TouchArcade.ru

In January Namco Bandai released an excellent iOS version of their classic 3D fighter SoulCalibur [ $11.99 ]. A a fan of SoulCalibur on Dreamcast more than a decade ago, the faithful iOS port was a great way to re-experience the game. The virtual controls worked well, the graphics were crisp and high-res, and the finely-tuned mechanics withstood the test of time.

However, as good as iOS SoulCalibur was, it was strangely devoid of any kind of multiplayer, a key component for a fighting game. Over the weekend, Namco Bandai looked to rectify that omission by releasing a new update that adds Bluetooth multiplayer to SoulCalibur. The new versus mode works just as well as you’d expect it to, and squaring off against an opponent face-to-face is just as fun as it was back in the day. It really is crazy just how well SoulCalibur has aged after all these years, especially as a competitive game.

One important thing to note though is that multiplayer isn’t compatible with the iPod touch. SoulCalibur is a pretty technically demanding game anyway, and even upon release required at least an iPhone 4, iPad 2 or 4th generation iPod touch to run. It is likely the lower amount of RAM in that iPod touch device that is the reason multiplayer is a no-go.

If you’re a SoulCalibur fan in the iPhone or iPad camp then get to updating your game and go search out a worthy opponent. Believe it or not, SoulCalibur is actually on sale right now to celebrate the update, down from its normal price of $14.99, so if a lack of multiplayer caused you to pass on the game before now is not a bad time to finally pick it up.

[source]

This week on The TouchArcade Show, we do another stellar job staying on topic — for the most part. At the top, we spend a good amount of time to the latest releases: Epic Astro Story, Puncho Fighto, and Burnout: Crash eat up a lot of our games section. Topics like the recent Kickstarter explosion and Magic: The Gathering on tablets round out the show. We also answer quite a few user e-mails, which we always appreciate.

If you’d like to listen this week, go ahead and do so via the handy links below. If you would rather get these things the easy way, feel free to subscribe to us on iTunes or, hey, even Zune. The subscription is free and automatic. It’s a win-win. Or something.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-047.mp3, 42.2MB

Here are your show notes:

GAMES

• Burnout Crash! [ $4.99 ]
• Puncho Fighto [ $0.99 ]
• Epic Astro Story [ $3.99 ]
• Blast Ball [ $1.99 ]
• Infinity Blade 2 [ $4.99 ]
• Kitten Sanctuary [$0.99 / Free ]

JARED’S KITTY KORNER

• LoveCat [ $1.99 ]

FRONT PAGE

• ‘Magic’ Coming To iPad
• 2XL’s ‘XLR8′ Isn’t a Game, But it Makes Driving Feel Like One

Also, this owns, thanks @mikemeade:

[source]

Do you remember the Bullet Time Wars of the early ’00s? Every game had to have it, and not one of them got it right. We lost a lot of good games during that time; lost to the unnecessary addition of a dumb movie gimmick.

But then Max Payne [ $2.99 ] was released, and overnight the war ended. There was no disputing that, finally, a game had gotten bullet time right. That day was almost 11 years ago, and since then the world has changed. Games still implement bullet time, most of them successfully, but they all owe it to Max Payne.

For those of you who somehow missed out on it the first go around, Max Payne is revenge story wrapped in a noir coat that is so thick that the game occasionally comments on how warm it is. It serves as almost a noir for dummies book. Can’t sit through Chinatown? Max Payne will teach you all there is to know about noir.

But, for as silly as the writing occasionally is, it is still a good story. You will run into some truly gut-wrenching moments before you hit the 5 minute mark. But I wouldn’t dare spoil an 11 year old game, so I’ll stop right there. If you want to know more… Well, I assume you know what to do.

There is little sense in reviewing an 11 year old game that won nearly every award it could when it was first released. It’s well established that Max Payne is a fantastic game, but it is also ELEVEN years old. That means it comes with all the baggage that an 11 year old game has earned. So, rather than focusing on Max Payne the game, lets talk about Max Payne the iOS port instead.

