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We did our best to stay rational amidst the rampant speculation that Nintendo was getting into the App Store with the release of Pokémon Say Tap in Japan this summer. For one, it isn’t a move that makes sense. Nintendo puts its own titles on consoles and handhelds that it owns and sells exclusively. Also, Nintendo is keen on ragging on the App Store and saying Apple has it all wrong, so why would it bother with an app?

The word that we trusted was that this was a The Pokémon Company release, not a Nintendo one. The Pokémon Company is an affiliate of Nintendo and are the marketing managers of a brand that expands well beyond the confines of video games and into the realm of TV, toys, and other forms of media like a trading card game.

Turns out that this information was accurate. Nintendo of America, in a recent chat with Giant Bomb, flatly denied any Nintendo involvement with the project and said Nintendo content will continue to stay on Nintendo platforms. Pokémon Say Tap is a The Pokémon Company marketing tool. That’s it. Period.

"On July 1, the Pokémon Company announced that it was launching a free Android and iOS application in Japan called [Pokémon Say Tap]. The Pokémon Company routinely launches applications for cell phones and PCs as a way to promote its non-video game products, such as a music CD and Pokémon TCG cards in this instance,” Nintendo of America said in a statement given to Giant Bomb.

“Since they are intended purely as promotional tools, not as unique video games, Nintendo is not involved in any way,” it said. “… Nintendo has no intention or plans of publishing its IP on non-Nintendo platforms. This is an example of a promotion by a key Nintendo partner and has no bearing on Nintendo's overall strategy.”

Keep dreaming those Nintendo dreams for Nintendo-published and created releases on the App Store. Mario and the rest of the bunch aren’t coming in the foreseeable future, as was made clear in this statement. You'll have to keep buying the latest Nintendo handhelds if you want in on some Nintendo action.

[Via GiantBomb]

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Monster Hunter: Dynamic Hunting [$4.99] received an update earlier this month that rewards its most invested players with harder content. In version 1.01, “Real Hunt” was added. It’s a masochists' take on the “New Game Plus” model that allows anyone who beat the game to enter into it and experience the title all over again with stronger monsters, less item drops, no way to see monster health gauges or attack predicators, and zero continues. So, if you like fretting about lost progression or item enhancement, this seems like the mode just for you!

In other update news, Capcom notes that several bug fixes have been addressed in this version of the game. The studio gets no more specific beyond “minor.”

Video by AppBank

Dynamic Hunting doesn’t rank too high on our “games we like” list, but it is a solid romp for fans of the series and people who really get into Infinity Blade-style [$4.99] over-the-shoulder fight / swipe fests. If you’d like to learn more about it, check out our day zero impressions piece. If you’re more into chatting with people about the game make sure to hit up the message board.

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Old games get news legs on mobile. Can we call that a fact, yet? Regardless, yet another aged and half-forgotten title is in the process of being translated to mobile platforms. In a chat with Joystiq, Bazinga Studios said that it’s interested in reviving The Neverhood on new-fangled devices, provided it can wrestle the licensing from its IP guardians.

In 1996 I was too busy being wowed by Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, so I missed this particular CD-ROM adventure game, but as you can see, it has a fun art style characteristic of a time when there was a lot more clay than CG in mass media. Also, it's classic point-and-click just like our daddies made them.

It seems like the project is moving forward despite the legal conversation. The Facebook page for the game has several screenshots as well as tiny updates regarding the platforms its set to grace, which at this point are iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, and Windows 7. According to this page as well, several of the game’s original designers are on this project.

Looking good, right? We’ll be keeping our eyes on this one, for sure.

[Via Joystiq]

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Glu Mobile’s Gun Bros [Free] now has even more features, including a real-time co-op element that’s sure to tickle fans of the F2P dual-stick shooter.

Available this morning, the update adds “BRO-OP,” the long-awaited co-op compliment to the game that, before, had to lean on imported AI copies of friends. The mode supports play over 3G and Wi-Fi, by the way, so all your bases should be covered.

In a cool twist, Glu has also added in voice chat to mix, which should go a long way in the coordination efforts between you and your partner.

Combat has received some attention with this update as well. At the top end, the game can now boast about having a better, more fluid auto-aim system. More importantly, it can also scream that it supports even more guns and armor. The new stuff looks just as crazy as everything else in the game. As a side-note, I'm totally stoked for that “Diabolical” set — check out those bat wings! Killer!

