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The folks at Halfbrick had been teasing their much ballyhooed Gadget update for Jetpack Joyride [ Free ]for the past couple of months, and just last week it finally landed in the App Store. And it was awesome. However, Halfbrick must have still had some gas left in the tank after that massive update because over the weekend they released yet another update for Jetpack Joyride, this time adding support for the Retina Display of the new iPad. Check out some screens from the newest build (click to enlarge):

In addition to the graphics upgrade on the new iPad, the visuals have also been improved for the previous generation iPads as well as the iPhone 4. Loading times have also been improved across the board as well as a whole bunch of minor tweaks and fixes. I was really impressed with the Gadget update that hit for Jetpack Joyride last week, and with this latest Retina Display update the entire package has really been fully fleshed out.

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On this week’s episode of The TouchArcade Show, we battle through conversations about muscle retention and HHH’s taste in order to bring you the latest and greatest in the world of iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad. We get off to a running start by discussing the hottest real-time strategy game at the moment, Total War Battles, and then quickly dive into a flurry of oral reviews courtesy Mr. Hodapp. Later, we pan Kickstarter again, talk about Rovio Mobile’s weird IAP plans, and the themes of Minecraft.

If you’d like to listen this week’s episode, please do so via the handy-dandy links just below. If you’d rather get our podcasts the second they hit the Internet, consider subscribing to us on iTunes or Zune Marketplace.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-049.mp3, 41.9MB

Oh! And if you have interest in joining our Minecraft server, send us another e-mail, as we might end up opening our stuff to all. E-mail podcast@toucharcade.com. Thanks!

Here are your show notes:

GAMES

• Total War Battles [$6.99]
• SpellTower [$.99]
• Polymer [$.99]
• Escape from the Age of Monsters [$.99 / HD]
• Bubble Pig [$.99]
• Aby Escape [Free]
• Ballistic SE [$1.99]
• Ski Safari [$.99]
• Wormholes [Free]
• Bus Turbo Racing [$.99]
• Marvel Vs Capcom 2 [$2.99]

JARED’S KITTY KORNER

• catnapper [Free]

FRONT PAGE

• ‘Minecraft – Pocket Edition’ Now Supports Crafting
• Robert Bowling Announces His New Studio
• ‘Angry Birds Space’ / ‘Jetpack Joyride’ / ‘Sword & Sworcery’ / ‘Anomaly Warzone Earth’ Updates

Aralon: Sword and Shadow HD, $0.99 Aralon: Sword and Shadow by Crescent Moon Games is a huge open world action RPG. It has more than 30 hours of gameplay in a massive 3D world, the biggest landscape ever to grace a mobile device. A full night and day system, complex quests, crafting, swimming, fishing, pipe smoking, pick-pocketing, and much, much more. Play as an elf, troll, or human, pick various classes, and go on an epic journey through the Kingdoms of Aralon.

Aralon: Sword and Shadow is now available for the discounted price of 99 cents, over 80% off for a limited time only!

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One of my personal favorite games of 2011 was the quirky slot machine-meets-role-playing game King Cashing [$0.99 / Free ]. The slot machine battle system was a really different kind of idea that turned out to work great in practice, and the character leveling and upgradeable items drew you in to continue forging on through the campaign. We totally enjoyed King Cashing in our review, and about a month later a big update hit that added new weapons and a new kind of battle, making the whole game just that much better.

Yesterday the second major update hit for King Cashing, this one even bigger than the first. It adds an entire new Survival campaign where you face off against a string of enemies while utilizing the same pool of spin cherries. You can earn a small portion of cherries back by each time you defeat one of these enemies, but you can’t go back and replay levels to grind so efficient play is crucial if you’re going to last until the end of the campaign. It’s quite challenging and a great twist on the normal gameplay found in the original campaign mode.

Speaking of the original campaign this update also brings 3 new battles against “protected” bosses who are covered with shields which must be broken away before inflicting damage on the enemy itself. There’s 3 new weapons too, one for each class member, as well as some new bonus types and a myriad of other tweaks and fixes. The new Survival mode adds a great new way to experience King Cashing, and the other new goodies are all welcome additions as well. If you haven’t checked out King Cashing yet there’s a lite version to try and the full version is currently on sale for 99¢ to celebrate this new update.

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Ladies and Gentlemen, start your engines. As Nimblebit’s Pocket Planes continues to barrel through its beta period, we’ve had a chance to try out one of its new features. It’s been added since our GDC preview and we’re pretty sure you’re going to like it.

You know how Tiny Tower [Free] and Pocket Frogs [Free] have missions you can complete—stock this much of certain items, or breed certain colors and patterns of frogs? Pocket Planes is going to have missions, too, but they’re competitive. For these ones, you’re going to need a little help from your friends. Or rather, your flight crew.

