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Like most geeks, I've spent some time thinking about the best place to go in case of a zombie apocalypse. My pick is always Costco — food, weapons and big solid doors all in one place. Since that plan is unlikely to ever have any real world value, I've taken the opportunity to barricade my local big-box against the zombie horde in Please Stay Calm [Free], a new location-based MMO from Massive Damage Inc.

If you've ever played a game like Mafia Wars, you'll have some idea of what to expect in Please Stay Calm. It's similar in design, but it takes place in your neighborhood. The world has been overrun by zombies, and you're a survivor. You'll need to scavenge for resources, build up a safehouse and a good team, and gun down the undead — and a few of your fellow survivors.

The world Please Stay Calm inhabits is one that's on the edge of destruction. Zombies are everywhere, the government has been useless, and the survivors are on their own — almost. The app ties you into the CVC, a network of survivors that connects you with missions, a black market and chat. While this is all done up in a simple informational interface, presenting the package as an app for survivors adds a nice bit of immersion.

As a survivor, two tasks will occupy most of your time: hunting zombies and scavenging for supplies. As you explore your neighborhood, you can visit nearby stores and landmarks. Without leaving your home, you can investigate the corner store across the street and strip it of a portion of its useful resources. Searching for supplies opens a top-down minigame where you seek out static dots that represent supplies and cash while dodging the dots that represent zombies. Hunting zombies brings up another minigame. Two dimensional zombies assault your screen while you try to pick the right weapon to use from a flashing selection screen. Both are reflex tests, so care and quickness will see you through alive.

Winning a fight or surviving a scavenging hunt rewards you with cash and supplies, two of the many, many numbers you'll need to pay attention to in this game. Some supplies can be taken to the black market and sold for cash, others are a currency on their own. You've also got health to worry about, stamina, and energy — you can't investigate without energy. Then there are credits, the premium currency for Please Stay Calm. They can be converted to supplies and cash. Supplies upgrade equipment and pay for health packs, credits pay for items that restore stamina and energy (and public chat, strangely), and cash gives you equipment. Lost yet?

Eventually your assortment of bars will refill for free, so the patient among us can play without paying. Then you can go back to hunting. If that was all there was to the game it would get old fast, but there's always more to do. Like any MMO, Please Stay Calm is better with friends. You can choose one nearby location as your safehouse and use your supplies to upgrade it. Not only do you end up with an awesome stronghold, but its stats effect yours in battle. More friends in your safehouse means more people to cooperate with, and everyone knows you can't survive a zombie apocalypse alone.

There are a few other things to do in Please Stay Calm. You can duel other players to earn cash, supplies and experience. As you level up you'll get access to missions that carry the storyline and offer great rewards. You can build outposts and harvest them for cash or supplies. And Massive Damage Inc. has more planned: they've hinted at turf wars, crafting systems and more of everything else. Still, without those things Please Stay Calm feels like it's still a bit beta, still somewhat unfinished.

The location-based MMO is a genre still growing into its own. Location-based anything is still quite new — only since we've had GPS technology in our phones has it really caught on. Please Stay Calm is a fun example of where the genre is today, but ultimately it feels like a novelty. You can tie it into Foursquare, and then it's a more social novelty. If, like me, you're waiting for the killer app of this genre, you'll have to keep waiting, but Please Stay Calm is a satisfying way to pass the time till then. If you want to share your zombie-slaying exploits on your way to the top of the leaderboards, stop by our discussion thread.

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As far as board games go, Monopoly can be found somewhere near the bottom of the barrel. It's simple to play but hard to keep track of, it takes forever, and someone always steals from the bank. Usually it's the banker, who's probably just looking for a bit of entertainment to offset the monotony. Someone in Korea took the fundamentals of Monopoly and made BlueMarble [$0.99] with them, which is, well, equally unfun, according to the fine people at BoardGameGeek. Thankfully, when the folks at M&M Games Inc. adapted that game for iOS, they kept only the basics — and then they threw in card collection, deck building and adorable avatars.

