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PlayGround States logo, as it appears on Facebook.

“It’s been an amazing experience,” Double Fine founder Tim Schafer told fans via a live stream that celebrated the closing moments of Double Fine Adventure’s success on Kickstarter. The project generated over three million dollars worth of donations in a month. Double Fine had asked for $400,000. It wasn’t just amazing. It was magical.

Not every studio sees this kind of outcome. Lead artist and the brains behind Playground State, Barry Collins, is walking us through what his studio looks like, and what has happened to his game, after his project failed to receive funding.

Playground State was founded two years ago by Barry and his brother Brad to explore and express the ideas that Barry has had floating around in his head since childhood. If you look closely at its web site, you’ll notice that there’s no physical address. It’s just a collective “willing people” across the globe coming together to build a series of sci-fi titles called Knights. A PC title called Knights: Spiral Islands was to be the first.

Spiral Island became a known project thanks to Kickstarter and a warm reception by PC enthusiast web site Rock, Paper, Shotgun, which featured it in an editorial in February 2011. Spiral Island is described as an episodic online action-adventure game in which you, as a knight in the game’s sci-fi universe, battle evil across the cosmos. Its hook, outside of its UDK visuals, is its lack of boundaries: in one mission, you’ll be hacking and shooting Vikings, in others space bees, mushroom zombies, robots, and large crabs.

Concept art of a playable Knight. You'll see other Knights in the upcoming preview game.

It has the look and feel of something incredible, especially if it were to be expanded as planned. Spiral Island was pitched to potential donors as game design in motion, as it would have seamlessly integrated new scenarios and enemies in a constant steam.

For whatever reason, it didn’t receive sufficient support. The Kickstarter effort ended with a thud later that April. Playground was looking for $10,000. A hair over $1,500 was pledged across 36 serial donators. One pledger, for example, has backed 48 other projects.

It’s easy to see this as a knockout shot, but to Barry, it’s just a glancing blow, and now the team is looking to iOS and its vast audience to continue.

“The lack of funds was frustrating, but it didn’t really kill our ambitions or desire to make this work,” Barry tells TouchArcade. In the ultimate show of confidence, the studio grew. It picked up an artist, a musician, a sound designer, and a couple of programmers following the failed attempt at funding.

That Playground is reacting in the exact opposite way you’d expect isn’t lost on Barry, and he explains that the reason is tied into how deeply his core team believes in what the studio is trying to accomplish.

“It’s our baby,” Barry tell us. “Amazingly, after maybe an hour or two of rambling with the various team members, they all irrevocably become hooked on the concept and what it has to offer, and slowly but surely begin to own it. Right now we have a team of guys all on the same page and all excited about the small steps as much as the bigger one that will come later — Knights as a whole.”

The crab monster we originally fell in love with, but now fewer polygons for mobile.

While the team grew, so did Knights. It’s now more than a game: it’s a series of mobile titles based in the same universe that spans multiple platforms and genres. Barry has an idea for several projects, some of which are in early stages of development. The most important is an Epic Citadel-like preview title, built specifically for iOS to show off what his team can do.

But even though the team is growing and excited about the games Barry wants to make, it has a horrible issue: it’s hemorrhaging programmers. It can’t keep one on staff, and this is putting a kink in the size and scope of the Knights games Barry wants to make. Barry says they’re in a spiral of simplification, as no one has the expertise to implement complex content into builds. The lack of a revenue stream is undoubtedly one of the culprits here. It’s also the reason why it’s bothering with a showcase project in the first place, and opening its doors for outsourcing work.

“This constant tug of war is what pushed us to our current goals of producing a very basic, free to download visual demo — a means of walking around a crazy environment full of eye candy and talking to basic scripted actors within the world. This will lay the ground work for follow-up episodes to come afterwords,” Barry tells us.

That Knights is blowing up, too, isn’t lost on Barry. He says this game has two goals: to nab exposure and be a launching board. Barry believes it’ll generate new ideas for future Knights games, and argues that the scope in this game is much more manageable than the one he put out there with Spiral Island.

This is how Playground wants to tackle on-screen FPS controls.

Another game is another iPhone and iPad-specific title called Knights: Arena. This is also a victim of the rotunda of programmers cycling through the studio. It’s an FPS that revolves solely around online play: team deathmatch, capture the flag, and so on. Barry, with a lengthy Internet sigh capping off what he tells us about Arena, says the studio’s goal is to establish a revenue stream as quickly as possible. It needs to hire at least one, dedicated programmer. “But that in itself is a Catch 22,” he says. “Need a programmer to make revenue, need revenue to get a programmer.”

