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Last week we reported that, thanks to Apple recently relaxing its iOS SDK agreement, Manomio submitted a major 2.0 update of Commodore 64, their C64 emulator / game system, to the App Store with BASIC reenabled (and fingers crossed). We're happy to report that the app has been approved and is now available for download [link].

I had a chat with developer Stuart Carnie yesterday, shortly after he received word from Apple that Commodore 64 v2.0 was approved, during which he shared further details concerning this notable update.

With BASIC back, so too is the full C64 keyboard. Carnie is excited about the prospect of users having full and complete access to every game presented, which, in some games, can only happen when a full keyboard is available. And, while it's here in v2.0, the keyboard hasn't gotten any attention since it was removed back in November and, as such, a near-term update will address the absence of a few missing keys (semi-colon, colon) as well as a lock mode for the RUNSTOP, C=, and SHIFT keys, to use in conjunction with others.

A bit further out will come cycle-exact emulation on newer hardware (ARMv7), to resolve digital sound issues with Space Taxi and enable a few free games from Beam Software, such as Exploding Fist.

We've seen a lot of anticipation from readers for an iPad version of C64, and Carnie tells us that it's big on the roadmap. Thanks to Apple allowing BASIC, he really wants to create a great experience for iPad users wanting to experiment with the language, including a finely tuned keyboard and even Bluetooth support. "Think 'full' C64 experience," says Carnie. Due to Manomio's work on the upcoming Amiga classic titles, these more significant upgrades are slated for release next year — and we can't wait.

As for additional games on the horizon, Carnie was able to reveal that they're in the progress of bringing several more Thalamus titles on-board: Creatures I and II and Retrograde. Also on the way is MYTH: History in the Making from System 3, which requires emulated 1541 floppy drive support and a disk-swapping user interface (which is already in the system).

Thanks to Apple for their relaxed stance on the SDK agreement and thanks to the folks at Manomio for giving retro fans like myself so much sweet candy to enjoy.

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Today developer Halfbrick Studios unleashed the newest update to its wildly popular fruit slicing game Fruit Ninja [99¢]. In version 1.4 a brand new multiplayer mode allows you to square off against players online using Apple's Game Center. Upon starting a game, a new option for multiplayer can be chosen which takes you to the Game Center online lobby. From here you can choose to start a new game which will match you up with a random player or you can pick a friend from your Game Center friend list to send them out a request to join a game. As with other Game Center online multiplayer games, matching up is simple, quick, and basically lag-free.

The Fruit Ninja multiplayer mode is also really simple to understand. A series of fruits are tossed up just like they are in a normal game. All of the fruit either have a red, white, or blue border. The blue fruit are your own, and you will gain points including bonuses for combos by slicing them. The red fruit are your opponent's, and if you accidentally slice them it will deduct points from your score. The white fruit are fair game for either party and if you can slice them before your opponent does you'll earn some bonus points for your score. Multiplayer rounds last for one minute, and whoever has the highest score at the end wins. When the round is over you're taken to a post-game lobby where you can choose to rematch against the same opponent or quit back to the menu. It really is very simple but also a tremendous amount of fun. Things get hectic with so much fruit flying around and trying to slice your own while avoiding your opponents.

The Game Center online multiplayer is pretty much all that is in the Fruit Ninja version 1.4 update, but Halfbrick is planning on bringing even more new features soon. Leaderboards and achievements will be added for Game Center, and according to one of the devs in our forums so will post-game lobby voice chat. Halfbrick also hints that the long-awaited "banana mode" is nearing completion and should be made available in the near future. Another interesting point is that the new Game Center functionality runs in tandem with the existing OpenFeint integration. So upon starting the game you'll get a welcome pop-up from each service, and all of the OpenFeint options are still available from the menu just as they were before. Conceivably, you could disable one or the other and just use a single social service, but the online multiplayer only works with Game Center enabled.

At any rate, this new update to Fruit Ninja is a ton of fun, and I've been pleasantly surprised with how well Game Center multiplayer works and how much it can add to a game. If you own a copy of Fruit Ninja for your iPhone, make sure and grab this latest update and head over to the Game Center username trading thread in our forums to add some friends to your list and partake in some competitive online fruit slicing.

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Backflip Studios has released their latest free game to the App Store. The release of Buganoids follows their other summer launches including Tunnel Shoot, Graffiti Ball, and Ninjump. We profiled Backflip Studios' success in the App Store back at WWDC. As of this writing, they report that their games have seen over 48 million downloads with up to 2 million unique players playing each day.

For this latest App Store entry, Backflip enlisted the help of a developer we're very familiar with around here – Dan Bliss. Bliss' App Store career [iTunes link] has been pretty much exclusively dedicated to retro-inspired games, so his involvement made a lot of sense for Buganoids.

