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A couple of weeks ago, we had a chance to get some hands-on time with the iPhone and iPad version of Puzzle Agent from Telltale Games. The story of FBI puzzle detective Nelson Tethers was coming together nicely for the iOS devices, and now the game is finally available. Puzzle Agent succeeds beautifully in the art style and story departments, but falls a little flat with the actual gameplay offered. If you go into Puzzle Agent expecting a robust puzzle game with a lot of content and replayability, you'll likely be disappointed. However, if you're looking for an excellent mystery to solve with humorous characters and an interesting plot, you'll find a lot to enjoy about the overall experience of Puzzle Agent.

The game starts with Nelson sitting at his desk in the FBI headquarters. You can tell he doesn't see a whole lot of action, as he is surprised to receive a phone call asking him to go on an assignment in the field. The eraser factory in Scoggins, Minnesota has ceased production, and thus been unable to supply the White House with their required allotment of erasers. All inquiries as to what the problem is at the eraser factory have resulted in odd puzzle-related responses from the townsfolk in Scoggins, making Nelson the perfect candidate to have investigate the situation. You'll travel to Scoggins to question people, solve puzzles, and uncover a twisted tale of what has gone awry at the eraser factory.

Puzzle Agent functions similar to other point-and-click adventure games, giving you a scene with various interactive elements to investigate. A circle will emanate from wherever you touch on the screen, and an icon will show up within that circle if something can be interacted with. I love this mechanic as it allows me to easily check an entire area for clues without tapping on every square inch of the screen. Talking with characters in the game is definitely the high point of Puzzle Agent. Each character is fully voiced and has multiple points of conversation to engage in. The amount of personality and humor that the characters exude through the dialogue is phenomenal, and playing through Puzzle Agent is analogous to watching a well crafted animated film. The art style is also very pleasing, featuring the minimalist hand drawn style of Graham Annable who created the Grickle comics and animated shorts.

iPad screenshots (click to enlarge):

The actual puzzles you'll be solving in Puzzle Agent are a mixed bag. Some are interesting, intuitive, and fun while others are just plain awkward and frustrating. Many times it's just not clear what you are supposed to be doing in a given puzzle. A hint system is in place in case you get stuck, so it never really prevents you from progressing, but it can be annoying to spend time trying to solve a difficult puzzle with trial and error when you are immersed in the story. Another frustration with Puzzle Agent is the controls. The game is designed very well for touch screen, but the actual responsiveness when touching or dragging items is not so great. It feels like the game is optimized for the mouse and cursor of the Mac/PC version, and using the larger surface of a fingertip doesn't afford the precision needed to perform some of the basic actions in the game.

There also isn't much reason to go back and play the game once you've beaten it, as the puzzles and story don't change. One important point to bring up is that Puzzle Agent looks far better on the iPad than it does on the iPhone. Many of the textures are blurry and show signs of artifacting, and are a far cry from the App Store screen shots that look like they are optimized for Retina Display.  This leads me to believe that it's just a bug with the release version that doesn't allow it to display the game in the proper resolution, although I have yet to confirm this. It doesn't completely ruin the game, but it is a significant distraction. The iPad version doesn't seem to exhibit this problem, and hopefully the issue gets rectified with the iPhone version soon.

Even with these issues, Puzzle Agent is still a really enjoyable experience. And that's what it really boils down to – it's better served as an exceptional entertainment experience rather than an exceptional game. The art style, music, voice acting, and story are incredibly well done, but the controls and puzzles are pretty hit and miss. If you're looking for something akin to an enjoyable interactive movie, Puzzle Agent serves this purpose really well.

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Games based on comic books have been almost as hit or miss as games based on movies in the past, so I think my cautious optimism for Gameloft's recently released Spider-Man: Total Mayhem [$6.99] was well deserved. Sure, there are some absolutely fantastic comic book games such as the quarter-sucking X-Men Arcade Game, and a few others over the years. Unfortunately, many fall in to the same pit that movie games fall in to where they lean far too heavily on whatever intellectual property the game is based on instead of actually having good gameplay. This is true to some extent in Spider-Man: Total Mayhem, but the whole package is comprehensive enough that it doesn't even seem to even matter.

