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About a week ago, EA announced two potentially hip, upcoming apps for Mass Effect fans with iPads and iPhones. The first was a third-person shooter called Infiltrator. The other was a straight-up companion app dubbed Mass Effect Datapad. One problem: EA didn’t have much to say about the latter title. Like, at all. Talk about a bummer.

We said we’d update you, so here we are. In an interview at the event, Giant Bomb nabbed some details on Datapad from Mass Effect 3 lead writer Mac Walters. In brief, Walters confirmed that it’ll at least carry the game’s codex entries.

From the interview:

WALTERS: Probably the most inclusive thing on the Datapad app is the codex entries, which of course are available in the game. The ones in the game will be tailored to your experience and open up as you play the game. While we wanted to add other ways to access the universe, we didn’t want you to necessarily feel like you HAD to have them. They had to be optional, but they also had to feel useful in their own right, and fun, just like the Infiltrator game, which is amazing.

This series’ codex entries are well produced. In fact, they make you want to hang out with them in a comfortable place, instead of just glancing at them in-between missions and action-y content. If Datapad has a half-way decent UI, it’ll make snuggling up with Mass Effect 3’s codex, natively, totally possible. We’re stoked.

[via Giant Bomb]

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Double Fine’s Double Fine Adventure is doing … OK on the funding front. In the first 24 hours, it shattered all sorts of fun records, including the most funding raised in that period. As of this morning, the studio has gathered 1.7 million dollars in pledges, which is a lot more than the 400,000 bucks it is asking for.

We covered the project because an iOS version seemed like a good possibility. In the original Q&A, Double Fine said Mac and iOS ports are something that it would “love to do” and they were both at “the top of the list for things” if it raised more funds than it asked for. Mission accomplished.

A recent update to that response in the Q&A, however, is decidedly more cautious about the possibility of a Mac or iOS port. “We would love to do both of those things,” it says now. “They are at the top of the list for things to do and we’re working to determine whether we will be able to offer them.”

This is a subtle change, but an important one. An iOS port sure doesn’t seem as surefire as it once did — which you know, was probably the point in fiddling with the wording in the first place. A rep told TouchArcade that an announcement should be coming shortly, and the change was just a new way of telling people that Double Fine is looking into iOS and Mac and pricing a port out.

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Lyst Ignition [99¢] from Steel Games is a fascinating – and sometimes frantic – color-matching game which involves tapping little orbs as they descend down the screen. By learning and tapping different combinations of orbs, you can create explosions and other effects. There’s a few rules to learn initially, but the main objective is to destroy orbs of matter.

There’s five types of matter which fall down the screen. Basic matter is the most common and is shown as a black circle, but there’s also orange, blue, critical and multiplier matter. Plus power-ups and “catalysts” appear. A series of interactive tutorials explain how the various types of orb can be combined. This tutorial is totally necessary to understand the game.

The most basic combination involves matching two orbs. By tapping an orange matter and a blue matter, it creates an explosion wherever you tap next.  If the explosion destroys any white orbs of critical matter, it’s worth more points, while destroying a multiplier orb increases your score for that whole explosion. Blowing up matter increases the timer which is always counting down towards zero, at which point the game ends.

Tapping two matter of the same color generates a vacuum wherever you tap next. This sucks the falling orbs into a cluster, making them a prime target for a high-scoring explosion in your next move. You can match up orbs in quick succession – the moment one match is made, you make another – because new orbs never stop falling down the screen. And they descend faster than I expected, and get faster with each level cleared.

Things get more interesting once you start matching three orbs together. For example, after tapping two orbs as described above, you can tap a Catalyst orb to enhance the effect. This might create a wider or longer lasting vacuum, a larger explosion or a series of explosions.

Two other game elements are power-ups (like a “frost wall” which stops orbs from falling temporarily or “shockwave” which reduces the size of orbs and makes them float upwards) and chain reactions. The chain reaction button creates a series of chained-explosions, destroying all matter in close proximity to the previous explosion, but it takes a while to recharge in between uses.

The strength of Lyst Ignition is that you’re constantly making snap decisions about what to do next. Do you create a vacuum or explosion? Use a power-up or catalyst? And which is the best place to aim the combination to destroy the most high scoring matter orbs? Once you’re familiar with the various orbs you think fast and tap almost non-stop.

I’ve been describing classic mode, but there’s also “Ignition” mode, which features an ‘Ignition Zone’ which grows over time. If a matched color pair fall into that area it increases in size rapidly. Whereas if a mixed color pair fall into the zone, it explodes, detonating nearby matter and preventing you from scoring. A brand new update to Lyst Ignition adds another new game mode, Invasion. Here, invaders will appear and “deactivate” your matter, rendering it useless. You’ll need to use explosions to get rid of these invaders and reactivate the dead matter.