The developers accurately describe Buganoids as "Tempest" meets "Centipede" with a dash of "Gyruss" thrown in. The game is a circumferential shooter where your goal is to destroy the spawning bugs coming up from the planet. Your only ability is to shoot down — straight into the planet. So, in order to adjust your aim, you need to walk around the planet. If a bug makes its way to the surface, you're going to have to shoot form the opposite side to take it out. It's a pretty simply mechanic that offers a surprising amount of depth.

The game offers five different weapons across seven different globes and includes 3 levels of difficulty. Like all of Backflip's free games, they are ad-supported by offer the customer the ability to buy-out of the ads.

There's both an iPhone and iPad version of the game, and they are both free. So, no reason not to try it out.

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Earlier this month we took a look at the upcoming bullet hell shooter Phoenix from Firi Games. Phoenix claims to be able to push hundreds of bullets onscreen at a time and still run smoothly even on the oldest of Apple iOS devices. Firi recently sent us a work in progress build of the game and after spending some time playing it seems they are well on their way to bringing another solid entry into the shmup genre on the App Store. The preview build we were given is missing some key elements like music, some sound effects, and graphical variety, but the core of the gameplay is in place and it's definitely a lot of fun.

Phoenix is a little bit different from other scrolling shooters in that there aren't set levels. Instead, the entire game is an endless randomly generated level with a difficulty that scales based on how well you are performing. Think of it as the Canabalt [$2.99] of shmups. Controls are of the relative touch variety, meaning you can touch anywhere on the screen to control your ship instead of it always following closely to your fingertip. Defeated enemies will drop upgrades to your main weapon, health packs that repair your ship, temporary shield powerups, and a super weapon of sorts called the Alpha Strike Attack which gives your ship incredibly strong firepower for a limited time.

I was a bit skeptical about the scaling difficulty in Phoenix at first, but in practice it actually seems to work as intended. When you are doing well the game throws bigger and more difficult enemies at you who will fire faster and spray more bullets in your direction. Scoring also scales with the difficulty, which can be seen with a tiny meter next to your score display. As you avoid damage, the meter increases and so do the points you earn for defeating enemies. Due to this, you score doesn't necessarily reflect on how long you survive in the game, but rather how efficiently you can avoid damage. Scores are tracked by an in-game global and regional leaderboard.

So far Phoenix has nailed the groundwork for an interesting take on the bullet hell shmup. Controls work well, and I was easily able to narrowly dodge the multitude of bullets being fired at me while simultaneously dishing out my own offensive onslaught. Visually Phoenix is looking very nice as well, although having only one scrolling background image got a little old. I'm told that this is something being worked on and there should be some more variety in locations in the final release. The leaderboards are also being tweaked, as right now they are somewhat basic and allow multiple entries per user which really clutters things up for such a high score focused game. Phoenix seems really well suited for something like Game Center, but it remains to be seen if the developer has any plans to implement this.

All in all I'm really impressed with what I've played of Phoenix at this point, and if Firi Games can polish up some of the rough edges in the game shooter fans can look forward to some bullet hell action no matter which iOS device they own. Firi had been shooting for a September release, so barring any unforeseen issues cropping up we should be seeing Phoenix arrive in the coming weeks. In the meantime you can follow along with the discussion for Phoenix in our forums, and we'll take a closer look at the game when it hits the App Store.

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If you were around for the arcade craze of the 80's, you no doubt have seen a coin pusher at some point. Basically, a traditional coin pusher is a machine loaded with quarters or whatever tokens the arcade used with a mechanical "broom" that pushes back and forth at the back of the machine. The goal of the game is to drop a quarter in to the machine, and when it gets pushed forward it pushes all the other coins in front of it forward, hopefully resulting in said coins falling to the collection tray below.

Here is a video I found on YouTube of a real coin push machine in action:

While I'm sure there are more games with similar gameplay mechanics on the App Store, the big three seem to be Dungeon & Coin, Coin Push Frenzy, and Coin Dozer. Each have their strengths and weaknesses, but they're all free so you might as well just download them all if you're remotely interested. All of the games work in a similar manner in that you start with an allotment of coins, you drop them in to the game, then you can either wait for your coins to recharge or you can buy more via an in-app purchase.

When you take a game like a coin pusher machine and compact it down to the iPhone, quite a bit is lost in translation. Coin pushing machines invoke the same emotion as gambling in that you could just be one coin away from starting a massive coin avalanche, or in the case of the video above, making a $5 bill drop in to the collection tray. This feeling is extremely difficult to duplicate with an iPhone game especially since all the prizes are virtual, and feel entirely meaningless in comparison.

Because of this, I really don't recommend buying more coins in any of the games. Only having five coins left and strategically dropping them to try to get more is a lot more fun than I originally thought it would be, and having to wait to get more coins really makes you think about how you're going to use the existing coins you have more. In comparison, once I bought a bucket full of coins as an in-app purchase for a couple bucks, I just started spamming them everywhere because I had so many. Managing a limited pool of coins is just much more fun.

