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Here’s an interesting rumor: Apple has worked on a controller for its devices, according to a couple of lines in Anandtech’s iPad review. Here they are in all their glory:

I know of an internal Apple project to bring a physical controller to market, but whether or not it will ever see the light of day remains to be seen. As smartphones and tablets come close to equalling the performance of current game consoles, I feel like the controller problem must be addressed.

Play with us for a second and consider this: what would the easiest way to stop all the fracturing inside of fracturing going on in the third-party controller space? If Apple was to do something with a peripheral, we wouldn’t be writing a story every week about a brand new controller that has its own proprietary code that studios’ need to plug into their software. Everyone would just automatically support Apple’s New Thing, and there would be no other viable market.

But, that’s just reading tea leaves inside of tea leaves. Also, there’s a billion ways to read into this, if it’s even accurate, which we doubt, since a controller compromises that vision of iPad and iPhone. These things were meant to be used with our fingers, not with styluses or controllers or other peripherals.

Then again, who knows. Maybe this will be a “one more thing” at a keynote.

[via MacRumors, via AnandTech]

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This week on The TouchArcade Show, we have to force ourselves out of discussions about WrestleMania and other stupid junk in order to bring you the latest, hottest, and best in iOS. At the top, we dive into several new releases: Hunters 2, Ow My Balls XL, and Motoheroz take center stage. Later, we discuss what Baldur’s Gate for iPad means to us, and we even dabble on the ever interesting subject of why AAA publishers don’t seem to care about the App Store, and why we don’t bug them about it.

There’s much, much more, so feel free to listen if we’ve tickled your interest. You can do so via the handy-dandy links just below, or hey, subscribe to us on iTunes or Zune. We’ll love you forever if you do the latter.

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Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-045.mp3, 42.7MB

… And here are your show notes:

GAMES

• Hunters 2 [$4.99]
• Ow My Balls XL [Free]
• Motoheroz [$.99 / HD]

JARED’S KITTY KORNER

• Kitten Sanctuary [$.99 / Lite]

JARED’S KITTY KORNER REDUX

• Drop a Cat [ Free ]

FRONT PAGE

• Sega To Release ‘PSO’ On iOS… Kinda
• Rovio Gobbles Up Futuremark Games Studio
• ‘Baldur’s Gate for iPad’ Hitting Every iPad and Maybe iPhone, Too
• ‘Dark Meadow’ Free-To-Play Finally Hits

This week’s episode Was Sponsored By Stamp Art Fever.

Stamp Art Fever, Free Stamp Art Fever by independent developer Francesco Chessari is a unique strategy game in the App Store. In the game, you are an art-stamp collector, building your virtual stamp collection by searching over 700 exclusively-designed stamps.

In Stamp Art Fever your objective is to acquire and collect artistic stamps, build up and manage your collection gallery, and trade and compete against other players from all over the world for the most valuable collection. It is not a game just for stamp lovers – if you have a collector mindset and you love art and management games, Stamp Art Fever will strike an immediate chord with you.

Stamp Art Fever for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad is available now in the App Store for FREE.

IMPORTANT EDITORIAL NOTE: Eli will be going to Medieval Times on Saturday, not Sunday. We are sorry for any confusion this mix up may have caused.

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In a universe in which ninja tournaments aren’t just an elaborate excuse to stage a gory multidimensional melee, there’s an adorable little ninja on his way to castle Shimawa on a hill. Hatted and garbed in his finest eentsy weentsy blacks, this little ninja is on his way to the 200th annual ninja tournament. He doesn’t know it until he gets on the stage, but he’s not skilled enough to win, at all.

And thus little ninja’s failure becomes the premise of another game on mobile platforms that revolves around fruit. And while 8-bit Ninja might roll in one of the most dry and tired design elements in today’s market, it does have something to share: simple fun.

At its core, this is a 2D side-scrolling avoidance game. You’ll control little ninja as he dodges an infinite amount of fruit being fired at him from an upset crowd. The more fruit you dodge, the higher your point value at the end of your session. The game ends when a piece of watermelon, cantaloupe, an orange, or a pineapple hits you as you glide from left to right in the cutesy, though strangely not 8-bit, playing area. I doubt that users will ever receive an emotional rise from any of this, but the action model does a decent job of engaging me. Its immediately accessible and blunt, like an everyday simple pleasure.

