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I’m not sure how it is that Kairosoft does it, but they’ve managed to nail a gameplay formula that’s so engrossing that seemingly everyone is more than willing to overlook the fact that all of their games are mediocre ports of feature phone games. I, for one, don’t care at all, and have spent an embarrassing amount of time building game studios, racing teams, shopping malls, schools, and all the other things the guys from Kairosoft have put me in charge of.

For a limited time, Grand Prix Story [99¢] and Mega Mall Story [$1.99] are on sale. As you probably guessed by the title, in Mega Mall Story you manage a shopping mall. We explain how it all works in details in our review. Similarly, our review of Grand Prix Story goes over all the ins and outs of your racing career.

My favorite Kairosoft game is still Game Dev Story [$3.99] and I really recommend diving into that first if you’ve yet to play a Kairosoft title as its premise is likely the most familiar to readers of TouchArcade. Regardless, all the games are tons of fun (although some are more confusing than others) and you really can’t go wrong with any of them.

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Surely you’ve heard of Words With Friends by now, haven’t you? I figure, if my mom plays it, that’s a pretty good benchmark for the entire world knowing about a video game. Well, if you haven’t, here’s the gist- Words With Friends is basically the game of Scrabble with a social cross-platform twist. Utilizing the magic of asynchronous multiplayer and push alerts, you can play games of Scrabble with friends across the world. Cooler yet, it doesn’t matter if your friends have Android phones or are even playing the Facebook version of the game… It just works.

It’s casual and simple enough that you could play with your grandma, while being classic enough that it’s fun for even the most hardcore types who enjoy playing word games with their friends and family. Seriously, I can’t say enough good things about Words With Friends.

I can say one bad thing though, in that the advertisements that power the free version can get a little obnoxious at times, especially if you have a hatred for interstitial ads… Which is exactly where today’s sale comes in. For a limited time, you can get the ad-free version of Words With Friends for 99¢. I can almost promise you’ll get more than 99¢ worth of entertainment out of this game, but, if you’re a cautious App Store customer you can always try the free version first. All of your games will transfer over if and when you decide to spring for the paid version.

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You know how around Halloween you bought five bags of Fun Size Snickers to give out to trick or treaters, but somehow only three bags made it into the candy bowl and now you’re feeling really bloated and gross and you really need to look good for upcoming holiday parties so you’re eating grilled salmon three times a day and that would be fine, except all you can think about is how you really want to eat a bunch of donuts and cake and candy? Yeah, uh, me neither. However, it’s obvious that the people at Com2uS were in throes of weight loss-related fantasy when creating their latest game, Chocohero [$.99].

Before we get too far, we need to establish whether or not you should play this game. Are you diabetic? Has your dentist recommended you stay away from sweet, delicious candy? If so, you shouldn’t have a problem, because this is a video game and not real life, duh. You play as Chipster, the Chocohero the game is named for, who must save his Chocobit friends from an impending milk flood in the land of Smoresdom. These Chocobits (which look a little like bunnies, except better because they are candy) are trapped on delicious pastry ledges made of things called Cakems, which you must destroy or work around in order to rescue your friends before the floods come.

Basically, you’re constantly falling and the faster you fall, the more likely you are to rack up points, Chocobits, and powerups before the milk catches up to you. You control Chipster’s fall by either tilting your device or by using its one-touch control. The controls are perfect (though it’s not like this kind of game demands precision), and the powerups that are available are simple and well-designed. You can stop time, attract nearby coins to you, and pick up the means to unleash Fever mode (where you act like a tornado and barrel down for a few seconds, breaking everything in your path).

The game gives you a seemingly endless stream of objectives to complete (rescue X Chocobits, destroy x Cakems, etc.) that unlock progressively longer capes as you achieve them. The longer your cape, the greater your falling speed and the more likely you are to avoid the milk flood long enough to rescue more of your friends and cause even more damage to baked goods. The beauty of this is that it both gives you an incentive to keep playing and the means to progress juuust a little further each time, ensuring the game never gets boring.

Chocohero is certainly not the only game of its type out there, but it’s definitely one of the best designed. In addition to tight controls and well-designed levels, the art style and music are perfectly complementary (and, of course, super-adorable). For about a dollar, this is a really fun little diversion for pretty much any time you have a few minutes, especially when you’re waiting for your next dentist’s appointment.

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This past April, Owlchemy Labs was set to release Smuggle Truck to the App Store, a game about transporting illegal immigrants across the border in a rusty old pickup truck. Due to Apple’s sensitivity to the subject matter, however, what we ended up seeing released was Snuggle Truck [Free/HD], a game about transporting fuzzy stuffed animals across the border into the zoo. While initially being disappointed in the sudden theme switch, I actually found the colorful characters and complete silliness of the premise to be a bigger success than the originally intended idea. And as we noted in our review, Snuggle Truck was so damn fun anyway that the theme really didn’t matter much at all.