Playground State’s ability to keep its legs churning in the mud seems unreal, but it’s a human reaction. With a teeth-gnashing kind of pride, Barry plans to continue marching on beyond his studio’s funding failure. He doesn’t just want to make games — he wants to see his dreams realized.

“I don’t quite know how we managed to grow in quality, strength, and numbers. Faith in Knights among the team is stronger than ever today, despite everything,” he tells us.

“Knights is one of many projects I dream of making. So this is the blood, sweat, tears part of paving the way to eventually being able to produce these with a real budget and fully paid team. This is it. This is what I love. It’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.”

That’s why Barry is up for using Kickstarter again. He has at least two in the works right now. One is for an extensive indie bundle that features developers in the Vancouver area. The other is for Knights: Arena or a single-player variant of that idea, which he wants to launch “at the same time that we launch the free demo, so people can see or play it and discover it that way.”

Barry talks about Knights: Spiral Island in his Kickstarter promo.

Spiral Island’s crowd-funding failure didn’t come without costs in terms of people and revenue. There were lessons learned, though. The first was scalability. “No need to come out of the gate with a massive universe to embark on hundreds of small stories in other universes. A single story is good enough, or if finances and or programming get in the way, as we are discovering, there are still options,” he tells us.

“We did not go into this expecting it to be quick and easy, and it has not been quick or easy either,” he says.

And let’s say these Kickstarters don’t pan out? Barry isn’t worried. “We will keep pushing along until we are earning revenue on our own, find the right investment deal or get the attention of a publisher that wants to work with us.”

“But no matter what, this project will see the light of day, and as a series of mobile games to start.”

Towards the end of our Barry conversation, we pressed “pause” so we could ask what makes him so idealistic. His vision for these Knights games still seems almost too ambitious considering the lack of funding. The risk of what will happen if these ideas die could be monumental to the studio’s future and Barry. These games are the realization of his dreams, after all.

Honu are a species you'll be able to talk to in a preview. Here's one in a warrior outfit.

“Knights in general is an extremely ambitious concept,” he says. “It started big and the scope of the games we want to tell based in this setting have been cut back for the sake of getting something to market sooner. “

“The concept of Knights being so grand just means we always have room to grow. We realize that we may only ever produce the Knights preview or only ever get as far as Knights: Arena because there’s a real possibility that Knights is lame and we are all crazy people working away on an idea nobody else likes. “

“For me this would just be a continuation of exactly what I have done for 11 years, which is to just hire myself out to whatever studio wants to pay me, and doing so in mass with others is old hat. The grind of tracking down clients and deadlines, milestones, massive delays in payment and so on… it’s all a part of the job. But, Knights, to me, is a way out of this, to finally get all the ideas my brother and I have been brewing up for decades. It’s time we produce things we want rather than the things that pay the bills.”

Barry says that he likes to focus on what could happen with some success. He could hire programmers, no more lost time on contract projects, and the people he’s surrounded by could be supported.

“I just really hope people want to play a game about the Knights — the ultimate saviors of all things, the definition of heroic. Not a bad bone in their bodies, watching them take on any bad guy we can dream up and throw at them, across all history in any universe and time. I really want to play that game.”

When a Kickstarter fails, it’s not necessarily a catalyst for disaster. Barry is idealistic, and maybe too ambitious, but he’s not a quitter. He’ll keep creating. The success of Double Fine was magical, but the intensity of at least one man who didn’t win big is special, too.

While Barry’s story stands on its own, we are covering something larger here. This is part one of a two-part series of articles. In the next, we’ll introduce you to three more studios who haven’t had the greatest experience on Kickstarter. We’ll also discuss why we don’t normally cover games on the service and why we’re not certain of the long-term viability of crowd-funding sources like Kickstarter.

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Simon Oliver of Rolando fame is coming back to mobile with a new Okabu game, The Guardian is reporting. Oliver released the original Okabu on PS3 back in 2011. It took a slugging from critics for its overly dry and simplistic design, but Oliver and his studio Handcircus Games has since been working on a free-to-play take in preparation for a release this year across iOS and Android. He didn’t comment on what this one will do differently.