If this sounds like something you’ve played before, it is. I asked developer DogByte where the idea for 8-bit Ninja came from, and unsurprisingly, it’s a product of its time. DogByte loves Falling Balls and Fruit Ninja and wanted to construct something that took elements from both, but iterated in important, though non-surface, areas.

And that’s the thing about 8-bit Ninja: it does have some interesting points of design buried within its cutesy art direction and simplistic play. For one, you’ll never walk into the game carrying tools that directly interact with enemy fruit. Little ninja can, however, pick up and utilize random items that spawn on the map. Weaponry, like blades or shurikens, act like timed but stationary turrets of fruit-slicing fury. Picking up these items up is a clear choice, and one that adds a light tactical flair to the game’s action. And then there’s the progression system, which is as sweet as chocolate.

“The game features multiple unlockable characters each with unique special powers to unleash, multiple arenas with unique extras and a lot of power-ups,” DogByte tells us. But that’s selling the progression a little short. As you play, you’ll earn EXP for your character, which seems to ramp up his speed and his special ability, which in the case of little ninja, is a shield. There are two other characters to unlock down the line, each of which boasts different abilities.

Also, you’ll collect two forms of in-game currency: gems and eggs. Gems can be used to level up those randomly spawned items so they last longer and have greater effects as you play. You can also buy a nifty one-use hat that acts as armor. Eggs, on the other hand, can be used to buy new characters with new abilities, new levels, or even gems. These constituent parts all feed into each other harmoniously, and really bolster that best-in-class one-more-play kind of tone, similar to, strangely, Call of Duty’s You’ll spend a senseless amount of time powering up my guy and abilities, all in the name of superior stats. This kind of stuff gets in your head in a satisfying way.

Gems and eggs also feed into the game’s free-to-play model, but this title’s brand of functionality appears to be inoffensive. Instead of annoying or nagging, it treats the user as a premium-level consumer from the get-go. The pre-release build of 8-bit Ninja has never made me feel like I need to dip into my wallet to enjoy the progression system and what it offers. Eggs and gems rain freely, though at the cost of ad support. Ads were off in the build I played.

8-bit Ninja might be simple, and the name might be a hair deceiving considering that this plainly isn’t an 8-bit game, but this is definitely something you’ll want to check out later this April when it hits iOS and Android for the price of free.

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No matter what iteration of Apple’s tablet you have, Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition will work on it. In our conversation with Beamdog’s Cameron Tofer this afternoon, the COO confirmed that no iPad will be left behind. He also said that an iPhone port is a possibility, too. “We’re going to have to make that decision of can we do it, is it really worth it,” Tofer told us. “If we can’t do it, if we get it on there and its just not playable, we can’t make a product of it. I’m going to give it my best because I’d love to see it on [the iPhone], but I can’t really make any promises right now.” The license agreement that Beamdog signed that makes this edition of the game possible includes the iPhone.

Downloadable content seems considerably less iffy. While Tofer didn’t specifically state that Beamdog will be churning out content outside of the new adventure and character, he teased that Beamdog isn’t going to bail on the game post-release. “This isn’t just something where we’re going to ship the game and move on. We’ve got big plans,” Tofer told us.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
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Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-Bonus-034.mp3, 20MB

Tofer described Beamdog’s relationship with rights holder Wizards of the Coast as good, and the studios work together daily.

If you’d like to hear more of our conversation, feel free to tune in via the links above. On top of a weekly podcast, we frequently discuss topics with developers on bonus shows like these. Get them while they’re hot! They tend to get cold fast.

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You may not have noticed since it was a short-lived situation, but just before this past weekend Retro Racing [99¢], the fun old-school style top-down racer from Mr. Qwak, was pulled from the App Store. The sole developer behind Mr. Qwak explains the cause for the removal in a blog post on his website, but in short it was due to trying to change his Apple developer account from personal to business and hitting a few snags along the way.

