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Eerily similar to getting Samsunged, iPad-owning Tetris fans got EA’d today. iPhone Tetris fans will know this song and dance all too well, as EA pulled it on them late last year. In a nutshell, the Tetris for iPad that you may know, love, and already own now ceases to exist. EA pulled it off the App Store to make room for the “new and improved” Tetris for iPad.

What’s new with this version of the game? A whole hell of a lot of in-app purchase, extending as far as monthly and yearly memberships to the T-Club, which will get you a 15% bonus on top of the lines and T-Coins (the game’s consumable currency) that you earn by playing. Oh, EA’s Origin has also been shoehorned in.

The sad part is that the Retina-ready graphics in this new Tetris look great on the new iPad, and the addition of the “one touch” control method make the game a lot more fun to play. But, again, much like the iPhone version, it makes absolutely no sense why this couldn’t have been an update to the existing game that everyone already paid anywhere between 99¢ and $7.99 for.

It’s really hard to get behind EA as a developer or publisher on the App Store when they’re more than willing to pull these kind of hijinks. It’s one thing to submit new users to a bevy of IAP options, but by pulling the old game from the store entirely, if you lose the original Tetris .ipa file for any number of reasons, getting the game again is going to set you back the full purchase price.

So, if you’ve got the original Tetris for iPad, make sure you keep it backed up in a safe place.

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Into the whole Chthulu mythos but not that interested in obscenely lengthy, difficult board games? Then this is the perfect time to hop in to Elder Sign: Omens [$3.99 / HD]. The dice game made its original transition to iOS with only one Ancient One, Azazoth. As we mentioned in our review, Azazoth has a habit of devouring the lives and sanity of every team of investigators you bring in until you happen on a great team and some good luck.

This week’s long-awaited update brings in two new Ancient Ones. The rather unimpressive-sounding Yig is included, and Cthulhu is available as an in-app purchase. Yig gives players a better starting point. He’s much less malevolent than Azazoth, both easier to seal away and quicker to wake. He also brings with him a few monsters and adventures that are a little less likely to leave your investigators inconsolable, mindless wrecks, or, you know, dead.

For those already adept at putting down Azazoth, you might want to do it again: you’ll unlock a new investigator that should add a little more variety to your playthroughs. Then you can grab the Call of Cthulhu campaign for a much bigger challenge.

The new campaign takes you back through the museum, but this time with a new goal: discovering the intent of some mysterious intruders (they probably want to raise Cthulhu, just sayin’). Once you do that, it’s off to the Pacific Rim to search for the lost city of R’lyeh and prevent the rising of Cthulhu. You do this by collecting extra investigation tokens, so you’ll have to balance succeeding at adventures and hoarding your tokens.

There are 30 new adventures to be had in the Call of Cthulhu campaign, each more horrifying than the last, no doubt. There are also four new investigators that you can use in any of the campaigns, and a fifth that’s unlocked when you complete Cthulhu. That’s a lot of new ways to play, whether it’s solo or pass-and-play with friends. And as usual, this update brings with it all sorts of fixes and tweaks that should smooth out the cultist-hunting experience, like skippable scene transitions and lowered memory requirements.

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So, what’s Chair Entertainment been up to, you wonder? Well, at least part of the studio has been busy designing and implementing Infinity Blade 2’s [$6.99] long-awaited, and awesome-sounding, ClashMobs feature. IGN Wireless just posted a short hands-on piece that details its functionality and otherwise shows off the new-look element.

From what we’re gathering, the early promise of ClashMob has been realized: in it, you and thousands of others take turns beating the crap out of one really big monster in an epic attempt to gather exclusive loot. The challenges come in the form of skirmishes, and seem like they’ll have a mini-game sort of feel to them. One type skirmish has you doing the most damage to a monster that you possibly can within 30 seconds, for example.

IGN details some of its social hooks:

The more connected friends you have participating in ClashMobs, the better benefits you’ll be eligible for. Bonuses like additional combat time, bonus victory cash and extra ClashMob attempts will be awarded to players with more MyMob members.

ClashMobs are due out as part of a larger update next week. Expect new equipment, new monsters, a new gem interface, and “a gem forge” feature. Check out IGN for more info because, man, this sounds like the greatest thing ever.

[via IGN]

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Much to our surprise, non-Retina games and apps on the new iPad aren’t anywhere near as terrible looking at the difference between Retina and non-Retina games and apps on the iPhone. Regardless, it’s still really nice to play games that take full advantage of the over three million pixels of that beautiful screen.

Four great games recently had updates land to boost them into higher-than-HD-land:

• Carcassonne [ $9.99 ] – Review – A practically flawless iOS board game.
• League of Evil 2 [ $1.99 ] – Review – A Super Meat Boy-like sequel.
• Ticket to Ride [ $6.99 (HD)] – Review – Another great board game port.
• Zombie Highway [ $0.99 ] – Review – A slick survival driving game.

So, either mash that “Update All” button if you’ve got these games on your new iPad, or check out some of the above reviews. You really can’t go wrong with any or all of these games.