For the jaded among the Gun Bros crowd, Glu Mobile has also laced this update with an important new feature, Daily BRO-OP challenges. Upon completion, you’ll be rewarded with extra in-game cash, which should stave off the desire to actually buy stuff with real money to some extent.

Looking good, right? I’ll have to jump into Gun Bros again. Oh! And check out our message board thread on this update if connecting with someone is enticing to you.

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Have a Snake-shaped hole in your app collection? Longing for light cycles? Check out Hard Lines [$0.99], by Spilt Milk Studios. It's the perfect mix of point-gobbling and line-racing arcade action in one little package.

The basic gameplay is simple and familiar. You take control of Lionel, a line that can take only 90 degree turns. You've got a choice of controls, with Tappy's on screen buttons, Swipey's swipes to turn, and Turny, which divides the screen into two tapping zones (yes, the game presents its controls with those rather tongue-in-cheek names). If you crash your line into itself, another line or a wall, it's toast. Your goal, as in Snake, is to survive and earn as many points as you can in the process.

Don't write this off as just another knockoff. Hard Lines takes the formula further with six great game modes. Yes, you can play Snake mode, where your line grows ever longer as you gobble up glowy things. Or you can play Survival mode, which is a light cycle battle that pits you against a couple opponent lines. Deadline gives you three minutes to pull in the highest score possible, while Gauntlet sends an endless supply of enemy lines at you. There's also Pinata, where the lines you kill explode into piles of point-bearing glowy things, and Time Attack, which requires you to keep earning points to keep going.

What you get out of all that variety is a high-score race that doesn't get dull. Hit a plateau in one mode and you can move to the next. Unfortunately the leaderboards are currently only OpenFeint, not Game Center, but Spilt Milk Studios plans to address that in an upcoming update. They'll also be adding Retina support and tweaking the difficulty to get players right into the action. You can keep tabs on their plans in our forums.

What Hard Lines is missing in those features, it makes up for with charm and humor. The lines are chatty little things, always ready with quips to entertain you or to lament their deaths. On a long enough timeline these might get old, but so far the developer has been adding more quips to keep them fresh. The graphics and sound have a retro-stylish appeal that brings to mind the games Hard Lines owes its existence to. Oh, and make sure not to miss the vocal theme in the tutorial – it's really something to hear.

I expect that the lack of Game Center support will be a deal-breaker for many of our readers. If you can let that go, there's a great arcade gaming waiting for you in Hard Lines. I'll be waiting for you on the leaderboards if you decide to jump in.

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Space is a pretty lonely place, something you'll discover in Jonathan Mulcahy's A Long Way Home [99¢]. Stranded a hundred light years away from Earth after a catastrophic ship explosion, the game's astronaut hero has to find a way home. He travels from galaxy to galaxy alone, with just a haunting piano soundtrack and an occasionally chatty wrist computer to accompany him.

To find his way home, he needs to jump from asteroid to asteroid, collecting enough dark matter to open a wormhole and travel another light year toward Earth. The asteroids rotate slowly, and its your job to pick the right moment to jump. Time it well and aim correctly, and he'll fly in a straight line toward your next target, or near enough to get picked up in its gravity. Aim poorly and he'll fly straight off into the endless void of space. Not a good way to go.

I found it challenging enough to survive many of the game's 100 levels, because jumping across large chasms of space from tiny, rotating asteroids takes a lot of precision. Even if you've got great aim, the challenge ramps up as you're introduced to debris fields, asteroids that limit your jumps, teleporting dark matter and other obstacles. But despite all the potential chaos this is a slow, thoughtful game. Occasionally you'll need to act fast, but for most of the game you'll be waiting for the perfect jump.

A Long Way Home rewards patience, while impatience usually gets you killed. You can walk around the asteroids using your choice of on-screen, accelerometer or hot zone controls, and that speeds things up a bit, but if you jump too soon you'll have to wait until you've drifted away and then start the whole level over again. If that sounds like something that would make you want to smash your iPad over your knee after a few tries, this isn't your game.

Even with the patience of a saint, you may run into a few frustrating spots. You can die unfairly in some levels, skimming the edge of the screen or getting a little too close to a debris field. I also ran into one bug that nearly broke the game, letting me skip a few levels and making my computerized companion wander off for the start of a new galaxy. A reset fixed it, but a major error like that makes me a bit more cautious about recommending the game.