Over time your points earn beakers (like from a science lab). These are used to unlock experiments from the main menu which add additional gameplay features. Each time you choose one new game feature, you rule out another, so you can use this to play around with different strategies. Once you’ve got the maximum number of beakers, you can randomly discover new features as well.

Lyst Ignition does a good job of adding enough unique elements to its matching gameplay that it feels like a fresh entry in the genre, and there is a healthy amount of strategy with how you utilize making matches across the various modes. If you can put in the time to learn its intricacies, Lyst Ignition offers a fun experience if you’re in the mood for a new puzzler.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Who didn’t see this one coming: more Cut the Rope [$.99 / Lite / HD] toys, games, and, for the first time, physical board games are coming. Earlier this afternoon, ZeptoLab revealed three merchandising agreements that’ll put Om Nom in almost every corner of our physical homes. Here’s to hoping he uses a litter box.

With Mattel and Hasbro, Zepto has licensed the brand to see the release of board games, both physical and digital, apparently. Mattel specifically will be releasing a Cut The Rope board game that allows kids to take a Cut The Rope toy and interact with the iPad app via its “Active Touch” technology. We’ve seen this before with a Disney title, and it looks cool for what it is.

Toy company Jakk’s Pacific and apparel company Li & Fung round out the announced partnerships. The former will see the release of one of those Plug-and-Play consoles, except with Cut the Rope. The latter will see the release of sleepy and lounge-y time clothing this fall.

If this all sounds crazy, by the way, stop by a Wal-Mart and try not to see Angry Birds stuff. It’s impossible. You can’t even buy a candy bar without bumping into one of its numerous plush toys or … whatever.

[via Joystiq]

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Sick of dual-stick shooters? Gunning down spaceships lost its shine? I hear that. But let me just say this: unless you’re really, truly, and utterly sick of the genre, you really shouldn’t miss Beat Hazard Ultra [$0.99], an outstanding music-generated shooter from Cold Beam Games.

It has a few problems – awkward menus, fiddly controls, limited music sources – but I can’t think of a more compelling reason to grab a pair of virtual sticks and let the bullets fly. This version is just about on par with its PC and PSN counterparts for a fraction of the price. There’s no better way to light up your screen with insane strobes of gorgeous color. Just mind the photosensitive seizure warning, because it’s not kidding around.

If you haven’t played the desktop or console versions, Beat Hazard Ultra might seem to stand out uncomfortably in the realm of dual stick shooters. There aren’t really any levels, the enemies don’t sport much variety, your ship isn’t at all interesting to look at—not a great package by traditional metrics. But the game’s beat detection and intense visuals easily make up for those deficiencies.

The soundtrack is your iTunes library (specifically your .mp3 files), a few included Internet radio stations or a handful of baked in tracks. If you can, bring in your own music—it makes the game so much more fun. Each time you play, the game builds a level around your song of choice. The music is monitored on three levels—the energy of a particular movement or verse decides the boss encounters and enemy waves that will appear, the beat creates the pulse and intensity of your weapons fire, and everything in between controls enemy numbers and movement and shot patterns.

Because this works so well, it’s hard to care that you’ll be seeing the same few enemy types and the same handful of bosses over and over again. Or possibly not seeing them—you can crank the intensity of the visuals up to 200%, and at max firepower you’ll hardly see what’s happening as your screen pulses with light and color. The intense visuals pulsing in time with your favorite tracks is something to experience.

The controls make this a little harder than it needs to be. There are several power-ups you can collect and use in Beat Hazard Ultra, bombs and homing missiles and the like, but the way they cluster around the joysticks on screen makes it kind of hard to trigger them. Single-stick modes avoids this, but it’s too uncontrollable for practical use. The floating joysticks are also an exercise in frustration—choose the fixed option for more control. For some of us, even the menus are weirdly awkward. If that describes you, then drag them, don’t tap them.

While I can manage higher scores and longer runs on other platforms, this version is just as fun. Running through songs, collecting multipliers and cash, and blowing up ships for high scores could get old, I suppose. Then you can switch to Survival or Boss Rush to change your focus, and increase the difficulty up to five steps from Easy to Suicidal. I’ve still got a long way to go to be able to survive a track on Suicidal, but the journey is worth it.

You want to be well rewarded for your time? Play on a high difficulty in a long-running mode. You’ll watch the experience bar fly up when you’re done, levelling you over and over. Each time you finish a run and level at least once you get to unlock a perk of your choice from a huge list. They focus on aggression, power-ups, scores or endurance, and you can upgrade each of them with virtual cash as you go. There’s strategy here: you can only equip a few perks even after you unlock the one that gives extra slots, so you have to choose them carefully before each attempt.

