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Konami is getting into the Thanksgiving mood, too, though in a less bombastic fashion than most of the “big” publishers currently invested in the App Store. Starting this week, you can grab two of its better titles, Gesundheit and Pro Evolution Soccer 2011, for the generous price of $.99. These two games usually sell at around $1.99 or $2.99, so there’s a decent chunk of change to be saved here if you choose to buy.

• Gesundheit – $1.99 – $.99
• Gesundheit for iPad – $2.99 – $1.99
• Pro Evolution Soccer 2011 – $2.99 – $.99

Why aren’t more games going on the cheap, you ask? We were pondering the same query until we browsed the publisher’s catalogue this morning. Turns out that the lion’s share of its games are being offered at $.99 nowadays. You can’t really go down from there — unless you want to start competing on the free charts … with games that aren’t ad supported and have a couple or fewer free-to-play hooks.

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I’ve seen a few strange hybrids in my day. Many of them have been described in sentences that end with “… meets Angry Birds,” but I’m not complaining. Some of the most interesting games on the App Store have taken unusual inspirations and combined them. Still, I’m not sure what inspired developer Phil Hassey to create a version of Galcon [$1.99 / Lite], his 2008 galactic strategy game, that replaces the planets and ships with chickens and nests. A joke that went a bit too far, maybe?

But while Chickon [Free] may have started as a joke, it has ended up as an interesting alternative to Galcon. It isn’t a game for big Galcon fans — you’ll probably find it far too simple if you’ve already spent time with its older sibling — but for folks who like freemium games, barnyard animals and a bit of light strategy, it’s not a bad choice.

Here’s the premise: Chickontopia has been taken over by robot chickens. They’ve captured all the roosters and locked them away, and they’ve built factories to replicate themselves. You, a humble chicken, are the only one that can stop them.

It’s a stretch, but it’s also a start. Where Galcon has you skip from map to map taking over a corner of the galaxy at a time, Chickon places its battles in an overarching strategy game. To free a section of the world you need to destroy its factory. To do that, you need four roosters to help you. You rescue them by attacking their cages while carrying at least 5 chicken feed. You earn chicken feed by battling robot chickens on a Galcon-esque map.

So you grind your way to success, defeating nest after nest. Battles are quick and easy. Your chicken builds up eggs, and you can take over other nests by tapping on them to send your chicks their way. The enemy does the same. It can be difficult to tell exactly how effective your force is, since Chickon does away with visible numbers, but it’s rarely all that relevant. Once you claim all the enemy’s nests, you win the match, earning one chicken feed and possibly some power-ups.

The power-ups are another new addition, and they add grinding, strategy, and an opportunity for IAP. For the ordinary battles, you won’t generally need them. My biggest complaint about the game is that the difficulty curve is far too subtle. It’s pretty much go in and win for way too long. Freeing roosters is a bit tougher — the enemy starts with more nests — and destroying factories can be extremely difficult. That’s where the power-ups come in. You can use them to steal nests, destroy enemy units, build up your supply, speed up your troops, and even nuke everything in sight. You can pull them out freely in a pinch, but they’re limited in quantity.

You can earn more by fighting more robots, and there are plenty of robots to fight. Some battles might earn you none, others just a few, and some will give you piles of power-ups. If you just can’t get enough, you can also purchase Chickbux to buy more. Use them well and you can blast through otherwise punishing fights.

It’s an interesting system, and as far as grinds go it’s a fun one. But Chickon loses out by abandoning Galcon’s multiplayer features. Since it’s so microtransaction-based I imagine multiplayer could be a frustratingly imbalanced experience, but the single-player content isn’t compelling enough keep most players interested for all that long. It’s a dilemma that might not be solvable, and it makes me wonder if Chickon was ready to leave the nest at all. Overly-generic art and sound effects don’t help that impression.