The real bummer is that Retro Racing had just launched last month and was doing pretty well, selling between 1000-3000 copies a day. It sure sucks when that number abruptly drops to 0 when you aren’t expecting it. Mr. Qwak advises not making changes to your developer account during a new release period like this, a lesson he learned the hard way.

The good news is that Retro Racing has returned to the App Store, and before the removal business happened it had received a great new update. First off, the previously iPad-only same-device multiplayer mode has been enabled for iPhone and iPod touch users. It’s tiny, but it works, and I appreciate its inclusion since the local multiplayer is one of my favorite parts about Retro Racing.

The next big addition in this newest update to Retro Racing is 3 new levels, with more levels already planned for future updates. One of our biggest gripes with the game in our review was that it was so short, so it’s nice to see that being addressed. Finally, iCade support has been added to the game, which seems like a perfect fit for the style of game that Retro Racing is. You can see Retro Racing in action on the iCade in this gameplay video from the developer.

I like Retro Racing quite a bit, and am happy to see the developer account situation sorted out and the game back on the App Store. The new update is nice too, though I still have one outstanding gripe: landscape support. The game feels so cramped in portrait mode on the iPhone that I find I can only play it effectively on the iPad. Granted, it feels awesome on the iPad, but still. Maybe that option can be added in the future, but everything else about Retro Racing is top-notch, and if you hadn’t checked it out previously be sure to give it a look now that it’s back.

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The iPhone and iPad port of Interwave Studios’ endless runner rComplex [$1.99] hit the App Store with a tremendous thud last week, as it failed to provide its users with the tools to succeed in the game’s artistically gifted world. On top of needing powers that Professor Xavier would find fascinating just to avoid the game’s obstacles, players had to deal with slow animations and bogus collisions. These problems have been addressed, however, in a hip, new patch. And, hey, the game’s is totally playable now.

Version 1.2 of rComplex, which cleared Apple certification on March 24, pulls the game’s camera back a notch so you can see what you need to avoid without fancy psychic powers. Also, the jump animation has been improved alongside the game’s collision detection. In all, these fixes make rComplex a substantially better, and enjoyable, game. If the early reception kept you from taking the plunge, consider re-considering. Or something.

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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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This is a promo image for Solipskier, which was used when Mikengreg revealed the game to people.

When a game developer creates an awesome game, we expect its next release to be just as good. This works both ways. Greg Wohlwend and Michael Boxleiter of Mikengreg fame have told me what it feels like to have to work on something new with the expectation of past success in the background. It isn’t just noise — it’s having an effect on the development on its new title, Gasketball. From ideas to coding, the shadow of the success of an arcade skiing game called Solipskier [$.99] looms. It makes decisions harder. It ramps up the scope and quality. It’s making the stakes higher at a time when the studio is looking to do something totally different.

We discussed two kinds of pressure: external and internal. Mike and Greg said that they don’t feel any external heat as they build Gasketball. Solipskier got into a lot of hands, but that hasn’t given the studio the kind ravenous base that other great independent developers, like Team Meat of Super Meat Boy fame, enjoy. There aren’t throngs of people  expecting mastery in the follow-up from Mikengreg, in other words, so the bar feels low.

The pressure comes from inside, they expressed. Solipskier’s sales were the best Mikengreg has ever experienced, and the studio desperately wants Gasketball to outperform it in revenue, quality, and audience. Success is mutating their goals, as if the magic of Solipskier could ever be repeated.

“We really want our next game to seem like a step up, which is not actually very different from our early development days, every game we’ve made has been more interesting, more polished and more successful than the last,” Mike told us in an e-mail exchange. “The difference, now, is that we are trying to succeed in terms of a million players willing to pay us, which sets the quality bar dauntingly high for a two-man outfit.”

Gasketball's logo and the placeholder image for the game's web site.

Greg keeps asking himself if it’s even possible to have another Solipskier, and that seems like a fair question to ask. Its development, from idea to prototyping to final release, happened in brilliant flashes of creativity. Gasketball, on the other hand, hasn’t had that sort of conceptual magic. The conceit took longer to come along, and the studio had to throw out a lot of stuff in order to find this game.

