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Kairosoft’s Pocket Academy [$3.99 / Lite] takes the best and worst elements of its prior releases, Game Dev Story [$1.99 / Lite] and Hot Springs Story [$3.99 / Lite], blends them together, and then applies them to a school environment. It’s not remarkable on the surface. It has the same cutesy art direction used in these prior games. It also re-hashes a lot of mechanics, continues to shroud a lot of its crucial foundational and tycoon elements in mystery, and it controls like crap. But it does still deliver in the form of the studio’s should-be patented carrot-on-the-stick design approach and fleshes out a crucial, but oft-forgotten, driver in all simulation games: the people.

Provided the gun to my head wasn’t real, I’d argue until the moment the trigger is pulled that Pocket Academy isn’t as much of a school simulation as it is a over-the-top student simulation game because, at the end of the day, this game isn’t about how pretty your school is or about how many trees you’ve planted. It’s about what your kids are learning and how well they can prove that your system, either totalitarian or social-focused, works.

On the top end, this game puts you in the shoes of an administrator planning out the next greatest thing in education. You’re in charge of building classrooms, researching new facilities like restrooms, libraries, and nurses’ offices, and creating statistical bonus zones with bonus-laden objects like shrubbery, trees, or even rocks. Chaos is frowned upon, as the careful planner who puts like buildings together can string together dramatic bonuses to student-side factors like learning and school spirit.

This is where the one real rub rears its head: Pocket Academy isn’t good at telling you what is “good” versus “bad.” It hides a lot of bonuses and mechanics from viewing. The only solid way to find out what works well with something else is via experimentation, which is a costly and horribly slow, pace-chewing endeavor. Even buildings and research subjects have terrible descriptions that can lead to hair-pulling strategic misfires.

Like Game Dev Story understood, to some extent, the development process and let you lead it, Pocket Academy allows you to do the same with a school. The end product is a well-learned student body, and you get several years to turn kids’ mush into iron. Ample classrooms and activities are a necessity to do this, as well as teachers. Students come in once a year or through transfer if your school is attractive enough. Teachers, on the other hand, need to be hired and then leveled up. Satisfactorily, you are put in charge of what statistics receive boosts upon leveling up, which lets you mold a curriculum that feels… well, you. It's pretty redeeming building something in your own image.

Science, math, English, Spanish, and history are the subjects each student can learn. As they sit in classrooms, they’ll automatically receive points in these areas. As they roam and participate in other facilities, they’ll earn additional points that you can then, in turn, spend in classrooms to boost their core attributes or apply to research. This is the push and pull: do you spend these points in order to get more areas for interaction, or do you spend them to educate the students more?

I usually go with the latter since it’s the real meat of the game. In order to attract more kids, you need to compete in challenges based on those core subjects. The higher the IQ, the likelier they are to pass the challenge. Also, schools as a whole are rated and a lot of funding, as well as those ratings, depends on end-of-semester test scores. The goal is to be the best school in the world, so the students actually matter. But the other decision is a fundamental one, too. Without interaction, you don't get points for research or tests.

Weighing these two options, as dull as they sound, is entertaining. I think it helps that there's always something you could be doing in the process or, at least, building towards.

To its credit, Pocket Academy really fleshes out who these kids are. They’re all named and you deal with them over the course of several years. You’ll also see them make friends, attempt to date other students, get frustrated, succeed, and fail. Students all have certain disposition traits, too, which factor into how they learn and where they learn the best. As if that wasn’t enough, there are also activities they favor which you can cater to by building clubs or more facilities.

After spending years with these kids and using them in the right way, you do tend to bond with the character, as silly as that sounds. But it’s that connection, as flimsy as it is, that makes this simulation game much more satisfying than most. You have a stake in the systems, at least.

I could go on and on about the systems at play, what you can do, and the billions of little things that you’ll end up doing to improve the experience. There are tons of mechanics and little touches at play in Pocket Academy, all of which are satisfying to some extent to use, deal with, or think about. The game starts brutal, so be prepared.

I have a feeling that, like Game Dev Story, you’ll run out of meaningful things to do in Pocket Academy after an epic several-year run but I don’t think that hurts. As it is, there are plenty of things — perhaps too much in places — to do for several, several hours. For those of you who didn’t download sight unseen, no worries: this is a sharp little simulation game packed with depth and, oddly enough, a little emotion. It might be hard to penetrate at first, but stick with it and you’ll be rewarded with an awesome game.