Like all Gameloft games, many parts of Spider-Man are clearly borrowed from other titles of theirs, and Total Mayhem is no different. A lot of the combat feels like a mix of James Cameron's Avatar [$4.99 / Free / Free] and Iron Man 2 [$4.99 / Free / HD]. Spider-Man is host to the same wall climbing and rail sliding sections as nearly every other 3rd person action Gameloft game, and just like almost all of their other titles, the voice work is laughable at best and face palm worthy at worst. They even managed to sandwich the upgrade system from Hero of Sparta II [$6.99 / Free] in that nearly everything in the game drops orbs of various colors which are then used to upgrade Spider-Man's various abilities.

What saves the whole game is that even though they recycle all these different elements, they seem to combine extremely well to create a game that just feels like a Spider-Man game should. There are endless thugs for you to bash, a heavy reliance on the spider sense, and a surprising array of extremely recognizable bosses that anyone who has read a Spider-Man comic or watched a Spider-Man cartoon will know. The levels included are fairly linear, but feature a great mix of fighting standard enemies, bashing mini-bosses, swinging around, climbing, and the varied events leading up to the boss encounter.

The combat system works well, and even though it feels a little button mashy at times, it's a lot of fun to watch Spider-Man execute his combos filled with punching and web slinging. However, even fighting bosses is a little too easy because of how well the spider sense evasion system works. Whenever you're fighting, when there's an incoming attack you're able to slam your thumb down on a virtual button that appears just to the left of the joystick. A successful button mash kicks the game in to slow motion, and Spidey evades the incoming blow and counter-attacks. It all flows together great, and these spider sense moves usually look really cool.

There's a surprising amount of content in Spider-Man: Total Mayhem, including a hefty amount of unlockables to boost replay value. Twelve levels are included, and in each of the levels are tokens you can pick up to unlock bonus art to look at. In addition, there's an "ultimate" difficulty to unlock as well as a boss rush mode. There's even the black Spider-Man symbiote suit to unlock to play through the game again with Spidey powered up. Also, when fighting bosses you have opportunity to take photos of them, and these photo opportunities seem fairly easy to miss. If you're a completionist, you will be playing through Spider-Man: Total Mayhem many times.

Total Mayhem is loaded with high resolution graphics that look absolutely fantastic on the iPhone 4. It's not universal, but like most Gameloft games it wouldn't surprise me if an iPad-specific HD release was on the horizon. Gameloft did a great job of making a game that plays like a Spider-Man game needs to. The spider sense seems entirely overpowered in combat, and it won't take long for you to get tired of the spider sense quick action sequences that are liberally used in cut scenes, but beating up an endless array of nameless thugs is just as fun as it should be.

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Last week during the QuakeCon keynote address, John Carmack pulled an iPhone 4 out of his pocket and shocked the audience by showing a demo of id Software's next game, Rage, running on the device. Set in a post-apocalyptic world, Rage will have elements of racing games and first person shooters. There's also said to be RPG elements in the game as well, making it sound similar to both the Fallout series and Borderlands. Information is still limited as the game isn't slated to launch until 2011, but either way the following demonstration is beyond impressive:

We've spoken at length with John Carmack at length in the past, where he's mentioned potential upcoming id Software titles such as Doom 2, Quake Classic, and the rest of the id back catalog coming to the App Store. Wondering what the state of all these projects were, we once again pow wowed with Carmack to see what he's been up to since we last spoke.

According to John, id has restructured a lot last year and several people from the mobile team has since been sucked in to other big projects, and they've only recently got the mobile team staffed back up to the proper size for iPhone development. Carmack admits that after releasing Doom Classic [$6.99] he hadn't even opened up Xcode until last month to start working on Rage technology.

Currently, id is completely focused on Rage, and John isn't sure when they will get back to the classic games "even though it makes a lot of sense." He also explained that while both Doom II RPG [$3.99] and Wolfenstein RPG [$1.99] have done well on mobile phones, their performance on the App Store has been less than ideal, leading to the decision to not bring the Orcs & Elves games over to iOS.

