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Relax those fists and wiggle your fingers. If you weren’t elite enough to get into the Steam Mobile [Free] beta and are experience some, er, anger issues over the whole deal, you don’t have to anxiously ball up your hands anymore. The beta process has ended almost as suddenly as it began. The app is now available for all as a free download.

We’ve given Steam Mobile another look, and aren’t noticing any features that weren’t listed as initially beta features. Text-based chat with friends, profile and group stuff, as well as game shopping and asset viewing are all included in the package. And yeah, we also bought a game from a toilet. If this isn’t the future, then what is it?

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I was able to stop by Gameloft’s San Francisco offices while at the conference, and chatted with them about some of their recent releases as well as some of the backlash they’ve received over them. First was the issue of how they put advertisements into Hero of Sparta II [$4.99], and after an overwhelming amount of negative feedback they decided to take them out. I think it’s good when a company goes out on a limb to try something, and then can admit they were wrong about it and make things right in the end.

Next we discussed the reception to Dungeon Hunter 3 [Free], which was pretty mixed. The game itself was actually pretty good, but so drastically different from the previous two entries that I think it alienated the established fan base of the series. Had they positioned it as a spinoff rather than a direct sequel, I think the outcome would have been a lot more favorable. Plus, it’s a freemium title, which is the type of thing that will always draw criticism from some folks.

Finally, we talked about their recent release Urban Crime [Free], which was essentially a repackaging of an older Gangstar title into a freemium model. The game has not gone over well with either critics or players, and we didn’t have too many good things to say about it in our review either. The combination of outdated visuals, a rehashed game world that many people had already played to death, and tough freemium restrictions was just a recipe for disaster with Urban Crime.

(Left to right: Hero of Sparta II, Dungeon Hunter 3, and Urban Crime)

So what do these three games all have in common? Well, they’re all examples of Gameloft trying to find out the best way to sell their brands in a turbulent market like the App Store. Honestly, I think putting ads in Hero of Sparta II and making an old game into a freemium game with Urban Crime were just their way of experimenting to see what works, and although neither of those really went over so well with gamers the negative feedback was actually invaluable to Gameloft moving forward. And as for Dungeon Hunter 3, I think they made a good game but just didn’t position it right, which is another lesson learned the hard way.

What I did take away from our meeting is that Gameloft is not going completely freemium with their games from here on out, as some people have been quick to conclude. Part of these experiments is finding the best way to go about selling their future titles, and with nearly all of their development cycles lasting from 10-14 months, it can be hard to keep up with a market that moves as quickly as the App Store. But they assured me that they do have a mixture of the types of premium games that they’ve built their iOS reputation on still coming down the line, as well as titles that take advantage of the freemium model, which seems to be the prevalent model in the App Store as of late.

To wrap up our meeting, they let me get some hands-on time with their upcoming Unreal Engine title, which is still extremely early in development and doesn’t even have a title just yet. I’m sworn to secrecy on most of the nitty gritty details for now, but let me say that I was really impressed with how good the game is shaping up to be, and of course it looks absolutely gorgeous with the Unreal tech under the hood. About all I can say is that it’s a fully 3D real-time action game that will have a full storyline to play through. It will be a paid game, but will have some in-app purchase items. Finally, we should be seeing the game in the second quarter of this year, which should be by this summer.

I’m really hoping to be able to share more on the upcoming Unreal game as it gets closer to release, and after meeting with the representatives of Gameloft in person, it’s easy to see that they’re a passionate bunch who care a lot about putting out products that their customers will enjoy. Their recent missteps really seem like a part of a larger learning experience in a marketplace where traditional rules are pretty much thrown out the window. I’ll look forward to seeing how Gameloft adapts and grows on the App Store this year, and if they’re able to unlock the key to a happy medium between being profitable and keeping their huge stable of fans happy.

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On this week’s episode of The TouchArcade Show, we push through discussions about feral dogs, the Mindfreak, and accents in order to bring you the latest, hottest, and best-est in iOS game news and chit-chat. At the top, we dig into unreleased titles like Adventure Bar Story before we dive into more known quantities, like say, Triple Town. Post-break, we weigh in on heavy stuff like the Zynga vs. NimbleBit, uh, issue, and of course, get to a few of your listener questions.

