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We originally planned to describe Roping Rob [99c] as a "hook-throwing platform game", because modern gamers are familiar with that genre, thanks to popular titles like Super Quick Hook [$2.99 / Review]. However, according to the game description from developers, Wehaveapp, you're actually carrying a harpoon, so let's call it a "harpooning-platform game", which is technically accurate, but not quite as catchy.

The game opens with a background story, which does a great job of setting the context for the game-play. The 'Robs' are little creatures who work at the center of the Earth, where they ensure the core is constantly stable, hot and fluid. However, one of the Robs is defiant and wants to travel, to check out the Earth's surface. This game follows his journey through the Earth, with levels starting at the inner core and moving through the molten outer core, the lower and upper mantle and eventually to the crust, as he ventures to the Earth's surface.

I've always enjoyed games which take you on a journey, like the classic Gyruss (1983) where you progress through the planets in our solar system. Roping Rob uses this approach well, with each chapter being graphically depicted as a different environment, based on the Earth's layered geological structure. As you play, you're always very aware of your proximity to the surface, which encourages you to keep playing.

There's over thirty levels to complete, which is accomplished by locating and entering the glowing exit in each one.  As always, there's a range of obstacles along the way, including rotating platforms, spring-boards, barriers and buttons. You'll need to harpoon through small gaps and even use a massive drill to dig through the Earth. You'll have to dodge spikes, rolling boulders and poisonous fumes, to be successful in this platform game.

The gameplay controls are minimalistic, with no buttons or virtual pad. You simply tap the screen to throw your harpoon in that direction, and tap again to release it. Once your harpoon is impaled in a roof or wall, it automatically retracts, pulling you towards it.  You can either let yourself be pulled right up to the harpoon, or else let go to throw yourself in that direction while you have momentum.  There's no left or right walking, just harpooning.

This game is made using GameSalad, which often leads to a couple of knee-jerk negative comments, but it's best to judge a game based on it's own merits, regardless of which tools are used to develop it. Who cares how a game is made, providing it's challenging and fun. And this game is both of those things.  Although, there are a couple of minor gripes. Some loading delays occur at the start of levels, the screen sometimes changes orientation unexpectedly, or won't change orientation at all, and the sound effects can become annoying, such as the constant metallic *clang* of the harpoon. And Level 16 is actually impossible to complete, but the developers already have a fix for this, which was just released in an update, so the Rob CAN reach the surface!

High scores are stored (in-game) for each level, including time, number of harpoons used and number of tries.  However, the number of tries is showing as "1" for each level, despite attempting one nasty level many, many times. Also, there's a space for the total stats to be displayed, but that area is blank, presumably mistakenly. These issues have also been ironed out in the just-released update.

Roping Rob is a simple game, with basic yet strangely appealing graphics. There's a fair amount of entertainment provided, with replay value if you choose to better your own level completion times.  The big question is – what happens when the Rob finally reaches the surface?

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My mom's experience with videogames largely consists of watching me play Final Fantasy IX and X and offering such helpful advice as, "Why don't you just cut his head off with that big sword?" and, "Don't you have a gun? You could just shoot him and be done with it." Her own gaming career came to an abrupt halt several years earlier when she learned that jerking the controller left, right, up, and down doesn't actually make Sonic move. There's a level of abstraction necessary to make the correlation between a button-press and on-screen action, a bridge we were never able to cross together.

The impulse to cross that bridge is currently driving the home console market and has been doing the same in the mobile gaming space for years. In a blissful marriage of concept and execution, it's an impulse that Esquilax Games have nailed with Climber Brothers [$0.99/Lite], a delightful little puzzle-platformer in which players are tasked with guiding the titular brother-climbers to safety through a set of increasingly difficult physics- and momentum-driven levels.

Esquilax wisely pared Climber Brothers down to one mechanic: when your right and left thumbs are touching the screen, Greg and Jeff (respectively) jam their picks into the rock face. When you let go, they let go.