Still, at the price it’s worth a look, especially if Galcon’s epic-scale space battles struck you as a bit too pretentious. Chickon is an oddball game with a lot of oddball character, and if it feels too much like a cash-in at times it’s still not without intriguing features. It’s a game you can play for 30 seconds and feel like you’ve made tangible progress, and that’s not something to take lightly. With a little more love, Chickon could have been something truly interesting — instead, we’ll have to settle for often grindy, and occasionally fun. Agree? Disagree? Share your thoughts in our discussion thread.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Saving Yello [99¢] from Tactile Entertainment and published by Dreamfab is a new physics-based puzzler about a pet goldfish named ‘Yello’.  Poor Yello has been plucked from his bowl and dumped on the floor by his young 7-year old owner who doesn’t appreciate that fish are actually water-based creatures. Yello needs your help to return to his fishbowl, within a limited number of turns, but along the way he wants to destroy some of his owners toys as revenge. Since its release, this quality game has immediately shot into the top-40 on the US App Store.

You can fling Yello across the level, back towards his bowl, by stretching his tail to determine the trajectory and power, then releasing.  If you pull his tail back far enough, his little tongue pokes out, he gasps and his eyes go bloodshot from being stretched. Assuming you aim successfully, Yello eventually plops back into his glass bowl and swims around happily (and you score a star and the next level is unlocked).  If you don’t reach the bowl within the allocated turns, or send  Yello into an out-of-bounds area, the level is over and the poor fish starts crying.

But, getting Yello back in the bowl is only part of the challenge. If you want to earn the other two stars for the level, you’ll need to destroy his owner’s toys by crashing into them, to achieve the displayed score thresholds. If you destroy three-of-a-kind items, such as three teddy bears or cars, you’ll receive bonus points for a “toy-combo”. Destroying five items in one turn increases the score multiplier. Once you score enough points to earn three stars – and importantly, still reach the fish-bowl – Yello celebrates by jumping up and down in his bowl, happily saying “Wheeeee!”

Saving Yello is definitely going for the “cute fish” factor, giving Yello a variety of animated expressions.  If you throw him directly at a wall, just before impact he says “uh-oh!” in a cute little voice. And people lap that stuff up, just like the happily soaring bird in Tiny Wings [99¢]. But, just because he’s cute doesn’t stop this game from roughing him up. The unlucky fish is dropped on the floor, set on fire, encased in ice, exploded by dynamite, impaled with pins and blasted by bombs. Metal objects land on him with a heavy CLANG! And some levels feature: fish hooks!

This may sound like fish torture, but these items actually help Yello.  He can burn wooden obstacles when he’s on fire or freeze and shatter metallic barriers whilst frozen. He can grab dynamite in his mouth as he flies through the air, which explodes when he lands (charring his face black). The fire, ice and explosions can all trigger chain reactions, toppling or destroying entire structures for increased points.

Being impaled with pins helps him stick to walls, and when obstacles fall on his head you can tap to clear them away for extra points. And Yello is such a hard-core fish that he jumps onto fish-hooks and uses them to swing to higher platforms.  Can you beat that, Nemo!?

There’s currently 40 levels provided within three settings (Play room, living room and kitchen), with more levels promised soon. Each setting is unlocked by gaining enough stars from prior levels. In-App Purchases are available to unlock all levels but this is not necessary. There’s supposed to be leaderboards for each setting and overall, plus achievements in Game Center / OpenFeint, but Game Center  wasn’t working in the initial release. Strangely, there’s also more achievements listed in OpenFeint than in Game Center.  The developers advise a fix has been submitted to Apple.

One weakness of the game is the dynamic camera work, which automatically frames the camera around the fishes position. The game lets you pan or zoom-out to see the whole level, which is great, but after a second, the camera disregards the users preference and automatically re-centers back on the fish. This forces you to aim blindly or from memory of what’s off-screen. More of the level is shown when you pull Yello’s tail, however the ability to see the whole level while playing  (and a more accessible restart button) would really enhance the gameplay.