“We had to resolve to getting down in the muck and doing the hard work of prototyping, testing, and scrapping everything for yet another prototype that felt like it had promise,” Greg told us. “For a game to really strike all the chords for us it has to be pretty specific.” Solipkier was initially designed as a Flash game. A lot of its systems and mechanics are designed around that platform. Gasketball is a departure, so it took longer to design as the studio learned new tricks.

The idea for Solipskier came from a brainstorming session that revolved around parallax scrolling. Speed and parallax seemed to gel well, so Mike and Greg started prototyping. In a blog post, the duo described the idea for the landscape painting component came as a watershed, “oh my god” moment. With wide-eyes, they went to work. In the end, the Mikengreg created an exhilarating skiing game unlike any other. Instead of focusing on tricks, jumps, and speed, Solipskier leverages style and the emotion that bursts from your chest when you feel like your acceleration is spiraling out of control.

Version ".01" of Solipskier

This wasn’t the duo’s first rodeo. Solipskier was created first and foremost as a flash game, just like Mike’s other titles as a part of Intuition Games. It was, however, the first game of either developer to grab major mainstream appeal. Mike tells me that he realized that this was a truly special project after publishers had entered into a bidding war for the game. An iOS version wasn’t in the picture at the time, but the reality of Flash development changed the tone of the porting conversation going forward.

“We were always looking for the next step out of the Flash world and into a more sustainable market that allowed for us to make larger, more fully formed games,” Greg told us. “The Flash market is great and gave us a way to become better developers while getting paid for it; however, it wasn’t a sustainable business.”

Mike and Greg were working “crazy hours,” and fretting over paychecks when they developed for Flash. Living by the seats of their pants did have its moments. “It was exciting in some ways for sure, but it couldn’t last,” Greg said. “We were lucky to have such success with Solipskier, as it’s allowing us to fully commit to iOS and downloadable titles in future.”

Within the first two months, the iOS version of Solipskier made a little over $70,000, while the sponsored Flash version generated $15,000. On Metacritic, it’s sitting at a 79 average across five positive reviews. Greg tells us that this success “changed the scope” of what it could do with its next game. The duo continued to pay themselves the same amount of money, but Solipskier gave them consistency and the ability to screw up.

Version "0.5." Can you spot the differences!?

“Since Solipskier, we’ve made six or so fairly polished prototypes and scrapped all of them,” Greg tells us. “We could have taken any one of those further but we’d rather call it a failure early and often than find ourselves with a less than stellar finished game that never found that magic we always look for.”

Solipskier’s success and design are weighing heavily on Mike’s mind as he executes concepts on Gasketball. He second guesses a lot and he’s finding it hard to accept praise from friends. “We’ve always seen the flaws in our work first and foremost, but even worse on this project I see things that aren’t there.” Mike elaborated: “My brain is constantly convinced that there are more features I need to discover before the game will be good, but they’re always just out of reach or vision. Every time I implement an idea and it doesn’t make the game instantly better I feel a crush of defeat. I feel a bit like I’m going crazy.”

They’re not alone in this, though.

The Other Guys

Other studios go through the similar issues. Some deliver greatness quickly. After Chair Entertainment released a brilliant Meteroid-style game called Shadow Complex on XBLA, it was able to stoke a similar sort of fanfare and praise with the launch of Infinity Blade. After Simogo released Bumpy Road, it followed it up with an equally charming rhythm and stealth game called Beat Sneak Bandit.

Some studios deliver late. Mobigame released its puzzle game Edge a couple of years ago to insane levels of acclaim and drama. The app was pulled because of a bogus trademark violation just as it was hitting critical mass, and the studio had to fight for the game to get back onto the App Store. Its follow-up, Cross Fingers, released 11 months after Edge. Mobigame’s David Papazian tells us that Cross Fingers is picking up steam. Edge has since been re-released.

Edge on MacOS

“We were very happy with this second game because it is really innovative and completely unique on the App Store. While I am writing, I can see that Cross Fingers is 5th in the Top Free in the US App Store with more than 8 million downloads. However, the game works a lot better now than it did at the start, because we evolved with the market. We added more levels and in-app purchases. Also, the fans are not the same as Edge fans, a lot of women and men from any ages love Cross Fingers, when Edge is more for gamers.”