BlueMarble doesn't have the cleanest translation, but if you've ever played either of the board games you won't have trouble falling into its rhythms. The first square gives you a nice chunk of cash, you visit places around the world and buy them, and build houses or hotels on them. Some squares cause you to lose money, and others win you more. There's even a jail, er, desert island.

Instead of fighting over who gets to play the hat and who will be the race car, BlueMarble lets you pick between adorable animated animals, blobs, robots and more. And you don't necessarily need to play until all the other players are bankrupt — in single-player, the game usually goes for a certain number of rounds, at which point the player with the highest worth wins. You can also play until someone reaches a certain amount of money or total net worth.

But what really sets BlueMarble apart is the addition of collectable cards. In single-player, each match has a second condition to meet — hitting it wins you a new card. You can also earn stickers, achievement-like meta game rewards that unlock new cards and avatars.

The cards replace "Chance," "Community Chest" or "Key" cards, depending on which game you're used to. You can build a deck of up to twelve cards (out of a possible 80 cards), and you'll always have three randomly-chosen cards available to you while you're playing. They cost marbles to use, and you earn marbles as you move around the board. But there's a catch — it costs marbles to upgrade your lands too.

The cards let you do all sorts of things. Some are familiar — one lets you leave the desert island instantly. Some are aggressive, letting you steal lands, marbles and cash from your opponents. Others are stranger, or reliant on luck. Deciding which to bring, when to use them and whether to save or spend your marbles adds a nice layer of strategy to a game that otherwise rides entirely on a roll of the dice.

The single-player levels are abundant, spanning six worlds, each with ten scenarios to master. The multiplayer, on the other hand, is sadly lacking. BlueMarble offers single-device multiplayer only, which isn't the best call for a non-iPad game. I'd love to see an iPad version — the extra screen real estate would show off the candy-colored visuals beautifully, and I could see playing with friends on the big screen. Even more, I want online multiplayer. I'm not holding my breath, but an update that brought Game Center and its associated multiplayer is exactly what this game needs.

BlueMarble is currently on sale, so if you're considering buying it, do so while it's cheap. It's great fun, but without proper multiplayer integration it's probably not worth the higher asking price. If you share my fond memories of childhood games of Monopoly, though, and are looking for something that scratches that itch while actually entertaining, you won't do much better. Charming, cheerful and fun, BlueMarble does a great job of breaking the mold while not straying too far from its roots — and you won't ever have to be the banker.

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Somehow, at some point, it became public yet-still-unofficial knowledge that Criterion Games’ Burnout Crash was coming to the iPad. It’s official now. In a new blog post, publisher EA has confirmed that the top-down racer is headed to our favorite tablet in 2011. It’s also coming to the iPhone and iPod touch, too, during the same “holiday” release window. Neat!

We haven’t seen this version in action yet, but the features EA is noting makes it appears as if it’ll stick pretty close to its XBLA and PSN source material:

Use intuitive taps and swipes to steer vehicles, trigger explosions, and rack up ridiculous scores across three game modes, 18 traffic junctions, and six unique locations. In addition to a rocking 80s soundtrack featuring Vanilla Ice and Gloria Estefan, you can look forward to Autolog support to connect, compare, and compete with friends and rivals.

Basically, Crash is a critically middling top-down version of pre-Paradise Burnout’s uber-popular crash mode. Like vehicular pinball, you wreck your tiny car into traffic and hope to pull off various multipliers and chain effects with explosions. We think it’ll actually be better on touch devices, but we’ll have to wait to see.

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5th Cell’s and Iron Galaxy Studios' Scribblenauts Remix [$4.99] is a work of utter genius. Think of a noun, type it in, and then the game conjures whatever you chose to aid you in a puzzle. Need to find a way to reach a button on a cliff above the sliding door it controls? Hop on a pegasus. Want to bury a dead man? A stylish coffin, a shovel, and a spot of dirt will do the trick. Remix's brilliance is in its ability to let you use any tool to solve any puzzle. It cradles creativity unlike any other game, and Remix isn’t shy about letting you play in its world, to create all the fire-breathing dragons or toasters you can handle.