This is the absolute best this game has ever looked. On the new iPad, the game sees resolutions and clarity that were pipe dreams when it first came out. Granted, the textures are low resolution, but they still look pretty good rendered on the iPad’s Retina Display. The between level “comic book” sequences are not Retina resolution, but it’s not a great mystery as to why.

I doubt anyone at Remedy envisioned people wanting to play the game at ridiculous resolutions, so it’s likely that they never created super high-resolution assets for anything. But, thanks to how well everything upscales, they still look pretty good. While it didn’t age as well as Grand Theft Auto 3 [ $4.99 ] did visually, it is still a great looking game. Bonus points if you can make it through the whole game without giggling at Max’s facial texture.

Controls are about what you would expect from virtual joysticks. Max feels a bit floaty when he moves, and looking around can be a pain, but the game is still very playable, thanks in part to a pretty competent auto aiming system. I know a lot of folks scoff at the idea of auto-aim, but it really does make the experience more cinematic and fun. When I turned off auto-aim, the results were decidedly less than fun (and often borderline frustrating), but your mileage may vary.

The real problem with the default virtual control layout is that the hit zones for buttons are too close to each other. Because you are aiming at a nondescript part of the screen, rather than a button, you will often find yourself jumping when you want to enter bullet time. A minor problem once or twice, but growing in annoyance significantly over the course of an 8 hour game. Like GTA3, you can move the buttons around on screen in the options, but you never really shake the feeling that this is a game made for a controller (or keyboard and mouse).

(Original E3 2011 trailer for PC version.)

Playing Max Payne to completion takes anywhere from 7 to 10 hours. If you intend to make that journey, please be sure to manage your own save files. Yes, Max Payne offers an auto-save, but I found it to be unreliable at best, and downright abusive at it’s worst. Unfortunately, games ported from PCs seem to bring more quirks than if they were ported from a console. Max Payne is from a time where we didn’t trust the game to save for us, so we took that responsibility upon ourselves. Max Payne for iOS has ported that feature spectacularly, so make sure you adjust your habits accordingly.

I’ll be the first to admit that I was super stoked about Max Payne coming to iOS. It was a game I loved on the PC 11 years ago, and I wanted to see how rose the colored glasses were. The answer is, surprisingly, not that rose. While it looks old, and has virtual joysticks, Max Payne is every bit the great game it was 11 years ago. I wish Rockstar had put more love into the port, but for costing me 1/25th of the original game, I’ll cut them some budgetary slack.

Now if I could just get rid of these war flashbacks, I’d be in business.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

This afternoon, Aquaria [$2.99] joined the growing list of iPad apps that support the new iPad’s high resolution screen. And in celebration, publisher Semi-Secret Software is offering it for $2.99 instead of its usual $4.99 price point. Semi-Secret is thinking that this is the first time Aquaria has supported 2048 x 1536, so scribble another note in your “Perks To Owning Aquaria on iPad” column if you’re playing along at home.

Here’s what it looks like now, by the way:

This sale ends this coming Sunday, so you’ve got some time to act before it ends. We suggest you fill this extra time by playing Aquaria so… maybe you should just jump on this now. Or something.

[source]

The latest update to Mass Effect: Infiltrator [$4.99] isn’t enough to make the most soured Mass Effect fans out there happy with Iron Monkey’s vision, but it has added a shred of new content and a couple of much-needed tweaks to the core game.

The most attractive feature of version 1.0.3 is the addition of manual aiming. From the options menu, users can now disable Infiltrator’s funky “tap-to-aim” mechanic and choose what to kill and when manually. The automatic aiming mechanic, which has been “improved” in this update, too, felt broken at launch, and made tough fights way tougher.

This update also works in more in-game rewards and has incorporated facial scarring for Ezno. Make too many Renegade choices and the world will know, as he’ll slowly morph into a space version of Freddy Krueger. New iPad performance tweaks have been added, too.

