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The third episode of Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space was originally released in 2008, on the cusp of the videogame industry’s zombie renaissance. Four years and three Dead Risings later the iOS port of “Night of the Raving Dead” [$4.99] may feel — to steal a quote from the game’s antagonist, the vampire Jurgen — “played, yo.” Still, Steve Purcell’s brand of silly humor gives “Raving Dead” life, even for those tired of zombies and vampires.

This season of episodic Sam & Max games comes into its own in “Raving Dead,” particularly if players have been keeping up since the first episode ”Ice Station Santa” : we can start to see how the central town and its inhabitants are changing over time. We now have access to Sybil’s shop, but Bosco’s Inconvenience has been shuttered since he went missing in the second episode, ”Moai Better Blues” ; Flint Paper takes a more active role in “Raving Dead,” and Sam and Max have all but stopped giving Stinky the benefit of the doubt in the mysterious death of her grandfather. This is one of the strengths of episodic gaming, and it’s nice to see Telltale Games’ writing come to fruition.

This type of self-referential writings has its limits, though. In-jokes that refer to players’ previous exploits feel natural to players keeping up with the series, but the second quarter of “Raving Dead” can be jarring for those who, like me, didn’t play Sam & Max Save the World. Not that “Raving Dead” is a literary giant, but there are a few levels of nuance in Sam and Max’ relationship with Jurgen that you’ll miss if you didn’t play the “Situation: Comedy” episode from that series, which isn’t currently available on the App Store. And this wouldn’t even be so bad if this plot point didn’t directly inform at least two of the puzzles in the first half of the game.

Nevertheless, “Raving Dead” features the strongest writing and characterization to date — I’ll never forget the way Jurgen hooks his thumbs into his nipple rings while he relaxes.

Whereas as “Ice Station Santa” and “Moai Better Blues” tend to meander along until a plot twist at the end, “Raving Dead” establishes Jurgen as the antagonist fairly early in the game, and most of the puzzles revolve around him. This gives Purcell room to stretch out and give the game a little more nuance, and I’d even argue that he re-imagines and modernizes the social commentary George Romero wrote into seminal zombie movies like Night of the Living Dead, from where this episode borrows its title. Sam & Max isn’t subtle stuff, by any means, but there are some threads of maturity to be found, not to mention that “Raving Dead” has a relatively bleak ending — I won’t spoil anything here, but it does seem heavy-handed for the series.

This episode is pretty clearly demarcated into two halves, the first of which is probably the most mechanically and thematically interesting of Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space to date. Unfortunately, that praise comes with a caveat: the first half of the game is murky in its goals, and you’ll likely stumble into the puzzle solutions instead of tactfully divining them. There are a few puzzles in particular that, even after having solved them, don’t seem to have much in-game logic behind them — brute force experimentation isn’t as satisfying as actual problem-solving.

The problem is that “Raving Dead” is narratively strict, often times depending on the player to trigger specific events to push the story forward. In older Sam & Max episodes, players generally had a handful of puzzles to solve at a time, giving them a reason to explore different areas, interact with different characters, and gradually amass the knowledge and items they need to move forward. “Raving Dead” is stingier with its progress, meaning that you’ll need to solve each puzzle in turn before you can move on.

The upshot is that the interplay between Sam, Max, and Jurgen is really neat once you figure it out. Dialogue hints have always been a big part of Sam & Max, but “Raving Dead” is almost impossible to figure out without taking the time to think about Jurgen’s character and motivations. (Again, having played “Situation: Comedy” helps.) Thankfully, the same general idea repeats itself a few times in a row — once you know what makes Jurgen tick and how his castle functions, the game starts to pick up steam in terms of narrative progress and player engagement.

The second half of “Raving Dead” is more straightforward and consists of traditional item management puzzles. The game does a good job of feeding players items, which keeps the game moving forward and pixel-hunting to a minimum. The final boss fight, too, is a return to form after some lackluster fisticuffs against Mr. Spatula in “Moai.”

“Raving Dead” ends on a somewhat dour note, but I can’t help be excited at the midpoint of Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space: different plot threads are coming together and the designers at Telltale consistently and effectively iterate on the mechanics and structure of the point-and-click adventure. “Raving Dead” is easily stronger than “Moai Better Blues” and more interesting than, if not executed as well as “Ice Station Santa.” Here’s hoping the last two episodes keep up the good work.

