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It appears as though the sequel to The Game Baker’s original Squids [$1.99], Squids Wild West, is still on track for a release this summer. We know this because (a) The Game Bakers just e-mailed us to say this is still the case and (b) The Game Bakers has also released new themed content in Squids teasing the upcoming release of the new game. You don’t do the latter unless you’re especially sure-sure that a game is on target.

So, what’s up with this new content? In today’s update to Squids, The Game Bakers have dropped in a set of three bonus levels set on a Squids Wild West map. If you’re wanting a solid first-look of what the studio is doing with Wild West asset-wise, this is the way to get that. The update is free, of course.

We took a look at Wild West (when it had a working title) at GDC this year, and were really impressed. The Game Bakers went back to the drawing board and is ironing all sorts of stuff out, while also giving the series’ fans plenty new things to do in the new game. Check out our write-up if you’re interested.

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In the midst of the two year anniversary celebration of Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja [$0.99 / Free ] which includes a huge new update hitting the App Store sometime tomorrow, the Australian developer hasn’t forgotten about their five o’clock shadow-wearing bad ass Barry Steakfries, star of such iOS titles as Monster Dash [ $0.99 ], Age of Zombies [$0.99 / Free ], and Jetpack Joyride [ Free ]. They’ve just released a new trailer revealing Flash the dog, a helpful sidekick for Barry who is coming to Jetpack Joyride in a future update.

As you can see, Flash is a helpful pup, grabbing coins for Barry and riding along in his own doggy versions of the various vehicles in the game. Also part of this update is the new gadget the Dezapinator, which will cause some of the zappers in the game to fizzle out and fail, and the Turbo Boost which will drop rings that explosively propel your forward. Finally, new DJ Headphones are available in the shop and offer up a remixed techno version of the game’s music.

The only bummer is we don’t know just when this update for Jetpack Joyride is going to hit, but we imagine it will be really soon, and in the meantime you can get back to trying to teach your dog how to use a jetpack.

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Crashing into things and making them explode almost never gets old, and that’s exactly what Bravo Games was banking on when it released Crash Mayhem [ Free ]. Luckily, this game lives up to its name and is just as fun as it may sound.

The thing about Crash Mayhem that immediately sucks you in is the lure of making as big of a crash as possible, racking up repair bills just as high as you can in the process. If this concept sounds familiar, that’s because the Burnout series was basically built on this same premise, even up to the iOS release of Burnout Crash [ $4.99 ].

Let’s preface this by saying that Burnout Crash is a pretty good addition to the Burnout series, and only debuted about a month ago on the App Store. The control style in Crash Mayhem is similar, the camera view is similar, the drivers are still incredibly stupid, and the scoring system is basically the same, too. Now that you know that, you should also know that Mayhem might even improve on Burnout’s formula a bit.

Besides the obvious advantage of Crash Mayhem being free, you can complete other goals that aren’t just blowing up everything in sight, causing catastrophic damage in the process. Instead, this non-stop action is broken up by objectives you’ll find across the game’s open world. Being able to actually explore around a world is quite a nice refresher after spending so much time strictly making things explode.

As previously mentioned, Crash Mayhem is indeed free and as with most free games, it does have some sort of in-app purchase for you to buy if you wish. This game’s pricing scheme is an example of IAP done right because you’ll only have to buy it if you don’t want ads or if you want some extra levels. As it is, the base free game gives you fifteen levels that you unlock as you play, with five more included with purchase.

The ads are persistent throughout the game, not just in menus and such, so if a banner blocking part of the screen will drive you crazy then forking over the 99¢ IAP to remove them will probably be high on your list of things to do. Still, having a game with as much content as Crash Mayhem available for free to try before you buy is a welcome thing.

The visuals in the game tend to be a bit drab and lacking in punch, but are satisfying enough to not be too much of a bother. Variety would have helped out a bit in this area, as you play in the same open world throughout every stage of the game. For the audio, the main theme playing on the main menu is very catchy, and the sound effects do just fine and capture the action happening on screen well.

Game Center integration is a definite advantage that Crash Mayhem has over Burnout, as you won’t have to sign up for another silly account (Origin) just to share your high scores with your friends. Being Universal also helps, so that you can compare with your friends regardless of iOS device.

While it may be easy to say Crash Mayhem is a simple copy-and-paste job of the Burnout series by looking at screenshots, you’d be entirely wrong. Crash Mayhem is certainly derivative of Burnout (and especially Crash), but adds its own flavor and features that make it stand out on its own. With a price tag of free, you’d probably be doing yourself a disservice by passing this one up.