Saving Yello successfully wraps quality graphics and sound, interesting gameplay, varied power-ups, decent game physics and a cute fish into this entertaining fish-flinging game. This can be played casually, simply reaching the fish-bowl to open the next level, or you can 3-star the levels for more of a challenge. What’s next? Well, having survived three rooms in the house, the developers are still deciding which hazardous settings to drop Yello in next. That fish needs a new owner!

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Bloomberg reports that Apple has opened up a new class of App Store offerings, allowing game publisher Big Fish Games to offer a monthly subscription package that will allow provide users with access to a number of the company’s games through a dedicated iPad app.

The setup is similar to Netflix Inc. (NFLX)’s streaming application for the iPad. Subscribers can get unlimited access to games such as “Mystery Case Files” and the “Mahjong Towers” series from inside the Big Fish app.

Games played through the subscription service, which are streamed to a user’s iPad from Big Fish’s data centers, will initially require Wi-Fi access to play.

The standard package from Big Fish Games will launch as a $4.99 monthly subscription, increasing to $6.99 per month early next year as more game titles become available for the app. A free ad-supported option limiting play to 30 minutes per day will also be available.

[Originally Posted on MacRumors]

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On your first look at Snoopy’s Street Fair [Free], you’ll probably feel a warm glow of nostalgia. It might be for Charles Schulz’ classic Peanuts comic strip or television specials like A Charlie Brown Christmas. But you also might be thinking of something a little more recent. Like, say Beeline Interactive’s big hit, Smurfs’ Village [Free].

The apps have a lot in common, you see. Both of them are fantastic at bringing back the properties we know and love. Both flawlessly emulate the look of the classics. Both are missing a few key features. And both are cripplingly tied into IAP and grinding mechanics.

Snoopy’s Street Fair does a particularly good job of cranking up the nostalgia machine. As you build up your street fair to help Charlie Brown go to the baseball tournament, you’ll be flooded with memories. The game is filled with familiar sound bites that were either pulled from the Peanuts TV specials or are excellent impersonations. All manner of beloved characters pop up — Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Woodstock, Peppermint Patty, Linus, Lucy and a huge roster of B, C and D-listers.

But more than that, nostalgic features are peppered throughout the experience. As you level up, you unlock classic comic strips that you can go back and read freely. After unlocking a certain item, you can take Peanuts photobooth pictures and send them to your friends. There are Snoopy trading cards to collect. These sweet little Easter eggs really elevate Snoopy’s Street Fair to something occasionally special.

It’s almost enough to make you want to use the app to, say, introduce the Peanuts gang to your kids. I’d recommend against it. To its credit, Beeline Interactive does a very good job of pointing out that the IAP costs real money, and warning players that there are real world purchases to be made. But that hasn’t stopped the developer from making this game’s argument for IAP very compelling. You can earn everything in-game, it seems, but it would take an extremely long time. You only earn a couple Snoopy Dollars each level, and many of the items and characters can only be bought with them — for 20, 50, even 75 Snoopy Dollars a pop. The minimum purchase is 50 for $4.99, so be prepared to dig deep.

This wouldn’t be so irritating if the game surrounding the IAP was more compelling. I’ve fallen in love with a few freemium games with simple grinding mechanics, but this one is just a bit too brainless. You can tap each of the stalls and features of your fair once in a while – 30 seconds, 24 hours, or somewhere in between. You get coins and experience when you do, and occasionally random rewards pop out to try to hit the part of our psyche that loves that kind of thing. The grinding is oversimplified, as is the decorating. It’s all just rather bland.

There are a few mini-games that round out the experience, but they’re pricey and straightforward. You can twist lemons for lemonade, or marshmallows for campfire roasting, and you can play with paints. But you can only do these things occasionally, because you could otherwise earn too much experience or have some kind of fun.