It's not just that the controls are responsive and precise or that the physics in Climber Brothers feel spot-on, it's that the catch-and-release mechanic takes full advantage of the iPad's tactile interface to match an extremely basic input (thumb touching the screen) with a physically analogous output (climber touching the rock). The result: one brother serves as a fulcrum as the other swings around, carried by his momentum, to his next anchor point; from there, repeat ad infinitum, or until you've reached the safe zone.

I'm tempted to situate Climber Brothers somewhere between the ice climbing section of Modern Warfare 2 and full-blown Kinect gameplay. In the Call of Duty level, the right and left triggers replace your thumbs as input devices, but the emotions are the same — the tension in your hands, the mounting desperation coupled with the tactile joy of progress: right, left, right, left. What makes the physics-based Climber Brothers more interesting, though, is heat death — when you run out of potential and kinetic energy with which to create momentum, no matter how desperately the Brothers cling, the game stops: players have no choice but to let go.

"[H]e reflected that when one gets properly wearied, drowning must really be a comfortable arrangement, a cessation of hostilities accompanied by a large degree of relief, and he was glad of it, for the main thing in his mind for some months had been horror of the temporary agony. He did not wish to be hurt."

That passage, from the end of Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat," is about drowning, but it could just as easily be about climbing. Back in Climber Brothers: your thumbs begin to cramp and your mind races, searching for some way to violate the laws of conservation of momentum, but you realize that Jeff and Greg are truly lost. After that split second of fatalistic anguish, letting them drop comes as a relief and the Brothers carry a morbid grin as they plummet.

At least Esquilax Games has a sense of humor.

And so there's a certain pathos to maneuvering the Brothers around, plotting your course, solving puzzles. You realize acutely that you hold the Brothers' lives in your hands more directly than usual, thanks to that tiny, incremental step in physicality.

But there's a secondary pleasure, borne out of Climber Brothers' finely-tuned physics engine: flight. Climber Brothers has a fantastic learning curve that introduces its physics organically and unobtrusively. Esquilax doesn't teach you how to slingshot your beleiderhosened avatar around so much as its level design ingratiates the concept into your subconscious. I don't remember when I learned how to do it, but I know now and I didn't earlier.

And once the baseline mechanics have been laid out, Esquilax iterates in several different ways — some levels require the Brothers to use their momentum to hook around sharp angles and ledges; others are about maximizing speed without sacrificing height; others still are about freefalling through gaps just so. Don't get me wrong — there's something empowering about solving puzzles, but the avian joy of through the air — like a duo of portly, vaguely Teutonic Spider-Mans — particularly underscores the simple grace of Climber Brothers.

There are certainly some issues: the music loop is short and taken from a collection of stock tunes (our forums point out that the same music is used in Storm in a Teacup [$2.99]), and some elements of the map have special properties (can be landed on, can't be grappled, will kill you, etc.) that aren't always clear. But Climber Brothers is remarkable in its ability to match its core conceit to both its mechanics and interface, and then to mix, match, recontextualize, and refine as needed. It's finely crafted, well presented, and precisely executed.

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The auto-running genre is one of the most saturated on the App Store, and although there are many excellent games that use that particular formula, there are far more mediocre or just plain bad games trying to cash in on the genre’s popularity. It’s because of this that it’s hard to get excited when I see new running games released, similar to how I throw up a bit in my mouth every time another match-3 rears its head.

Cynical attitude aside, when a new running game comes out that’s actually good, it deserves to get some attention, even if it’s the billionth one I’ve played. This brings me to Brain in Jar [99¢], the debut title from independent developer Java Soda Games, a new auto-runner that qualifies as one of the good ones. It doesn’t really reinvent the genre in any way, but it has a great visual style and the gameplay mechanics are honed near-perfectly, making it an incredibly fun game to get into. Not to mention, you play as a brain in a jar escaping human capture from a lab, which should be a wild enough notion to pique anybody’s interest.

Brain in Jar isn’t an endless runner, rather it’s made up of 25 increasingly difficult levels that are randomly generated with each play through. Your jarred brain makes its escape by way of a sturdy metal cart which can propel itself through each level thanks to your telekinetic powers. You have the ability to jump and double jump, and a few levels into the game you get the power to control your movement speed, slowing down or speeding up using left and right arrows.