A new Flight Crew challenge will be posted every so often—maybe twice a week. The challenges look to be pretty simple: deliver as many jobs (pieces of cargo and passengers) to a certain city somewhere in the world. You can’t just take any old thing, though. Everything in the game has a destination, and the destination needs to match the city for this to work.

Your Flight Crew can have as many or as few people as you can muster, but the more the better: the crews who manage to bring in the most jobs will win some very cool in-game prizes. Like, say, the bad boy below. Look familiar? Nimblebit is hard at work making up some very cool secret planes as we speak—here’s hoping for a good ol’ fashioned airship. And on top of the cosmetics, it sounds like there will be a Bux reward to boot.

Now Pocket Planes is still a work in progress, so none of this is set in stone. But currently, the only thing you need to join a Flight Crew is a Game Center account (which you don’t need to share with your crewmates) and a common Flight Crew name. If I were the sort of person who wanted to get a leg up on the competition, I might use that information to hit the forums and start drumming up a good team of people. While I was at it, I might try to recruit a few of the folks who have put 2323 pages of forum posts into trading frogs in Pocket Frogs. Those dudes seem like they might have the dedication for the job.

The rest of the game is coming along nicely, from what we’ve seen, and it looks like Zynga hasn’t caught on to it so far (fingers crossed!). Nimblebit isn’t ready to commit to a release window yet, but it can’t be too far over the horizon at this point. So stick around—we’ll have much more to show you as Pocket Planes gets ready to touch down.

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It’s been sort of a slow news day, so while we’re busy plugging away at busting out reviews from yesterday’s release onslaught, here’s two great deals you should be aware of. Actually, before you get either of these you should take a good long look at Ballistic SE [ $1.99 ] as I’ve been having a blast with it since it came out last night. But, anyway, on with the show.

Smash Cops, Free – [Review] – [Forum Thread] – Normally $2.99 and free for a limited time, Smash Cops is a really cool driving game where you (get this) play a cop, and smash into other cars. It’s worth checking out for the controls alone, because the way you drive the car is by “pushing” it with your finger. It’s hard to explain, and feels a little weird as first, but once you get into it you’ll wonder why more top-down games don’t employ similar controls.

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, $0.99 – [Review] – [Forum Thread] – Normally $4.99 and recently slashed to 99¢, Ascension is a deck building fantasy-based card game. I had some small gripes with the mechanics of the actual game itself in my review, but as far as a paper card game to iOS port, Ascension is flawless and worth checking out just to see how well it translates. 99¢ is also a stupidly good deal considering the physical version retails for $39.99. An expansion with new cards is available in game for $2.99, which sells for $29.99 in the real-world paper version.

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Most puzzle games would have you believe that fun only lies under a pile of rigid rules. That doesn’t seem quite right, when kids have the most fun playing without any rules at all. Whitaker Trebella’s Polymer [ ] isn’t child’s play, but it only demands one thing: a shape can’t have unfinished edges, or it’s not a shape. Everything else is fair game, and that sure feels freeing.

To create shapes in Polymer, you slide rows of pieces back and forth, columns up and down. When you’ve found a stopping point and slid your last piece into place, tapping the shape destroys it. With that, poof, your hard work is gone. In its place you’ll find a fresh canvas and a big pile of points to soothe you.

Polymer’s first mode serves as a good introduction. Called “Two Minutes,” it gives you that much time to create anything you like. A hundred tiny shapes in a row, cascading into ever multiplying combos? Sure. A few carefully crafted behemoths? Go ahead. Quality generally scores over quantity, but your masterpiece won’t be worth much if you can’t finish it in time.

“One Polymer” mode does what you might expect: it gives you as long as you need to create the ultimate shape. Each piece that you manage to add to it rockets your final score to new heights, but there comes a moment when your shape is so large and complex that every move you make will damage the surrounding structure. The most important skill you can learn here is how best to delay that moment.

“Bombs,” the third and final mode, adds, well, bombs to the mix. These are pieces with timers and four unfinished edges. Working them into a shape doubles its score, but the game ends if a single timer runs down to zero. More and more bombs are introduced as the game progresses. Here you need to know your limitations—how complex of a shape can you make within each time limit?

You’ll begin playing Polymer with only the first mode and two kinds of pieces, a rounded corner piece with two free edges and another that caps ends. Reaching a certain accumulated score unlocks the next piece, and then the next mode. It’s a good system, ensuring that you fully understand how to play with what you have before things get more complicated.

Unfortunately, this same system might prove frustrating for some players. Since the scoring scales on a steep curve, players who can’t pull off large shapes will find themselves pecking away at unlocks for much longer than necessary. There are two ways out of that hole: improve, or pay your way out. Each unlockable can be bought if you don’t have the patience to earn it. It’s a little too easy to see this as a push to make extra purchases.