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Back at GDC in March, Devolver Digital held somewhat of an “open call” for indie developers to pitch them their game ideas for possible publishing deals. They served beer and talked with various developers while being toured around San Francisco on an enormous bus. That’s right, they held their meetings on a moving bus. It was a really interesting departure from the typical dry business pitches that take place at conferences, and the Penny Arcade Report has a fantastic write up of the event from when they tagged along for a few of the bus interviews.

One of the games that was pitched and was picked up by Devolver while they were there is Cube Roots’ Dungeon Hearts, a fast-paced matching game dressed with the trappings of a classic JRPG battle system. In the game, colored coins scroll across the bottom of the screen almost like note charts in Rock Band. You can shuffle coins around to make matches, and the color of coin that you match determines which character in your party of 4 will attack the enemy. This continues in a “boss rush” series of battles as the difficulty steadily increases.

It’s a bit more nuanced than that, actually, and to really understand the gameplay in Dungeon Hearts check out this lengthy video the developer posted back in March which describes the mechanics in the game.

We’ve seen some really successful uses of the “mash a puzzle game together with RPG elements” formula, like Puzzle Quest 2 [ $4.99 ], Dungeon Raid [$2.99 / Free ], King Cashing [$1.99 / Free ], and many more. From the early looks at Dungeon Hearts it appears this might just be another winning combination. Unfortunately, Devolver Digital is pegging the release window for “early 2013”, which seems much too far off for my liking. However, a new video should be hitting in the next several weeks to tide us over, and in the meantime you can feast on the screens below from a more recent version of the game or drop by our forums for some discussion of this quirky upcoming title.

Also, be sure to check out Penny Arcade Report’s follow-up article on Dungeon Hearts where they talk to both Devolver Digital and Cube Roots about their experience landing a publishing deal on a moving vehicle.

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Honestly, there’s not much a rhythm game has to do in order to make me happy. A nice selection of tap-friendly tunes, decent UI, and adequate replayability features are the extent of my wishlist. For its part, O2Jam U [ Free ] manages to satisfy two of those three criteria, making it a satisfactory addition to the genre in my book. More importantly, O2Jam U manages to unveil a new wrinkle with the inclusion of freemium elements, a somewhat unique addition to song-based rhythm games.

If you’ve ever played a rhythm/music title on iOS you should be familiar with the gameplay in O2Jam U. Simply put, select one of the 16 currently available songs and earn the highest score possible by tapping out notes coming down the screen. Play results are scored on a grading scale and gems are awarded which can be used to purchase different tile patterns for each song. The tile patterns are a nice way to extend the life of each song, but I didn’t like the fact that patterns weren’t one-time purchases for songs.

Song-wise, you can expect a lot of K-Pop and other similar beat-heavy tunes. Obviously, musical preferences vary greatly, but I thought the song selections were definitely appropriate and lent themselves to a fun experience. Thankfully, folks can simply download the app for free in order to check out the musical variety.

O2Jam U also offers a multitude of standard options in addition to pattern changes. For example, each song has three difficulty settings, as well as the option of playing with 2, 4, or 5 rows of scrolling notes. There’s also a speed option, for those wanting a bit more hectic experience. There’s nothing particularly groundbreaking as far as features, but it’s nice to see all the different options consolidated in one game, even if the overall UI seems to be a little peculiar (I imagine due to something being lost in the English translation).

While the UI’s quirkiness can somewhat be looked past, what’s less acceptable is the poor optimization that seems to permeate across all iOS devices. Selecting songs and navigating through menus almost always leads to slowdown and/or temporary screen freezes. I assume this has to do with the online infrastructure that the app hooks into (the game is a straight port of a PC title). Regardless, the performance issues put a significant damper on the overall experience, especially when it occurs mid-game (although some slowdown appears deliberate and not necessarily performance-based). Another significant side effect of the online system is a requirement to have an internet connection in order to play.

Seeing how O2Jam U is a free title, folks may be wondering about the freemium/IAP situation. Surprisingly, the system is quite fair. Upon first launching the game, you’ll be given 100 points which are used to play “paid” songs. Selection-wise, 8 of the 16 available tunes are free with the other half cost 3 points each. As you can imagine, the 100 points will go a long way towards replaying those 8 songs and when your point total eventually declines, you will slowly regenerate a limited number of points over time (the IAP for additional points is also reasonably priced).

Slowdown issues aside, I found O2Jam U to be a fun little music game. There are enough initial points to sample all the songs, and the decent amount of options ensures some replayability. Song selection may be a bit sparse, but that can easily be fixed with future support. There are some folks that will find the network requirement and performance issues to be deal breakers, but for everyone else, O2Jam U is worth at least a try.

