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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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Surely you've heard of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP [99¢ / $1.99], right? If not, I'm pulling this web site over right now and giving you a lecture on the subject. S&S is a fantastic collaboration between musician Jim Guthrie and artist Craig D. Adams with Capybara Games providing the glue that put the whole project together. It's a point and click adventure game with some of the best pixel art I've seen in my entire life paired with an entirely original soundtrack that combines with the game itself so well that portions of the game flat out gave me chills of awesomeness.

I could get into the plot of the game, but a large part of enjoying it is discovering the game world for yourself. I wrote our review with this in mind, and as such it's written in layers so you can stop reading when you're reached your desired comfortable level of spoilers.

Sworcery comes in two flavors. There's the iPhone only version which is on sale today only for 99¢. Similarly, there's a universal version for both the iPhone and iPad which is on sale for $1.99 today as well. Personally, I greatly prefer the game on the iPad, but there are some aspects (like rotation for combat) that are better on the iPhone so it doesn't make a whole lot of difference which device you play it on as long as you play it.

In addition, the soundtrack of the game, Sword & Sworcery LP – The Ballad of the Space Babies is also on sale. It's a "name your own price" sale, so you can decide to pay a million dollars, the $8.99 that it's going for on iTunes, zero dollars, or anything in between. It's really a great piece of work, so if at all possible try not to be one of those people who give nothing (or a penny) for this fantastic album.

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Feeling a little cynical about politics? Pick up Frogame's TITUS [$1.99]. You won't feel any better about the world, but you might enjoy being the one on top of a corrupt system for once.

This is the oddest title I've played in a while. The art is strange enough (though quite attractive), with sinister-looking characters that look like something Edward Gorey might have thought up. But the story is even stranger. You play Titus, an agoraphobic watchmaker who wants to become president of Wealland. You're up against the sinister Black Squirrels, a secret society lead by a mime named Desmond who seems oddly obsessed with destroying you personally. You'll have to employ all manner of dirty tactics to take them down, most of which are played out in a collection of 3D mini-games.

For example, you're going to need funds to run your political campaign. Fundraising puts you out hat in hand in front of the bank, while a wealthy donor tosses wads of cash down to you. You'll use on-screen buttons to move your hat back and forth to catch the cash and dodge his (rather uncalled for) bombs. And you'll need to regularly give out propaganda using a Doodle Jump[99¢] style game where you leap from mailbox to mailbox.

None of these mini-games would stand on their own, but the whole thing is wrapped in a compelling political simulator. You have to win nine elections before facing down Desmond, the despotic mime. They require increasingly large amounts of strategy, and a little luck, as you draw closer to your goal. You need to make sure you're bringing in enough funds without angering your donors, seek out rumors and scandals for the appropriate candidates, pay bribes for journalists that are high enough to score the interview without being so high as to sully your reputation, and decide just how dirty to get. Want to shake down passers-by for cash? It's an option, but it might come back to haunt you.

The meat of the game is in the main campaign, but if you're hooked on the electoral process you can run single elections with any of the characters you've defeated. You can also play the mini-games individually if you're really into them, but I'm not sure why you'd want to—they're fun enough in the context of the campaign, but they don't stand on their own very well. There aren't any leaderboards, unfortunately, and the achievements aren't synced to any online service. While we're talking negatives, the translation isn't fantastic. It seems like TITUS might be a more humorous game in the original French, but it stands as a quirky dark comedy as it is.

In a market that often rewards copycats and me-tooism, it's refreshing to play such an odd little game and find that it's also a lot of fun. Darkly cynical fun, but fun nonetheless. I didn't expect to recommend you a political simulation about the showdown between an agoraphobic watchmaker and a despotic mime, but here we are. It's definitely a happy surprise.

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Pavel Tsarev's iDaTank [$1.99 / Lite] was released a few weeks ago but had some troubles, namely some crashing issues and a lack of a save function when the home button was pushed — thankfully an update thrust out last week fixes those problems, meaning all of us can sit and enjoy the unique experience without having to worry about saving issues.

Nailing down what it is that makes iDaTank enjoyable is difficult. At its core, it’s a resource-hoarding exploration game where you're controlling a small tank as it moves around a small, three dimensional planet collecting resources and killing enemies. Somehow it also manages to feel a bit like a rogue-like, where permadeath can end your game quickly (although you can purchase more lives through the in-game economy), weapon upgrades are slowly seeded out and an RPG system lays underneath the hood to increase the tanks properties.

It doesn't fit into an easily definable genre-box, which is what makes it all the more appealing. The game play doesn't stretch much further than what you'll get from the outset — you drive around, stripping planets of resources and killing enemies, but you still feel like you have to see what's at the end.