He did, however, describe the original Okabu as a first step. He and his studio built a universe, and they’ll continue to work within it. “We wanted to retain ownership of the IP so we could build something that we knew would work across different platforms,” Oliver said. “That’s been our focus since October, working on a prototype for a new free-to-play game set in the Okabu universe, for iOS and Android,” he continued, hopefully with a flourish.

A screen of the PS3 version of the game.

The entire interview, by the way, is a fascinating read. Oliver has been around since the beginning of the App Store and, with help from Rolando, he became one of the first App Store success stories. The Guardian quizzed him about all sorts of currents topics, including the Triple Town controversy, IP ownership, and the new and more vibrant App Store landscape. His answers carry a different weight.

[via The Guardian]

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Back in January, developer Spry Fox released Triple Town [Free], an iOS version of their immensely popular Kindle, Facebook, and Google+ matching game. Triple Town was widely loved by gamers and gaming critics, including our own 4.5 star review, and it was great to see a developer that was able to innovate so heavily in what has become a stagnant match-3 genre.

Since its release, Triple Town has received several updates, but they have mostly amounted to maintenance type stuff. Over the weekend, another new update was released, this time adding some very welcome new gameplay maps.

First is the City on a Lake map, which you can see in the screen below. This gives you the standard 6×6 grid found in the original mode only this time there is an L-shaped body of water smack dab in the middle. Obviously this is going to affect your strategy by limiting the amount of space you have to make matches, since the water is unusable space. It puts a nice challenging spin on the regular Triple Town formula.

The second new map is called Peaceful Valley, pictured below, and is a much friendlier, casual experience. It gives you a 5×5 map grid to work with, but here there are no bears or ninjas to muck up your carefully planned town layout. This is another nice departure from the original mode like City on a Lake is, only instead of being more challenging it’s actually much less challenging, and really lets you concentrate on thinking ahead and making smart matches instead of dealing with those pesky bears.

Aside from the big addition of two new maps, there are some minor tweaks in this update as well. High scores are now saved locally in addition to online through OpenFeint, and can be viewed from the options screen. There is also now an in-game orientation lock for people like me who like to get their game on while laying in bed. Finally, there are even more optimizations and bug fixes.

There is one tiny catch, though. The two new maps are only available for those who have paid to unlock unlimited turns from within the game. If you aren’t one of those people then there’s some good news for you: to celebrate the new update the unlimited turns IAP is on sale for $2.99. I paid the original $6.99 for Triple Town when it first came out and felt it was completely worth it, so from where I stand 3 bucks is a fantastic deal for one of the finest match-3 games available, even more so after this latest update.

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As I mentioned yesterday, I can’t get enough of OMGPOP’s Draw Something [$0.99 / Free ]. All of my iOS device owning Facebook friends seem to be playing it, and we all seem to be equally horrible when it comes to drawing things. The dudes over at IGN, however, apparently are playing games with people who aren’t horrible at drawing.

Take a look:

There’s even more where those came from. Seeing this sort of talent really makes me wish Draw Something had a better social sharing component, as I’d be great if I could mash a button and automatically tweet one of my drawings, and, in the process, be able to look through the drawings of others.

Have you saved any particularly incredible drawings either of yours or of your opponents in Draw Something? Drop ‘em in the comments, I’d love to see them.

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Alright, I’ll come clean. When I saw OMGPOP’s Draw Something [99¢ / Free] glued to the #1 positions on both the free and paid charts I assumed it was yet another flavor of the week flash in the pan freemium game. Then I tried it, and wow is this game good. I’m not quite sure how they did it, but Draw Something is a perfect witch’s brew of Facebook integration, word scrambling, and asynchronous two-player Pictionary.

It works a little something like this- You start a game with someone (I’ve found games with people you actually know via Facebook seem to be the most fun.) and are given the choice of three words of varying difficulty. You choose one, do your best to draw it, and hit submit. Your friend gets a push alert, sees your drawing, and is given a array of scrambled letters to spell the word with. If they guess correctly you’re awarded between one and three coins, they take their turn, and the process repeats.

The free to play mechanic is actually sort of neat, as you can play the free version for eternity with ads and a limited set of colors to draw with. Alternatively, you can spring for the 99¢ ad-free version. The coins you earn are used to either buy bombs which nuke some of the letter tiles which don’t go to the word you’re supposed to guess or buy more colors to paint with. Sure, you can just do your drawings in the few colors that everyone gets, but to really tweak out your illustrations you need at least a few more paint sets.