Interestingly, this update also works in a bonus mission that has users playing as a Turian attempting to escape a Cerberus medical bay. Aside from the mechanical issues, our biggest problem with Infiltrator is that it’s just a shooter. Mass Effect is about character, emotion, and story, and Infiltrator never latched onto these aspects in any meaningful way. Missions like this are a step in the right direction.

[source]

Reviewing games you have a history with is always difficult, especially when they’re derivative titles from a series you hold dear to your heart. Looking back on it, at some point I’ve owned each of the eight Burnout games that make up the franchise going back to the original that was released all the way back in 2001.

If you’ve never played a proper Burnout game (which is a problem you really should look into solving) here’s what the series is all about- Imagine a high-octane arcade racer that not only has a fabulous sense of speed, but takes the typical car damage system dozens of steps further into a car crashing system. Instead of merely beating the competition to the finish line, gameplay focuses on making sure your your opponents never actually make it there.

Subsequent sequels took this many steps further, even evolving into entire game modes that focused entirely on orchestrating the most elaborate pile-ups you can. It’s from these game modes that Burnout Crash [ $4.99 ] is distilled from, making its original appearance on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN late last year.

In Crash, the familiar racing game camera angle is replaced with an overhead birds-eye view of your car. The game consists of a series of intersections, each with slightly different layouts and traffic patterns, and you need to unleash as much damage as possible. Initially, you drive in, and slam into some cars. Cause enough damage, and you’ll be able to explode again, and vaguely control where your car gets blasted to in the process. This continues until you’ve either let five cars escape off screen, or you’ve reached the damage threshold for the level.

Burnout Crash perfectly embodies the horrid cliche of “Easy to learn, but difficult to master.” It’ll only take you a few tries to get a handle on the game physics, but actually learning the nuances of where to try to stack up cars on each intersection and how to position your own car to not mess up existing piles almost turns Crash an entirely unexpected physics puzzle game, especially if you jump into it expecting something like previous Burnout titles.

Gameplay is further spiced up by special cars that appear such as a wave of police cars that block part of the intersection to the insufferably terrible driver Dr. Beat who will restore one of your missed cars if he survives his drive on and off screen. (However, as Penny Arcade points out, he’ll crash into anything.) Additional game modes also add a decent amount of replay value.

My first experience with Burnout Crash was on Xbox Live Arcade, as a $15 title. Like most Burnout games, the overall energy of the game was amplified by a real soundtrack, heavy amounts of voice work, and a fabulous tutorial, creating an absolutely fantastic first impression. Those last two things? Nowhere to be found in the iOS port of the game. I could understand cutting a lot of the voice overs if EA was shooting for the 3G download limit, but the game weighs in at 146MB currently. The lack of any kind of tutorial is even more puzzling, and has left players in our forums confused as to what you’re even supposed to do in the game.

That’s not what has me personally disappointed the most though, as I already know how to play and usually play iOS games with the sound very low or off so voiceovers don’t do much for me. What I’m bummed about is that for whatever reason, EA thought the best (and only) way to control the game was via a weird system of swiping gestures to move your car around after each crash breaker explosion.

If you can “see the Matrix” behind Burnout Crash, it’s apparent that what you’re playing is a very elaborate and cleverly disguised ball-rolling game. Imagine something like Labyrinth 2 [ $4.99 ], except instead of freely rolling the ball you can only move when a crash breaker triggers, and instead of trying to make it to the end, you’re trying to roll into as much as you can. It’s because of this that tilt controls, even when playing on the Xbox 360, felt like they’d make the most sense- as they often do in top-down games.

On the technical side of things, given just how long EA has been working on the iOS port of Burnout Crash, there’s some odd flaws. While I’m thankful the game is universal, some of the textures in game are blatantly low-resolution on the new iPad. I’ve experienced Game Center weirdness, with popups often telling me that the game is not recognized by Game Center. Additionally, most intersections start with some noticeable frame rate drops as you race towards them. Also, the little springy “boing” sound that plays each time you swipe the screen really needs to go.