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We’ve been hotly anticipating Nimblebit’s follow-up to their massively popular Tiny Tower [ Free ], called Pocket Planes, since it was first unveiled at GDC in March. We took a close look at its Flight Crew Challenges in a hands-on preview last month, and we dug deep into the Nimblebit way of making games free-to-play the right way in an in-depth article earlier this month. Finally, we talked about our early impressions of the game on our podcast a couple of weeks back. See? Told you we’re hotly anticipating it.

Today, Nimblebit has released the first trailer for Pocket Planes giving everybody their first glimpse at the game in action.

As you can see from the video, and what we’ve known for a while now, is that Pocket Planes is looking to be a fantastic follow-up to Tiny Tower. It’s really been the current obsession around the TouchArcade headquarters since we’ve had our hands all over early versions, and we can’t wait for everyone else to get their hands on the game too. Unfortunately, Pocket Planes still doesn’t have a firm release date but it’s certainly close on the horizon, and once we find out when it hits for sure we’ll be letting you know.

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I admit without shame that I was a huge Poké-nerd back in Pikachu’s heyday. The explosion of Pokémon’s popularity coincided with my sophomore year of high school, and being nerdy enough to know my cool-kid rep was in the negatives even before I started lugging around a Pokédex with my textbooks, I wore Pokémon t-shirts and evangelized the games and cartoon without a care. I also saw new Pokémon movies on opening night and, surrounded by squirmy kiddles and their irritated parents, broke out in wild applause and cheers when the Nintendo logo appeared on the screen, which prompted all the kids to whoop and holler along with me (and the parents to stare at me with such loathing that I wanted to crawl into the nearest Poke-ball).

There is, however, one immediately noticeable difference between MonTowers ~Legend of Summoners’~ [ Free ] critters and Nintendo’s kid-friendly goldmine. Amid the fantasy- and horror-themed creatures you will amass, you’ll also accumulate anime girls so scantily clad and busty they make Lara Croft look like a teenie bopper who has only just started to blossom. Fortunately, unlike the milky-white flesh of your personal monster-hunting assistant (and what soft, creamy, heaving flesh it is), there is much more to MonTowers than meets the eye.

Like Pokémon, MonTowers is a monster-hunting game where you pit monsters against each other and, ideally, add defeated opponents to your ensemble. Your goal is to clear a series of towers by defeating the monster on each floor and moving up to the next challenge. There’s a cursory story outlined at the start of the adventure, but really, it’s all about climbing monster towers and fighting deadlier and deadlier opponents.

At the beginning of each brawl, you get a chance to attack first by completing a touchscreen minigame. During your attack phase, your monsters automatically step up one by one to deal their damage. Should you botch your first-strike opportunity, the opposing monster gets its licks in before your group. The cycle rinses and repeats until your team or the enemy drops dead.

When you defeat an opponent, they either combust in a flash of light, or shrink into a coin. Earning a monster’s coin adds that monster to your collection. From the moment I received my first coin, I felt that old Poké-compulsion come flooding back–not only the burning desire to “catch em all,” but to form posses made up of different abilities that dominated the competition.

As our forum users can attest, there’s no real rhyme or reason to capturing a monster. Sometimes you’ll bag it, but more often than you’d like, you just won’t. Not to worry; there are other ways to expand your portfolio. As the game unfolds, you’ll learn recipes that reveal monsters you can breed to create new types. When you run out of monsters to hook up, you can spend the tokens you earn from leveling up on Gachamon, a gambling-type minigame where a payment of five tokens cooks up a random monster. Most monsters created through Gachamon are stronger than many of the ones you’ll encounter as you ascend monster towers floor by floor, making it an expensive addiction I was willing to indulge.

To build your team, you unlock monster slots that allow you to beam in monsters from your coin collection. Each monster comes with a summoning cost divided among five colored gems you harvest during the game, and you can use those same gems to buy upgrades. The catch is, you can’t take all your monsters into a fight. Instead you assemble a small squad from your pool of summoned fighters, picking and choosing ones with lots of health, attack power, and special abilities like health regeneration.

As you progress, you’ll eventually have to un-summon older, weaker monsters to fill your finite amount of monster slots with new blood you recruit along the way. Un-summoning a monster frees up its slot, but costs you all the time and gems you spent decking out your monster with enhanced powers.