It’s these game mechanics that make Brain in Jar so successful. They’re simple, mind you, but done very well. Jumping is super responsive and has that certain something that makes it just “feel” right. I’d liken it to how jumping and moving in a Mario platformer just feels so much better than similar games. Also, the ability to control your speed adds another layer of strategy that sets this game apart from other runners, and again Java Soda really nails the feel of controlling your character this way.

Another highlight to the gameplay are the obstacles in each level, which get more dangerous as you progress. These are typically science lab-ish items, like computer desks and metal bookshelves. What’s clever is that some of these items can be dealt with in multiple ways. For instance, you don’t have to jump over a desk or table, as some of them you can just ride right under. Or with bookshelves you can just jump right through the open spaces in the shelving rather than trying to jump the entire thing.

These multiple paths come more into play as you get deeper into Brain in Jar. Eventually, as one example, there will be lasers trying to shoot you down in your tracks. You can fire back, of course, but you can also seek shelter under a table in some circumstances. The best part about this is how it tends to all happen on the fly. You might be cruising along and have to double jump a giant bookcase, then slow yourself down so as not to run into a ceiling mounted turret, casually dropping down and racing under a desk as the turret futilely fires at you from above, the desktop shielding you from its blast.

It’s these organic action sequences that really put a smile on my face while  playing Brain in Jar, and help me forgive some of the game’s shortcomings. For one, while the 3D backgrounds and objects look good, they never change, and the scenery tends to feel pretty repetitive. Secondly, there’s no endless mode. The standard Normal mode is certainly challenging enough, and the Hard mode will really test your skill, but with the random nature of the levels and the running gameplay it seems strange not to include some type of endless survival mode. To that effect, Game Center integration with achievements and leaderboards would be a great addition to add some variety and replay value to the game.

While there aren’t a ton of bells and whistles in Brain in Jar, what it does do it does extremely well, almost better than any of my other favorite running games. The developers seem keen on adding more to the game through updates too, as they’ve said in our forums where members are enjoying the game as well. If you aren’t totally burnt out on auto-running games and want one with a comical sci-fi style and excellent mechanics, then give Brain in Jar a spin.

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Pocket Warriors [$4.99] is an action hack-and-slash game, with 2d cartoon-style graphics, from WitOne Games.  It's based on killing  monsters and leveling-up your weapons through combat. But you're not alone on this quest, as your party consists of two little warriors – a male and a female, who must work together to protect the village from monsters and dragons. In the thread in our forums, Pocket Warriors is likened to a 2D version of the Monster Hunter series, and it provides many hours of monster combat, with 3 chapters, each containing 12 missions for a total of 36 quests.

Your adventure starts in the village, as you prepare for battle. There's a weapons trader selling both weapons and magic spells,  a blacksmith offering weapon upgrades, the village chief dishing out quests, and your own home for depositing items and storing stuff. After interacting with these four places to prepare, you can walk through the village gates to hunt the next available monster. There's often no minions, just straight to the boss!

The monsters are the real stars of this game and fortunately they're varied and creative, so it's a pleasure to unlock and confront them, one by one. There's 14 monsters shown in your "Monster Book", such as fire-dragons, hell-crabs and stone giants, each of which looks and behaves differently and has unique weaknesses. The key to this game, as with any boss-fight, is to study how each monster behaves during combat and then exploit this to defeat it, using weapons and magic.

How does the combat work? Well, this is a hack-and-slash game, but it's a slowed-down version of this. There's buttons for moving left / right, attacking, defending, switching characters, and magic spell slots (up to 3, if acquired). There's definitely some button mashing while attacking, but you also need to constantly withdraw and attack strategically, depending on the monster being fought. I found the block button slow and unreliable, so generally preferred to back away. String together ten successful attacks and the monster will drop some material, which you can grab for weapons upgrades. The goal is to defeat the monster before it reaches the village or kills either of your party members, which leads to a reward of coins and materials.