If you said Remix is a Best Of port of Super Scribblenauts and Scribblenauts, you wouldn’t be wrong. Remix is the sum of those core experiences with added touch controls that can, in some instances, feel inorganic. It strikes me as more of an upgrade, though. The game engine has a noticeably sharper look and feel, extraneous movements and navigation elements have been stripped or streamlined, the play is generally snappier, and some new levels have been thrown in for good measure. While 5th Cell didn’t re-invent the wheel with Remix, it did bother with the balance, weight, and treads on the thing.

The setup goes like this: you, as a curious boy named Max, are thrown into dozens and dozens of puzzles or challenges that all revolve you satisfying certain objectives with nouns or the use of adjective and nouns. The progression is incoherent — in one level you’ll tune a race car, in others you’ll carry around a dead man, set up a school for the first day of class, or hide a lion in front of a magic show’s audience. The constant is the gleaming Starite, which is your reward for fulfilling all what is required.

The majority of scenarios aren’t really the hotbed of creativity that I’d love for them to be. Sure, you could conjure a winged dragon or a vampire in the school house level, but what the game is going to credit you for are the basics: chairs, desks, podiums, and all of that rather dull school-y stuff. There are some significantly more open experiences to be had. The first level, for example, simply charges you with sniffing out the actual Starite in a tree filled with impostors. I used a flamethrower against the tree to burn everything out of it because I’m a jerk, but it totally worked.

I can go either way with the duller scenarios. Most of the time, I use them as extra encouragement to think outside the box. Sure, I could give the hairdresser scissors, but wouldn’t it be a funnier if I gave her an exceedingly more creative object to snip her client’s hair? Some of the more open levels, on the other hand, do require critical thought. Creating a mass extinction event without asteroids is harder than you think. If you ever get stumped, the game does a decent job with its hint system giving you all the teases you need to succeed while still not robbing you of those glorious “A-Ha!” moments.

Like in other Scribblenauts titles, you’ll need to do a measure or two of moving, probably most often to mount that flying dragon you just created. The touch controls function well for the most part. A simple tap to the levels borders steers Max, while shakes remove everything you created and two-finger swipes allow you to look at the map. Actions like jumping and climbing are automated to maximize your leisure and sharp radial menus handle all the “remove or give object” kind of functionality. The iPad’s regular virtual keyboard is your magical conduit to the game and noun creation.

Probably the best thing about Remix is that movement is important; it’s the creation. And what you can do almost magical. Want to watch God fight a T-Rex? Make it happen. Want to see what happens when you throw a caveman or a toaster into a pond with a shark inside of it? Go ahead. The casual disregard of the actual objectives is actually an empowering side-mechanic that really, somehow and someway, allows you to experiment and conjure alternative solutions to the fairly simple problems the game might throw your way.

The introduction of adjectives and the adjective-leaning puzzle levels really flesh out the experimental play. In one level, for example, you’ll be asked to make a man into a dragon with some mad genius potions. Thinking of which attributes you think are important to dragons and then applying them to potions is nothing short of entertaining, just like the game’s open and sandbox-y world. If you want to do it, you probably can. It’s insane and great all at the same time. It’s indescribably fantastic to wield so much power.

It’s pretty cliche to write in a game review, but I really think you’d be doing yourself a disservice by not checking out Remix. It’s an utterly fascinating game that isn’t afraid to put significant power in your hands. It utterly embraces creativity and brims with extremely satisfying moments and stories to share as a result.

Publisher WBIE could have easily had this phoned in and still made stupid amounts of money, but it didn't; this is a rock-solid pseudo-port that plays extremely well on mobile and displays a measure of technical and mechanical grace none of us expected it to. Oh, and it's Universal and supports iCloud saves across devices — icing on the cake, folks.

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It seems like a recent trend on iOS is for developers to band together on projects, putting all of their various resources together to create a better final product. This past July we learned of one such project called Bike Baron, a collaboration between Mountain Sheep, Qwiboo, and music composer Ari Pulkkinen. Bike Baron is a side-scrolling motorcycle stunt game in the vein of the popular Trials games from Redlynx, but ditches the overly-industrial visuals for a more cartoonish look and a heavy dose of humor.