You might also want to curate your music collection carefully. I have no complaints about how the game handles its beat detection—it isn’t always obvious, but the changes between different songs are considerable (and consistent through replays). I do wish, however, that Beat Hazard Ultra was a bit more intelligent about managing play order. When you set up the game you can choose a particular song from a full list of your library, or you can play a random track. The non-standard modes go on for longer than a single song, though, and there’s no way to choose what will play after the first.

Thankfully, Beat Hazard Ultra is still fun with slow tracks. The best are the ones that vary their beats, since those are the levels that really get wild. Hard thumping bass might be more intense, but it can also get a little repetitive. My white whale is Girl Talk’s All Day – I figure I can top the Game Center leaderboard for songs 7 minutes and up if I can just master the full hour and eleven minutes of it. Unrealistic, maybe, but I’ll keep trying. I’m racking up a lot of achievements on the way.

I can’t think of many reasons anyone should pass this game up. If you truly loathe dual-stick shooters, there’s no escaping that Beat Hazard Ultra falls in that genre. If you hate music you should probably pass, and if you’re badly affected by full-screen strobing lights you’ll want to stay far, far away. Otherwise, it’s a heck of a game, gorgeous, challenging and long-lived in turn. I’ve hardly been able to put it down, and listening to music without the game just doesn’t feel as cool right now. Let us know what you think on the forums, but don’t miss this one. Your eyes deserve a little excitement, don’t you think?

TouchArcade Rating:

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The runner space is steadily becoming as clotted as match-3 or tower defense on the App Store, but we’re starting to see some hip innovations in specific parts of these title’s overall experience. Dream Runner, a new 3D runner that was just announced on our boards, is the perfect example how studios are attempting to spice things up.

Excuse the vagueness, but Dream Runner’s pitch is that it will have several narrative-led elements, as well as multiple objectives and worlds to explore, some of which will usher in new mechanics. Your everyday runner usually just offers the same obstacles, the same characters, and the same stuff forever and ever. It’ll be nice to have a game that is willing to shake things up.

The team isn’t ready to talk specifics yet obviously, but it is willing to share a small promo video with the world, which you can view below. Dream Runner is also almost ready to hit beta, and you can possibly get into that by hitting up this link.

Check out the art, by the way:

“There is something in here that will appeal to a wide range of gamers — whether they be fans of endless runners, appreciate great art and compelling stories or just like playing a solid all-round, fun game,” the developers said on our boards.

It’s slated for release at some point this quarter. We’re currently checking into the price and the platforms.

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We’ve been watching for Furmins [$0.99 / Universal] for a while now, because when you hear Housemarque is launching a game on iOS, you sit up and take notice. These are the guys behind Super Stardust HD, Dead Nation and Outlands, some of the best games on the PlayStation Network. Furmins hasn’t blown us away like their console titles have, but it’s a gorgeous little physics puzzler that’s great fun to boot.

Only one little problem—Housemarque jammed things up a bit with a pretty off-the-wall in-app purchase system. I’ll get into that a bit deeper once I tell you what the game’s all about, but suffice it to say that you may end up stuck behind a paywall before you’re done. It’s a bummer, because you’re going to want to get your hands all over as much of this game as you can.

From the start, great level design sets Furmins apart. Each level has the same goal: get all the fuzz-ball furmins into a basket. You can’t directly interact with either, so you have to play with the environment to create a path. Though the game keeps a pretty tight rein on the tools you can use, each level manages to feel like a new challenge, and some have seriously entertaining solutions.

Those tools you have to work with are a mix between objects that need to be placed with pixel-hunting precision and interactive elements that can be triggered with a tap. At first the game comes off as a pretty by-the-numbers physics puzzler – move a platform here for the furmins to bounce off, a wall there to keep them from going too far. This all changes when timing elements are brought in, and things start to get a little crazy.

If you’re into puzzles because you like slow, thoughtful experiences, Furmins probably isn’t for you. Once you sort out the platforms, ice blocks, and other pre-set bits, the real fun starts. As soon as you set things in motion you’re responsible for quick reflex moves like triggering other platforms at just the right moment or switching conveyor belt directions. This makes it extra hard to manage your positioning since a winning setup will depend as much on execution as anything else. Tap at the wrong moment and you won’t land the jump that sets your whole plan into motion.

This might be frustrating in a worse game, but here it’s occasionally brilliant. Pulling off some of the more difficult levels will make you feel both clever and skilled, which is a pretty great reward. Even better, you’re doing so in a charming game with lovely art and music.