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My ability to write an amusing introduction for this week's bucket full of Wednesday night game releases has been obliterated due to my mind being blown that the powers that be are still making James Pond games. Maybe it's just me, but my perception of James Pond as a video game mascot was about in line with Bubsy. In the 90's it seems like everyone and their brother in law was trying to come up with the next Mario or Sonic, and I'm really not sure any succeeded. I suppose persistence isn't a bad thing though, and you can't fault 'em for trying. I'll still play a James Pond game 21 years later!

Anyway, here's how this works– Developers are able to set specific release dates for their iOS games. Since App Store features are updated on Thursdays, it seems that's most beneficial day to release a game if you're shooting for featuring. Of course the whole featuring process is a closely guarded secret surrounded by black majicks, so who knows if releasing on a Thursday even helps. Regardless, with a specific release date set, games become available in the regions of the App Store as it becomes that date. Thanks to New Zealand's proximity to the International Date Line, they get a first crack at everything. All of these games will be available at 11:00 PM Eastern, or earlier if you're east of North America:

Ballistik Wars, Free – Forum Thread – I'm not entirely sure yet what the catch is with this game being free, but I've loved everything Ponos has released so I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Ballistik Wars will also be great. I could be wrong, but seriously, Ponos has a great game catalog.

Cargo Runners, $7.99 – Forum Thread – This is the second entirely iOS board game by Trouble Brothers. Cargo Runners is a 2-4 player game where you race around the world collecting cargo. I've had a great time with board games on the iPad, and it's great seeing brand new ones being developed for the platform.

Color Bandits, 99¢ / HD – Forum Thread – I'm digging this game's gimmick. Apparently aliens have stolen color from the world and you're fighting to get it back. The whole black and white slowly transitioning to color thing seems really cool. And, hey, boss fights.

James Pond in the Deathly Shallows, 99¢ – Forum Thread – Agent Pond RETURNS!!! Oddly enough, James Pond games (at least the ones I played) always had lots of platforming elements, this one seems to be more of an underwater-themed horizontal shooter. Regardless, it's universal, a buck, and based on some great (although likely unknown to most) IP.

MapleStory Cygnus Knights Edition, $4.99 – Forum Thread – This is the second single player MapleStory game to be released on the App Store, the first of which being MapleStory Thief Edition [$4.99]. It's a bit of a mystery to me why they don't just bring a full MapleStory client over to iOS, as surely recent devices have to be powerful enough to run it… But, I guess they wouldn't be releasing Cygnus Knights if Thief didn't do well.

Mooniacs, $1.99 / Lite – Forum Thread – Namco is taking a crack at the "casual physics based puzzle game where you do things to earn stars" genre. (That is a genre now, right?) I tried this game at E3, and it's actually pretty cool. You fling your little dude up to catch flying things called "JujuBees." Namco has an interesting plan for releasing new updates, and additional content will apparently be unlocked as people globally reach some collected JujuBees threshold.

Postal Panic, Free – Forum Thread – This is a sorting game, but instead of needing to sort colors or shapes like so many sorting games out there you're sorting packages to a specific zip code as they come across a postal scanner. It seems like a clever real-world spin to the typical sorting game type.

Puzzle Agent 2, $4.99 / HD – Forum Thread – The original Puzzle Agent [$4.99] won a ridiculous amount of rewards last year, and I'm expecting the sequel to be just as awesome. Like the first one, Puzzle Agent 2 has Professor Layton-like puzzle-centric gameplay with a heavy coating of that signature Telltale Games charm.

Street Fighter IV Volt, 99¢ – Forum Thread – This is basically Street Fighter IV [99¢] but with online multiplayer. Oh, and it's got Balrog, Vega, and Cody which aren't available in the non-Volt version. Also, Capcom is planning on doing some kind of wacky incremental price raising where they're hiking the price by a buck each day it's out until it caps out at $6.99. Street Fighter IV was excellent, and the addition of online multiplayer in Volt should make this an easy day one purchase.