Today, the developers have sent along information regarding pricing and the release date of Bike Baron. You can look forward to the game hitting the App Store on October 20th at a price of just 99¢. They have also sent over a new gameplay video featuring one of the extreme levels in the game, and in this case the word "extreme" seems to mean "really freaking difficult", as you can see for yourself:

I'd like to stress again that this was a demonstration of an extreme level, and you shouldn't expect all of the 40 levels in the game to be lined with explosive barrels, though there should be plenty of danger to be had in the game's normal progression. Also, you'll be able to create levels with as much danger as you'd like using the included level editor. Other features of Bike Baron will include iOS 5 and Universal iPad support, Game Center integration, and enhanced visual effects for the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S.

We'll be looking to get our hands on Bike Baron just as soon as possible, and while you wait for the game to drop on October 20th you can stop by our forums for a discussion of the game.

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Don’t count out the possibility of a handset version of Botanicula. In a chat with Pocket Gamer, Czech dev Amanita Design said it was at least considering the idea of bringing the mind-meltingly gorgeous point-and-click “exploration game” to phones. Fleshing that comment out, it cautioned that Botanicula for phones is “still just an idea and we need to carry out a few experiments before we can talk about it seriously.”

Botanicula was revealed earlier this month and is currently slated for a release at some point in early 2012 across the PC and Macintosh. Its premise goes a little something like this: five bug-like friends go on a journey to “save the last seed from their home tree which is infested by evil parasites” and, apparently, spiders.

"Mind-meltingly gorgeous" is probably an understatement on my part, by the way. Botanicula is… just, wow. We sincerely hope a touch version will prove viable for the studio.

[Via Pocket Gamer]

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Like most, I think of myself as a reasonably intelligent person. I'm no genius, but I'd like to believe I've got a few brain cells to rub together. SpaceChem Mobile [$5.99], a puzzle game that's just made its way from PC to iPad, shakes my confidence about my own intelligence — and then it leaves me feeling brilliant, just moments later.

Zachtronics Industries' puzzler hit the PC indie scene earlier this year, wowing critics and players alike. I tell you this to keep you reading, because the other shoe is about to drop: this is a game about chemical synthesis. And it's not some sort of dolled up, sexy chemical synthesis. This game puts players to work creating chemical products from their raw elements in the simplest terms possible. You'll be bonding one chemical symbol to another, creating workflows out of color coded paths to move them along. And you'll (probably) love it.

I say "probably," because SpaceChem isn't for everyone. You'll need a heavy dose of curiosity and creativity, plenty of patience and just a dash of masochism. But if you're still reading this review after seeing the screenshots and learning what it's about, I'm pretty sure you'll love this game.

As mentioned, SpaceChem is all about chemical synthesis. You're responsible for turning elements and compounds into the required chemical products, and then mass producing them. At the game's most basic, a level requires you to bring in two elements, bond them together and output the correct compound. To facilitate this process, you have a pair of red and blue waldos, remote manipulators that will follow the paths you lay down and the commands you place in that path. You create the program, and they'll follow through, red on red, blue on blue.

From that simple input/output beginning you'll learn to break and create bonds, combine and discard the fruits of multiple reactors and set up conditional commands. The outputs get more and more complicated, but the game largely lets you muddle your way through unassisted. Aside from introducing you to each new command with a tutorial screen, you'll be left on your own to work through each level. This left me hitting my head on any number of walls while I worked my way through, but there are few feelings as good as finally solving a tricky level and watching your quota fill up.

Each time you get that thrill, though, there's another level waiting to defeat you. There over 40 levels to work through in the main campaign, and most leave you longing for the comfort of your last completed level. Once you're through those, there are well over 100 more puzzles available in ResearchNet with more to come. These are community created and carefully curated, and yes, you can contribute your own assignments as well.

One of the coolest things about SpaceChem is that each level has a near-endless number of potential solutions. Each solution you come up with is ranked against the community, so you'll know if you could have done better, with fewer cycles spent or symbols used. Then you can go back and increase your efficiency. If you're so inclined, you can also see what players from the desktop version have done by visiting SolutionNet. It's cheating, a bit, but it's also extremely educational to learn how efficiently other people are pulling these things off.