The rub of the coin system is that actually earning enough coins by playing to buy bombs and unlock paint sets takes forever, which means you basically have to buy them unless you’re way more patient than I am. But, at the end of the day, I’m having a really hard time getting that worked up over the IAP as the game is worth every penny worth of the $4.99 bucket of coins I bought to unlock a bunch of paint (and the 99¢ I dropped to get the ad-free version).

Recently, the game was updated with additional words, and complete support for the Retina Display of the new iPad. In fact, my original intention of this post was just a quick news article on that fact, but I just can’t help but gush all over this game. Everyone I know is playing it, and recently taking my turns in Draw Something is both among the last things I do before I go to bed and the first things I do when I wake up every day.

So, I’m tagging this as a review, giving Draw Something five stars, and telling you again: Download this game.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Flight Control Rocket [$.99] is beautiful. The art is pyrotechnic: the groovy colors are sharp and detailed, betraying no fuzz, gloom, or jagged edges on the new iPad. Even the menus have flair. Created intricately to reflect the swinging sci-fi themes that the rest of the game is so gleefully entrenched in, they’re a pleasure to plumb. The on-screen antics feel just as good, as Firemint has iterated on the core design in really fresh ways. But, it’s a shame that all of this is wrapped in the stench of corporate influence. Some of the most interesting additions to the core play model are rendered meaningless courtesy clumsily handled free-to-play functionality.

The sci-fi influence, outside of the slicker and more vibrant visual appeal, is just a fun contrivance to push the series’ usual conceit: take a ship, plot a course, and then repeat until the screen is so full of ships, that it becomes impossible to not avoid a mid-space collision. New features include a fascinating variety of ships with abilities, all of which refreshingly change up the pacing. There’s 15 new ships in total, including a snake-like series of ships that coils as you move it, a ship that splits into two, and even a new drop-ship type that spits out smaller ships into the playing area.

The new ships also feel like stopgaps, designed specifically to keep you from developing a rhythm or from zoning out. Flight Control is usually just an effort in concentration; but with these, it is becoming a much more viable strategy game. There’s enough content on a micro-level now to warrant focus, forethought, and tactics.

To its credit, the action stays manageable despite the varying seeds, sizes, and the abilities of certain ship classes. In part, this is because the action feels a hair or two slower, but there’s also a new health component that allows for a couple of hiccups along the way, whereas the previous game just ended after one collision. It also doesn’t hurt that this series remains a breeze to play: tap and trace, that’s it.

A not-so-clever IAP system sours all of the good vibes these parts of the experience can offer. As you play across the game’s two modes, endless and a time-based survival mode, you’ll earn pieces of optionally purchasable in-game gold. You can use this, in turn, to buy robitic avatars that grant specific bonuses during play. The starter robot randomly ratchets up the score of a landed ship, for example, while others bump up gold earned or grant you extra lives. These sound neat in theory, and they would be totally fun adds if (a) they weren’t saddled by egregious IAP loops, and (b) weren’t laughably expensive.

In order to use a robot more than three or so times, you need to spend in-game gold on the batteries to power them. IAP loops consistently strike me as beyond tacky, and in this situation, they’re rigged in the game’s favor. Also, my mental math says it’ll take me at least a dozen hours to obtain one of the top-tier robots without spending any dough, which is especially silly considering this game costs real money to begin with. It’s sad. The robots idea is a casualty of a crazy business model that is too aggressive, too Facebook-y to take seriously. It’s a big, black eye instead.

Minus the free-to-play shenanigans, Flight Control Rocket is easily the best entry in the series so far, as it sports a lot of fresh and fun ideas, as well as a groovy new theme that Firemint fleshes out splendidly throughout. It’s also one of the best looking new iPad games. But, the free-to-play components do exist, and they keep the experience from feeling like a cohesive whole. This game is split into parts, as a result, and the bad has a habit of putting a damper on the good.

TouchArcade Rating:

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In another world during another time, roving bands of mercenaries die with staffs and swords clutched in grimy, blood-stained hands on epic quests to seek out fame, fortune, glory and honor. Also, tax relief — precious, precious tax relief. Kameloot’s king has pumped up the tax on gold to unbelievable levels, but he’s offering a way for cities to opt-out. It’s called the “Grand Gossip Notoriety Prize,” and the competition in the kingdom is getting stiff as heroes of all shapes and sizes, as well as bandits, monsters, and other various bump-in-the-night stuff, vie for the break.