Carmack admits he's had a lot of fun working with iOS 4 recently, and wished he had more time to devote to it. And while it's more than a little disappointing that we won't see the classic id games anytime soon, with how impressive the Rage demo was, I'm A-OK with John Carmack and the rest of the id Software team working on the forefront of iPhone development instead of focusing on porting retro hits– I doubt I'm alone in that.

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QuakeCon 2010 is a free four day gaming festival that takes place down in Dallas, TX every year. QuakeCon is host to a massive LAN as gamers from all over bring their PC's to come play games locally, see the latest software and hardware from various vendors, and compete in various tournaments. I've never been able to make it to the event, but it's always been high on my to do list as friends of mine who go every year routinely rave about what an awesome time QuakeCon is.

…But just because we're not in Texas this weekend doesn't mean we're missing out on all the QuakeCon festivities, as to celebrate the event id Software has significantly dropped the price of all of their iPhone games. These games are all worth owning, and highly recommended.

DOOM Resurrection, $6.99 → $1.99 – Everything that is awesome about a modern Doom game applied to a rails shooter. The fact that the game is on rails was a point of tons of controversy when the game was originally released, but we thought it was absolutely awesome in our review and is still high up there among the best looking iPhone games to this day.

Wolfenstein 3D Classic Platinum, $1.99 → 99¢ – It's hard to get much more classic than Wolfenstein 3D when it comes to first person shooters. The iPhone port has a wide array of control options and since its initial release was update to Platinum which includes more maps, more bosses, and even custom map support. There's also a lite version to try.

DOOM Classic, $6.99 → $1.99 – This game hardly needs an introduction, but much like Wolfenstein 3D, this classic first person shooter is right at home on the iPhone with a ton of control options, along with 36 missions to play through across four episodes. Doom Classic has both deathmatch and cooperative multiplayer, but unfortunately you can only play with local players.

DOOM II RPG, $3.99 → 99¢ – This odd spin on the Doom universe still has you killing demons with huge guns, but this time it's in a turn based RPG setting. It's a little weird, but once you get past the whole Doom going from a first person shooter to an RPG, Doom II RPG is a ton of fun. For more details and gameplay video head over to our review.

Wolfenstein RPG, $1.99 – This isn't on sale as it's published by EA, but it's odd to mention the rest of id's lineup without Wolfenstein RPG. It plays very similar to Doom II RPG, although the plot and events that transpire in Wolf RPG seemed substantially more wacky. Check out our review for more information on exactly how many chickens you'll be kicking in this game.

QuakeCon goes all weekend, and these sales will only last for the duration of the event. If you've been thinking of picking any of these games up, make sure you do it by Sunday night.

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The Madden series hardly needs an introduction, as football player turned coach turned commentator John Madden has had his name on football games for the better part of 20 years now. On home consoles, it has become tradition for EA to release a new Madden game each year with updated rosters, a few new features, and other various tweaks. As of tonight, the second yearly installment of the Madden series has arrived for the iPhone.

Last year we took a close look at Madden NFL 10 and thought it was a really great football game for the iPhone. Madden '10 came loaded with all the licensed players, stadiums, logos, and everything else you'd expect of a Madden game along with game modes ranging from single exhibition games to full seasons. The two hip new features of Madden NFL 10 for the iPhone were hot routes allowing players to draw on the screen to control players, and "action control time" which switched the game to slow motion mode allowing for precise maneuvers with the virtual controls.

There wasn't much to complain about with last year's Madden, which really left me wondering what EA was going to include in this year's release to up the ante. The preview we got revealed substantial graphical upgrades including Retina Display support, but it wasn't until I got to spend more time with the game today that I realized just how much more fun the other new features made playing Madden NFL 11.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not a sports person by any means. I don't remember the last time I watched anything more than the Super Bowl on TV, and the only sporting events I've attended have been the result of friends with extra tickets. I play sports games, but generally gravitate towards arcade style sports games like Homerun Battle 3D [$4.99 / Free], or sports games that have RPG elements such as Baseball Superstars 2010 [$4.99 / Free].

I mention this because I generally never really got into a Madden game, or really any full football game. The weak link for me always came in choosing from an endless array of both offensive and defensive plays, with each yearly iteration of football game boasting even more plays to choose from. I don't know enough about the strategy of football plays to have ever felt like I was making a wise decision, and when it got down to it, play selection just always seemed like a needless interruption every few seconds while playing the game.