If you can look past those few bugs, though, A Long Way Home is a game worth experiencing. With my headphones in and the music on, the feeling of loneliness was so visceral that I found myself actually missing my chats with the wrist computer. It can really hold up its end of a conversation, but it's only around to introduce new game mechanics. The rest of the time, it's just you and the universe. I wouldn't blame anyone who found that dull, but with a few fixes this could be a real indie darling. If you're up for patient, thoughtful gameplay that makes for an evocative experience, you should give A Long Way Home a shot.

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Here's a fact that might not be entirely too surprising: People are hungry for World of Warcraft. Seriously, I still know people who spend hours upon hours a day and have been playing with the same fervor since it was released in 2004. Also, tickets for Blizzcon, Blizzard's yearly almost entirelyWoW-centric convention, sell out within seconds of going up for sale. So, really, Gameloft couldn't have picked a better game to clone with Order & Chaos [$6.99], especially judging by the fact that the company just announced that they've managed to make $1,000,000 in the first 20 days that it was available on the App Store.

In addition, there's also an update on the way which fill add some new quests, the ability to migrate characters between servers, and separate chat channels for each language. After that, future updates are planned which will include things like new dungeons and PvP arenas. Something tells me that with the kind of cash Order & Chaos is making, Gameloft will be supporting it very well.

If this is the first you've heard of Order & Chaos, we posted both some early impressions as well as describing what it was like leveling from 1-10. The thread on our forums is massive, and worth checking out as well. If you've even vaguely dabbled in WoW, consider giving O&C a download. It's crazy just how much Gameloft has duplicated.

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Straight up: you’ll have to forgive me if some of the nuance of Shadow Cities [Free] — one of the newest geo-centric MMO games available on the App Store — has evaded me. It’s not good at telling you what it is and how you’re supposed to interact with it. Although, a lot of that might have to do with the fact that I don't exactly live in a dense metropolitan area, rendering the location awareness of the game moot since there's no one around me playing.

The PR isn’t much better, though the press releases and the buzz around it are the things that drew our attention in the first place. Shadow Cities is billed as a PVP-centric ARG that uses wherever you are as the game’s map. Like an MMO, it supposedly offers a cool and deep leveling system and a ton of missions and ‘activities.’

That's real high-concept stuff. What I actually see is a weird, blacked-out Google Maps-style world with little purple, blue, red, and green orbs floating around like neon snowflakes. With a couple of flicks of my wrists, my orange orb can decimate these other colored orbs. Then, I get experience points and, I guess, the implied promise of further orb decimation.

It seems like the point of the game revolves around killing these orbs. With each victory, I come closer to dominating my urban center, which happens to be a small city deep in the American south. I don’t see any progress bars or anything of that sort, though, so I’ll just assume that the forthcoming tyranny will take some time to seed.

In Shadow Cities, you play as a mage of one of two sides. I picked the “tech priest”-type of dudes assuming that the meld of man, psychic powers, and machines would fair better against the earthy, organic types of mages. I don’t think there’s a substantial difference in what “team” you pick. At least, I don’t get that impression.

There are two chat rooms available to you once you start the game. It isn’t, at least here, specific to your urban center. The guys talking in the chat are from my state in general and they’re looking for people to battle because app hasn’t reached the kind of critical and consumer response that it needs to flourish and become more than a proof of concept that sounds neat in press releases.

Over on the game’s official blog, proof of stuff that can happen in the game can be found. Earlier in May, users were encouraged to join battle groups, which are, essentially, global communities of 100 mages assigned to a country. There was a campaign in which one team won over another by keeping large cities to themselves, while destroying the other team’s big cities. That sounds pretty cool, actually.

I’d like to get a sense of that scale, but through the app, I can’t. I just see city streets and AI-controlled wisps of color that dance around my orange wisp. I destroy these wisps and then more generate and then I destroy them. If I could see where my battle is going, how my individual fights are factoring into a larger picture, or if I actually felt like I was interacting with a larger world, Shadow Cities would click better with me.

There's a lot of promise here. I mean, think about it. Just by whipping out your phone and spending the 15 seconds it takes to crush an orb, you could be helping to decide the fate of a global battle. That's heavy, man, and fun-sounding idea to boot. Or, additionally, if you live in a dense area, this could be like Yelp!, except with mage battles. You walk into a store some jerk checked-in to and then BOOM — you take him out.