Rounding out the flaws, on the other hand, are a pair of familiar issues. While Snoopy’s Street Fair lets you add Game Center friends, it doesn’t have any other Game Center integration. Worse, it doesn’t make any attempt to save your progress to the cloud. Delete the app for any reason and you’ll have to start over from scratch. It’s a bad call for a game with its hands so deep in your pockets.

If Snoopy’s Street Fair is a game for nostalgic adults, it’s not interesting enough to hold any attention. If it’s a game for children, the aggressive focus on IAP is distasteful. Still, if you have fond memories of Charlie Brown and crew, it’s worth your time to poke around briefly and see what charm this game has to offer. Just don’t get sucked in — unlike Peanuts, wine, or cheese, Snoopy’s Street Fair doesn’t get better with age.

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Recently, we mentioned that Space Tripper [$3.99] – the iOS version of Astro Tripper – has finally been released by True Axis the makers of the popular game: Jet Car Stunts [$1.99 / Free]. After being released on various other platforms over the past decade, it’s finally our turn for an iOS port of this top-down arena-based shoot’em-up, which features a main campaign plus score attack and challenge modes to unlock.

Although I’m happy to recommend this game now, my initial impressions were less favorable. You see, Space Tripper offers tilt controls as the only option for movement, but strangely, it appears no auto-calibration occurs at the start of the game, so the craft was unresponsive to tilts and left sitting like a lame duck. However, after discovering the tilt calibration and tilt-sensitivity options and testing a few different configurations, the craft became very responsive, ducking and weaving around enemies.

The decision to implement only tilt controls will immediately put some players off, but it actually works rather well (after you play with the settings). The developers conducted some trials with touch-based controls early on in their development process, but decided that touch controls obscured the action and weren’t responsive enough.

Tilting moves your craft, while tapping the left side of the screen changes weapon and tapping the right side flips the craft around, to face the opposite way. When you flip direction, the craft also slides back a little, which is a subtle movement, but it’s often life-saving when you spin to face an enemy that’s too close. This game requires careful approaches rather than always rushing in, however there’s also time limits for each level, so you need to keep attacking.

The weapons shoot left or right, so you need to move alongside an enemy to attack, but there’s no fire button as your selected weapon fires automatically, non-stop. Your ship is equipped with two weapons: red and blue. The blue lazer fires a direct forwards-facing beam, while the red weapon fires a three pronged blast, covering a wider range. When you collect a red or blue power-up, the weapon of that color is leveled-up, so you could potentially have a very strong red weapon, but a weak blue one, or vice versa.  These level-ups are definitely worth grabbing, as the extra fire-power is helpful for destroying enemies, but importantly, it also looks cool.

Whereas many shoot’em-ups are set in a rectangular play-field, Star Tripper uses various different shaped arenas, with 3D features like ramps which you can jump off. You can’t fly beyond the arena, but your enemies can enter from outside, shooting at you even before you can get to them. To keep track of their position, you constantly refer to a handy radar, which shows the position of all enemies on the level. The green enemy blips on the radar turn red when they become aggressive and accelerate towards you, which helps prioritize your targets.

There are four unique worlds, each with their own graphics, enemies and objective. Sometimes it’s all about shooting down enemies, but other times you’re destroying generators or knocking down pillars (while also blasting enemies!). The enemies are nicely varied, including tanks, helicopters, heat-seeking missile turrets and even swarms of insects, fizz wheels and killer-worms.  Plus there are big boss fights to reward your efforts. Like a massive yellow spider that crawls and jumps, a big fat tank or a massive one-eyed sea creature. You need to find and exploit each bosses weak-spots to take it out.

When your three ships are destroyed, you’re presented with two options – either stop playing and record your score, or continue playing but forfeit your score from the high-score rankings.  At first, this seemed like a great feature, as it allows less competent players to continue their game without being forced to restart from the very beginning. However, the continue option only gives one additional life at a time – which is sometimes lost within 30 seconds. This forces you to frequently re-choose continue. It would be better if “continue” granted another set of three lives.