You control the tanks movement by sliding your finger in the direction you want to go — there is no virtual joystick, but it feels similar, perhaps even better than one. The firing is done automatically, so even though it might look like a duel stick shooter, it's not. Somehow, the constant upgrades keep it interesting and as the game progresses, you can actually feel it change underneath your fingers. You get more control over your tank, more speed, weapons, storage — the progression feels spot on, even though you'll have to grind a bit to get through later levels.

There are a total of 26 different levels, each subdivided into different subsections based on planet type. Each planet has its own alien life, is shaped differently and a few even have bosses, which if you run into unprepared, will absolutely slaughter you. That's made all the more difficult by the fact you can't back out and leave a planet if you find it too tough, which means you'll need to grind the early levels before you jump into some of the later ones, providing a serious challenge even if you're fully prepared. The goal of each planet is to capture a certain amount of resources, sometimes this means running over and delivering some blue crystals, other times you'll need to kill enemies or blow up giant egg things. You'll often need to make several trips from the resources to the delivery platform before you're finished with the level.

Picking which upgrades to use on your tank and your weapons is integral to your success in each mission. Weapons are handled by the same in-game economy as the lives, so you have to choose between the two. Tank upgrades are dispersed out when you reach a new level by gaining XP from killing aliens. There's also the whole permadeath thing that might turn some people off — when you're out of lives, you have to start over at the very beginning of the game.

iDaTank is built in Unity and looks the part. The 3D graphics are simple, but they work with the overall atmosphere of the game, which is to say it's a minimal, but well-planned and well-executed idea. That said, the enemy animation is top-notch and the tank looks great as well — like something pulled straight out of Jonathan Ive's brain if Apple suddenly decided to start making space-tanks. The interface continues the minimalist trend, almost to a fault as it takes a couple of taps to figure out what a button does instead of just one, but the uncluttered look works well with the rest of the game. It's a universal build, but it looks a little better on the iPhone's smaller screen then it does on iPad. However, the controls are a little smoother on iPad, so pick your fancy there if you have a choice.

Despite the ambiguous name, iDaTank is a surprisingly in-depth adventure game with a thin, but adequate layer of RPG elements added on top to keep you coming back for more. Like the best rogue-likes, it works like crack in that you'll manage to inch further and further into space through each playthrough before suddenly realizing it's three in the morning.

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Last week at WWDC, I met up with the guys from Get Set Games to talk about the success they’ve had with their game Mega Jump [Free] as well as what the future holds for them on the App Store. First of all, they revealed that Mega Jump has just passed the 15 million download mark, which is an impressive milestone to say the least. You might remember that just over a year ago, Mega Jump launched as a 99¢ paid app. It saw a brief sale period at one point, but last August the team decided to make the game permanently free and try to make their money by selling a huge selection of IAP goodies from within the game.

Love it or hate it, this freemium pay model has done extremely well for them in the past 10 months, and they have no plans to revert to a paid app anytime soon. Mega Jump has also received a steady stream of updates during its lifespan, and the newest one that is set to hit any day now will be the game’s 15th. It adds a huge new feature to the back end of the game which will allow the developers to send new content to the game through OpenFeint without actually submitting it as an official update. This means that things like new level skins and coin patterns can be pushed out to the game even more frequently and with less hassle. If you’re a Mega Jump fan, expect new content to be hitting the game at an even faster pace from update 15 on.

Next, they filled me in on one of their upcoming new games which will be starring the main character from Mega Jump, who I’ve come to learn is named Redford. Called Mega Run, it will be an endless running style of game using a similar art style from Mega Jump. The version of Mega Run I was able to try is currently just a functioning prototype, but already felt pretty good. The developers are planning to utilize a similar freemium pay structure and update schedule for Mega Run as they have with Mega Jump. It will also include the new back end feature that lets new assets be pushed to the game without an update, so they assured me that there will be plenty of fresh content coming to that title after it launches as well.

One bit of interesting news that came up during my meeting was finding out that Rob Segal of Get Set Games is one of the brains behind the Toronto Game Jam, or TOJam, and that the entire development team participates in this 3 day game jam every year. During the latest TOJam this past May, members of Get Set Games created a game called Seven Jamurai under their pseudonym Team Awesomo. Seven Jamurai was easily one of the most talked about games at the jam, and it’s pretty incredible to think that such a high quality effort can be created in just a few short days.