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It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than a year since Epic Games and Chair Entertainment released Infinity Blade [99¢], an Unreal Engine-powered sword battling RPG that redefined what we could expect from visuals on the iOS platform. They released the sequel, Infinity Blade II [$6.99], this past November, and basically improved upon everything in the first game. However, the original Infinity Blade is still really great, and I still find myself playing both titles regularly.

If you’re one of those people who haven’t dived into the whole Infinity Blade thing yet, now would be a good time to check out the series yourself without much risk, as the first game is on sale for its lowest price ever at just 99¢. Even if you don’t think the Infinity Blade style of game is for you, you at least owe it to yourself to drop a buck on it and find out for sure. I really didn’t think much of the game when it first came out, if truth be told, but I continued playing and somewhere along the line something just “clicked” and I found it almost impossible to put the game down ever since.

You can read our full review of the first Infinity Blade if you need some more insight, and if you like it and want some more, you can check out our review of Infinity Blade II as well. This sale is advertised as an April Fool’s sale, so be sure to grab it quick as there’s no telling how long it will last.

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Back in January, developer Spry Fox released Triple Town [Free], an iOS version of their immensely popular Kindle, Facebook, and Google+ matching game. Triple Town was widely loved by gamers and gaming critics, including our own 4.5 star review, and it was great to see a developer that was able to innovate so heavily in what has become a stagnant match-3 genre.

Since its release, Triple Town has received several updates, but they have mostly amounted to maintenance type stuff. Over the weekend, another new update was released, this time adding some very welcome new gameplay maps.

First is the City on a Lake map, which you can see in the screen below. This gives you the standard 6×6 grid found in the original mode only this time there is an L-shaped body of water smack dab in the middle. Obviously this is going to affect your strategy by limiting the amount of space you have to make matches, since the water is unusable space. It puts a nice challenging spin on the regular Triple Town formula.

The second new map is called Peaceful Valley, pictured below, and is a much friendlier, casual experience. It gives you a 5×5 map grid to work with, but here there are no bears or ninjas to muck up your carefully planned town layout. This is another nice departure from the original mode like City on a Lake is, only instead of being more challenging it’s actually much less challenging, and really lets you concentrate on thinking ahead and making smart matches instead of dealing with those pesky bears.

Aside from the big addition of two new maps, there are some minor tweaks in this update as well. High scores are now saved locally in addition to online through OpenFeint, and can be viewed from the options screen. There is also now an in-game orientation lock for people like me who like to get their game on while laying in bed. Finally, there are even more optimizations and bug fixes.

There is one tiny catch, though. The two new maps are only available for those who have paid to unlock unlimited turns from within the game. If you aren’t one of those people then there’s some good news for you: to celebrate the new update the unlimited turns IAP is on sale for $2.99. I paid the original $6.99 for Triple Town when it first came out and felt it was completely worth it, so from where I stand 3 bucks is a fantastic deal for one of the finest match-3 games available, even more so after this latest update.

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Earlier this month, SNK Playmore released an update for their excellent iOS version of their popular fighting game franchise King of Fighters-i [$6.99]. Unfortunately, there was a huge SNAFU with the update, and for a lot of people downloading it would wipe out all of their data as well as take away 6 characters which had been added in a previous update.

The good news is that SNK Playmore has released a new update for King of Fighters-i that fixes the issue of deleting the additional characters. The bad news is that if your data was previously erased, then you aren’t getting it back. At least not in my case. If you held off on the last update or your data wasn’t erased as a result of it then you should be good to go with the new update. Emphasis on the word “should” because at this point I’m sure anything could happen, so maybe you should proceed with caution.

The strange thing about all of this update drama is that in the end, it looks like the original offending update was merely an iOS 5 compatibility fix, and didn’t offer any new content or features. Sadly, the new update that fixes the old update doesn’t have any goodies in it either, unless you count the fun I’ll be having re-unlocking everything in the game over again.

I know that sounded snarky, but actually King of Fighters-i kicks all sorts of ass, and I really don’t have a problem playing through it all again. Still, I’d love to see an actual content update released someday, and hopefully there’s one in the works. In the meantime, make sure to grab the newest update if you were among those who were affected by the bug.

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I genuinely have no clue how we missed this the first time it hit the internet (in late 2011), but Lego’s Life of George [Free] just blew my mind. This is everything I wanted and more as a Lego-loving child. Check out the video:

In a nutshell, utilizing the Life of George ($26.99 on Amazon) Lego set, the app challenges you to build different Lego objects, then take a photo of them using the camera of your iOS device. The game scores you based on how long it took you to build the object, and a recent (Well, “recent” as in Christmas!) update added 30 new challenges and 45 new models to build.

Has anyone out there tried this? Looking at the charts, Life of George seems to have had some pretty dismal download numbers, peaking at #57 in the family subcategory. That’s too bad, since this is the exact kind of stuff I like seeing the iOS camera doing.

Thanks Marcos!

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