the top and bottom. It almost seems as if it's a port from a different device, like an older smartphone or PDA, but I couldn't find any information to that effect. The menu navigations work just fine and the game is still very easy to play, it just seems strange. Another minor annoyance is that despite having an in-game manual hardly any of the game mechanics are explained very well, although the game is simple enough that you catch on after playing for a bit.

Game Dev Story won't impress you with stellar visuals or an iPhone specific feature set, but it is a well thought out and thoroughly enjoyable time sink, and is even more intriguing if you're familiar with the last few decades of video game history. It took me roughly five hours to play through the 20 year career of my company, and at the end of that time your highest selling game and biggest profits serve as the final score, though you can keep playing beyond that time period indefinitely if you choose. There really is just something about this game that keeps me coming back for more over and over again. Further impressions and help discussion are taking place in our forums, and if you've ever had a hankering to create your own video games then Game Dev Story is one you should definitely check out.

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We've been following the development of Aralon: Sword and Shadow for quite a while now. The game actually has an incredibly interesting history which we covered in one of our early previews in that it originally was an amazingly expansive 3D RPG with absolutely horrid placeholder art. Crescent Moon Games got onboard for what they called an "Extreme RPG Makeover", and later provided us with some comparison screenshots showing their work in progress. Today they've released a brand new trailer showing tons of iPad in-game footage which looks amazing:

For an idea of just how far the game has come, here is the original trailer for the game:

For more information on Aralon: Sword and Shadow, stop by the thread in our forums which has taken on a life of its own while RPG fans anxiously await its release. Also, in other semi-related Crescent Moon Games news, Rimelands: Hammer of Thor recently received an update with several bug fixes, so if you own the game you should probably download that if you haven't already.

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As someone who was completely engrossed in the console wars of the 16 bit era, I took great pride in boasting about all the things Sega did that Nintendon't. (Of course as soon as I discovered RPG's on the SNES I flip flopped, but I digress.) The original Sonic the Hedgehog was an amazing game, and the rest of the series on the Genesis was just as good, if not better as they introduced both Tails and Knuckles. Unfortunately, with the advent of 3D gaming came 3D Sonic, and since then Sonic games haven't really been the same. Sure, there have been some fantastic 2D Sonic games for handhelds (the Gameboy Advance ones were particularly good), but the flagship Sonic games have been bad for years. That is, until today.

Sonic 4 [$9.99] has likely been in development for quite some time now, but was only first announced in late 2009 as the cryptic "Project Needlemouse" which was later revealed to be a return to classic 2D Sonic gameplay. Since then, the Sega hype machine has been in full force releasing various mysterious updates to the Sonic 4 web site, teaser trailers, screenshots, and development delays. In other words, Sonic 4 has a lot to live up to.

Sonic 4 is being released in episodes, with today's release as the first installment. Episode 1 comes packed with four zones: Splash Hill Zone, Lost Labyrinth Zone, Casino Street Zone, and Mad Gear Zone. Each of these zones are flavored with themes from classic levels of Sonic's past, with Splash Hill and Casino Street by far being the most memorable. Each zone is host to three acts and a boss fight. After beating the zone's boss, you unlock Time Attack mode which switches the game in to what Sonic games are best at: Going as fast as possible. Also worth mentioning are the two levels that are exclusive to the iPhone, but until the other versions of the game come out it remains to be seen how much different these exclusive portions are.

Controls are surprisingly decent for a game series originally designed with a physical controller in mind. By default you use a virtual joystick of sorts and a single button which handles everything else. Alternatively, a tilt control mode is included, but I found touch controls to feel far more natural. Like previous Sonic games, you can spin dash, and Sonic 4 implements a new lock on system of sorts which targets enemies and obstacles you can jump on to. When the game targets something, tapping jump sends Sonic shooting that direction, allowing you to precisely bounce off multiple enemies with ease.

Since Sonic games are all about speed, performance is arguably just as important as gameplay. Because of this, I busted out my entire library of iOS devices to see just how good of a job Sega did at optimizing Sonic 4 for the iPhone. After syncing the device to everything from the original iPhone to the iPad and iPhone 4, I'm more than a little surprised by the results. Performance obviously suffers with older devices, but Sonic 4 is completely playable even on the original iPhone. Oddly enough, the 3rd generation iPod touch seems to boast the highest frame rate, followed by the iPad pixel doubled, then the iPhone 4.

The level design is classic Sonic, with tons of loops, corkscrews, rings, recognizable power ups, and bonus stages. While Sega seems to have succeeded in bringing back the classic Sonic feel, the content included in the first episode seems like a tease after so much waiting. Sonic 4 is a ton of fun, but it's over before you know it, and without online leaderboards of any kind, I'm not sure how much appeal there will be in replaying levels for higher scores or lower times.

While the performance is certainly good enough to be fun, it's nowhere near the solid 60 FPS I had hoped for– even on newer devices and to make things worse, Retina Display support is nowhere to be found. The first episode of Sonic 4 will also be available on the Wii via WiiWare, the Xbox 360 via XBOX Live Arcade, and the PS3 via PSN in the next couple days. So, if you own any of those systems, you can consider waiting to see how those versions of the game are reviewed, especially considering the fact that Sonic 4 will be in 1080p on both the PS3 and 360. Otherwise, if you're looking for a very fun taste of what a Sonic game should be like on the iPhone, we recommend Sonic 4… Just be fully aware that it will likely leave you unsatisfied with an intense longing for the release of the next episode, and I'm not entirely sure if that's a good thing or not.

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