The exciting part of all this is that the team was so happy with how Seven Jamurai turned out that they are in the process of readying the game for an iOS release. Gameplay could be described as Castle Crashers meets Smash TV, as Seven Samurai is a frantic dual-stick shooter that relies heavily on cooperative play with up to 4 players. They are really fine tuning how all of this will work out in the iOS version, but you can check out this early video of Seven Jamurai from the game jam to get an idea of what it will be like:

Both Mega Run and Seven Jamurai are being developed at the same time, and the developers hope to have them both out on the App Store “in a few months”. My big takeaway from my meeting with Get Set Games is that this is a crew of video game-loving friends who have all defined their own roles in the company, which allows them to work together really well. They also have a near endless supply of amazing game ideas, and I could easily write twice as much about their previous game jam titles which were never fully realized but all have immense potential.

I’ll keep my fingers crossed that will see these games materialize in some form someday, but for now I’ll be looking forward to plenty of new Mega Jump content and both Mega Run and Seven Jamurai hitting the App Store sometime this year.

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One of my favorite iOS games of all time is the dungeon crawler Rogue Touch from ChronoSoft. Here at WWDC 2011, I had a chance to sit down with the man behind the games, Kevin Hill, to discuss the latest on that great classic adaptation as well as some of his upcoming titles, including roguelike / RPG Dungeon Tactics: Spirit Hunter Mineko, which we first mentioned back in March of last year.

First off, Rogue Touch will be getting a major update sometime in July as it moves from v1.6, which arrived last summer, to version 2.0. Kevin worked am impressive series of updates to the game in its early days, but none of them have brought nearly as drastic a set of enhancements as the coming update.

Rogue Touch v2.0 will bring an entirely new set of tiles and monsters with much greater detail than those of the current release. What's more, the game will move to an OpenGL-based rendering engine (don't worry — it's still a 2D game), improving the visuals in several respects as compared to its current CoreGraphics-based engine. Game Center integration is also in the mix, as well as various, smaller tweaks and enhancements. I took a look at the tile and character sheets for Rogue Touch v2.0, and I can't wait to make the upgrade.

The coming Rogue Touch update isn't all that fans of the game have to look forward to. Rogue Touch EX is still on track to inject the dungeon crawler formula with a dose of arcade action. The game will feature pseudo real-time exploration, something akin to what we've seen in Solomon's Keep. Rogue Touch EX is expected to arrive as a Universal application for both iPad and iPhone, with Retina display support on the latter.

The biggest news of all out of our meeting with ChronoSoft is the preview I was given of Hill's upcoming Dungeon Tactics: Spirit Hunter Mineko. The game marries elements of the roguelike dungeon crawler with those of the traditional Japanese RPG.

We detailed the backstory in our first look but, in short, the game is the adventure of Mineko, a teenage girl and Spirit Hunter who lives with her family in a remote, mountaintop village. One night during a magical and terrible storm, she and her fellow villagers see a menacing castle materialize out of nowhere. The village council decides that her brother should be sent to investigate this new evil and Mineko, never one to mope about the house, follows after him to help save her village.

Hill has made a number of design decisions aimed at keeping the game experience as accessible and uncluttered as possible. For example, movement is a simple swipe with two swipes for an action. Stairs are automatically ascended / descended when encountered. Tidy inventory and potion selection panes can be swiped in from above and below. The entire system feels rather streamlined.

The game features multiple environments including houses, sewers, cellars, caves, forests and castles as well as an active weather system and day and night modes. In addition to weapons and potions, there is a magic system handled via glyphs on a scroll that can slide in from the side of the screen. Additional side areas become available upon completion of the main mission, allowing some bonus post-victory dungeon crawling fun.

I had a chance to play an in-progress version of the game here at WWDC and it seems extremely well put together. Have a look at a brief video of the game in its current state.

We can expect Dungeon Tactics: Spirit Hunter Mineko to arrive sometime this fall. After that, it's on to work on the next title for Hill, an as-yet unnamed, futuristic strategy game in the vein of Advanced Wars and Super Robot Wars. I took a look at the character sheets and they look quite promising.

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While they weren’t technically the first to do it, Firemint’s Real Racing 2 HD [$9.99] was the first game to officially support full screen 1080p TV-Out on the iPad 2. After the iPad 2 dropped, it was discovered that a few other games also supported this already, but more of by chance and not necessarily as a specified feature. Now Real Racing 2 HD is making sure its the first game to announce support for one of the new features revealed for iOS 5 at Monday’s keynote.