The male and female warrior use different types of weapons, with swords, lances, axes, bows and magic maces being available. The cost of upgrading these weapons with game money is not cheap, so some grinding is necessary, whereby you fight low-level monsters over again to earn the money and materials needed for upgrades. Once weapons are upgraded to a high level, you can hold down the attack button, then release to launch a super-attack.

While you control one character in combat, your secondary character is automatically controlled. They rush into battle and flee automatically, which sounds great and helpful, except sometimes their battle-skills suck and they die, which leads to defeat. You can switch characters to try and save them, but then your primary character is controlled automatically. It would be better to either have some limited control over the secondary character, or to ensure they don't directly cause your quest to fail. Some users even suggested it would be better to go into combat alone. The developer has recently joined our forum thread and advises he'll improve the automated AI controls.

Pocket Warriors has some lovely atmospherics which make the game pleasing to play. Some backdrops include the plains, wilderness, forest, and a lost temple, each with quality sound effects, such as birds, sheep and frog noises in the background. There's also several spelling mistakes and the character name field accepts lengthy names, spanning multiple lines, which can ruin the display of in-game dialog – so don't do that! But none of this detracts from the basic pleasure of defeating monsters, using the cute little warriors that reside in your pocket.

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Spellsquares [$1.99 / HD], an atmospheric word puzzle game from Benthic Games, hit the App Store with its iPad version back in June. We missed out on it then, but we picked the game up on its iPhone release this month. It's right at home on the small screen, maintaining an enchanting mix of exploration and challenging puzzles.

In Spellsquares' story mode, you find yourself wandering a castle with a mystery to solve. A mysterious stranger has left notes to guide you on your way (kind of him, since you're out to foil his nefarious plan). Each door, treasure and point of interest is blocked with a word puzzle that you'll need to solve. The puzzles are crafted like Sudoku for words. A square grid is laid out with a few letters already in place. A pool of available letters sits to the side. Your job is to use those letters to make words in every row and column at once — easy puzzles require three-letter words and the hardest require five. Solving them takes a little bit of logic and a touch of vocabulary. Once you factor in hints, you'll also need a dash of strategy.

As you explore the castle, you'll discover hidden coins in every room. Those can be taken back to the Oracle, a ghostly automaton that entreats you to pick a card, any card. In exchange for your coin, you'll receive one of three hint items to help you on your way: two that reveal correct letters in single squares, and one that will confirm every correct letter you've placed in a particular puzzle. The hints are plentiful, but they aren't unlimited. Conserve them, but don't go overboard. There's no benefit to making it through the game without turning to hints aside from personal pride.

I found the game challenging enough that I was pumping coins into the Oracle fairly often, but your mileage may vary. If you find the game too easy and you didn't choose the hardest mode, restart and push it up a notch. Rushing through on Easy and then replaying on Medium or Hard will be a disappointment. The puzzles are the same; they just give away fewer revealed letters, so you'll be redoing puzzles you've already solved.

Spellsquares' story barely deserves to be described as such, but I don't count that against the game. It's a familiar tale: evil wizard does something evil, and an anonymous hero comes to uncover the mystery and defeat the plot. It serves to add a sense of exploration and purpose to the puzzling, and does an admirable job of that. Exploring the castle wasn't a thrill, but it was a nice break to clear my head between puzzles.

The story comes to a conclusion after you explore 14 rooms and solve a few dozen puzzles. But the game isn't over at that point. Completing the game unlocks Quick Play mode, with 60 puzzles of varying difficulty. You're given no hints for these ones, so they'll add a dose of challenge if you're still hooked.

An excellent user interface rounds out the Spellsquares experience. It isn't flawless — I found trouble placing letter tiles in lower squares at times, for instance — but it has one feature that every similar game should learn from. You can walk away from a puzzle at any time, and when you return your tiles will still be where you left them. If you need to head back to the Oracle mid-puzzle or you decide to move to a different room and return later, your progress remains intact. Saved me a headache or two, that's certain.