Dungeons and Coins, Free An odd conglomeration of a coin push machine and light RPG elements. You battle monsters by pushing coins of the edge, and unlike the other two games, you’re not limited by the amount of coins you can chuck in at once– often resulting in hilarious coin explosions as the physics engine tries to figure out what to do.

Coin Push Frenzy, Free Packed with the best graphics and physics of the three, Coin Push Frenzy has a bunch of different power-ups, collectable prizes, and additional unlockable coin pusher machines. Currently there seems to be some bugs that effect coin generation, but Freeverse is aware of the issue and an update is on the way but in the meantime putting your device to sleep and waking it back up again should make coins appear.

Coin Dozer, Free Downloaded over 2.5 million times, Coin Dozer has been somewhat of a sensation in Asian App Store markets. With gameplay very similar to Coin Push Frenzy, I like that you can actually see what prizes are coming up instead of just spawning mysterious chests or boxes like the other two games.

I've been enjoying all three of these games much more than I thought I would when I first caught wind of them. Like all freemium games, they're designed to be played randomly throughout the day, and it's fun loading up the various games, dropping a few coins, and seeing what you get. If you remember staring at real coin push machines in the 80's with wide eyes, dropping pocket full of coins and getting nothing but a few coins back, definitely give these games a try.

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Interactive fiction on the App Store has definitely surprised me not only with how well it works on the family of iDevices, but how much I've enjoyed the titles I've read. In the past we've posted a large roundup of the three big series including Gamebook Adventures, Fighting Fantasy, and Sorcery!. More recently we've covered the Choice of Adventure series which are much more similar to R. A. Montgomery's Choose Your Own Adventure books that were incredibly popular in the past.

Book 3 of the Gamebook Adventures series was just released, and both of the previous books also were updated to fully support the Retina Display of the new iPod touch and iPhone 4. In addition, in celebration of the new addition to the series all of the books have been put on sale. Reading the books in order isn't required to enjoy them, but you might as well start at the beginning because they're all worth checking out if interactive fiction is your cup of tea.

Gamebook Adventures 1: An Assassin in Orlandes, $2.99 Set within Orlandes City, nobles are being systematically murdered by a ruthless assassin no-one seems able to catch. Finding yourself thrust in the middle of a large conspiracy, you must make decisions that may put yourself and one other most precious to you in great danger. Can you locate the Assassin in Orlandes before it is too late?

Gamebook Adventures 2: The Siege of the Necromancer, $2.99 Set in the coastal town of Myr, you have returned home after a long Summer in the mines of Durath Tor to find your hometown besieged by strange creatures. A dark presence has taken over the town and you are the only one who can rid the stronghold of Erid Buul, the mysterious new Lord and his ghastly cohorts.

Gamebook Adventures 3: Slaves of Rema, $2.99 Cruelly taken from your homeland of Orlandes, you find yourself in a far off land at the mercy of a gladiatorial arena. Somehow trying to find a way to escape overseas, can you also unravel a potentially dangerous mystery that puts two nations on the brink of war?

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Over the weekend quite a few people have been coming to the realization that Game Center only seems to allow for 500 friends. Per TiPb and a few tweets, once you reach 500 total friends in Game Center the only way to add more friends is to delete an existing friend. While I suspect this won't be an issue for close to 99% of the people who use Game Center, our 4.1 update post, Project-79's absolutely fantastic thread listing all Game Center games, and the actual Game Center usename thread are packed with people trading friend requests.

If you've been going hog wild adding anyone and everyone, you might want to slow down so you don't need to go through your friends list purging people when you've got other people to add later. It's hard to say if Apple will ever increase this limit or not, as it was likely put in place to reduce lag while using Game Center. In comparison, both OpenFeint and Plus+ don't seem to have any kind of limitation on the amount of friends you have, but having massive friends lists in both services has caused problems for me in the past in some games.

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An App Store favorite of our readers who relish the retro is surely Manomio's Commodore 64 [link], the C64 emulation system / game store that does a great job of putting an expanding list of 8-bit classics right in our pockets. We first got wind of Manomio's emulation effort in June of last year, when it was submitted to Apple and rejected, as it was determined to be in violation of the iPhone SDK agreement.

Then said Apple,

Thank you for submitting C64 1.0 to the App Store. We've reviewed C64 1.0 and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it violates the iPhone SDK Agreement; "3.3.2 An Application may not itself install or launch other executable code by any means, including without limitation through the use of a plug-in architecture, calling other frameworks, other APIs or otherwise. No interpreted code may be downloaded and used in an Application except for code that is interpreted and run by Apple's Published APIs and built-in interpreter(s)."