Playing SpaceChem feels like learning a new skill. It's a slow education, but you can build on what you learn until you no longer feel like you need to start each challenge from scratch. The light-bulb moments are frequent and motivating. This game should feel like work, but it's insanely fun.

Unfortunately, the iPad version is missing a little bit of the desktop version: namely, the story and boss battles. The boss battles didn't work with the iPad's setup, and the story had to be chucked without them. So if you can't bear to go without, you might want to consider making your purchase on desktop. But everything else about this port is top notch. After an early patch the interface works beautifully on the touch screen. The music is fantastic, and, for what it's worth, the game looks as good as it could on any desktop monitor.

SpaceChem is an easy purchase to recommend. It's not as if I can tell you to buy it if you're into puzzle games about creating workflows for chemical synthesis — you're looking at a rare breed. If any part of you thinks you might be interested in such a thing, then congratulations, you're the target market. Play SpaceChem. If you don't, you're depriving yourself of one of the smartest, coolest puzzle games around. Why would you want to go and do a thing like that?

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Remember WAAYYYYYY back, oh I don't know, like, 9 hours ago when we told you that the Unreal Engine powered first-person shooter Warm Gun was hitting the New Zealand App Store and slowly worming its way throughout the world? Well, those sentiments have just a bit more meaning now for those of us in the good ol' US of A as Warm Gun [$4.99] and its free spinoff Carnival of Bullets [Free] are now available in our little neck of the woods.

In fact, the release has hit a few bumps in the road, as a representative from the game's developer Emotional Robots has explained in our forums that an old version of Warm Gun was accidentally loaded up into iTunes Connect and for a good chunk of its international release customers had been unknowingly buying this incomplete early version. Emotional Robots took swift action and have replaced that pre-release build with the proper one, so things should be all good with downloading the correct game going forward. If you happen to be one of those who downloaded the improper version earlier, you might benefit from deleting the game entirely and re-downloading the new version which is up in the App Store right now.

In case you've missed it before, here's the trailer for Warm Gun followed by the trailer for the free Carnival of Bullets single player demo:

As we've said previously, we'll be hopping online in the next few days to dig into the multiplayer-centric gameplay of Warm Gun and will bring you a full review of our findings soon. The reaction to the game in our forums has been decidedly mixed. Some players are having a blast, with the game performing well technically and matches online being mostly lag free. A larger group of players are feeling the opposite of that. Many are complaining of performance issues on devices lower than iPhone 4 or iPad 2, with laggy framerates plaguing both online and offline matches. These issues could be due to Emotional Robots having to make some pretty extensive last minute changes to the game right before release, and they have already committed to addressing all feedback and updating the game frequently to make sure it can be the best that it can be.

While the negative issues are troublesome, they also aren't completely unheard of when dealing with such a technically intensive game like Warm Gun. However, I feel confident in Emotional Robots' pledge to give the game plenty of tender lovin' in the coming weeks. If you find yourself intrigued by Warm Gun but aren't sure how your particular device will handle the load, your best bet is to check out the free Carnival of Bullets to gauge performance.

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The TouchArcade hive mind has been anxiously anticipating Emotional Robots' Warm Gun since early this year when it was first announced. Since then, we've seen a number of different videos and screenshots which have only served to get us all even more excited about the game. It's actually launching in two different versions, the online-centric Warm Gun [$4.99] which is currently live on the New Zealand App Store, and Warm Gun: Carnival of Bullets, which focuses on single player. We've yet to spot Carnival of Bullets for sale in international App Stores, but something tells me that as soon as someone does, a link will get dropped in the Warm Gun forum thread.

Just for fun, here's the trailer again:

We'll be working up a review for Warm Gun, but since it's an online game, for the full experience we're going to have to wait for the game's community to pick up some steam… So, keep an eye out for that in the next couple of days. In the meantime, if you're excited for Warm Gun, swing by our forums where people will likely be offering up their first impressions as the game slowly is released across international App Stores. Like most New Zealand releases, Warm Gun should be available in the US App Store at 11:00 PM Eastern.

Also, as soon as we spot a link for Warm Gun: Carnival of Bullets, we'll update this post with it.