Oh! We also had a special guest this week: Joseph Leray. If you’d like to give us a listen, go ahead and do so via the links below. Additionally, you could subscribe to our feeds at iTunes and Zune. All the cool kids do the latter.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-036.mp3, 33MB

Here are your show notes:

GAMES

• Adventure Bar Story
• End Night
• Ash II: Shadows [$2.99 Silver Edition / $4.99 Gold Edition]
• Triple Town [Free]

FRONT PAGE

• Zynga Rips Off ‘Tiny Tower’
• Unofficial ‘Dominion’ App Hits The Store
• Tweet-Land Has A Release Date

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Man, these digital platform companions apps come out of nowhere. Today, Valve, the creators of Half-Life and everyone’s favorite PC download platform, Steam, announced Steam Mobile [Free]. It’s what you think it is, which is to say, it’s a companion-y type of experience that’ll let you chat with Steam friends, view Steam groups and profiles, check out video game screenshots, and just about anything else Steam-related, including sales.

Best part? It’s available right now across iOS and Android. Worst part? This particular version is still in “closed beta.” To get in, you’ll need to sign into Steam through the mobile app as a way to “express interest in the beta.” Users will be rolled into the beta eventually.

Steam sales are deadly for our collective wallets under normal circumstances when we’re sitting at our computers. I’m not sure I’m ready to live in a horrible future where I’ll be able to impulse-buy $2.99 PC games from the toilet.

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Caylus [$4.99] is an outstanding game, consistently ranking in Board Game Geek’s top 10. It plays like Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth as you take on the role of a master builder tasked with winning the favor of a ruler and building something great. Your world revolves around struggles for resources, money, favor and opportunity. Big Daddy’s Creations, the folks behind Neuroshima Hex [$4.99 / Lite], have put together an equally outstanding port – as long as you’re prepared to play locally.

It’s becoming a bit of a running joke that Big Daddy’s Creations puts out great board game ports with shoddy (or no) multiplayer, and Caylus is no exception. You can’t play over Game Center, you can’t invite friends, and trying to play asynchronously will extend the game length to near-infinite. But if you’re down with fighting AI or playing locally against friends, this is a must-buy for any board game fan.

Here’s how a typical game of Caylus goes: there is a castle, there are buildings, there is a road. Each players has six workers, and takes turns each round placing them in the various buildings. The provost and bailiff (essentially progress markers) make their way down the road at the end of each round and each worker gets his due. Some buildings provide resources, others provide gold or change the turn order, and some let you trade your resources around.

The ultimate goal is to build up more favor from France’s King Philip the Fair than any of your competition. The king is generous with favor in a ‘you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours’ sort of way. If you use your resources to help build up his castle, he’ll bestow favor upon you – especially if you’re the most productive builder of the round. If you collect resources, you can turn them in at the end of the game for more favor. Building monuments, shops and landmarks like churches will make you very popular, and sometimes you can ship off extra money or resources to earn a little extra mid-game. Though I wouldn’t say Caylus is incredibly strategically deep, these methods of building up points give players a few different tactics to use to defeat their foes.

Going deeper, there are a number of rules and strategies that can affect your success in a big way. For example, each worker you place costs you money. Generally, the further along the road you place a worker, the better the reward. If the provost hasn’t passed the building he’s in, though, it won’t be counted in the round’s final tally. You can pay the provost to move him back toward the castle or further along the road – but so can everyone else. So sending a worker to a far out shop can be a massive risk, especially if you’ve already earmarked unearned resources to help build the castle at the round’s end.

There are five different resources to manage and a huge list of buildings to erect. There are also a slew of conditional rules to keep track of. So here’s where I applaud Big Daddy’s Creations the most: Caylus’s tutorial is outstanding. With the tutorial messages on through my first playthrough, I figured out maybe three quarters of the game. After one more match to polish up on the details I understood nearly everything. I’m still working on strategy, but such a thorough and straightforward introduction is pretty impressive for a game with Caylus’s complexity.

I’ve run into one or two cases that weren’t explained by anything in the rules, and it’s possible they were bugs. A couple crash bugs have been found, as has a miscommunication with Apple about translations (the game is only available in English but lists several other languages in its App Store listing). Big Daddy’s Creations has covered their plans to solve these problems in a blog post already, so I’m confident any other issues that crop up should be handled in a timely fashion.

