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This week on The TouchArcade Show, we battle through discussion about staph infections, broken necks, and other off-topic stuff to bring you the latest, hottest, and best in iOS news, reviews, and commentary. At the top, we do a new iPad check-in just to see if everyone is still digging Apple’s New Thing. Later, we dive into discussions on Swordigo, Hunger Games: Girl On Fire and Angry Birds Space. Of course, we also get to your user questions.

If you’d like to listen, feel free to do so via the links below. Additionally, you can subscribe to our weekly radio show via Zune and iTunes. It’s the easiest way to get our stuff the second its uploaded to the Internet, so consider your options!

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-044.mp3, 42.7MB

And now your show notes:

GAMES

• Angry Birds Space [$.99 / HD]
• Hunger Games: Girl On Fire [Free]
• Sky Gamblers: Aerial Supremacy [$4.99]
• Fireball: SE[$.99 / HD]
• Swordigo [$1.99]

JARED’S KITTY KORNER

• Nyan Cat Adventure [$.99 / Free]

FRONT PAGE

• Zynga buys ‘Draw Something’ Devs
• Mobile ‘WOW’ Could Still Happen

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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.

TouchArcade Rating:

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I can hardly believe it’s been almost one year since the release of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. Since that time, Sword & Sworcery has earned more accolades than I can shake a stick at, including our own Game of the Year award for 2011, and it redefined what we can expect from a melding of video games, music, art, and storytelling on the iOS platform.

Basically, if you somehow haven’t checked out Sword & Sworcery yet, you can currently get either version of the game at a discount in order to celebrate the one year anniversary of its release (and the vernal equinox, of course). And by either version I mean the iPhone/iPod touch-only version which is on sale for 99¢, or the Universal version which will set you back $1.99 during this one day price cut.

If you don’t currently own an iPad, but are having thoughts about picking up one of those fancy new iPads, then I’d just go ahead and jump on the Universal version. The folks behind Sword & Sworcery note on their website that they’re fully aware of Apple’s latest touchtronic device, and will be announcing something on that topic soon. I drool at the thought of a Retina iPad version of Sword & Sworcery, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Also, you can’t really mention Sword & Sworcery without mentioning Jim Guthrie who did the amazing soundtrack for the game. He’s all over this sale business too, and you can currently purchase the Sword & Sworcery soundtrack in digital form for whatever price you feel like paying. If you’re a collector type, you can also get the album on limited edition vinyl with original artwork from Pendleton Ward (seen above), or as a limited edition cassette tape. That’s right, a cassette tape! All of this is available at Jim’s Bandcamp page.

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So here’s something cool you may not have noticed about the new iPad: If you’re playing an iPhone game (or using an iPhone app) that has Retina Display assets for the iPhone, it will use the higher resolution set of assets. On previous models of the iPad, this functionality required the jailbreak utility Retina Pad. It actually makes a massive difference.

It’s a little hard to do that accurate of a comparison without just looking at both devices side by side, but I’ve doubled the resolution of the iPad 2 screenshots on the left to be the same size as the new iPad on the right. It may seem exaggerated, but the difference is even more noticeable when you’ve got a game like Flight Control running on two iPads side by side.

If you remember, back when the iPad was first released to make up for the complete lack of iPad-specific apps, Apple added the pixel doubling functionality to allow iPhone-specific apps to run full screen. The results were always a pixelated mess, and while it worked, it was a pretty terrible overall user experience. Now, with (almost) every iPhone app coming bundled with Retina Display assets, this new fullscreen functionality actually results in surprisingly decent looking upscaling.

Of course, iPad apps and games that are actually designed for the Retina Display of the new iPad look tons better, but now you don’t need to essentially write off any non-universal app as being a huge pixel party.

UPDATE: Here are some shots of Real Racing 2, an iPhone-only game with Retina Display assets as well as Real Racing 2 HD which is optimized for the Retina Display of the new iPad:

iPad 2 running Real Racing 2 pixel doubled:

New iPad running Real Racing 2 utilizing iPhone Retina Display assets:

Real Racing 2 HD running on iPad 2:

Real Racing 2 HD running on new iPad:

There are differences in lighting between the screenshots since each version of the game seems to render the scene at a different in-game time of day. Also, the iPhone versions running full screen on the iPad have a slightly different UI so I tried to line things up as close as I could. Regardless, the jump in quality is just astounding, and it seems like the image quality between iPhone Retina Display-ready games and non-Retina Display iPad games is pretty similar.

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Alright, I’ll come clean. When I saw OMGPOP’s Draw Something [99¢ / Free] glued to the #1 positions on both the free and paid charts I assumed it was yet another flavor of the week flash in the pan freemium game. Then I tried it, and wow is this game good. I’m not quite sure how they did it, but Draw Something is a perfect witch’s brew of Facebook integration, word scrambling, and asynchronous two-player Pictionary.

It works a little something like this- You start a game with someone (I’ve found games with people you actually know via Facebook seem to be the most fun.) and are given the choice of three words of varying difficulty. You choose one, do your best to draw it, and hit submit. Your friend gets a push alert, sees your drawing, and is given a array of scrambled letters to spell the word with. If they guess correctly you’re awarded between one and three coins, they take their turn, and the process repeats.