It’s this not-so-subtle lighthearted edge that gives Digital Tales‘ Battleloot Adventures its legs. It has all the usual tropes, including the classes, items, and structure, of a 16-bit era RPG, but it put a lot of weight behind them. It knows that swords, zombies, wolves, claymores, and magic are as tired as the M4 is becoming, so it focuses on the fun inherent in playing a fantasy game instead. Things like loot, combat mechanics, and art design are what it leverages.

This easygoing attitude is sinuous, as it winds and curves and penetrates into basically every aspect of the experience. The world of Kameloot feels playful; cities and castles are bubbly and inviting, while backdrops are sketchy and bright. Even the weapons and armor and the characters of this world reject straight lines and sober tones. Everything is goofy — even if that thing is trying to squash your head into bite-sized pieces. Check out that screen and you’ll see what I mean.

Having your head squashed is an unfortunate side effect of not taking battle seriously, by the way. At its core, this is a strategy RPG that, like others in the genre, isn’t afraid to be punitive when you make a bad choice. Damage in combat is largely dictated by a rock, paper, scissors style of balancing. Pit rock against paper and you’ll feel a bump or two a couple of turns down the line, guaranteed.

Parties consist of three fantasy warriors, each of which has a specific color and class. Battles are fought in instanced zones freely picked from the world map. Generally, you’ll be fighting against three or four others. Some battles have multiple phases, and there aren’t stat refreshes between them.

Digital Tales subscribes to the Keep It Simple philosophy. Tap on an enemy to attack. Touch a UI element to activate an item or special power. Tap on yourself to defend. It’s a miraculously simple setup, but that doesn’t make the strategy simple. What looks to be this game’s greatest accomplishment is how much has been streamlined into the background. Stats like strength and dexterity still guide a character’s abilities and there’s some degree of dice-rolling when it comes to negative spells, but you never really have to interact with this stuff. There’s also a lot of automation in battle. Healers, for example, automatically heal at a turn’s start, while rogues automatically throw accuracy decreasing potions.

“We wanted to move away from the typical, number-crunching world of core RPGs and reach for players who would still enjoy the pleasure of managing their party of adventurers without worrying about hit chance percent or armor coefficients,” Digital Tales’ Andrea De Siena says. “We tried to make combat more about choices than maths by streamlining such elements as stats, damages and special skills.”

“We wanted to entice both casual gamers and RPG aficionados alike with a simple yet strategic combat system, where you’re free to focus on what you like most: if you’re a newbie, you will easily jump in but you won’t be able to simply button-bash your way to the top; if you’re a seasoned RPG veteran, you will enjoy some well-deserved gameplay depth, mastering the edge system, energy management and talent and equipment choices.”

“Do you think that’s an ambitious mission statement? It probably is, but we’re not afraid: we have robot chickens, pumpkin-men and sheep-bombarding gryphons under our belt,” it jokes. I’ve seen a robot chicken and I can confirm that it is glorious.

Defending has an interesting price: it lowers an energy bar. Energy guides the action-y components. With energy, for example, you can attack enemies with several party members at the same time. Energy usage also closely ties into the “star” system. If you pull off a big combination attack, you’ll be rewarded with a star that can then, in turn, be used to activate big-time class-specific abilities.

The combat doesn’t feel as fluid as Digital would like. It’s still turn-based, so there’s a degree of sluggishness inherent with this kind of design. But battle does operate rather without any hassle on your end. The fighting in general, actually, seems as sweet as a chocolate, and it keeps me playing more so than the loot component, which in most RPGs that stress gear and new items like this one does, always ends up providing the actual fuel. It’s nice to see combat take the front stage for once.

Speaking of loot, expect to get plenty along the way. As you level up, more and more items that match your level unlock. Winning fights earns you coins, and you can spend this change buying these unlocked items. Special “guild” missions unlock new items as well. Rich swathes of UI and tons of equipment, like rings, swords, armor, and shields, as well as hates, should keep the collector busy. This is also tied to an IAP system, but I get the impression that it’s just there for people who don’t care for grinding.

Most of the world navigation is just cut-and-dried, task-focused stuff. Find an open zone, jump into battle, and then repeat. Later in the game, after a hefty tutorial, you get introduced to a more political component: guilds. When with a guild, you get certain bonuses, and you can freely switch between them as the story unfolds and the fights get nastier and nastier. In my short time with the game, I didn’t get to experience this as much as I’d like. I’ll be stoked to see it in action when the retail version hits.