Otherwise, the big sticking point is multiplayer. Caylus is universal, so you can play with friends on an iPad or pass-and-play on smaller devices. But online play should be a big part of the game, and playing with random unranked strangers that you can’t chat with takes a lot of the fun out of it. Also, you really have to poke around the interface to quit a game once it’s done, or to leave one for another part way. The interface is mostly extremely usable, but that’s an unintuitive task. And there’s a serious lack of stat tracking.

But for pure entertainment dollar by dollar, I’ll take Caylus over most board games in the App Store. It’s an obscenely good game, which makes its flaws all the more frustrating. If you also want to gripe about that, there’s support to be found in our discussion thread. Me? I’ve said my piece, so now I can go back to playing. It will take more than awkward multiplayer to keep me from having this much fun.

TouchArcade Rating:

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What’s up, 2012? On this week’s episode of The TouchArcade Show, we chat it up with Zeboyd Games Robert Boyd. Zeboyd is bringing its self-aware and monstrously funny JRPG Cthulhu Saves The World to iOS at some point in the near future, so we dig into what that game is all about. Additionally, Boyd fills us in on Zeboyd’s interesting history and then gives us a look at what informs the studio’s work. Spoiler: Zeboyd is into classic RPGs and wants to fix some of its problems with its own takes on the genre.

If you’d like to listen, you can do so via the handy-dandy links just below. You could also subscribe to us on iTunes and Zune Marketplace. The people who do the latter are easily are bestest friends in the whole, wide world. Think about that as you stream.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-Bonus-029.mp3, 17MB

Want more TAS? Awesome! We’ll be back in your earholes in a jiffy. Or, this Friday to be exact. See you then!

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Rift, a fairly popular MMO from Trion Worlds, has a mobile companion app. Earlier this December, the studio pushed out a free “beta” build that lets Rift users do all sorts of cool stuff, like, for example, chat in real-time with friends and guild mates, as well as peruse “the latest wall postings.”

Rift Mobile [Free], as it’s called, also comes stocked with a trio of mini-games — Planar Invasion, Craft Critters, and Shinies — that give players, and apparently not just ones with a Rift account, a “chance” to win in-game crafting and artifact loot. These games all seem pretty simple, but hey, loot.

Trion describes this release as the “first stage” of an overall Rift Mobile rollout. The final launch, accompanied by an Android app, is expected in Q1. We’re pretty stoked to see where this goes — no-one has really nailed an MMO companion app, so it’ll be fun to watch it grow and, hopefully, become truly awesome.

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Ready for Dragon Shout [Free] 2.0? The independently developed Skyrim companion map app has recently seen its social update go live. Starting now with an IAP, you can add people to a “party” list and see their individual markers and journal entires. You can also chat with friends and people around the world from the comfort of the app, and view and drop public markers for people to comment on.

A new folder system compliments these additions, and so does a sharp new already annotated map. The latter should really help a lot of Skyrim noobs, we think. Skyrim is big and scary place. It helps to have a hand. Or sixteen.

We took a gander at Dragon Shout after release and were pleasantly surprised at its build quality. If you’re looking for a great companion app, this is it.

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It isn’t a surprise to us that 60beat’s new GamePad controller made some major waves last week. It’s a proper, corded controller with a full range of button and joysticks. Also, it requires zero technical savvy. Just plug it in and go.

This all sounds great… but since we still don’t have a GamePad in our hands, we decided to quiz Pangea Software’s Brian Greenstone about it. Pangea is behind Bugdom 2 [$2.99], which is one of the two games currently supporting the controller.

I asked him three questions. The first was what it was like to develop for the device, and if it was easy or hard. Greenstone’s answer leaves us hopeful that other studios will pick up support, provided the GamePad sells well enough.

“It was very easy. All I had to do was add their SDK to my project, change my Audio Session type, and then make some basic calls to start the data flowing. Bugdom 2 already used a virtual gamepad in the game itself, so the code to work with that kind of control scheme was already in place which made things very easy.

I had it all up and running in less than an hour.”

There are no developer  or game limitations, by the way — all the buttons and directional control work, straight-up. It sounds like voice-chat support is out, though, when the device is plugged in.

“No developer limitations other than the forced use of a particular Audio Session mode, but I don’t think that would affect most games, unless there are games that require the microphone to be working. So, probably no voice-chat games.

The user limitation is just that having the gamepad plugged in causes the audio on the iPhone / iPad to go thru the audio jack. That means that you have to use the supplied splitter and listen to the game with headphones.”