The free to play mechanic is actually sort of neat, as you can play the free version for eternity with ads and a limited set of colors to draw with. Alternatively, you can spring for the 99¢ ad-free version. The coins you earn are used to either buy bombs which nuke some of the letter tiles which don’t go to the word you’re supposed to guess or buy more colors to paint with. Sure, you can just do your drawings in the few colors that everyone gets, but to really tweak out your illustrations you need at least a few more paint sets.

The rub of the coin system is that actually earning enough coins by playing to buy bombs and unlock paint sets takes forever, which means you basically have to buy them unless you’re way more patient than I am. But, at the end of the day, I’m having a really hard time getting that worked up over the IAP as the game is worth every penny worth of the $4.99 bucket of coins I bought to unlock a bunch of paint (and the 99¢ I dropped to get the ad-free version).

Recently, the game was updated with additional words, and complete support for the Retina Display of the new iPad. In fact, my original intention of this post was just a quick news article on that fact, but I just can’t help but gush all over this game. Everyone I know is playing it, and recently taking my turns in Draw Something is both among the last things I do before I go to bed and the first things I do when I wake up every day.

So, I’m tagging this as a review, giving Draw Something five stars, and telling you again: Download this game.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Jordan Mechner and Smoking Car Productions’ adventure game, The Last Express, has been slated for an iPad and iPhone release. Mechner just announced the port over on his blog, and carefully avoiding the kind of details we want to know, like, say, what new features it will support. He did, however, reveal that the folks over at DotEmu are behind the port. DotEmu recently handled the iOS version of Another World [$4.99], and did a masterful job.

The Last Express Facebook page appears to be the place to look for new drips of information at this point in the marketing cycle. It’s sporting a few nifty pieces of art, as well as some production-phase images, all of which may or may not be from the original version of the game. We’re investigating.

We’ll definitely be keeping our eyes on this, so stay aboard. We’re like a train. With seats that you, the reader, can sit in. This joke totally made sense at one point.

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Arguably the biggest addition to this year’s version of the iPad (or at least, the most immediately noticeable one) is the inclusion of a Retina Display screen that ups the resolution to a monstrous 2048 x 1536. As anybody who has upgraded from an older device to an iPhone 4 or an iPhone 4S, you know that the Retina Display screen is a stunning upgrade in person and makes all other mobile device screens look inferior in comparison. Such is the case with the new iPad’s fancy screen, it really needs to be seen to be believed.

For anybody upgrading to a new iPad today, or if this is your first foray into the world of the iPad, then chances are you’re interested in having the games that can show off the new screen as you gloat to your friends. Here we’ve compiled a list of games that have been updated for the iPad Retina Display:

• Infinity Blade II, $6.99
• Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy, $4.99
• Galaxy on Fire 2 HD, $9.99
• Mass Effect Infiltrator, $6.99
• Flight Control Rocket, 99¢
• Real Racing 2 HD, $2.99
• Foosball HD, $2.99
• Touchgrind BMX, $4.99
• Labyrinth 2 HD, $7.99 / Lite Version
• Joining Hands, $2.99
• Woodroid HD+, Free
• Letris Power, Free
• Monsters Ate My Condo, 99¢
• Save the Pencil HD, 99¢ / Lite Version
• Tractor Beam, 99¢
• FMX Riders, $2.99
• Lab Solitaire, 99¢
• Parlour Solitaire, Free

There is a thread in our forums that’s constantly being updated keeping track of compatible games or ones that will be compatible soon. If you’re a developer with an iPad Retina Display update coming out, make sure to post it in that thread or post in the comments below and we’ll try to keep that thread as well as this article updated as new games hit. Also, Apple is currently featuring a selection of games and apps in the App Store that are new iPad ready.

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Two games were featured in the recent Apple keynote, and as of a few moments ago, one of them is now available. We’re still on the lookout for Infinity Blade: Dungeons, but right now Sky Gamblers: Air Supremacy [$4.99] is a quick mash of the “Buy App” button away from being in your hot little hands.

We’re downloading it now, but I feel like for the true experience we’re going to have to wait for FedEx to drop off our new iPads tomorrow. I’ve already bartered a deal with my FedEx delivery dude, and I should have mine bright and early.

If you want to chat Sky Gamblers on our forums, guess what, we’ve got a thread for that.

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New iPads are popping up all over Asia, and aside from a variety of unboxing and comparison videos, it seems that the first set of GLBenchmark 2.1 [$4.99] results have come in.

MacRumors explains:

Benchmarking the graphics performance of the new iPad also showed significant improvement over the iPad 2, with benchmarking tests boosting performance from 90 frames per second (fps) to 140 fps in the GLBenchmark 2.1.1 Egypt offscreen test and from 146 fps to 250 fps in the GLBenchmark 2.1.1 Pro offscreen test. Similar data had previously been uploaded to GLBenchmark’s site, although its authenticity has not been confirmed.

If these results turn out to be true, the new iPad could be a absolute beast in the gaming department. Ever since the announcement of the new iPad, our community has been justifiably worried about the graphical performance. I really hope these benchmarks are real, because, wow.

Keep in mind, like most benchmarks, take these alleged results with a grain of salt. We’ll have to wait to get our iPads on Friday to see how the actual real-world on-screen performance actually is.

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