Now for the first time, the developers of Snuggle Truck are offering both the iPhone/iPod touch and iPad versions of their game for free. While the decision to go free was to get more players trying the game and building their own levels using the excellent built-in level editor that was released in August, Owlchemy Labs does hope to be monetizing this freebie promotion by offering a selection of items in the new in-game DLC store.

First thing to point out is that not everything in the store is paid. All users will be able to download a pack of 5 brand new developer-created levels, and there is an additional 5 pack of new levels available for 99¢ as well. Also, a new time freeze power up is available in the store free of charge. Another new addition to the game is different truck skins. The first is a zoo truck skin that is available for a 99¢ IAP, with more skins planned for the future. You can also buy an augmentation for 99¢ that will make your next 100 power up items last 50% longer, and you can pay $1.99 to unlock all of the original 42 levels immediately rather than through normal game progression.

Finally, if you’re just down to throw some money at the developers because you like their game a lot, or if you’re the type who likes to have prestigious in-game rewards, their are 3 different developer support IAP options you can buy. For 99¢ you’ll get the Indie Supporter badge which is prominently displayed on the main menu so you can prove to all of your friends that you dropped an entire dollar on it. Next is a $4.99 Solid Supporter IAP which gives you an even shinier main menu badge to cherish. Finally, the most interesting option is the $9.99 Hardcore Supporter IAP, which not only gives you the shiniest badge of them all, but you can also email in a photo of the badge to Owlchemy Labs and they will give you some sort of customized gift. What is it? I have no idea, but I’m tempted to buy it just to find out.

While the game being free is exciting and there is a bunch of cool new content in this latest update, it does come with a down side. Snuggle Truck is now ad-supported. If you purchased the game previously then don’t fret, your game will remain ad-free. If you’re new to the game and are just downloading it since the free promotion, then you’ll have to deal with a drop-down ad every few levels or so. It’s honestly not that annoying considering how much fun the game is, but tolerance to ads is definitely subjective. If you buy the $4.99 or $9.99 developer support IAP, then you can disable the ads, which is nice but it would have been much nicer if that applied to the 99¢ option as well.

At any rate, it’s definitely a good thing for people who haven’t tried out Snuggle Truck to be able to grab it for free, and given the new IAP options, it sounds like it will remain free for a while, possibly for good. If you’re a previous owner, then definitely grab the new update for the additional levels and DLC options, as well as various other tweaks and enhancements. And don’t forget the in-game level editor which has already produced hundreds of user created levels, all sorted by rating and easily accessible within the game. If you’re new to Snuggle Truck, now is a great time to finally check it out with the new free ad-supported version.

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On this week’s episode of The TouchArcade Show, we pummel through conversations about GenCon, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and the McRib in order to bring you the skinny on the latest and hottest iOS games. At the top, we finish up our continuing conversation about Uppercut Games’s Epoch and then dig into FDG Entertainment’s Blueprint 3D, Kairosoft’s Oh! Edo Town, and a few other delights. In the second half, we dig exclusively into your listener e-mails.

We had a blast recording this episode and hope that you’ll have just as much fun putting it in your earholes. If you’d like, you can listen just below via these links OR you could subscribe to us on iTunes and Zunes. Doing that latter is a pretty awesome deal since you get all our podcasts and content the second they hit the Internet.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-025.mp3, 45MB

We’re officially out of e-mails, so feel free to hit us up for next week’s episode. Oh! And here’s your show notes:

GAMES

JARED’S KITTY KORNER

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Mobile analytics firm Flurry today reports on the continuing shift in portable gaming from dedicated devices to smartphones and other multipurpose devices. According to results compiled by Flurry from NPD market research and Flurry’s own mobile app data, Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating systems will account for 58% of portable gaming revenue in the United States for 2011, an almost exact flip-flop from 2010 when dedicated device leaders Nintendo and Sony held 57% of the market.

The most striking trend is that iOS and Android games have tripled their market share from roughly 20% in 2009 to nearly 60% in just two years. Simultaneously, Nintendo, the once dominant player, has been crushed down to owning about one-third of market in 2011, from having controlled more than two-thirds in 2009. Combined, iOS and Android game revenue delivered $500 million, $800 million and $1.9 billion over 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively.