With over 100 puzzles to work through, Spellsquares offers the word-puzzle fan a lengthy and entertaining experience. It won't last forever, but its well-crafted puzzles are a joy to work through once. If you missed out when the iPad version was released, now's your chance. While you're at it, pop into our discussion thread to share your impressions.

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Spacelings [99c] is the new 2d action-puzzler from Hotgen, who previously released To-Fu: The Trials of Chi [99c/HD]. As you might have gathered from the name, their latest game is set in space. The naughty mechanical Roborgs have abducted all the Spacelings and deposited them in over 100 levels around the universe.  Your spaceship, the 'Liberator', has no weapons, so instead of attacking you use your ships tractor-beam to try and recover your fellow Spacelings. This game is a rescue mission.

If the Spacelings stood in a polite orderly queue, directly below your spacecraft, things would be super convenient  – just activate the tractor beam, suck them straight up to your craft and then continue to the next level. However, the Spacelings are actually positioned all over the level, so the tractor beam must be swiped, to turn corners, until it eventually reaches a captured Spaceling to suck back to the Liberator.  Some levels are larger than your screen, so you can drag the background with your finger, to pan around and plan your approach.

You're given a limited supply of "deflectors", so the tractor-beam can only turn so many corners. This forces you to carefully plan-and swipe the beam's route through each level, to ensure you reach a Spaceling within the tractor beam's limited range. Fortunately, once a deflector has been deployed, it can also be re-used, allowing the beam to snake across the level for one recovery, then by moving the deflectors, head somewhere else for another rescue attempt. This game is all about turning corners at the right times.

There's other stuff in the levels too, like mines, beam switchers (reverses the tractor beam so it pushes objects), lazer-turrets, teleporters and disruptor fields (which the tractor-beam can't pass through). You'll be taught some tricks, like how to slingshot objects into each other to remove obstacles, enemies, bombs or mines. Be gentle with those bombs once they're in your tractor beam though, as they detonate upon contact, even if it's an innocent Spaceling. Definitely don't let the tractor-beam bring a bomb back on board your precious spacecraft either. And much like the classic movie Ghostbusters, you'll be advised never to cross the beams!

A new gameplay mechanism is explained at the start of each level. These hints and instructions are helpful initially, but towards the end of the game, the hint screen and a pop-up message both display exactly the same hint and requiring two taps to close before you can play. And the earlier hints start repeating. Perhaps the developers got sick of writing so many hints.

Each level is rewarded by medals based on the number of rescues, enemies destroyed and time taken. There's also a special medal for achieving all the medals in the same attempt. There's 393 medals to earn in total, plus Game Center support for 20 achievements and high-score / medal leader-boards. And it's universal, so it runs on all your IOS devices.

After playing Spacelings for a while, I started wanting more of a mental challenge as most levels are pretty easy, with the solution immediately evident, so it's just a matter of getting the timing right. There are some harder levels near the end of the game, although some of these are given away by the help page, or by marks drawn on the level telling you exactly what to do. It's unusual to see such hand-holding near the end of a game. Still, Spacelings kept my interest, right to the final levels, with it's tractor-beaming action.

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Most music-based games are based on the same premise: interaction with the rhythm or beat of the song in some form or fashion. That’s why Say What?! [Free] seems like such an interesting take on the genre; rather than interacting with the musical composition, the game challenges you to interact with the actual lyrics. While I think that Say What?! is definitely one of the more interesting takes on the genre that I’ve seen, a very limited selection of music coupled with a lack of gameplay diversity leaves it somewhat wanting.

The premise of Say What?! is simple: as lyrics to a song are displayed at the top of the screen various images scroll across the bottom portion from right to left. When portions of the lyrics light up, you must tap on the image that corresponds to the highlighted lyric.

On easier difficulties the relationship between image and lyric is simple. However, as the difficulty ramps up, the relationships become more abstract and require greater thinking and comprehension. This is further amplified by the fact that a lot more images start going by faster on the harder difficulties.