There’s three levels of difficulty: Normal, Hard and Hardest. Although one member of our discussion forums joked the levels should be named: “Hard, Yeah right  and LOLWUT”.  Fortunately, there’s some cheats built into the game (as described in the App Store game description). The cheat menu offers unlimited lives and/or invulnerability and the ability to skip levels. The unlimited lives option is great, as it’s still a challenge to complete the levels, but you can keep re-trying and your weapon power-up’s don’t reset when you die. As soon as you enable a cheat, all leaderboards, achievements, game mode unlocking and progress saving are disabled until game over, or you quit. This means legit players can still aim for ranks on the Game Center or OpenFeint leaderboards, without worrying about competing against “cheats”.

Star Tripper is a fast-paced, nice-looking and challenging game which will appeal to any hard-core shoot-em-up fans, but anyone can progress through the levels to try the boss fights thanks to the “continue” option and cheat modes. It’s taken several years for this game to reach our iOS devices, so perhaps we’ll end up seeing Space Tripper 2, sometime around 2018!

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It’s a good time to be a word game fan. Every few weeks a new genre standout arrives, ready to tide you over until the next big hit. Now App Store superstar Zach Gage (Unify [$1.99/Free], Bit Pilot [99¢], Halcyon [$1.99]) has thrown his hat into the word game ring with SpellTower [$1.99] . Those of us who fit in the Venn diagram intersection of iPad owners and word game fans benefit — SpellTower is elegant, clever and fun.

Not that it’s entirely unique. We’ve all played any number of games that make use of SpellTower’s main mechanic. Presented with a grid of letters, you spot a word and trace a path through its letters to select it. You can trace in any direction, loop diagonally back on your path, and make words of any length past two. And if that were all there was to it, this would be a yawn and a skip. But it’s not.

SpellTower isn’t bogged down with complicated rules or conditional abilities. The tutorial is only a handful of screens expressing a handful of simple rules. You can make a word as long as it’s in the game’s dictionary and it’s at least three letters long. Words that are five letters or longer clear letters all around them. You can’t make the same word twice, and if a letter has a number on it, it needs to be used in a word of at least that length. Finally, uncommon letters like Z, J, Q and X clear their rows if they’re used in a word.

Those rules will carry you through SpellTower’s four game modes, which change up how the board is presented. Tower mode gives you 150 letters to earn the best score you can. Puzzle mode adds a row to the board each time you make a word, and if any column hits the top your game will end. Extreme Puzzle mode follows the same rules, but requires longer words faster and more often. Rush mode adds new rows over time, putting you on the clock.

It sounds as though only Rush mode puts any pressure on you, but this is one of the tensest word games I’ve played. Tower mode can be played casually, certainly. You can just accept that you’ll find a number of words, and then you’ll hit the “done” button and wipe your hands of it. But can you just leave towers of letters standing there, unused? It’s beyond me, so each move I make is a balancing act between finding good, high-scoring words, and ensuring I don’t leave too many orphaned letters behind. At least you don’t need to worry about making mistakes — there’s no penalty for words that don’t work.

In Puzzle and Extreme Puzzle, though, this tension is ratcheted up to the nth degree. Since every move you make adds a new row to the board, you have to consider your moves very, very carefully. Almost inevitably you’ll be stuck with one or more towers of single, orphaned letters, and as those add up it gets harder and harder to make a move that won’t end your game prematurely. These modes aren’t to be played quickly.

Rush mode, on the other hand, must be played at top speed. Except, of course, you still need to weigh the potential of your moves to leave those orphaned towers. But this is a cathartic mode after playing Puzzle for too long. It’s tense, yes, but not every move has the potential to be fatal.