Papazian says Edge, and its awards, gave his studio legs. The popularity led him to meeting a lot of people, and gave him a good “in” when introducing his work to press. His studio’s pressure was internal, too.

“But you have some pressure, you must do it again and you polish the new game as much as you can, maybe too much. Luckily we did it again, but we did not receive any awards and Apple never featured Cross Fingers on the US store. We had to fight for this success, by updating the game until it finally worked.”

Tiger Styles grabbed a lot of attention with its puzzle game Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. While working on the follow-up, a Metroid-style game called Waking Mars, Tiger Styles’ David Kalina said he felt a subconscious kind of pressure to one-up Spider. It’s a similar feeling that Mike and Greg feel as they create Gasketball. “When you make a game that gets game of the year nods,” Kalina told us, “there is definitely this feeling that EVERY game needs to live up to that standard, which is sort of an impossible bar to try and meet every time out.”

Waking Mars is more about exploration than anything else.

The development of Spider had a sense of urgency to it. He needed the game to succeed so his studio could exist. With Waking Mars, Kalina said that urgency was replaced with the desire to blow everything up in its second game, which again, is something Mikengreg is similarly struggling with. “When you start approaching game development that way, the cost of everything goes up, and the more you spend, the more risky it is to fail,” he admitted.

Waking Mars, in the end, will keep his studio alive. However, Kalina said he wouldn’t pour so much time and so many resources into Tiger Style’s next game. Kalina wants to be able to fail and experiment and do bold things.

“I’d like to release two or three games in the next year and have them all be surprising in some way, and if they don’t happen to set the world on fire, we can be cool with that because we’re at least trying to push in new directions,” Kalina told us. “The worst thing we could do now is to say ‘we have to do something just like Spider or Waking Mars BUT BIGGER…’ If we go down that path, you may never hear from us again!”

On Gasketball

Gasketball has a chance to be stellar. It’s a basketball game that has its users matching their opponents’ last shots. It’s like a digital version of HORSE, except rendered on a fantastical 2D plane that lets you freely move the hoop and shot placement around. It also has special balls and barriers that you can set up to make your shot more Byzantine and advanced. There’s a plan in place to continually update the game as it lives on the App Store.

Surprisingly, nothing mechanically in Solipskier informed Gasketball’s creative direction, Mike and Greg said. In fact, Greg argued that there wasn’t one to begin with. He said Mike came up with the idea for a playful and fun basketball game that was “a bit more skill-based than just a slingshot or pre-mapped trajectory control scheme” game. Moving in a new direction entirely, Gasketball eschews the stark contrasts of Solipskier in favor of a more playful and fun art direction.

Mike walking people through their first look at Gasketball.

Our expectations got the best of us when we first saw Gasketball. It’s just not the game you envision this studio doing at first glance. Solipkier was speedy and sharp, and it had a very specific and awesome rhythm, tone, and style. You’d figure the next game from this studio would incorporate some of these elements. This game is exceedingly friendlier in look and behavior. It’s also more thoughtful and maybe even a shade or two less impressive from a conceptual standpoint.

The stakes are just higher now. But there’s also another reason this project is especially different for the studio. Like with Mobigames and Cross Fingers, Mikengreg see Gasketball as an opportunity to grab an entirely new audience.

“We’re both getting older and want to do more with our lives than spend a hundred hours a week in a dark office,” Mike tells us. “When you start working independently you tend to hold your breath and accept sacrifices to your happiness in the short term for long term gains and we’ve yet to really succeed in a way that really gives us the security to let go and look to the future.  It can get very nerve wracking to think that you only have one shot at releasing each game, and every time you fail to reach your goals you get one step closer to having to quit trying.”

It’s a strange world right now for Mikengreg, as the studio struggles with the success of Solipskier and thinks about a studio-wide transition. But it’s confident about Gasketball and its eventual quality. We are are, too. We’ve seen the game in action, watched the videos, and have even fiddled with a build. The title threw us off at first, sure, but now that we’re comfortable with the fact that Mikengreg are switching focus, we’ve been able to move past our expectations. It’s figuring out a way to do that, too.

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