Better to put your wallet away, though. The game is more fun when you have something to work toward aside from achievements and leaderboards, and playing without pushing yourself won’t get you far. Not only that: it’s entirely possible to get ridiculously high scores without the unlockable pieces. At the highest tier of play, you’re probably going to need them. Before then, though, they can actually get in the way, making the board too complicated for beginners. If you find yourself in over your head, you can toggle the more complex pieces off for as long as you need.

As mentioned in our preview, music plays a big part in the Polymer experience. The mood of each mode is enhanced by its soundtrack, cheery, studious and tense in turn. The tones created when you destroy a shape are equally fitting. This is one of those games you’ll want to play with the sound on.

The visuals are somewhat less appealing, at least at first. The look is clean and minimalistic, but when the pieces are all strung together they start to look a little sausage-like. It’s not the most pleasant association. I forgot all about that slight distaste after making a few complex shapes. I’ve saved pictures of a few of my successes for later, and been tempted to tweet more than one. If waiting to acclimate to the look doesn’t work for you, try one of the unlockable color schemes. Some are quite striking.

The thing that keeps me coming back isn’t color or music, though. It’s not even the selection of game modes. The game draws me in because it lets me be creative. It’s freeing to play a puzzle game that lets the player decide when a piece is finished. It’s great to have the choice to create something pretty, or huge, or sophisticated. Polymer cuts away all but the most necessary of rules, and the game is all the better for that. Take a look, and share your best creations in our forum thread.

TouchArcade Rating:

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The highly anticipated update to Jetpack Joyride [ Free ] which Halfbrick has been teasing us with since we first checked it out at GDC has finally gone live in the App Store. Version 1.3 brings the major new addition of Gadgets to good ol’ Barry Steakries’ arsenal. There are 15 Gadgets in all which are unlocked with coins in The Stash area of the game. You can assign up to 2 different Gadgets to Barry at a time, and each one brings with it a special ability.

For example, the “Air Barrys” Gadget gives Barry a pair of sneakers that let him immediately jump into the middle of the screen, rather than waiting for the jetpack to slowly raise him to the same point. Or the Missile Jammer which will cause the missiles that target you from offscreen to come at you wobbly and slow. Or the X-ray Specs, which lets you see ahead of time what vehicle is waiting for you in the icon, as demonstrated in this latest teaser trailer.

As you can tell, these new Gadgets can dramatically change how you play the game, and if you thought you’d had your fill of Jetpack Joyride before there’s now a bunch of new items to unlock and use to reinvigorate you. There’s also new Game Center achievements and new mission types that tie into the use of the new Gadgets. And of course Jetpack Joyride is free to download and play, so if you somehow still haven’t gotten on board yet then what are you waiting for?

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Heads up: Junk Jack [$2.99 / Lite] is going Universal really, really soon — provided nothing goes wrong in the certification process. Creator Pixbits has submitted the long-awaited, might-not-be-hey-it-could-happen update to Apple and are waiting for it to go live with just as much glee as we imagine the third-person mining game’s fans are.

This update also includes an exhaustive amount of fixes, tweaks, and changes, as we’ve come to expect from Pixbits. Of note, golems, mummies, frogs, new frogs, and headless zombies have joined the list of mobs. The game’s visuals have also been tweaked thanks to its “faster engine,” and cooking and farming are now a thing you can do. If you’re really into what’s new, definitely check out the game’s official blog. For example, there is no way you would have known that the maximum stack count is 65535 unless you read it somewhere else. Nope, no way.

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Rovio’s Angry Birds Space [$0.99 / $2.99 (HD)] hit the App Store close to a month ago, and we loved it in our review. (Shocker, I know.) The sole sticking point for us, and quite a few other people, was Rovio’s implementation of a new IAP mechanic. Some levels were only available via a 99¢ unlock, which made us question whether or not Rovio would keep the free level updates gravy train rolling. Also, the Mighty Eagle shifted gears from a buy-once-use-a- bunch item like Angry Birds proper to a consumable IAP.

Well, an update just hit which addresses our suspicions. 10 new levels are now available for free, and the way the Mighty Eagle works has been slightly tweaked. Just by downloading the update you’ll get a pack of 20 Mighty Eagles for free, and each day you’ll earn one additional Mighty Eagle. This goes a long way in making buying the Mighty Eagle feel a lot more optional, but I still can’t help but miss the unlimited use of the Mighty Eagle in completed levels like previous Angry Birds games.

But, whatever, if you just ignore the Mighty Eagle, Angry Birds Space is still a ton of fun, and highly recommended. If you’ve cleared all the initial launch levels, give these ten new ones a spin.

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