Flurry’s data for 2011 is based on estimates for the final two months of the year, but suggests that the rapid growth in gaming on smartphone platforms is showing no signs of slowing. The market dynamics of free or low-cost games sometimes supplemented by in-app purchases and played on multi-function devices versus dedicated gaming devices with relatively high-cost game titles are clearly playing out in favor of iOS and Android. The result has been a surging gaming market increasingly attracting casual gamers willing to spend a few dollars to play on their phones, while established players have seen not only their shares but also their revenue declining each year.

Nintendo has been resisting increasing pressure to bring its games to the iPhone and other platforms, sticking by its long-standing tradition of making its games exclusive to its own hardware. Flurry suggests that the rapidly-shifting landscape of portable gaming may soon bring Nintendo face-to-face with a “Nokia-like” decision whether to jump over to smartphone platforms or watch its business erode away.

[Originally Posted on MacRumors]

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Artillery games remain the rage on the App Store courtesy Angry Birds silly success, but we’ve just spotted a new one that’s actively innovating in the space: Sabor Studios’s Pota-Toss.

In brief, it’s a one-on-one fling game starring, of all things, potatoes of differing shapes, sizes, and character. Outside of its especially sharp art direction, we’ve been drawn to Pota-Toss because of its promising geo-location mechanics.

Pota-Toss’s levels are two-sided and each half is generated based on your location and time — if you’re playing in Las Vegas at high noon, for example, your side of the level will have a few artfully designed landmarks and a searing midday sun. The other player’s side of the level will have its own look based on his or her actual location.

Score a hit, and the level is regenerated to present a bigger challenge. The plan is to launch the game with hundreds of levels and keep updating the title with more and more well after release. We’re hoping more potatoes are added, too.

The two designers on the project alerted the world to their ambition with a Kickstarter page and received the funding they’re looking for. Obviously, we’re not the only dudes out there thinking this might be The Next Awesome Thing. Take a look at its video and get drawn in like we were.

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It’s easy to see why cover is so widely used in every modern game with a gun in it, but it doesn’t excuse how boring the systems usually are. Epoch [$5.99] stands out because its cover mechanics are actually fun to play with. They smartly combine agility and athleticism to the standard pounding and popping, while also offering an alien uptempo pacing, courtesy of Uppercut Games’s exploitative enemies. The cover system is strong enough, actually, to carry the game to completion, which is an important note to make since, aside from the story hooks, the game doesn’t have a lot more to offer outside of a standard weapons / items upgrade model.

Think of Epoch as a bizarre “what if” scenario come true. It’s sci-fi Infinity Blade with guns, and it’s pretty thorough with its adaption of that game’s upgrade model and on-rails structure. The key departure is within Epoch’s action model — instead of hacking and slashing, you’ll be whipping, sliding, jumping around, ducking or crashing your robot into pieces of cover as enemies sling bullets and lasers at you. If you’re moving tactically, enemies will lose their bead on your metallic frame, and you will then be subsequently free to target them and fire without worry.

The enemy AI is aware of what you can pull off, and the way they coax you out of a flow or a dead period is one of the more exciting aspects of Epoch. Some enemies fire timed grenades that you’ll need to avoid, while others can fire sweeping lasers that you’ll need to jump over, and so on. Mitigating these hazards, while also handling the other enemies firing at you at different speeds and rates, keeps the volume of battle on 11 and makes you to consider options and moves ahead of the one you’re currently executing. I like this approach to battle; it’s kinetic, but forces some thoughtfulness.

Moving in cover is a simple, visceral joy, by the way. The animations are smooth, the swipe controls are intuitive, and you get a palpable sense of power, speed, and actual control as you bound from pillar to pillar, barrier to barrier. Epoch does a great job at mixing up the action, too, by bringing in new enemy types, compelling waves, and generally keeping you on your toes throughout the game. Though, with that said, it lasts just shy of an hour.

Shooting is a side-bar, much like cover is for most cover-based shooters. It’s automated, but based on who you target. There are, on the other hand, some user-controlled special abilities that essentially act as upgradeable crowd-thinners on cooldown clocks. Think magic but in the real world explode-y sense, and you’ve got the ticket.

Epoch … encourages its users to play through sequences multiple times in order to earn more income to buy new guns and new abilities from its in-game store, which is brimming with high-cost content. There’s a stumble here. Re-runs though a level you’re previously beaten doesn’t appear to yield new fights or content outside of difficulty. The kickback is that, even though the combat is awesome, you’ll find yourself doing the maneuvers in the same spots.

Another point: even though the on-rails approach that Epoch takes to guide you through its narrative element is effective, the lack of control can become grating when you’re just re-loading the same content over and over again. Infinity Blade disguises this same problem effectively by giving you the ability to pick where your character goes. It also dishes out some optional side paths and item pick-ups. Epoch doesn’t, so you’re left with zero to do outside of fighting whenever you’re stuck in a grind cycle.