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You may not have noticed since it was a short-lived situation, but just before this past weekend Retro Racing [99¢], the fun old-school style top-down racer from Mr. Qwak, was pulled from the App Store. The sole developer behind Mr. Qwak explains the cause for the removal in a blog post on his website, but in short it was due to trying to change his Apple developer account from personal to business and hitting a few snags along the way.

The real bummer is that Retro Racing had just launched last month and was doing pretty well, selling between 1000-3000 copies a day. It sure sucks when that number abruptly drops to 0 when you aren’t expecting it. Mr. Qwak advises not making changes to your developer account during a new release period like this, a lesson he learned the hard way.

The good news is that Retro Racing has returned to the App Store, and before the removal business happened it had received a great new update. First off, the previously iPad-only same-device multiplayer mode has been enabled for iPhone and iPod touch users. It’s tiny, but it works, and I appreciate its inclusion since the local multiplayer is one of my favorite parts about Retro Racing.

The next big addition in this newest update to Retro Racing is 3 new levels, with more levels already planned for future updates. One of our biggest gripes with the game in our review was that it was so short, so it’s nice to see that being addressed. Finally, iCade support has been added to the game, which seems like a perfect fit for the style of game that Retro Racing is. You can see Retro Racing in action on the iCade in this gameplay video from the developer.

I like Retro Racing quite a bit, and am happy to see the developer account situation sorted out and the game back on the App Store. The new update is nice too, though I still have one outstanding gripe: landscape support. The game feels so cramped in portrait mode on the iPhone that I find I can only play it effectively on the iPad. Granted, it feels awesome on the iPad, but still. Maybe that option can be added in the future, but everything else about Retro Racing is top-notch, and if you hadn’t checked it out previously be sure to give it a look now that it’s back.

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Swordigo [$1.99] shouldn’t be as refreshing as it is. We were playing through better hack and slash adventures twenty years ago. But the genre has stumbled en route to the App Store, and we’ve been left waiting for a classic of the mobile era. Swordigo might just be the one.

Touch Foo is building a reputation for impressive games. Soosiz [$1.99 / HD], the studio’s first release won our hearts with a combination of novel design and great controls. Swordigo has all the things you’d expect from a good hack-n-slash: boss battles, sword combat, spell slinging, character upgrades and a ton of exploration. We’ve seen it all before. So why is it so utterly satisfying?

Scarcity is part of the reason. But Touch Foo has done more than create a game in an under-represented niche. It’s done an outstanding job of building it in the process.

From the controls to the upgrade mechanics, nearly everything in Swordigo works better than you might expect. On-screen directional controls are so often awkward, but they’re flawless here. In the eight hours I spent with the game I only bungled one or two jumps with my hand out of place, a better than reasonable margin of error. And that eight hours of content? That’s just for the main game. If you’re inclined to hunt down every last treasure chest (and earn the related Game Center achievement), expect to put in more time.

The art might be a problem for some. I’ve never been comfortable with Touch Foo’s style. The critters and character design in Soosiz grated on me, and the transition to 2.5D hasn’t helped. The environments are decent if repetitive, but it would be generous to say the character models have the detail of a Playmobil figure. You might be inclined to skip the game because of that. Don’t. The hero looks better as the game goes on, and you won’t notice the look when you’re knee deep in rock-solid gameplay.

You also shouldn’t look to this game for an original story—Swordigo goes well beyond nodding to Link and his crew. I’m not saying that like it’s a bad thing—it’s a charming homage, and it’s also unobtrusive. Touch Foo clearly spent its time elsewhere, designing an impressive platforming experience and a fun set of customizable upgrades. Some of the latter can be bought with the not-rupees dropped by enemies and unsuspecting bushes. Others are found tucked away in secret treasure chests.

Early on, there isn’t much to do. You’ll have a sword and a jump button and can only do so much with the combination. But your toolbox expands as the game’s four spells are introduced. Three can be used against enemies, and all four let you interact with the environment in new ways. You can shoot switches with your magic bolts or blow up hidden walls with bombs. Boss fights take advantage of those abilities, and there are unique challenges in nearly every new area. Because of this, Swordigo stays novel for its entire length, never relying on familiar tactics for long.

If a challenge can be defeated using spells or objects from the environment, the game plays beautifully. Sword combat, on the other hand, is a bit stiff. Your attacks run in a pattern, and you’ll often need an overhead swing at just the moment you slash forward. Enemies seem designed to exploit that weakness in the most frustrating ways, firing just over your sword’s reach or swooping down and hitting you in the face. Thankfully death is rarely a problem—falling takes you back to the last ledge with a sliver of health lost, while anything more permanent drops you at the most recent checkpoint. You can also teleport between checkpoints, so it’s trivial to take a trip back to town to shop or heal.