Make no mistake, while Say What?! may be classified under the music genre, this is less of a music-based game and more of a puzzle/word comprehension title oriented around music lyrics. Fans of Rappin' Granny [$0.99] will be somewhat familiar with this type of gameplay and should enjoy it, as well as anyone that can handle games that require snap thinking. However, for everyone else this game will probably seem like a frustrating exercise in futility.

Until you play it a few times, that is. One of the biggest issues I have with Say What?! is that the highlighted lyrics and images associated with them appear to be set pieces. This means that, assuming you play the same song enough, you should be able to memorize the patterns for each song and thus raise your score with ease. Sure, the surrounding wrong images appear to randomize each time, but if you know exactly what image to look for, you really won't care about the other 'noise' images.

This is further compounded by the fact that Say What?! only has three free songs, with a paltry seven more songs available as IAP for $1.99 each. The IAP seems a bit expensive considering that there's not even any way to preview the songs being purchases (although I suppose one could just search online for a preview of them). Finally, while I don't have a problem with the songs I tried, I feel that the limited variety of genres will be a turn off for some players.

While I did enjoy Say What?!, it's a game of limited appeal and limited content. If you're looking for an interesting twist on the puzzle/music genre, I'd say give Say What?! a try. Unfortunately, even if you enjoy the experience, it ends up being way too short. Hopefully the game will continue to expand and add more songs of various genres, which would be a good first step of creating a fan base around this interesting game.

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While some traditional publishers are resisting the trends towards lower-cost software in the handheld gaming space, others are actively working to figure out how to make these sorts of experiences work on their existing platforms. While not a shining beacon of success, the PSP Minis campaign does demonstrate a good faith effort on the part of Sony to cater to the direction that portable gaming seems to be heading. A few growing pains are part and parcel of adapting to a changing market, and there have been a few notable early wins scattered through the program.

One of the largest of these successes has been Frima Games’ A Space Shooter for Two Bucks, which recently reported a healthy figure of 150,000 downloads over PSN. Given the type of game they made, and its popularity on PSP, it’s no surprise that the developers worked to port the title over to the iPhone. Making its debut on iOS as A Space Shooter For Free [Free/HD], this game retains all the good elements from its PSP origin and joins a catalog of solid shmups available on the platform.

A Space Shooter For Free is the story of P. Jefferson, an optimistic and nerdy kid who is relentlessly tortured by bullies at school. Much like our own Brad Nicholson, Jefferson turns to obsessive weightlifting and unjustified xenophobia as a means of dealing with his repressed rage issues. Equal parts bravado and libido, he’s essentially a mash-up of Zap Brannigan and Duke Nukem.

However, unlike the Duke, this universe does not celebrate his misogyny or misbehaviors, making the character much more tolerable. The story and dialogue are snappily done in comic-book panel style, and Jefferson’s pathetic attempts to “court” the older woman who runs the upgrade store were just cheesy enough to keep me coming back to see if the idiot could pull it off.

Let me start off the gameplay discussion by stating that this game is no Cave title; if you’re looking to have your socks blown off by god-tier bullet hell action, this is not the one for you. That being said, Frima blends a cornucopia of strong elements into ASSFF that give the game tons of depth and replay value.

In standard vertical-scrolling space shooter fashion, enemies of varying types will converge on your ship from all directions. Memorizing their attack patterns and behaviors will be the key to your success, as will scooping up the power-ups that destroyed baddies leave on the screen. The usual suspects are all here: shields, missiles, and main gun bumps give your ship a temporary boost in fighting power. Some missions will be against standard waves of aliens, and some will feature boss characters to defeat. Clearing a boss stage will provide your ship with one of five special weapons that is persistent throughout the rest of the game.

Speaking of persistent, along with your temporary power-ups, you’ll be collecting scrap/currency that you can use in-between missions to purchase permanent upgrades to your ship. There’s a great deal of variety here, and the desire to grind out enough scratch to get the next upgrade kept me motivated to pew-pew bravely on. Adding spread to your main cannon, magnets to pull scrap in for you, devices to increase the power or reduce the energy cost of special weapons, and items that maximize the efficiency of temporary power-ups are all options.