For all the pleasure the game has to offer, though, we must eventually get to the pain. On one hand Furmins does a great job opening up its content, letting you jump around between levels and most worlds whenever you want, playing in any order that strikes your fancy. On the other hand, four worlds are completely inaccessible to start, and unlocking them is a surprisingly obnoxious process.

It’s complicated, but I’ll try to be brief. You unlock worlds with the stars you earn from collecting all the sweets in each level (yeah, a three-star system. What physics game is complete without one, right?). You earn three per level, or six if you pick up the (pretty much free) star-doubling addition tucked away in the store. If my math is correct, you should be able to open up all but one level with double stars and perfect three-star performance. If you don’t notice that optional multiplier right away, though, you may only be able to open two of the locked worlds and a handful of the bonus levels before hitting the wall.

So instead of spending time playing the game, this star doubling option leaves you either spending the start of the game calculating out the possible IAP paths or locked out of a good chunk of content. Then, of course, you’ll have to replay completed levels (and, I mean, at least that is an option, but who wants to replay already-mastered puzzles?) or purchase stars to make up the difference. Conflating achievement with currency looks good on paper, but this is just plain confusing. It’s sure to leave a bad taste in the mouths of players who learned they needed to game the system a little too late.

If you hop into the store and grab the star-doubling multiplier straight off you’ll be pretty much fine, assuming you leave the bonus levels until last and eventually earn three stars on everything. If you pull all that off you can enjoy the game thoroughly with nearly all of its content intact. And Furmins is a great game to enjoy, with gorgeous visuals and a ton of really sharp physics puzzles to work through. I just wish I could have avoided the mind games that came along for the ride.

TouchArcade Rating:

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When it comes to game genres that have been done to death, the word game is king. You can’t blame developers for trying to come up with a unique twist for them, because if it does well, it does SO well — look at that Words With Friends phenomenon. How do we make the next Words With Friends? And then there’s a flood of games that all make you use your spelling skills. Great. Maybe if I get really fancy I can spell “ubiquitous”. Or something.

Maybe it is possible to find a few that try the new twist and come out successful, though. Bubble in Paradise [$0.99] didn’t sound too promising to me from the name itself, but once I got a look at the bubble mechanic I could tell the possibility of getting hooked was there. Basically, the premise is simple: your screen fills with bubbles, each of which have a letter on them. To form a word, you have to tap the letters and submit, and if you’ve got a word, the bubbles all pop, clearing more space for the ones to come. The twist is that if you don’t use them, the bubbles grow, and if you let them get too big, your game is over. Hope you have a good way to use that Z in a sentence.

There are little powerups to help you on your way, such as Freeze, Deflate and Plus. The first two are self-explanatory (and something you will certainly need as the levels progress in speed and challenge), but Plus is a special one you can unlock that will increase the score given by all nearby bubbles when you pop it. The only way you can unlock this is to collect stars as you play, which will randomly appear on the boards. The further you get, the more powerful goodies you can get your hands on. You’ll also need to learn to avoid ones like Faster (makes bubbles appear more quickly) and Inflate (makes nearby bubbles grow). Things get tricky once these appear and you’re already rushing to make combos.

Another option the game offers is hints, so if you are really stuck, you can use one to have the game show you a word. There are a limited number of free hints, however, and after you use them all you have to earn them in play or dish up your dollars. This is where in-game purchases come in. You can grab 20 hints for $0.99, which is pretty cheap actually, or if you have trouble assembling words in general and grew up in a small cave being raised by forest animals and making clicking noises to communicate, the 1,000 hints package might be good for you at a whopping $9.99.

Like every solid word game, Bubble in Paradise offers multiple modes to play in, so if you get burned on one you can try out another. Normal, Endless and Battle are available right off the bat, but you’ll have to earn stars to play Blitz (a timed mode). If you don’t want to wait to unlock Blitz, you can dish up a buck and unlock everything. The tone of in-game purchase options means a lot to me as a user, and I found that these were never intrusive. They were there if I wanted them, but without them the game was still perfectly fun. One other cool thing about these was that you can send them as a gift to a friend playing the game, which I thought was a cool touch.

One of the only issues I had with Bubble in Paradise is that I couldn’t always find someone to play in Battle mode. On the other hand, it’s just as easy to invite friends to play as the game is Crystal and Game Center enabled and can quickly hook you up with a network of people who may or may not outspell you. Bubbles in Paradise is a simple title, but well-executed and very enjoyable. I’m probably biased since I like to spell and learn new words. I also admit I gloated a little over the fact that my best word in the last round was “puked.” Not because it’s a long word, mind you, but because I have the sense of humor of a fourteen year old boy.

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