Admittedly, I’m probably being overly nitpicky because of my experience with this game. However, the things Crash feels like it’s missing don’t make a whole lot of sense, especially when it comes to the game’s tutorial. Regardless, I’m still going to play through Crash over and over again on my iPad, with my fingers crossed that EA eventually addresses some of these things. And even if they don’t, if you’ve never played the console version, I’m not even sure you’ll care or notice.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

While iOS has become a haven for a large variety of strategy games, good RTS titles seem to come few and far between. Enter Amoebattle [$4.99], the latest title from Intrinsic Games and Grab. Hitting all the cues, Amoebattle does a good job providing a full RTS experience while making its own mark on the genre.

Amoebattle’s tale centers on your role as a new microbiologist exploring the microscopic world with the Amoeba Control System along with your AI assistant AMI. After some introductory research, you encounter rogue amoebas disturbing the ecosystem, which leads to a quest to discover the origin of these hostile beings. The overall narrative does an adequate job moving the story forward while not detracting from the overall experience. For most RTS titles, that’s all you can really ask for.

When it comes to gameplay, Amoebattle implements the standard RTS mechanics while infusing it with some novel elements. Missions are primarily linear advancement, with some stealth, defense and open-ended objectives thrown in for good measure. Amoebattle is also very unit-centric – there aren’t any buildings to produce units or gather resources.

Instead, your amoeba can simply replicate if they have a full ‘Food Point’ (FP) meter and sufficient power. FP can be acquired in a variety of ways depending on if your amoeba is an omnivore, carnivore, or herbivore (each classification also affects other attributes). For example, carnivores gain FP exclusively through attacking other units while herbivores can eat various plants to build FP. While you can use a full FP meter to reproduce, it also bestows increased stats, adding to the strategy.

Power, meanwhile, is a secondary resource that is slowly produced in the background (but can be sped up by capturing fossil artifacts). Players can utilize power to replicate or to launch a variety of probes onto the battlefield. Probes range from slowing down opponents to infecting them with a long-term poison and work well in providing additional battle options.

In addition to replication, your amoebas can also mutate into a variety of different units. Initially the unit pool is small, but as you journey through the campaign you unlock stronger and more varied units, each with their own stats and appropriate strategies. Mutation also requires power, meaning you can’t just wield it arbitrarily.

The above elements lead to a surprisingly deep gameplay experience. Each mission provides suggestions for completion, but as you unlock more options players can begin to experiment with different play styles. Whether you choose to bum-rush with close-range carnivores or utilize a balanced approach with ranged and support units, Amoebattle certainly keeps your options open.

Props also go to the control scheme, which offers an intuitive approach that works well on both iPad and iPhone. Amoebattle uses a combination of taps, drags, and scrolls (single and two-fingered) to control all aspects of the game. Admittedly, it’s a bit tougher to control on the smaller iPhone screen, but it still works surprisingly well. As expected, the game works best on the larger iPad screen.

There’s something to be said about Amoebattle’s difficulty. In short, this is one challenging game. The tutorial and introductory levels do an excellent job introducing core concepts, but once you reach the middle tier of missions, the game quickly stops holding your hand and leaves you to figure out the increasingly tough objectives. It’s important to note that despite the challenge, Amoebattle’s levels are fair. Just don’t expect to steamroll through all the levels with relative ease (especially if you’re new to RTS games).

Amoebattle’s other weaknesses are few, but do hold the game back from RTS perfection. The lack of a skirmish mode hurts replayability, as the game certainly has a deep enough system to make it enjoyable. The same goes for multiplayer, which would be perfect for this style of RTS. As it stands, Amoebattle has a decent amount of content with its campaign, but it would have been nice to have more to do outside campaign completion (besides achievement hunting).

Regardless, Amoebattle succeeds wonderfully at creating a touch-based RTS for iOS. When you take into account the deep gameplay, beautiful visuals (iPad-retina compatible, no less) and approachable control scheme, Amoebattle is a title well worth checking out and joins the short list of great iOS RTS titles.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]