These four modes offer a variety of satisfying play styles, and it sounds like Zach Gage has plans for more to come. Also coming are Game Center achievements. Leaderboards are already in, but there’s a need for achievements to mark things like fully clearing the board in Tower mode. If I ever pull it off, I’m going to want to be able to smugly show off my word superiority. A few other little touches could help the game, like a more obvious way to end Tower mode and a score breakdown.

But SpellTower is already a complete package, brought together by Gage’s trademark use of cheerful colors, simple patterns and elegant typography. It’s a shame that it’s only for iPad owners for now, but if you can pick it up, you should. And if you have ideas for other modes you’d like to see, you can share them with the developer in our discussion thread. Assuming you can find the words, that is.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Namco Bandai is getting into the gorging spirit of Thanksgiving Day here in the US and encouraging gamers to gorge on new games for their iOS devices with a week long Thanksgiving sale. There’s a staggering amount of games listed on sale, so surely something to pique anyone’s interest.

Personally, I’m quite partial to Pac-Man Championship Edition, Puzzle Quest 2, and Time Crisis 2nd Strike. Oh, and Splatterhouse. Yeah I said it. Sure, it takes a brutally difficult arcade game and makes it that much more difficult with the addition of virtual controls, but I’m just a sucker for nostalgia.

• Ace Combat Xi Skies of Incursion, $4.99 → $0.99
• Buccaneer Blitz, (Universal) $2.99 → $0.99
• Dig Dug Remix, $2.99 → $0.99
• Fossil Feast, (Universal) $1.99 → $0.99
• Galaga Remix, $2.99 → $0.99
• House of Glass, (iPad Only) Free+ $4.99IAP → $2.99IAP
• Isaac Newton’s Gravity HD, (iPad Only) Free+ $4.99IAP → $2.99IAP
• Isaac Newton’s Gravity, $2.99 → $0.99
• Lost in Time: The Clockwork Tower, (iPad Only) Free+ $4.99IAP → $2.99IAP
• Mappy by Namco, $1.99 → $0.99
• Mishap, $4.99 → $2.99
• Mishap for iPad, (iPad Only) $4.99 → $2.99
• PAC-MAN CHAMPIONSHIP EDITION, $4.99 → $0.99
• PAC-CHOMP, (Universal) $1.99 → $0.99
• PAC-MAN REMIX, $2.99 → $0.99
• PAC’N-JUMP, (Universal) $1.99 → $0.99
• Pool Pro Online 3, $1.99 → $0.99
• Pool Pro Online 3 for iPad, (iPad Only) $1.99 → $0.99
• Puzzle Quest 2, (Universal) $4.99 → $2.99
• RALLY-X Rumble, (Universal) $1.99 → $0.99
• Ridge Racer Accelerated, $6.99 → $1.99
• Sky Gamblers: Rise of Glory, (Universal) $4.99 → $2.99
• SPLATTERHOUSE, $2.99 → $0.99
• Time Crisis Strike, $2.99 → $0.99
• Time Crisis 2nd Strike, $6.99 → $1.99

I noticed that not every sale seems to be active yet in the App Store as of this writing, so it’s probably a good idea to double check the pricing before blindly mashing the purchase button. If a price hasn’t dropped yet for you, just give it a bit and check back. You’ve got all the way until Monday the 28th to take advantage of these sales.

Also, prepare yourself for the likely onslaught of other Thanksgiving Day related sales during this week and into the coming weekend.

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Raccoon Rising [99¢] from Romper Games is a delightful game about a sleepy raccoon trying to survive when his forest is invaded by an army of robots and their deforestation machinery. After watching the trailer (below), you might expect an endless-vertical jumping game, as it resembles NinJump [Free/HD]. But, it’s actually more like a vertical platform game, because you’re not constantly jumping and can find places to stop and plan your approach upwards, through the obstacles. Also, it’s level based, so you’re not always restarting from the very beginning.