I actually found myself growing attached to battle-scarred veterans, and it’s a shame that most battles end quickly if you bring in your heaviest hitters, rendering many older monsters obsolete. Ah, progress. You are a cruel mistress. (Although you can reminisce on old times by visiting the gallery, where you can view all your summoned monsters past and present, and in the various stages of undress brought about by any upgrades you purchased for them. Believe me, once you capture and fully upgrade the Nymph and Succubus, you’ll be spending a lot of time “reminiscing” with them.)

As with any collecting game, obsessing over filling every blank spot in your monster collection is the star of the show. A good thing, too, since MonTowers‘ battle system is pretty simplistic. Aside from exercising slight control over who attacks first and pouring healing potions down the throats of injured monsters (lose them in battle and all their upgrades go with them), you mostly just sit back and watch. To be fair, I found the battle system just as complex as it needs to be. The real strategy lies in upgrading your bestiary, building dream teams, watching them annihilate the biggest and baddest the game has to throw at you, taming them, and continuing your journey upward.

Even your strongest team of monster slayers doesn’t stand a chance against the game’s most powerful adversary: Father Time. Similar to other freemium games like Tiny Tower [ Free ], many functions in MonTowers require real-time minutes or hours to complete. Lowly monsters only need a few seconds or minutes to pop up, but more advanced minions will keep you waiting for hours. The upgrade gems you harvest cost one energy apiece, and you replenish one energy every three minutes. Not so long, but to the impatient, waiting is waiting.

You can expedite certain time restrictions depending on the girth of your wallet. Tired of waiting for a summoned monster to warp in or apply researched upgrades? Slip it some tokens and it will appear instantly. Don’t want to wait for your wounded monsters to regenerate one health per second? Feed them potions, but be prepared to spend tokens on more once you run out, as you’ll rely on them in battle once you enter the third tower and beyond.

In many ways, the game’s time restrictions feel designed to make you either watch the clock and wait for assorted activities to wrap up in their own time, or break down and spend money–in-game or real–to get things moving. But, just like with Tiny Tower, the time restrictions never bothered me. There’s usually something to do while your timers tick down. Return to monsters you haven’t captured, take on new foes, consult your recipes to arrange blind dates for two lucky monsters, spend your savings on Gachamon, grind or purchase IAP tokens to instantly finish summons and upgrades–or, God forbid, put the game down and do something else for a while. Maybe gather some friends and LARP MonTowers in the woods or salivate over your sexier acquisitions.

And speaking of sexy (the game asks you to confirm that you’re at least 17 before installing it), the amount of skin it shows is good for a chuckle, but is no more than window dressing designed to attract horny 15-year-olds. Case in point: your female monsters actually remove clothing with every upgrade rather than adding on more for protection. Silly logic. But don’t let MonTowers‘ cheap bids for attention fool you. Look beyond all the thongs and pasties and you’ll find an engaging, if somewhat simplified, monster-hunting experience.

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There was quite a debate in the TouchArcade command center today regarding whether or not we were even going to post this, as our community seems to simultaneously hate it when we post about clones, but absolutely loves talking about them. So, we’re going ahead with this along with the caveat that we’re trying to get in touch with all parties involved to get to the bottom of things. With that out of the way, let’s back things up a bit.

Johann Sebastian Joust is a no-graphics game designed for the PlayStation Move controller by Die Gute Fabrik. The game seems to be a staple at any indie game developer party, and features Bach’s Brandenburg concertos as the soundtrack. The idea of the game is to jostle the PlayStation Move controllers of the other players to get them out. The threshold of how much the controller can be jostled is adjusted in time with the music, and it’s a ton of fun to watch people playing. It’s a very difficult game to explain, so, watch this trailer:

Today, ustwo released an eerily similar game called Papa Quash [ Free ]. I suppose we should cut right to the chase here, so, assuming you’ve watched the above video, imagine that… But with dub step:

The rabbit hole goes much deeper here than your typical tale of game cloning. According to ustwo marketing director Steve Bittan, the concept of the game was actually cooked up by Sam Pepper, a YouTube pseudo-celebrity whose original claim to fame was appearing on the TV series Big Brother.

Allegedly, Pepper contacted the guys at Die Gute Fabrik who gave him to go ahead with the game and wished him luck. Die Gute Fabrik fired back via Twitter by saying, “Just to be clear, we have never and would never approve, give permission, or encourage anyone to clone of any of our games.” Where things get interesting in all this is that Mills, the ustwo co-founder and self-proclaimed Chief Wonka, has been very vocal in the past regarding cloning. In the past, he’s told PocketGamer:

“Making games, entertainment, a new design, a product should always be about unearthing something that makes you proud no matter what happens on the financial side… Fakes and copycats quite simply have to absolutely f**k off to another paradigm.”