So while there are frustrations and a handful of small bugs, they’re blips in a solid eight hours of entertainment. Whether it ends up as a hidden gem or a genuine hit, Swordigo will have earned its place in any number of hearts. Touch Foo may be treading familiar ground, but it does so with great skill. If you’re up for a good old fashioned adventure, this is where you want to be. You might also want to be in our forums—it’s dangerous to go alone.

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Finnish studio Futuremark Games Studio has a new owner: Rovio Mobile, the creators of Angry Birds. In an announcement today, Rovio announced the acquisition of FGS, but it didn’t disclose what the studio will be doing for its new owner. It also didn’t talk about what it paid, though that’s pretty standard.

This is an interesting buy on a couple of levels. Futuremark was once a two-studio company. One was a 3D benchmarking studio, the other made passable games like, say, Unstoppable Gorg [$4.99 / Free]. Rovio has acquired the latter as opposed to the former, and its allowing the main arm retain all of its game studios’ known IP. Futuremark will be able to make sequels, then.

The PC version of Unstoppable Gorg.

In a press release, Rovio says that this is all just a part of its “rapid expansion in entertainment, publishing, animation, and retail.” Rovio plans to “continue to focus on seeking out the world’s best talent to join its team.”

Futuremark, by the way, will continue with benchmarks. In a statement we received, Futuremark says that it will churn out a new version of 3DMark this year that will “allow a direct comparison of gaming performance across” various OSes and form factors. That sounds… fun.

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At the beginning of February, the team behind the action platformer Terra Noctis [99¢] announced their new iOS project called Spellsword (no relation to Rocketcat’s upcoming game). After dishing out scant details for Spellsword in our forums, the team has been quiet for the last month or so while toiling away at the project. Today they’ve sent along the first video for Spellsword that finally shows the game in action.

The core gameplay in Spellsword is arcade-style action platforming similar to Super Crate Box [$1.99], but with lots of cool upgradeable items like hats, rings, amulets, and special powers. It will also be more structured and goal-oriented than SCB with 90 missions slated for the release version as well as unlockable endless arenas. It’s looking pretty sweet so far, and it sounds like Spellsword is very near its completion, so expect to hear a release date sometime in the near future.

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Just a quick heads up to let you know that Noodlecake Games has made two of their iOS titles free for a limited time. First up is Lunar Racer [Free], a side-scrolling 2D racer that feels like a mashup of Excitebike and Mario Kart. The physics are crazy, due to being on the Moon and all, and Lunar Racer is a frantic arcade experience due to just how easily the tides can turn during a race.

There’s also a whole host of unlockable items to trick out your ride with, as well as 12 different lunar tracks to race on. Finally, there’s a local multiplayer mode over Bluetooth or WiFi that is a total blast if you have a friend handy with another copy of the game. You can read about that and more in our review of Lunar Racer, but since it’s free you might as well just go grab it anyway and find out how it is for yourself.

The other title Noodlecake is currently offering for free is the excellent Super Stickman Golf [Free]. It’s been free a few times before, but that is definitely no reason not to grab it if you haven’t already. Super Stickman Golf is what happens when you combine the trajectory-based mechanics of an artillery style game like Worms with the rules of golf. The results are spectacular. Super Stickman Golf offers a crazy amount of single player courses to play through, and a bunch of special “power-up” golf balls to use that give you unique abilities like sticking your ball to a surface or causing it to stop suddenly and drop right out of midair.

Despite all of this single player goodness, perhaps the biggest draw of Super Stickman Golf is its fantastic online multiplayer mode, which we covered when it first hit. It’s a ridiculous amount of fun and is easily one of the finest real-time multiplayer experiences I’ve had on iOS. Needless to say, make sure to grab both Super Stickman Golf and Lunar Racer while they’re currently free if you’re a fan of not paying anything for good games.

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Spy vs. Spy originated as a comic in Mad Magazine back in the ’60s, it was created into a home computer game in 1984 and subsequently ported to just about every console imaginable. And now, according to the ridiculously vague teaser image that made its way into our inbox, it appears that Spy vs. Spy is heading to the App Store. It doesn’t explicitly say as much, but the developer attached to the project, Robots & Pencils, is a known iOS developer, so it sure seems like a pretty safe bet.