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It's no secret that Rovio has been looking to turn Angry Birds into an … even bigger worldwide phenomenon than it already is. They've already got an impressive online store loaded with swag, as well as a pre-order page where you can get in line to order everything from lunch boxes to Angry birds sandals of all things. Normally I'd say, "Who the hell buys this stuff?" But, I've seen a ridiculous amount of people wearing Angry Birds shirts, and my neighbors' dogs' favorite toys are their full array of plush Angry Birds toys. Oh, and it probably doesn't hurt that these days Angry Birds is available on every platform under the sun, and it wouldn't surprise me if sometime next year I'll be able to play Angry Birds on my microwave.

A recent post on the Rovio blog provides some clues for the next step of Angry Birds world domination. David Maisel has joined the Rovio team with the mysterious title of "Special Advisor." I'm imagining this as a Game of Thrones-esque hand of the king kind of situation. Anyway, one of David's many claims to fame is transforming Marvel Entertainment from a comic book company desperate to remain relevant in the digital age to self-producing and self-financing massive summer blockbusters, turning existing comic franchises into multi-million dollar movie series and getting an entirely new generation interested in reading comics again.

Will Maisel be able to duplicate that success? It's hard to say. Rovio has recently raised $42m in investments to expand, and part of those expansion plans included acquiring Kombo, which is a leading Finnish animation studio. It seems that they've got all or most of the pieces of the puzzle to start pumping out Angry Birds TV shows, movies, or whatever else.

Now, I know how easy it is to just scoff and dismiss this news (all while simultaneously posting a comment to this story about how much you hate or "don't get" Angry Birds) but consider this– Angry Birds has single handedly turned a ridiculous amount of people onto gaming that otherwise never would have cared. Hell, I've seen this in my own family. My own father spent most of my life trying to get me to play less video games, and now courtesy of the iPad 2 I bought my parents plays "Pigs" (as he calls it) daily and has since branched out to similar casual games. I hear similar stories from friends all the time.

Love Angry Birds or hate it, it's fantastic to have something like this bringing this many more people into the world of gaming. If an Angry Birds movie is wildly successful, it will also serve to raise even more awareness to mobile gaming–

And that's never a bad thing.

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The best thing about the iTunes family of storefronts is that it carries Sharon Stone’s moody and moving flick “Last Dance.” The second best thing, which is more relevant to our interests as a site on the Internet that deals with games, is the stunning amount of video game sales.

This week in particular has an awesome sale. Publisher Com2uS is slashing the prices of every single one of its offerings down to 99 cents. Get those wallets outs, dogs. It’s time to put those debit and credit cards to good use. Let’s take a look at the list:

• Chocolate Tycoon: $1.99 → $0.99
• Heavy Gunner 3D: $2.99 → $0.99
• Inotia 2: A Wanderer of Luone: $2.99 → $0.99
• Inotia 3: Children of Carnia: $4.99 → $0.99 [Universal]
• Tower Defense: Lost Earth: $2.99 → $0.99
• Third Blade: $2.99 → $0.99
• Trapped: Undead Infection: $1.99 → $0.99

Of course, a lot of Com2US stock is already being sold for pennies. Check it:

• Slice It!: $0.99
• Sniper vs. Sniper: Online: $0.99
• Caligo Chaser: $0.99
• World of Tunes: $0.99
• Zombie Runaway: $0.99
• Chronicles of Inotia: $0.99
• 9 Innings: Pro Baseball: $0.99

That's a lot of solid games going on the cheap. If you'd like a suggestion, I'd say you should jump ALL OVER Tower Defense. It's an awesome game with tons of levels, hours of play, and fun challenges. The most recent update also patched in some balance tweaks, which means that you can finally finish "Vulcan," AKA the impossible-level-that-I-poured-four-hours-into pre-patch. Of course, you can't go wrong with most of these at this price point, either.

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GameLab's D.A.R.K. [99¢] is game with a conflicting sense of self. It's trying to simultaneously be a tense, science fiction horror game and a dual stick shooter with RPG elements. It's a difficult line to toe and in a lot of ways, D.A.R.K. is leading with the right foot, even if it flounders a bit here and there.

The game centers on a space marine who kind of looks like one of the marines from Starcraft II, but with a mohawk, as he investigates the loss of contact with a ship called the USS Storm Bringer. As these things tend to go with science fiction narratives, he quickly learns that things aren't as they seem and he needs to blast his way through waves of zombies and robots to get to the ships black box to find out what happened.