Bittan, speaking with Edge continues:

“This is a quick, short-term project, in and out of the door very quick. Obviously the concept is quite similar. We don’t want to be dragged into it too much – it’s not anything to do with our app division.

We don’t copy – everyone is influenced by certain things. It’s like saying Sega is copying Mario or something. Whale Trail people said was similar to Tiny Wings, but we went back to the drawing board with that. If people think we’re happy to clone people they’re very much mistaken.”

We’ll see how it all shakes out once more people start talking. We’ve yet to hear back from ustwo ourselves, and Die Gut Fabrik is preparing a statement on the matter. Now, I’m going to go sigh a lot.

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It would be easy to write Witch Wars [ Free ] off for its, shall we say, intensely aggressive IAP implementation. It would be hard to argue that Com2Us hasn’t reached new heights on that score. But let me play devil’s advocate for a minute. Sure, there are characters that can be unlocked for ten dollars. That’s a thing that happens in this game. But it’s also a solid competitive match-3 in a market that doesn’t have many of those to choose from. If, say, you’ve been waiting for a successor to Puzzle Quest 2 [ $4.99 ] all this time, that might not be something you can afford to ignore.

The IAP breaks down a bit like League of Legends. You start with Athena, the default witch. She’s a bit middle-of-the-road as far as abilities go. You can unlock six other characters, half with coins and half with (far too much) cash. If you do, you can use them online or solo any time. Otherwise, be patient. Every day, a new witch unlocks temporarily for everyone to try out online. In the course of a given week, you’ll be able to play each and every character Witch Wars has to offer.

There are two things that make it possible to just keep on playing Witch Wars without putting in any money at all. The first is that the vast majority of other players are doing the same thing. I encounter Athena in nine matches out of every ten, and virtually never run into a soul using the most expensive unlocks. This won’t last in the long run, but for now it works out well. The second thing is that the pricier characters aren’t outrageously superior. Their abilities, while powerful, are expensive to upgrade, and they can still be defeated easily by a skilled player or a lucky one. Putting down cash is far from a guarantee that you’ll stomp every opponent you face.

With the IAP thing out of the way, Witch Wars plays pretty much like you’d expect from a competitive match-3. The board is filled with RPG fare—swords, potions, spellbooks and coins—and some slightly out-of-place handcuffs. Coins are currency, so they’re valuable despite doing nothing to affect the outcome of the game. Matching swords attacks your opponent, matching potions heals you, and matching spellbooks charges your mana bar. You’ll move up a spell tier for each section of the bar you let fill before casting. Handcuffs lock down your opponent’s pieces, leaving them vulnerable and frustrated.

The main differences between the six characters rest in their spells. Athena has a pretty basic set—a spell to lock your opponent’s blocks, an attack that pulls its power all your on-screen swords, and a third-tier explosion that takes out the other guy’s entire grid. Elrhyme has ice spells, Wisp has healing spells, Silpheed’s are poisonous, and so on. It’s a diverse group of characters, and mostly a balanced one. Not that you’re likely to spend much time with most; it would take about $25 to unlock all three premium characters, and about 23,000 coins for the rest.

The average game is a sprint; with swift fingers you can easily take out an opponent in a minute or two. If you’re quick enough to earn combos you can speed things up further with bursts of bonus power. With such brief games, Witch Wars matchmaking might get a bit frustrating as the player pool shrinks in the long term, but for now it’s filled with a lot of eager players and a quick rematch button that sees heavy use. The game keeps a close eye on your rankings, giving you a rating for your wins and losses and keeping track of wins and streaks. Not only does this offer up some fodder for Game Center achievements, it also provides overall sense of progression despite the brief matches.

There’s another type of progression to be had in Witch Wars: character leveling. Here again we find the pitch for IAP: if you can’t earn coins fast enough in game, you can always buy them (and they aren’t cheap). This, at least, is mostly a shortcut purchase; it would be a struggle to earn enough coins in multiplayer to unlock the priciest character, but it’s doable. In the survival-style solo mode this should be easier; you earn double coins for playing on medium difficulty and triple coins for hard. But to survive a few rounds in hard mode is, well, hard.

So caveat emptor: Witch Wars is out to part you from your hard earned money. It doesn’t make any attempt to hide that fact. But there’s no reason you can’t rack up quite a few wins (and coins) just by playing with the free witches. Putting in cash might put you at an advantage, but it’s smaller than it looks. So ask yourself—is it worth all that to play a fun, competitive match-3? If you can resist the call of IAP, that’s quite the thing to get for free.

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