The original Spy vs. Spy game offered an interesting 2-player same-screen gaming experience that saw each player trying to catch the other in different kinds of booby traps carefully hidden amongst the various rooms of an embassy. I can definitely see this being a ton of fun on the iPad, especially with that big screen and touch controls. There is really no other information on this potential iOS Spy vs. Spy, but I’d expect that we’ll be hearing a lot more about it in the near future.

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Earlier this month, SNK Playmore released an update for their excellent iOS version of their popular fighting game franchise King of Fighters-i [$6.99]. Unfortunately, there was a huge SNAFU with the update, and for a lot of people downloading it would wipe out all of their data as well as take away 6 characters which had been added in a previous update.

The good news is that SNK Playmore has released a new update for King of Fighters-i that fixes the issue of deleting the additional characters. The bad news is that if your data was previously erased, then you aren’t getting it back. At least not in my case. If you held off on the last update or your data wasn’t erased as a result of it then you should be good to go with the new update. Emphasis on the word “should” because at this point I’m sure anything could happen, so maybe you should proceed with caution.

The strange thing about all of this update drama is that in the end, it looks like the original offending update was merely an iOS 5 compatibility fix, and didn’t offer any new content or features. Sadly, the new update that fixes the old update doesn’t have any goodies in it either, unless you count the fun I’ll be having re-unlocking everything in the game over again.

I know that sounded snarky, but actually King of Fighters-i kicks all sorts of ass, and I really don’t have a problem playing through it all again. Still, I’d love to see an actual content update released someday, and hopefully there’s one in the works. In the meantime, make sure to grab the newest update if you were among those who were affected by the bug.

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This is a promo image for Solipskier, which was used when Mikengreg revealed the game to people.

When a game developer creates an awesome game, we expect its next release to be just as good. This works both ways. Greg Wohlwend and Michael Boxleiter of Mikengreg fame have told me what it feels like to have to work on something new with the expectation of past success in the background. It isn’t just noise — it’s having an effect on the development on its new title, Gasketball. From ideas to coding, the shadow of the success of an arcade skiing game called Solipskier [$.99] looms. It makes decisions harder. It ramps up the scope and quality. It’s making the stakes higher at a time when the studio is looking to do something totally different.

We discussed two kinds of pressure: external and internal. Mike and Greg said that they don’t feel any external heat as they build Gasketball. Solipskier got into a lot of hands, but that hasn’t given the studio the kind ravenous base that other great independent developers, like Team Meat of Super Meat Boy fame, enjoy. There aren’t throngs of people  expecting mastery in the follow-up from Mikengreg, in other words, so the bar feels low.

The pressure comes from inside, they expressed. Solipskier’s sales were the best Mikengreg has ever experienced, and the studio desperately wants Gasketball to outperform it in revenue, quality, and audience. Success is mutating their goals, as if the magic of Solipskier could ever be repeated.

“We really want our next game to seem like a step up, which is not actually very different from our early development days, every game we’ve made has been more interesting, more polished and more successful than the last,” Mike told us in an e-mail exchange. “The difference, now, is that we are trying to succeed in terms of a million players willing to pay us, which sets the quality bar dauntingly high for a two-man outfit.”

Gasketball's logo and the placeholder image for the game's web site.

Greg keeps asking himself if it’s even possible to have another Solipskier, and that seems like a fair question to ask. Its development, from idea to prototyping to final release, happened in brilliant flashes of creativity. Gasketball, on the other hand, hasn’t had that sort of conceptual magic. The conceit took longer to come along, and the studio had to throw out a lot of stuff in order to find this game.

“We had to resolve to getting down in the muck and doing the hard work of prototyping, testing, and scrapping everything for yet another prototype that felt like it had promise,” Greg told us. “For a game to really strike all the chords for us it has to be pretty specific.” Solipkier was initially designed as a Flash game. A lot of its systems and mechanics are designed around that platform. Gasketball is a departure, so it took longer to design as the studio learned new tricks.

The idea for Solipskier came from a brainstorming session that revolved around parallax scrolling. Speed and parallax seemed to gel well, so Mike and Greg started prototyping. In a blog post, the duo described the idea for the landscape painting component came as a watershed, “oh my god” moment. With wide-eyes, they went to work. In the end, the Mikengreg created an exhilarating skiing game unlike any other. Instead of focusing on tricks, jumps, and speed, Solipskier leverages style and the emotion that bursts from your chest when you feel like your acceleration is spiraling out of control.