GameFlow changes all of this, and I really can't overstate how awesome a feature it actually is. Using some new AI algorithm likely designed by a team of people who know way more about football than I ever care to, Madden 11's GameFlow will intelligently chooses plays for you. It is absolutely insane how much this changes both the feel and the pace of the game. Using GameFlow, endless submenus of plays are a thing of the past. Instead, you just play football. The plays it selects work fairly well too, or at least, much better than my typical choice of plays which usually alternate between the hail mary and the fake field goal kick– both favorites of mine.

What's also shocking is how much this actually speeds up playing the game. You can tap the screen to skip through the extra animations, victory dances, and other junk and play through a whole football game in what barely seems like any time at all. Of course, if you are the kind of person who knows exactly what every play does, all you have to do is flip GameFlow to off and you have complete control of each and every play.

The hot routes functionality from last year has been expanded, and at any point during the game you can pause the action and draw paths for your players. If you're playing offense and do this, you can save those routes as an audible, or if you're playing defense you can just send your players wherever you want. The whole system works very well, and by drawing lines you can send dispatch players to man to man duty, follow the ball, or really anything else. This really makes defense a lot more fun because you can now actually sensibly direct your team around instead of just tabbing in between players and chasing after whoever has the ball. Check out my top secret LOL offense:

As mentioned already, the graphics of Madden NFL 11 look fantastic. The stadium crowd has actual depth now, and they even wave around signs for the home team. The included weather effects look good, and overall it seems like all the player models and animations are more detailed. Every texture in game also seems to have been substantially improved, making going back and forth between 10 and 11 seem fairly drastic.

Madden 11 also is host to some other noticeable tweaks over last year's as well such as controls that feel a little better and a spruced up interface. There's an in-game store which currently is home to a free roster update, but seems like it might be used for future DLC . Finally, Madden NFL 11 behaves beautifully as an iPhone game, gracefully saving your game and resuming quickly when you load it again.

Like last year, the inevitable comparison between Gameloft's NFL 11 [$6.99] and Madden NFL 11 will likely take place in our forums for months to come, but in my opinion, Madden wins by a landslide. Gameloft's offering seems to run at a higher frame rate, but Madden looks better overall– rspecially when it comes to how the crowd and stadiums are rendered. Madden NFL 11 has local bluetooth multiplayer while NFL 11 is single player only, and the commentary in Madden seems less repetitive than Gameloft's. Where Madden really wins though is in the extra features. With how much I've fallen in love with GameFlow I can hardly bring myself to deal with NFL 11's play selection, and Madden's total defensive control makes playing defense in NFL 11 flat out boring in comparison.

At the end of the day, people who like Madden games likely don't need this review, or anything more than the iTunes link to download the game for that matter. Who I really expect to sway into checking out Madden NFL 11 are the casual sports fans, or people like me, who are vaguely interested in sports games but found the various technicalities of football games to generally be annoying. GameFlow fixes all this, and I can hardly believe that I spent the majority of my day today playing Madden 11 on my iPhone– not because I was trying to power through it to write a review, but because I was actually really enjoying a football game for the first time since Mutant League Football on the Sega Genesis.

The iPad and iPhone versions are essentially the same aside from the price difference and UI tweaks to make the controls more comfortable for playing on the iPad. The iPhone version is workable with pixel doubling, and the only thing you're really going to be missing out on is the upcoming "Vintage Voltage Football" mode which is basically just Super Shock Football [$1.99 / Free] with Madden graphics.

International App Store Link: Madden NFL 11

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In a surprising move, 2K Games has dropped the price of Civilization Revolution from $6.99 to Free for one day. We looked at the game back in August when it was first released for the iPhone:

Civilization Revolution is the latest iteration of Sid Meier's dynasty of games where the player is simply tasked with the goal of building an empire to stand the test of time. Like previous Civilization games, Revolution is a turn-based strategy game where you take command of a primitive civilization from their meager beginnings to complete world domination. Civilization Revolution was originally released in 2008 to strongly positive reviews.

Pick it up for free while you can.