When iOS 5 is released sometime this Fall, Real Racing 2 HD will support fully wireless TV-Out via the iPad 2 and AirPlay Mirroring with an Apple TV. Essentially, it will perform the same function as the TV-Out feature did using an HDMI cable plugged directly into your TV but completely wirelessly, though it won’t be displayed in full 1080p. It will still run in full screen, but the maximum resolution AirPlay Mirroring can output is 720p. However, that is a very small price to pay to be able to play Real Racing 2 HD on a TV using the iPad 2 as a controller and having it be completely wireless.

In short: I want this for every game ever. The Real Racing franchise has typically been at the forefront of adopting new and interesting features in iOS, and I really hope others follow suit. In fact, AirPlay Mirroring combined with gaming is incredibly similar to what Nintendo is touting as a huge feature of their new Wii U console that was unveiled at E3 yesterday. This gives even more credence to the talk that Apple is now a firm player in the console gaming market with AirPlay Mirroring as they increasingly try to invade the living room space.

I personally love it, and although there are many things the home consoles offer that iOS doesn’t, I absolutely feel there is room for my iPad 2 as a viable option when deciding what to play on my TV at home. We’ll keep a close eye on how this feature is utilized in other games too as we near the release of iOS 5 later this year.

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Have you ever signed up for a cheap vacation, only to find the room is half the size you expected and the "beach-front" view is actually a back alley and a pile of dirt? That's pretty much what Fin, the pint-sized hero of Mighty Fin [$0.99], gets when he decides to sign up for Shady Sal's suspiciously cheap Round the World Tour. Instead of dirty sheets, he's dealing with sharks and frigid waters in a vacation he'll be lucky to survive.

Guiding Fin through the deadly waters involves the same sort of one-touch gameplay that made Tiny Wings [$0.99] such a winner. You can press down to make Fin dive, and release to make him jump. He swims toward obstacles full-speed ahead while you react to keep him safe. Along with spikes, jellyfish and other deadly foes, each level is filled with points bubbles. These boost your score and telegraph the best way around upcoming obstacles. Since each level is randomly generated when you play it, this extra assistance is handy.

Mighty Fin has eight levels, with regular and endless modes for each. That doesn't sound like much, but the levels are long and some are quite challenging. Each level also has three hats to earn – one found within the level, and two for getting gold-ranked scores on regular and endless. Game Center leaderboards add a little more replayability.

The levels that Fin visits on his vacation are mostly pretty bleak – Backwater Bay, Teacup Tempest and Shipwreck Strait are as grey and unwelcoming as they sound. So it's a good thing the rest of Mighty Fin has charm to spare. The art is top-notch, especially for Fin himself. He's a goofy, bug-eyed little fish, but he looks so joyous when he leaps out of the water that I just had to root for the little guy. The hats are a nice touch too—it's a little more fun to play with a fish in a top hat or a lady's bouffant. You'll also want to catch the witty quips scattered throughout the game.

Mighty Fin's charm helps to smooth out some of its struggles. The music really needs more variety, for one thing. Also, If you're at all skilled with the game, the first couple levels won't make a great first impression – the levels are a bit too long and a bit too easy to start. The challenge ramps up, but avoid the early endless levels if you're finding the game too easy. I had to kill Fin off intentionally a couple times after I cleared a few million points. The later levels fare much better.

If you're not motivated by the high score chase, the game's done once you unlock all the hats. I'd love to see achievements and maybe a (cheerier) future level pack to pad the game out. An endless mode that actually gets harder and faster as you progress would be a nice addition, too.

It's certainly no complaint that I'd like to see Fin safely through another undersea vacation. In the end, I was entertained and thoroughly challenged by Mighty Fin. Reactions are mixed in the forums, but I think this is a winner for Launching Pad Games.

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Yesterday, I was quite excited to see Konami release an iOS version of their classic arcade beat ‘em up X-Men [$2.99], and I quickly downloaded the title as soon as it hit the US App Store. The good news is that this is a totally competent port of X-Men that’s just how your remember it from 1992, and it plays just fine using virtual controls. The bad news is that once the rose-colored glasses of nostalgia wear off, X-Men is a simplistic and repetitive game at its core compared to modern offerings.That doesn’t mean it isn’t any fun though, and it’s still a total blast to kick the snot out of legions of Magneto’s henchmen using your favorite X-man or woman.

X-Men was always at its best played cooperatively with friends, with the pinnacle being the dual-screen arcade cabinet that allowed for all 6 players to play together simultaneously. This feature has been faithfully retained in the iOS version thanks to local WiFi cooperative play. I don’t have enough devices to confirm whether you can play with all 6 players at once or not, but I did play through a 3 player game using an iPad 2, iPhone 4, and iPod touch. The connection was both easy to set up and reliable throughout the game, and cooperative multiplayer in X-Men is just as much fun as I remember it being.