Version ".01" of Solipskier

This wasn’t the duo’s first rodeo. Solipskier was created first and foremost as a flash game, just like Mike’s other titles as a part of Intuition Games. It was, however, the first game of either developer to grab major mainstream appeal. Mike tells me that he realized that this was a truly special project after publishers had entered into a bidding war for the game. An iOS version wasn’t in the picture at the time, but the reality of Flash development changed the tone of the porting conversation going forward.

“We were always looking for the next step out of the Flash world and into a more sustainable market that allowed for us to make larger, more fully formed games,” Greg told us. “The Flash market is great and gave us a way to become better developers while getting paid for it; however, it wasn’t a sustainable business.”

Mike and Greg were working “crazy hours,” and fretting over paychecks when they developed for Flash. Living by the seats of their pants did have its moments. “It was exciting in some ways for sure, but it couldn’t last,” Greg said. “We were lucky to have such success with Solipskier, as it’s allowing us to fully commit to iOS and downloadable titles in future.”

Within the first two months, the iOS version of Solipskier made a little over $70,000, while the sponsored Flash version generated $15,000. On Metacritic, it’s sitting at a 79 average across five positive reviews. Greg tells us that this success “changed the scope” of what it could do with its next game. The duo continued to pay themselves the same amount of money, but Solipskier gave them consistency and the ability to screw up.

Version "0.5." Can you spot the differences!?

“Since Solipskier, we’ve made six or so fairly polished prototypes and scrapped all of them,” Greg tells us. “We could have taken any one of those further but we’d rather call it a failure early and often than find ourselves with a less than stellar finished game that never found that magic we always look for.”

Solipskier’s success and design are weighing heavily on Mike’s mind as he executes concepts on Gasketball. He second guesses a lot and he’s finding it hard to accept praise from friends. “We’ve always seen the flaws in our work first and foremost, but even worse on this project I see things that aren’t there.” Mike elaborated: “My brain is constantly convinced that there are more features I need to discover before the game will be good, but they’re always just out of reach or vision. Every time I implement an idea and it doesn’t make the game instantly better I feel a crush of defeat. I feel a bit like I’m going crazy.”

They’re not alone in this, though.

The Other Guys

Other studios go through the similar issues. Some deliver greatness quickly. After Chair Entertainment released a brilliant Meteroid-style game called Shadow Complex on XBLA, it was able to stoke a similar sort of fanfare and praise with the launch of Infinity Blade. After Simogo released Bumpy Road, it followed it up with an equally charming rhythm and stealth game called Beat Sneak Bandit.

Some studios deliver late. Mobigame released its puzzle game Edge a couple of years ago to insane levels of acclaim and drama. The app was pulled because of a bogus trademark violation just as it was hitting critical mass, and the studio had to fight for the game to get back onto the App Store. Its follow-up, Cross Fingers, released 11 months after Edge. Mobigame’s David Papazian tells us that Cross Fingers is picking up steam. Edge has since been re-released.

Edge on MacOS

“We were very happy with this second game because it is really innovative and completely unique on the App Store. While I am writing, I can see that Cross Fingers is 5th in the Top Free in the US App Store with more than 8 million downloads. However, the game works a lot better now than it did at the start, because we evolved with the market. We added more levels and in-app purchases. Also, the fans are not the same as Edge fans, a lot of women and men from any ages love Cross Fingers, when Edge is more for gamers.”

Papazian says Edge, and its awards, gave his studio legs. The popularity led him to meeting a lot of people, and gave him a good “in” when introducing his work to press. His studio’s pressure was internal, too.

“But you have some pressure, you must do it again and you polish the new game as much as you can, maybe too much. Luckily we did it again, but we did not receive any awards and Apple never featured Cross Fingers on the US store. We had to fight for this success, by updating the game until it finally worked.”

Tiger Styles grabbed a lot of attention with its puzzle game Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. While working on the follow-up, a Metroid-style game called Waking Mars, Tiger Styles’ David Kalina said he felt a subconscious kind of pressure to one-up Spider. It’s a similar feeling that Mike and Greg feel as they create Gasketball. “When you make a game that gets game of the year nods,” Kalina told us, “there is definitely this feeling that EVERY game needs to live up to that standard, which is sort of an impossible bar to try and meet every time out.”

Waking Mars is more about exploration than anything else.