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Anthill: Tactical Trail Defense [$1.99] from Image & Form is a clever and innovative game which let's you control an ant colony, which is being attacked by various predatory insects. It's a real-time strategy game about insect warfare. You act like a general, overlooking a creepy-crawly battlefield and dictating the strategy for the colony's survival by gathering food, engaging in combat, and collecting artifacts.

You start by drawing a straight or curved line with your finger, which originates from your ant-hill.  This represents a pheromone trail for ants to follow. Once you've finished drawing a line, you specify if the new route will be used by workers, soldiers or spitter ants.

The lines are all color coded, with worker routes in blue, soldiers in yellow and spitters in pink.  Once you've drawn a line, any ants of that type will emerge from the anthill to patrol along it. There's no limit to how many separate lines you can draw of each color, but if you draw too many your ant forces will be spread pretty thin.

Each type of ant has a different specialist role. Soldier ants attack and kill predators, leaving their carcasses lying on the ground. Worker ants are responsible for collecting food and will work as a team to carry any large insect pieces (or artifacts) back to the ant-hill, because you eat what you kill. The more worker ants deployed, the faster the food is collected, but if there's enemies around, the workers run away. Spitter ants love to inhabit burrows in the ground and spit at nearby enemies. They're particularly good at taking out any airborne predators. But if you're too slow, other insects may beat you to the burrows and use this vantage point to spit on you.

Lastly, the bomber ants don't require paths to be drawn, as they can fly to any part of the screen where you tap, which is handy for attacking any approaching big bugs. You need to tap in front of moving enemies, as it takes a while for the bomber ants to fly to the target zone. After each aerial attack, they return to the ant-hill before you can re-deploy them. To improve your chance of success, you can tap the screen several times, to dispatch a whole swarm of bomber ants and target multiple enemies. You can even upgrade the bomber ants so they carpet bomb an entire area.

The trails aren't permanent, as you can hold your finger on any trail briefly until a delete button appears. This adds to the strategic gameplay, as you can constantly redirect or concentrate your six-legged solders. It would be nice if you could extend or reshape existing trails on the fly, but that's not possible, forcing you to delete and redraw. My strategy was to have worker ants travel alongside the soldiers to gather the spoils, with spitters providing flanking cover. But the great thing about this game is that there's no right answer, the military strategy is up to you.

The next step is to choose how many ants of each type you want to spawn. There's a spawn button for each of the four different ant types, but you can only create new ants if you've gathered enough food. So, while you're attacking and defending the anthill, you also need to be collecting food and deciding how many of each ant-type to spawn.

Each type of ant has three extra strengths to unlock. Worker ants can gain speed, backbone, or courage; while soldiers can be upgraded with brutality, toughness and grenades. Each upgrade costs stars, which are gained based on your level scores, or optionally purchased via IAP (which is not necessary). If you missed any stars, you can return for them later, after you've upgraded to make it easier.

Anthill delivers three territories (worlds) to unlock and complete, with over twenty levels in total. Each level is allocated a different star value. To complete a level and collect those stars, you simply need to keep your anthill intact through each wave of insect attack. A progress bar is displayed for each attack wave, although the behavior of most enemies is random, so each of the levels will vary if repeated.

While this game is enjoyable, there's two areas for possible improvement. Firstly, the difficulty levels are not too hard, with users reporting they're often gaining all stars for a level within a couple of attempts. This suggests that different difficulty levels would benefit players wanting more of a challenge.

Secondly, while the graphics look good, some of the enemies are the same color as your own ants, making them hard to differentiate once the screen is buzzing with insects. The enemies have small red health bars, but these are not always immediately obvious. Sometimes you can hear that you're being attacked, but can't immediately tell where the attack is occurring. It would be better if the enemies were more obviously differentiated.

Anthill: Tactical Trail Defense is a creative, entertaining, and nice looking game which requires strategic decision making, but still has an arcade feel to it. It's almost like playing an insect-based tower defense game, where the tower is your anthill, so it's appropriate that the title includes the words "Trail Defense". If the game gets enough support, the developers plan to release an infinite (timeless) mode in the future. As it stands now, Anthill is still a unique strategy game with entertaining gameplay and a nice amount of content to play through.

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