Greenstone said Pangea will continue to support the device if its successful and Bugdom 2 sees a sharp spike in sales. That sounds pretty reasonable.

We’re looking forward to telling you all about this thing first-hand in the coming days. Come on, Mr. Postman!

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Toxic Blob’s puzzle-meets-strategy game Sin or Win feels like it has some issues with its actual execution, but it’s ultimately an entertaining-enough game that presents a really cool idea: moral choice as a viable, fundamental game-changing mechanic.

In games like Mass Effect 2, for example, its moral choice system boils down to being a space jerk or a space saint — the difference between booting a dude through a window or getting chatty with him. There are other constructs that flesh out these decisions, but you don’t change the way you fundamentally shoot stuff because of what you’ve done.

Sin or Win, on the other hand, incorporates two unique play styles and introduces basically two different kinds of puzzle games depending on your moral choice: sinning or winning. With a stroke of your finger, you can become the savior of its physics-enabled cavemen, or you can masterfully bring them to their individual fiery dooms. Each route has a unique kind of scoring and its own strategies. The choice, then, changes play.

It’s really hard to call this just a “puzzle” game because it’s unlike any puzzle title I’ve seen before. There are cavemen, and then there are the clouds, the pit of lava, and the various “fiends,” which range from a dragon to a laser-spewing UFO.

The playful, bumbling cavemen are the game pieces. They shoot from either side of the screen, happily bouncing off the confines of the game’s single level. With a nudge, you can send them whizzing to and fro. Dropping them lovingly into a cloud is “winning,” while pushing them into the fiery pit, equipped the cutest Satan you’ve ever seen, is “sinning.”

As you drop cavemen into the pit, it gradually fills. Once the pit hits the brim of the actual ground, the game ends.

You’ll be given sin or win points based on how you dispose of the cavemen. The combo system, however, is universally tied to how long you can juggle these boneheads. The trick to huge scores is keeping these guys up in the air for extended periods.

The grim reapers, who bookshelf the playing area, assign points in either a “sin” or “win” column. Winning, I find, is all about caressing the cavemen — which is to say, gently pushing them towards a cloud. You’ll also need to care about their plight, as each death nets sin points. Sinning, in contrast, involves dramatic movements, flings with flair and little care, and the creation of disastrous collisions to ensure that no-one gets to sit happy and comfortable inside a cloud for extended periods.

Both methods of play are viable, and each sort of incorporates the game’s other parts in a few different ways. For example, you’ll want to keep the dragon well away from your cavemen if you’re winning; maybe, hopefully dashing it against the pit in short order. If you’re sinning, you might want to keep it around, as it has the ability to lower the level of the pit and maximize the profit of your misdeeds.

What I particularly enjoy on a conceptual level is that it’s much harder to sin than to win. In most games, it’s the other way around. But… I don’t feel like the execution of some of sinning’s mechanics are up to snuff.

Straight-up, it’s too hard to juggle and also manage the random beasts or items that you need to drop into the pit at the same time — it’s too demanding and the game moves too fast. On the flip-side, it’s a tad too easy to float the cavemen into a cloud. And while hard flicks will cause the cloud to drop its cavemen, the clouds can also disappear once it reaches a quota, which removes the danger altogether. I’d like to see more balance.

That said, I don’t think these qualms entirely rob the game of fun. Putting aside the intensity for a second, the challenge of juggling multiple cavemen is satisfying enough, and the controls are up to the task. The physics are predictable and fun to exploit, as well, and you’ll get a pretty good grip of what the game does in no time.

Figuring out your approach to each session is probably Sin Or Win’s greatest strength. The moral choice is something of a strategy component, too, as you’ll want to prioritize and maximize as you play. Of note, it’s also completely OK to hover in a grey area. Want to sin and win? You can — and this leads oftentimes to the longest and most enjoyable spurts of play, in my experience.

Sin or Win has its ups and downs. The OK core play, however, and the flat-out ingenuity on display helps makes the “downs” a little easier on the soul. We suggest giving it a look, especially if you’re into an experience that turns moral choice into a play mechanic. That alone is pretty unique in this space. Oh, and it doesn’t hurt that this game’s art direction is superb, either. So cute and grim at the same time — it’s a little like Grim Fandango but with a super rustic, fairy tail-y twist.

TouchArcade Rating:

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