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The newest iteration of Gameloft's officially licensed football game NFL 2011 [$6.99] was released on the App Store this past weekend. While featuring a significant graphical update and some other enhancements, this new version appears to be largely unchanged from the NFL 2010 that was released a year ago. Not necessarily a bad thing, as we enjoyed last year's version, but that was partly due to the “wow” factor of having such a comprehensive football game running on a mobile phone. Since that time, and especially with the release of the new iPhone, the bar of expectations for what is possible in a mobile game have been raised significantly. Because of this, NFL 2011 feels a bit underwhelming.

The improved graphics in NFL 2011 do look great though. The blocky and low-poly player models of NFL 2010 have been largely improved. What really stands out are the excellent animations in the game, replacing the somewhat stiff and repetitive animations from last year's version. Players now exude a lot more personality with celebrations after what can seem like every play. It goes without saying that everything looks all that much better running on an iPhone 4.

Another improvement in NFL 2011 is the move to replace some of the use of virtual buttons (which was complaint we had in the original game) with more natural iPhone specific controls. Certain moves will be performed with a tilt of the device rather than an onscreen icon, and kicking takes the form of swiping on the screen rather than the traditional power meter set with button taps. Also new this year are the addition of replays from the pause menu after any completed play and the removal of the “time freeze” element when dictating what actions your player performs on the field, which gives the game a much more natural feel.

NFL 2011 seems to be a decent package if you enjoy football games, and if you liked last years version then you should definitely enjoy this one as well. If you're looking for a completely different experience, you'll likely feel disappointed. Not coincidently, this release comes just over a week before the release of EA's Madden NFL 11, which we recently previewed and is set to release on August 10th. Last year it seemed that all the positive reactions to Gameloft's NFL entry were trampled by the bull that is the Madden franchise. We'll see if history repeats itself next week when both NFL titles are finally available.

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As we noted in our EA Hot For The Holidays roundup, the successor to the original SimCity for iPhone SimCity Deluxe [$6.99] is now available in the App Store. While not exactly a sequel, this new version is more of an enhanced version of the original iPhone iteration. From our preview of the game:

This sequel of sorts is basically little more than a makeover of the original SimCity [$2.99], it's a little disappointing that EA is releasing this as a separate game instead of applying these fixes to the existing one, but I suppose you could say the same about most EA sequels. SimCity Deluxe is going to have seasons (and disasters to go with each) as well as graphics that look a lot like SimCity 4 for the PC. In the game you will finally be able to modify the terrain with touch controls, which actually was a lot of fun. The new UI is also substantially less clunky, although still suffers a little just because there's so much you can do in the game and packing all those functions in to a sensible touch-based interface is never going to be easy.

After spending a little time with SimCity Deluxe, it certainly is an improvement over the original, and works rather well on the iPhone touch screen. If you have yet to own SimCity on your device and were thinking that the cheaper original version would suffice, that doesn't appear to be an option anymore. Curiously, the original SimCity for iPhone seems to have been removed from the App Store to make room for its deluxe big brother. I'm not sure if this is a permanent removal, but for the extra few dollars you're probably better off going with this newer version anyway.

Oddly enough, SimCity Deluxe isn't universal, and an iPad version of the game is nowhere to be found in EA's lineup of upcoming games that they've announced. The larger screen seems to be a natural fit for a game this complex, and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that EA eventually realizes this as well.

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The original Hero of Sparta [$1.99 / Free / HD] was a technically innovative hack and slash adventure game released in late 2008 when the App Store was still in its infancy and large-scale 3D games were few and far between. In our review we called the original "visually impressive and fun". In the Hero of Sparta series, you play as Argos, a Spartan hero, who has to make his way through endless hordes of monsters. Much like the God of War trilogy which the Hero of Sparta series is heavily "inspired" by, along the way you'll fight massive bosses, execute finishing moves via touchscreen quick action sequences, and eventually master the combo system to turn opposing enemies in to pulp.

Hero of Sparta II [$6.99] offers a significant graphical improvement over its predecessor and is packed with new powers and weapons to use while murdering everything that moves. If you enjoyed the first installment, it's safe to say you will also have a blast with the second one as well. If you haven't heard of the Hero of Sparta games before, give the lite version of the original game a spin to see how much you enjoy it.

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