I should note that the studio behind Shadow Cities, Grey Area, is behind the project and willing to keep iterating on top of the existing software. Gamasutra caught up with its CEO recently and he said as much, adding some specifics on new mechanics being added in the future:

"We want to develop it further and enable people to interact in the way that they want," he said, "we’ve been really conscious and paying attention how people want to create the battles… that’s what people want to do: strategize, plan, raid locations together, and all of that, so it’s definitely in the works, if you will.”

Cool. Come next update, I hope someone, anyone, around here picks up the game so I can put a spell all over his face.

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Even without Game Center support, Carcassonne [$9.99] was our runner-up Game of the Year last year. But now, with the release of a new update adding said support, what’s the GOTY Advisory Board supposed to do? Create a time machine? Nah. How about a “Missed Connections” category? Perfect!

While we figure this issue of great import out, play against some of your Game Center friends in one of the best board game turned video games on the planet. Also, enjoy some of the other perks of Version 2.20, which is sure as sure the last “big” update to the game until the first add-on graces the App Store. New leaderboards, 43 new achievements, score sharing, improved stability, chat time stamping, better power consumption, and an ELO bug fix are all a part of this free update that should see some significant hold-over until game creator The Coding Monkey hits fans with some rivers, Inns, and Cathedrals.

What I didn’t mention ever so slyly in the above is that these expansions won’t see the light of day for three billion years Standard Internet Time — The Coding Monkeys is cautioning fans that it’ll take a couple of months before “The River II” and “Inns and Cathedrals” hit. The good news, however, is that these will be quality bits of content as a result.

It’s hard to believe that someone still hasn’t checked Carcassonne out, but if you’re that dude, give this review a read. Seriously, this is a fantastic title. Just click “Buy app” already. Jeesh.

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Yesterday I posted some basic details and then followed that up with some additional impressions as I made my way to level 10. At some point during the night, Gameloft threw the switch to make the game available internationally. If you've been anxiously reading our preview coverage and forum thread, download Order & Chaos Online [$6.99] as soon as you can.

And as soon as you do, disable global chat for the love of all things true and decent. To do so, bring up the text entry and instead of tapping the "Global Chat" button to talk in that channel, holdit down until it is blocked. For whatever reason, Gameloft apparently hasn't segregated servers at all, so Global chat is a mishmash of every language under the sun.

I'm not sure how much of a "review" I can even do for a game like Order & Chaos. I played basically all day yesterday, and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface. I've yet to really even make it outside of what feels like the starting area, and my talent trees haven't even breached the second tier of skills. This seems like a massive game, and the TouchArcade guild chat seems to have unanimously agree that Order & Chaos Online is "as good as vanilla World of Warcraft." I'm not sure I'd go that far, but there certainly is absolutely nothing else like this available on the App Store.

With that being said, as I mentioned in a previous post, Order & Chaos is definitely textbook Gameloft. They cloned the art, gameplay, and everything else that matters while leaving out a lot of the "soul" (for lack of a better way to put it) that Blizzard always has in their games. It's technically competent, but at times it feels like you're just going through the motions of an MMO, doing kill quests and running around while not really being invested in the game world itself. I've yet to really even come across anything I'd describe as "lore," which could be a fairly negative thing in the eyes of many.

There's also the legitimate concern that Gameloft might not keep Order & Chaos fresh with updates. A vital part of any MMO is a constant stream of content for your subscribers to play through, and Gameloft hasn't exactly had the best track record when it comes to providing additional content to their games at all. Without a fairly functional crystal ball, it's hard to say if this will ring true for Order & Chaos or not. Also, the WiFi-only limitation sucks. The game works just fine for jailbroken users with 3G Unrestrictor, and not being able to play on the go with my 3G iPad is seriously a drag.

Anyway, what I do know is I've been having a blast with the game. It's been scratching the eternal itch I've had for a WoW-like MMO on my iPad, and the fact that the client is universal is just icing on the cake. The TouchArcade guild seems to be having a blast too. Speaking of which, let's see if we can just take over the Arcadian Forest server. I was actively recruiting today for the TouchArcade guild, but it hit the 60 character limit in about 45 minutes… So we're going to need to make other arrangements. If you're a guildmaster looking for players, stop by this thread. Alternatively, if you're a player looking for a guild, feel free to post here.

Order & Chaos comes with free 3 month subscription, following that subscriptions are 99¢ for one month, $1.99 for three months, and $2.99 for six months.

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