It was the system's included BASIC interpreter that was the sticking point for Apple, it turned out. Manomio disabled (and then removed, as it was deemed necessary) the BASIC interpreter and the app finally found its place in the store, and in Apple's good graces.

Last Thursday, Apple made significant changes to the iOS SDK agreement, relaxing restrictions on development tools used to create iOS applications. One of the areas of the SDK agreement affected was section 3.3.2, the specific part of the agreement that Apple determined Manomio had violated with the initial releases of C64. Upon hearing this news, Manomio CTO Stuart Carnie was quick to read over the new Apple document and found the following, updated section 3.3.2.

3.3.2 An Application may not download or install executable code. Interpreted code may only be used in an Application if all scripts, code and interpreters are packaged in the Application and not downloaded. The only exception to the foregoing is scripts and code downloaded and run by Apple’s built-in WebKit framework.

As can be seen in the new language, interpreted code is now acceptable under certain circumstances. In light of this fortunate turn of events, the developer has put together an updated version of C64 (v2.0) with BASIC enabled. Wanting Apple to be fully aware of his re-inclusion of the BASIC interpreter, Carnie extensively underscored his changes in the Reviewer Notes section of the submission form and additionally sent a courtesy e-mail to Apple on the issue. Since then, the developer and Apple have had further correspondence regarding the update and the response so far is positive. Apple will, understandably, spend additional time reviewing the application, but Carnie says he remains cautiously optimistic.

If Apple does end up rejecting the update, Manomio's plans are to remove the BASIC interpreter, but leave in place the other enhancement that this update brings, Carnie tells us. Those other enhancements include:

• FIX – fix crash when attempting to use the "Download All" feature and many games are queue
• FIX – Add additional controls to Hunter's Moon
• FIX – iPad landscape view is no longer partially off the screen
• NEW – Upgraded to OpenFeint 2.6.1 (includes time-scoped leader boards)
• NEW – iOS 4.1 tested
• NEW – New "Always use keyboard" option to access additional in-game features

Apple's recent update to the SDK agreement gives developers of all manner of apps more flexibility, but is a particular boon to developers of retro system emulators and games. We've got our fingers crossed that C64 with BASIC enabled is given the nod by Apple and that other developers are inspired to bring others classic systems and games to our favorite mobile device family.

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It seems fitting that Sega chose today, the 11^th anniversary of the North American launch of the Dreamcast, to announce that one of that systems most popular and beloved titles ChuChu Rocket! would be coming to the iPhone and iPad. I was an avid Dreamcast gamer back during its heyday, but never actually got into playing ChuChu Rocket. After spending time playing the title today at Sega's iPhone Games Day, I realize what I was missing out on.

ChuChu Rocket! is a colorful J-style puzzle game where you must get a group of cats safely into their rocket ships while avoiding cats. The mice will brainlessly move forward on their own, and make a right turn when running into walls or barriers. You can place various up, down, left, and right arrows around the playfield in order to direct the mice towards the safety of their rockets. Cats behave similarly in how they march around the board, and if you happen to misdirect your mice into any of the cats you'll fail the level. There are limited numbers of arrows per level to direct your mice with, meaning you'll have to think ahead to find the best placement of each one to assure you get your mice to safety.

That's the basic gist of ChuChu Rocket! anyway, but there can be variations of this due to the different modes of play. The Puzzle Mode is the main part of the game, and offers 100 levels of trying to get your mice safely to their rockets. This mode isn't timed, and allows you to think through how to complete the level at your leisure. Then there is a Challenge Mode with 25 levels that each have a specific goal, like directing the mice into the cats rather than the rockets. This mode is timed, and you'll need to get a certain amount of the mice to their goal before time runs out.

Finally there's Multiplayer Mode, which I think has the possibility to really shine on the iPhone. ChuChu Rocket! was the first online capable game for the Dreamcast, back before it was a common feature in video games. Multiplayer is 1-4 players, and you can either join up in teams of two or play free for all style. The goal here is to get as many mice to your own rocket as possible, while using arrows to direct cats into players rockets in order to prevent them from gaining any mice. This mode can be played over WiFi, 3G, or Bluetooth, and if you can't find any friends to play with you can add bots to the game and play against the AI. There are 25 levels to battle on, and the game will be the first from Sega to utilize Apple's new Game Center social network.

ChuChu Rocket! was a total blast when I had a chance to play it today, and it makes me sad that I never tried out this title almost a decade ago. It seems like a perfect fit for the iPhone, with all of the original levels reworked to be touch screen friendly. Gamers have been begging Sega to bring ChuChu Rocket! out on a current platform for years, and finally they will get their wish on the iPhone and iPad. Both versions will be exactly the same except for the iPad version which will contain a same-device 4 player multiplayer mode. Expect to see ChuChu Rocket! sometime in late October.

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