The development of Spider had a sense of urgency to it. He needed the game to succeed so his studio could exist. With Waking Mars, Kalina said that urgency was replaced with the desire to blow everything up in its second game, which again, is something Mikengreg is similarly struggling with. “When you start approaching game development that way, the cost of everything goes up, and the more you spend, the more risky it is to fail,” he admitted.

Waking Mars, in the end, will keep his studio alive. However, Kalina said he wouldn’t pour so much time and so many resources into Tiger Style’s next game. Kalina wants to be able to fail and experiment and do bold things.

“I’d like to release two or three games in the next year and have them all be surprising in some way, and if they don’t happen to set the world on fire, we can be cool with that because we’re at least trying to push in new directions,” Kalina told us. “The worst thing we could do now is to say ‘we have to do something just like Spider or Waking Mars BUT BIGGER…’ If we go down that path, you may never hear from us again!”

On Gasketball

Gasketball has a chance to be stellar. It’s a basketball game that has its users matching their opponents’ last shots. It’s like a digital version of HORSE, except rendered on a fantastical 2D plane that lets you freely move the hoop and shot placement around. It also has special balls and barriers that you can set up to make your shot more Byzantine and advanced. There’s a plan in place to continually update the game as it lives on the App Store.

Surprisingly, nothing mechanically in Solipskier informed Gasketball’s creative direction, Mike and Greg said. In fact, Greg argued that there wasn’t one to begin with. He said Mike came up with the idea for a playful and fun basketball game that was “a bit more skill-based than just a slingshot or pre-mapped trajectory control scheme” game. Moving in a new direction entirely, Gasketball eschews the stark contrasts of Solipskier in favor of a more playful and fun art direction.

Mike walking people through their first look at Gasketball.

Our expectations got the best of us when we first saw Gasketball. It’s just not the game you envision this studio doing at first glance. Solipkier was speedy and sharp, and it had a very specific and awesome rhythm, tone, and style. You’d figure the next game from this studio would incorporate some of these elements. This game is exceedingly friendlier in look and behavior. It’s also more thoughtful and maybe even a shade or two less impressive from a conceptual standpoint.

The stakes are just higher now. But there’s also another reason this project is especially different for the studio. Like with Mobigames and Cross Fingers, Mikengreg see Gasketball as an opportunity to grab an entirely new audience.

“We’re both getting older and want to do more with our lives than spend a hundred hours a week in a dark office,” Mike tells us. “When you start working independently you tend to hold your breath and accept sacrifices to your happiness in the short term for long term gains and we’ve yet to really succeed in a way that really gives us the security to let go and look to the future.  It can get very nerve wracking to think that you only have one shot at releasing each game, and every time you fail to reach your goals you get one step closer to having to quit trying.”

It’s a strange world right now for Mikengreg, as the studio struggles with the success of Solipskier and thinks about a studio-wide transition. But it’s confident about Gasketball and its eventual quality. We are are, too. We’ve seen the game in action, watched the videos, and have even fiddled with a build. The title threw us off at first, sure, but now that we’re comfortable with the fact that Mikengreg are switching focus, we’ve been able to move past our expectations. It’s figuring out a way to do that, too.

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Here’s a fun Friday story for you- Disc Drivin’ [$1.99 / Free / $2.99 (HD)], if you’ve never heard of it, is an a turn-based racing game that both Jared and Arnold can’t get enough of, still. The basic idea is if you took a game like Mario Kart, but gave it online turn-based multiplayer, and used a flick-based shuffleboard-like mechanic to race your discs around a track. We’ve got a pretty extensive review in the books, but since then, the game has been updated a whole bunch of times with all sorts of new stuff.

Anyway, in a recent short interview with AdWeek, Rich Sommer, the actor who plays Harry Crane on AMC’s Mad Men dropped some interesting details on the gameplay habits of the cast and crew:

Disc Drivin’ is a racing game that I’ve been playing a lot lately with Jon Hamm; Jay Ferguson, who’s also on the show; our head hairstylist; and our makeup artist.

Celebrity endorsement for apps and games isn’t a new thing, but it always seems like whenever a celeb’ is tweeting about the game they’re playing, it’s usually the same ultra-popular junk everyone else is playing. Disc Drivin’, however, is seriously obscure compared to something like, I don’t know, Temple Run.

So, yeah, if the folks behind Mad Men are playing Disc Drivin’, you totally should be too. Right?

[via AdWeek]

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