If this is all sounding a little like Dead Space or Alien to you, you're right, but it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's a time honored sci-fi trope because it works. Unfortunately, D.A.R.K. never seems too sure what it's supposed to be doing, concentrating on the atmosphere in a slower-paced horror setting, or cranking up the action as a dual stick shooter. There are short moments spread throughout the hour long campaign that try to create a feeling of dread, but much of the game relies on standard shooter concepts where you enter a room, clear a room, go to the next room.

That's another thing too — the game's description says, "Massive single-player campaign will have you playing for hours on end." That's simply not the case at the moment; the first episode included here will only take you around an hour to complete. Considering the game's low price it's not a big deal, but one might expect more content from the description. That said, starting a new game after finishing yields some different results, so it's worth rolling through twice. Judging by what's being said in the forums, a second episode, universal support and an arena mode are coming in future updates, so there should be more content on the way, as well as (hopefully) a resolve for the cliffhanger ending of the first episode.

D.A.R.K. does try to mix things up with a few RPG elements to spice up the dual stick mayhem as well. While it's not deep, it does get things mostly right. Weapons are upgraded automatically depending on how much you use them and you have a small set of stats you can upgrade as your level progresses. There are only four different upgrade paths, health regeneration, hit points, speed and power. I'm not sure what else one could be added here, but it would have been nice to have a little more character customization.

The main difference you'll see in D.A.R.K. compared to a lot of dual stick shooters is that it is trying to tell its story and it's doing so by pushing you through a series of rooms and offering the sense of exploration. In between the arena-style battles are short exploration bits, simple puzzles sections and the occasional big narrative moment. This is where D.A.R.K. is doing something new and it would be nice to see more of it in the second episode. The shooting bits are all well and fine, but there is a lot more opportunity for the exploration parts to really capture players and pull them into the story. The same goes for the audio design, which could use a little work, but considering the type of game it is, you'll likely have you'd hand covering the speaker when you're playing, so it might not be worth investing too much time in it.

The exploration pieces are certainly more geared to telling the story visually and D.A.R.K. can do so, even if it's not always pretty. The color palette is very much in the same realm as most science fiction and the style looks a lot like Starcraft if it was set on a ship. The game is incredibly dark too, which I guess shouldn't really be surprising — but don't plan on being able to play it outside either way.

I rather like the idea of D.A.R.K. and with more content promised to be on the way, I have hopes it'll settle itself and decide exactly what type of game to be and how to do it. There is a lot of potential in the idea alone, so if GameLab can deliver the second episode and the arena mode before upping the price, they might have something truly interesting on their hands as long as they're not scared to make the puzzles a bit more challenging and the shooting parts a bit more sparse.

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Looking for a unique puzzle game to fill your hours? Take a look at Joining Hands [$2.99] by 10tons, creators of Grim Joggers [$1.99] and Azkend [$2.99]. It tells of the Whispering Wood, a place filled with boogeymen to frighten the little Peablins, Gloobins and Brufflins that inhabit it. To make it through safely, they all need to hold hands.

In each of Joining Hands' levels, you're faced with a hex grid and several of these cute little creatures. The trick is to arrange them so that no hand is left unheld. Creatures are happy when their hands are held, and unhappy with they have a free hand. When everyone's happy, the level is complete. This is easy to do when you're just dealing with Peablins–those little green guys will hold hands with anyone. But then they start sprouting extra limbs, and soon you're trying to link up one guy with 4 arms, another with 3, and a few other friends. It gets a little messy.

The levels have a few tricks to mix things up as well. Some hexes are blocked by stones. Others have stars, which can be claimed by covering them and completing the level. Hearts (or "Comfort Zones") add another twist: any creature on a heart will be happy even if his hands are empty.

There are six types of creatures, including Peablins. Brufflins have inflexible arms, so they need to be positioned carefully. Poeglins need their personal space, so don't put them next to anyone else. Grimmlins can't be moved–their armor is too heavy. Whisprins are always happy, but they frighten anyone next to them. And Gloobins, who were added in a recent update, can only hold tentacles with each other.