Difficulty between stages can vary wildly, and so if you play solely in the campaign mode you’ll find yourself needing to grind in order to upgrade enough to tackle later sectors. This is the perfect time to take a break and check out the survival mode. It’s your standard wave-after-wave affair, but the high-score push is a draw, and Frima smartly allows any currency you earn in survival mode to carry back over into the campaign.

ASSFF falls into the same control traps that many iPhone shmups do. The touch controls feels right and auto-fire helps the cause, but especially when the difficulty begins to mount you’ll be covering vital parts of the action with your finger. The position of special weapons also make them difficult to activate without leaving your ship unprotected in a sea of murderous plasma bolts while you trigger them.

The game (as you’d rightly expect by the title) is free to download, and there’s more than enough content before the pay wall to help you make up your mind. If you find yourself sucked in like I did, a reasonable $.99 IAP will unlock the rest of the campaign content. Additional IAPs are available for those who want all the ship upgrades from the get-go. A Space Shooter For Free does a lot of different things, and juggles them very well. For the quality and quantity of shooter on display here, the value proposition is dynamite. For an initial price of free, I'd definitely encourage downloading and checking out this title.

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Let's talk about big money (no big prizes) for a second. Financial news site Bloomberg is reporting that Angry Birds creator Rovio Mobile is ‘considering’ taking a strategic investment from an 'entertainment company' to expand their wares to China and fund the upcoming movie. If it goes through, unnamed sources indicate that this investment would give Rovio the value of about 1.2 billion. I love it!

These mysterious sources aren’t indicating what parties are interested in investing. We agree with analyst superstar Michael Pachter when he suggests that EA, Zynga, or even Disney are the likeliest possible investors. All of these companies have a huge stake in the mobile space, and obviously wouldn’t mind getting a piece of the Angry Birds action. Disney definitely needs the most cred out of all of these publishers.

Fake, but you get the idea.

If you needed an indication of how popular Angry Birds is outside the world of the App Store or Android, look no further than your local Wal-Mart. Kiosks with Angry Birds plush toys are starting to appear. Also, several stores are carrying shirts with the iconic catapult games’ various winged mascots.

Love it or hate it, you already knew Rovio’s bird game is a powerhouse. I wonder how much longer this can last, though.

[Via Bloomberg, Joystiq - Image 1 via A Kid's Pencil, Image 2 via Gadget Sin]

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"Climb up, tryst with amorous billy goats, eat grass, give birth."

A little odd as the nutshell for an upcoming iOS title? To be sure. But, then, odd too is the game's hirsute developer, affectionately known as Yak. The title in question is Goat Goes Up by Jeff Minter of Llamasoft, who brought us Minotaur Rescue [link], Minotron: 2011 [link], and Deflex [link] for iOS.

The upcoming Goat Goes Up (a working title) is, according to Minter, inspired by several oldschool platformers, including the Atari 2600 title Man Goes Down, Nebulus, and Rainbow Island. And, as for the climbing, trysting, eating, and birthing, the developer indicates that the game in its final form will offer plenty more than that.

Minter recently posted a preview video of the game in early stages of development. The video below is a little rough, but represents the state of the title after just two days of coding.

UPDATE: Moments ago, Jeff Minter got back to me with a bit more detail about the upcoming title.

GGU is a simple but fun endless climbing game in which the objective is to raise a family of goats – literally, as high as you can. Platforms continuously scroll down and you have to keep climbing – the game ends if you get carried off the bottom of the screen. On the way you will meet billy goats with whom you can tryst. Meeting the billy goats makes you pregnant, and you have to eat grass to eventually produce a baby goat which follows you. Keep doing that to get more kids; more kids give you higher scores for the various bonus items that you can collect along the way. Various powerup collectibles help you as you climb.

On the journey you will pass through various zones, some of which refer to famous platform games from throughout history.

Simple and fun and despite the goat breeding theme actually quite innocent and lovely.

As well, he underscores the fact that the preview video was a very early sample and that the game has evolved significantly since it was released.

We'll be sure to share any further details we get about this one right away. Stay tuned.

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