Unfortunately, the solo gameplay doesn’t hold up quite as well. Since continuing from exactly where you end up dying is both unlimited and doesn’t cost any quarters, almost all of the risk or challenge is taken out of the game. It’s easy to just mindlessly mash through the game, continuing as much as you need until it’s all over. Sure, you can challenge yourself by restricting your own use of the continue option, but a more structured set of rules or goals would have been a nice addition. The inclusion of Game Center achievements and a leaderboard mitigates this somewhat.

Besides unlimited continues taking some of the fun out of the game, the actual brawler-style gameplay hasn’t aged so well either. Your offensive move set is extremely shallow, and X-Men doesn’t strive to be anything more than a mindless button-masher. The problem is that the visceral feel of physically mashing away at buttons on an arcade cabinet doesn’t translate so well to the flat surface of a touch screen.

One nice addition to the iOS version of X-Men is the ability to move the onscreen virtual controls wherever you like, though I wish I could adjust the opacity of them as well. It’s a universal game, and plays well on both the iPhone/iPod touch and iPad. There is the option to play the game in a cropped window that retains the original 4:3 aspect ratio of the arcade game, or a “16:9” option that fills out the entire screen of whichever device you’re using. I tend to go with the smaller window option as it retains the crispness of the pixel graphics, but it’s nice to have the option of full screen too.

If you were a fan of the X-Men game in arcades nearly two decades ago, then you should easily get your three dollars-worth out of the iOS version just on the nostalgia factor alone. If you aren’t familiar with the original game but enjoy a good arcade beat ‘em up, then X-Men should still do the trick, it’s just not the best the genre has to offer. The gameplay feels quite dated by today’s standards, though it’s not without its charms. If you have one or more iOS device-toting buddies with you, the experience improves dramatically in cooperative play.

I’m really happy that Konami decided to bring one of its classic arcade titles to the App Store, as are a ton of players in our forums, and I really hope that we continue to see more down the line. While the gameplay hasn’t aged so well and there isn’t an excessive amount of bells and whistles, the iOS X-Men is a totally decent conversion and an easy recommendation for fans of the original.

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Little known fact about the Araknasaur: its eggs are delicious. And the evil CEO of the Robot Seafood Corporation wants them for breakfast. He wants them so badly, he's willing to bring the full might of his aquatic robot army to bear against the Araknasaurian hero of Velocispider [$0.99], a Universal retro arcade shooter that's as ridiculous as it sounds. It's created by Retro Dreamer, creators of Linkoids [2.99/Lite] and Sneezies. [$0.99/Lite/HD]

Velocispider is a fixed-view shooter with ultra-simple tilt controls. You fire continuously upwards at the Aquabots as they come to kill you and steal your eggs. They start out in Space Invaders-style formations, but switch up often and come at you from all angles. Some randomly drop power-ups that improve your shots, restore a life or give you extra points.  You can charge up a powerful shot by holding down anywhere on the screen. I killed a lot of Aquabots before I learned about the charge shot, but it makes destroying bosses much easier. The tilt movement can be a little touchy and caused me occasional trouble. I wouldn't say an alternate control method is necessary, but it might be a nice addition for a future update.

The game is broken up into 20 individual waves. They unlock as you complete them so you can start from your highest completed wave, but that's just a convenience to help you progress through the game. The real challenge is playing through without dying by losing all three of your lives or all three of your eggs. At its heart, Velocispider is a high score competition, with Game Center leaderboards that will be topped by those who can get through all twenty waves in a single play-through. It's that challenge that will keep you coming back for another shot long after you've seen all that the game has to offer.

But enough about the technical stuff. Velocispider is a ton of fun, but the mechanics aren't what caught my eye. The game is gorgeous, in a pixel art and chiptune sort of way. The art is full of character, and that character is super ridiculous. I can't decide if I love the drop sharks (manta rays?) or the bomber whales more. The game also has a great soundtrack, though I wouldn't mind if a few more tracks were mixed in.

The story is the exact sort of campy over-the-top tale you'd expect from a game like this. There's not much to it, but I looked forward to the moments between each wave that illustrate the evil CEO's growing desperation and failing grasp on reality. Sadly, you might miss a few of them if you're doing well, since they only show up before boss waves or when you start playing.

If you're anything like me, the thrill of fighting off waves of aquatic-robot monsters with a well armed half-spider, half-velociraptor Araknasaur makes Velocispider an easy buy. Fortunately, it's also a challenging arcade game that will keep you scrabbling for a high score. Players seem to be enjoying the game in our forums too, so give Velocispider a look and let's go shoot some squid.

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