Joining Hands has a simple set of controls: drag to move the little guys around, and tap to rotate the Brufflins. There aren't any time limits or move restrictions, so you're free to experiment and work your way through each level with trial and error if needed. This makes the game feel a little bit too easy early on, but don't even think about relaxing. Later levels are a serious challenge–hard enough that I occasionally found myself wishing for a level skip mechanic.

You won't find any achievements here, but Joining Hands has a huge amount of content to keep you occupied. There are currently 10 episodes covering over 150 levels. You can also compete on Game Center leaderboards for total collected stars, although that caps out with people who've mastered the whole game.

I'm a bit of a sucker for cute art styles, but Joining Hands marries its cute art and sound design with solid, original gameplay. Our forum users have been quite happy with it too. Puzzle fans should definitely check it out.

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When Atari's Greatest Hits landed back in April, bringing 100 Atari arcade and VCS/2600 classics to iOS, retro gamers across the land bowed to Atari and the awesome they had brought. But still, there are plenty of great cartridge titles that aren't part of Atari's collections. Most notably, games by other studios. Studios like Activision, with games like River Raid. In fact, several readers specifically lamented the absence of that Activision vertical shooter, one of the best ever created for the 2600.

Tango Games just dropped us a line to make us aware of their recent release, AirFox HD [App Store], a Universal title (for iPhone and iPad) that seeks to fill the iOS River Raid void with what's more or less an exact clone of the game.

We tried to make the exact clone of this fantastic game with its marvellous atmosphere in every possible aspect of the original game (sounds, graphics, gameplay, scoring, etc.) and added few touches here and there, like adding GameCenter for online scores.

AirFox, as the author intended, feels pretty much exactly like River Raid. The game utilizes tilt controls for navigation and speed control, with a tap to the screen to fire. It even sounds like the 2600 original.

It's worth noting that several direct River Raid remakes have come to the App Store, like River Striker and Next Bridge…but they have also gone. We'll have to wait and see about AirFox HD's staying power. (River Raid fans might want to grab this one soon…)

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Monsters come in all shapes and sizes. Some of them are tiny little squares and circles with big eyes and toothy frowns. Others are sharp-toothed maw beasts. And sometimes those maw beasts like to eat cuter, smaller monsters. That you toss in their mouths. Using bombs. When you get down to it, Big Blue Bubble's Paper Munchers [$0.99 / HD / Lite] is an illustration of the circle of life — little monsters get eaten by bigger monsters, who spit out their cardboard remains and return them to the ecosystem.

You've got to make sure the big scary monsters are properly fed. When you tap the screen, a bomb explodes under your fingers and sends the little monsters flying. If a little monster matches the color of the mouth it falls into, you get an extra bomb. To get through each level, feed all the little monsters to the big monsters without running out of bombs.

Bombs come in two flavors: black permanent bombs and purple temp bombs. The permanent bombs regenerate every level — you always start with three, and you can earn more by matching colors. The temp bombs are only usable once. Run out, and you'll need to buy more. If you're feeling flush, you can buy them in IAP packs with real money. Otherwise, you can earn them with hard work and good performance.

Each level you complete ranks you on your performance — how many matches you made, how many bombs are left, and so on. Your score translates to monster dollars, which you can spend on buying more temp bombs. Do particularly well on a level and you'll be awarded the status of Master Muncher for that level, which also gives you a ton of extra monster dollars.

This isn't a perfect system. If you do poorly, you'll need to use more temp bombs, and you'll be earning fewer monster dollars, so it will be harder to buy more. And of course if you do well, you'll be wealthy in monster dollars but won't really need temp bombs. But by and large, it works well. You can certainly get by without buying IAP even if it means going back and grinding old levels, and the restriction on temp bombs is a great motivation to do the best you can every time. It becomes very important to make sure you're matching colors once per move to get the extra bombs, which adds a bit of strategy to an otherwise chaotic game.

Paper Munchers has 5 worlds, each with 15 levels. The level design generally offers a challenge without getting in the way. The levels themselves are static, so the challenge is in getting around the walls and platforms that keep you from feeding the monsters. The bomb physics are great, so success is just a matter of tapping the right spots at the right time. It all works very well. 35 Game Center achievements round things out, and the challenge of earning Master Muncher scores will keep you coming back.