The little raccoon’s simple story is told through comic-strip cut-scenes as he journeys through four worlds, including a temple, Tanuki forest, a ship called the ‘Salty Sprocket’ and finally, a city. Each world features different graphics, music, enemies and obstacles, but the goal is always to progress upwards until you reach a gate, which shuts behind you.

Each time you reach a gate you’re given a three-star rating for your performance on that section and a checkpoint is saved as a re-spawn point when you die. There’s over seventy gates (sections) in total and as you unlock them in the main story, they become available in Time Trial mode. Each section may only require a few jumps to pass through, but it typically takes multiple attempts to determine and execute your route. However, because there’s only a short distance between gates, dying and re-trying isn’t the end of the world.

The gameplay controls are simple and effective. Just  tap anywhere to make your coon jump in that direction, or hold down your finger for a power-jump, which enters slow-mo mode for targeting and smashing obstacles with flying kicks. If you’re jumping upwards, a second tap sends your raccoon leaping to the side of the screen, depending which side you tap. The real challenge is to time and aim your jumps well, as you often need to land in tight spaces, wedged between two death-causing obstacles, which may both be moving. However, the pause button (which is a slider) is not always that responsive and sometimes stops working altogether, meaning it must be closed form the iOS task bar.

The robots have deployed a range of machinery, so as you journey upwards you’ll face spikes, tree-crushers, band-saws and cannons. There’s punching cushions which repel you, hovering platforms, gun powder-barrels to explode and helicopter drones to jump on for a quick ride upwards. And once you reach the end of a world, there’s a boss fight waiting for you.

The 3D art and animation by Pixelnauts is appealing. In particular, the special effects – such as timber or the coon flying straight at the screen – look great. And the little raccoon character, with his blackened raccoon-eyes and wagging bushy tail, gives this game a feel-good atmosphere. However, although the end-of-world bosses were satisfying to reach, they don’t look quite as vibrant or visually appealing and the comic images also fall a bit flat. The initial loading times for worlds are also a little longer than most games, but there’s no such delays between stages (gates).

There are credit-card chips (”credits”) to collect within each world, because you “may need them in future”. If you click on the credits icon on the main menu it says “coming soon”. It’s a little unusual to ask players to collect in-game currency which has no current function, but trust me, the credits will be used for something cool in a future release: – but that’s still a secret, so we can’t share it yet. But we can confirm that the developers are keen to expand this game further.

Romper Games have fixes coming for a couple of technical issues: There’s a glitch whereby the third level (Ship) doesn’t always unlock when you reach it. I replayed the final stage of world two and it unlocked successfully, however another user in our discussion thread have had the same issue, but replaying it hasn’t helped. Crashes have been reported for older 1g / 2g devices. The developers are participating in our forum discussions so they’re aware of these two issues. They may release reduced graphical assets for older devices and are working on a fix to resolve the level unlocking glitch.

Racoon Rising is a neat variant on jumping games, which I’m throughly enjoying despite the jumping genre being so saturated. The combination of vertical platformer and jumping game works a treat. And the core graphics, varied worlds and short re-playabe levels make this game easy to recommend, but if you’ve got a 1g / 2g device, you may prefer to wait for the update.

TouchArcade Rating:

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On this week’s TouchArcade Show, we spend a good chunk of the introductory phase of the show talking about the latest and hottest … in console games. But immediately after my Skyrim outburst and our shared Modern Warfare 3 discussion, we DO dig into iOS. Jurassic Park: The Game leads the foray. Games like Minecraft: Pocket Edition and Space Tripper, as well as news stories including Apple’s decision to pull Texas Hold’Em round out the rest of one of our rocking-est podcasts yet.

If you’d like to give us a listen (and you should) hit one of the links below to stream or direct download. If you’d like to subscribe, definitely do so via iTunes or, hey, even Zune. Options, you have them!

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-026.mp3, 38MB

Show notes just below, and please, if you have the time, throw us a question! We’re open to whatever. The e-mail is podcast@toucharcade.com

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