In all, actually, there seems to be a lot to like here. Most fantasy games get so into themselves, so muddled in their own goop, that it can be hard to see what separates them from the rest of the pack. Battleloot is different. It wears everything on its gleeful, not doubt dapper, sleeves. It’s funny, it’s cute, it has a lot of depth to offer, and above all, it appears to be fun.

My total time has been short, so expect some additional coverage down the line. You can keep an eye on the game’s progress via this message board thread, or hey, give it a try yourself next week if the Apple approval process goes well.

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Jordan Mechner and Smoking Car Productions’ adventure game, The Last Express, has been slated for an iPad and iPhone release. Mechner just announced the port over on his blog, and carefully avoiding the kind of details we want to know, like, say, what new features it will support. He did, however, reveal that the folks over at DotEmu are behind the port. DotEmu recently handled the iOS version of Another World [$4.99], and did a masterful job.

The Last Express Facebook page appears to be the place to look for new drips of information at this point in the marketing cycle. It’s sporting a few nifty pieces of art, as well as some production-phase images, all of which may or may not be from the original version of the game. We’re investigating.

We’ll definitely be keeping our eyes on this, so stay aboard. We’re like a train. With seats that you, the reader, can sit in. This joke totally made sense at one point.

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If you’re anything like me, the idea of a remake of a game you dearly loved when it was originally released comes as very good news. As much as I adore new games, there’s just something about playing something tried and true. Add HD graphics into that mix, and you’re really tempting me… which really should have been the case with Prince of Persia Classic [$1.99/HD]. I was hoping to be having so much fun with this game that it’d be hard to put the phone down to write this review, but unfortunately, that was not quite the case.

Prince of Persia Classic is far from all bad. If you played the game in its original form as a downloadable console title a few years back (or heaven forbid, even further back on the Apple II), you’ll recall that it had its charming parts… and its annoying ones. Still, there’s no denying that some of us spent countless hours navigating the prince through death traps, spiked pits, and all those things that make a game a proper adventure.

For one thing, the game looks and sounds absolutely gorgeous. Ubisoft has carefully gone through and retooled this for the modern gamer, doing their best to retain the spirit of the original and do it proper justice. I’d say that part works, but once you start playing it, that’s where the trouble seems to come in.

As you or may not know, Prince of Persia Classic is a sidescroller which requires lots of running and jumping to keep the prince safe as you navigate your way forward. This would have been great fun if the controls that allow you to do so weren’t awkward, but unfortunately they are. They feel a bit stiff and take some getting used to as a whole, which is not ideal when it comes to a game you want to pick up and play. Your movement control is a left to right slide bar, which really could have benefitted from a bit more sensitivity. It’s easy to make the prince run when you mean for him to walk, and you’ll have to learn to keep tight control of him to not hurl him down a chasm by accident.

If you can get comfy with the controls though, there’s a lot more in store for you beyond that. You have Normal, Time Attack and Survival modes to try out (the latter which challenges you to navigate the castle and save the princess in one hour or less), and of course the usual Facebook connectivity. You’ve also got Game Center included so scoreboards and achievements ought to keep you going for a while.

As it was in its original incarnation, Prince of Persia Classic is also a game that you’ll need to play a lot and die in a lot before you get a handle on how to really progress. Checkpoints help to make this reasonable, but I recognized some of that same frustration I felt playing the first one, as well as other retro titles from the same era. You had to be really tenacious to beat some of these titles back in the day. I think old schoolers would keep trying, but some other gamers with less experience might give up. Of course, it’s hard to say if that’s the fault of the difficulty curve of older games, or how much easier newer ones have become.

The verdict? If you must have it portable, it’s not the worst choice But if you just love the game, there are fine versions of it on XBLA and PSN that are simply easier to maneuver. They’re a few bucks more, but it might be worth it to you if awkward controls are your idea of a platforming nightmare.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Here’s a hip one that might interest puzzle game fans. Trigger Happy Labs is close to releasing its first title, a casual color-based matching game called Colorgon. Like a 2D version of a Rubik’s cube, the title has its users rotating colored blocks to form a chain of perfect pairs. The faster the better.

We saw the game earlier this afternoon, and were impressed with its UI direction. This specific element is as stripped down as the rest of the game, which, conveniently was the point of the entire project. Designer Mikael Tyrsen wanted a simple and beautiful, as well as time-wasting type of title. Mission accomplished so far.

Colorgon is slated to hit at some point within the next four weeks. It’ll launch as a Universal app, and incorporate Game Center and Facebook.

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