The art style is what drew me to the game, and it looks as good as I could have hoped. The whole thing has a layered paper craft aesthetic that's simply adorable. Everything looks hand-made: the backdrops, the monsters, the levels and even most of the interface elements. The sound does a great job too, with the whimpers of the tiny monsters making me feel guilty for sending them to their gruesome deaths. Not quite guilty enough to stop playing, though.

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War Grimoire [$1.99 / HD] is a tower defense title with the trappings of a great genre-based game, but its execution of fundamental elements and basic design are holding it back.

Instead of lingering on the bad, I’ll note what drew our all-seeing eye to the project in the first place: its visual flair.

War Grimoire's world is a vibrant one, enriched by traditional fantasy and Japanese comics and cartoon tropes. In this genre in particular, it’s unusual to see a well-budgeted game shoot for something outside of space marines, bugs, and ravaged worlds.

Character has a place, too. Instead of traditional towers, soldiers of all builds — including archers, mages, and dragons — are the pillars of defense. While it does default to dull monsters, there are some creative enemies that end up attacking your armies in ways I’ve never seen in a tower defense title before.

One of the more remarkable aspects is tower placement. Most levels allow you free reign with placement. It’s like the wild west of tower defense titles in this regard. Enemies pile in from all over the place, and you’ve got to be wise with your limited resources, but near infinite placement of long-distance soldiers and close-up fighters.

I also want to make note of the RPG tie-in. As in most tower defense games, you can upgrade your ‘towers’ while a level progresses. In this, however, you can take it a step further by upgrading individual class weapons and skill trees with points earned from the battles you’ve won, or hey, even lost.

In the pre-release images for War Grimoire, we saw massive battles: huge numbers of enemies and soldiers smacking each other in a centralized area. It looked chaotic, but in the fun, manageable sort of way. There was reason to the placement, at least.

In execution, battles fall apart. They’re in fact, too chaotic. Enemy pathways are clearly enough defined from the get-go, but then they take odd turns that you can’t anticipate if you haven’t played a level before. Worst case, they take odd turns that you flat-out can’t defend because it’s impossible to earn enough in-level currency to defend these points.

Disorganized chaos is the tip of the iceberg in a title otherwise riddled with much smaller design issues. The UI is needlessly heavy, games don’t always save properly, the English translation is terrible, and in general, success is measured by trial-and-error.

I’d love to see this game patched with a couple of updates. It has a bright future if the core is tweaked and massaged.

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I’ve been a pretty big fan of the Joypad Game Controller [Free] ever since we reviewed it back in February. In a nutshell, Joypad allows you to display a selection of different virtual controller types on your iPhone or iPod touch. You then pair the Joypad app with a desktop client via Bluetooth or WiFi which remaps keys on your computer's keyboard to the virtual buttons of the Joypad, and remaps mouse movement to the accelerometer. This allows the Joypad to control games on your Mac or PC, and makes for a very capable substitute controller when you don’t happen to have a real physical controller handy.

While that’s pretty cool in and of itself, the team behind Joypad have taken things a step further and released an SDK which allows any developer to implement Joypad support into their games natively, bypassing the need to pair with the desktop software. This also means that Joypad support can be baked right into iPad games, a feature we saw demonstrated at WWDC a few weeks ago.

And now we have the first actual implementation of Joypad support in an iOS game with Lars [$1.99], a retro-style platformer from Icarus Interactive. The short video below shows just how quick and easy it is to get Joypad working with Lars:

I’ve been playing around with Lars using the Joypad for a couple of days now, and it works just as flawlessly as it does in the video. The connection between the two devices happens automatically and near-instantly, and there’s literally zero lag when playing. One thing I do wish however is that developers putting Joypad support in their games would offer the ability to remove the onscreen virtual controls when the Joypad is in use for a more seamless experience.

Also, Lars isn’t exactly the greatest platformer in the world, although it’s certainly not the worst. In fact, it’s pretty fun, but it does feel a bit bland and repetitious. If you’re curious about trying the Joypad support though, then it might be worth the two bucks to pick up Lars and check it out.

The developers of Joypad hint that there are more games with Joypad support coming out soon, and I'm really curious to find out which games will utilize the functionality. It’s such a great experience playing an iPad game with the Joypad that I hope a lot of developers give the Joypad SDK a look for their own games. For now, at least Lars is a start.

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