If you’re into upgrades and that rinse and repeat model of progression I doubt you’ll have any qualms with Epoch because, otherwise, it’s a good game that really executes on what sets it apart from a billion other titles: it’s cover-system. You’ll jump, glide, and whip all over the place while executing on some cool on-your-heels strategy padded out by a host of competent mechanics and systems. I recommend it, but also excuse the game time and a lot of the pacing issues.

Oh! And check out the game’s story. It’s a delight and delivered just right.

TouchArcade Rating:

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One of the pleasant surprises of last month’s releases was King Cashing: Slots Adventure [99¢/Lite], the slot machine game with an RPG twist. I’m of the mind that you can throw experience bars and upgradeable weapons on just about anything and it will be a better game for it, and King Cashing is a great example of this.

You play as a King on a quest to rid the world of an evil being who’s holed up in his dark castle. You progress through the game battle by battle, and combat is handled by a unique slot machine mechanic. Each wheel of the slot machine represents things like your party members, weapons, bonus items, and enemies. You’ll give the 3 wheels a spin and stop them either individually or all at once. The things that you manage to line up horizontally across the wheels determines the actions that take place during the battle. It may sound strange, but it’s actually a pretty ingenious idea, and it works beautifully in the game.

King Cashing is great because it’s accessible enough that anybody who even has a passing familiarity with slot machines can pick it up and instantly be playing. But, for those interested in more, there is a good amount of underlying depth to the game with leveling up your party, upgrading their weapons and equipment, and trying to beat each battle as efficiently as possible in order to earn the the top medal.

That underlying depth just got quite a bit deeper, as yesterday King Cashing received a fairly massive update. First of all, the game is now Universal, and although it looked just fine running on an iPad in 2x mode before, it’s a lot nicer having the game properly formatted for the larger screen.

As for gameplay, the level cap has been raised to 25, so you can continue on progressing your party members if you had reached the cap before. Also, there are 9 brand new weapons in the game to collect and use. Something fun about these new weapons is that they were actually all named after members in our forums following a contest the developer held there. Just goes to show, it always pays to hang around the forums, as you never know when you might end up with your name in an indie game.

The biggest new feature of this update however is the addition of 3 brand new side quests. These aren’t your ordinary battles though, and instead are dubbed rag doll battles. Here your enemy is a dummy, literally, and doesn’t have any HP. Rather, the enemy health starts at zero and your job is to inflict as much damage as you can given your allotment of cherries, which are the currency used to spin the slots. The more damage you’re able to inflict, the better the prizes you’ll earn.

I absolutely love this mode as it’s essentially using the exact same mechanics but in a completely different way. I just keep on retrying, over and over, trying to climb my way ever higher up the prize ladder. These rag doll levels feel like proper games you’d find in a casino, and I imagine if the game charged real money in order to play then I’d have a pretty empty wallet by now.

Other minor additions in this update include a new Game Center leaderboard for the third rag doll level to keep track of who does the highest amount of damage, as well as 2 new achievements tied into the rag doll levels and new assortment of weapons. And of course, there is a massive amount of bug fixes and minor tweaks here as well, which are detailed in the app description if you’re curious to know more.

I’m really happy to see one of my current favorite games get such a great update, and if you weren’t sure about King Cashing before then there’s a brand new lite version for you to try on for size. Definitely at least give the lite version of this unique title a spin.

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I expected to love Evertales [$0.99]. Its trailer is stylish and charming, it looks a tiny bit like Trine, and it’s by Thunder Game Works, the folks who made the Trenches series, and Crescent Moon Games, the studio that brought us Pocket RPG, Aralon, Gears and other great games. We were optimistic in our previews. But here’s the thing about expectations — sometimes they leave you disappointed.

Despite its impressive pedigree, Evertales falls totally flat. It’s short, and it’s got a few kinks that still need working out. It’s excessively straightforward. But far worse than any of that, it’s just not very much fun.

The formula should work. You’ve got three heroes, each with his own set of abilities. Sort of. You have platforming, combat, and something that could resemble puzzle-solving if you squint hard enough. You’ve got upgradeable weapons and big boss fights. You’ve got great looking environments — I’ll give this game that much. But you haven’t got much else.

The trouble starts with those three heroes and their abilities. They just aren’t all that unique. The archer can shoot, but so can the mage and warrior if you buy their extra weapons. The mage can cast spells, which is a lot like shooting but much more useful. The archer can double jump, and the mage can float slowly to the ground. There will be areas where you need to use those abilities. The warrior can’t do much, but he seems to hit pretty hard. You can switch between them, but for the vast majority of the game you won’t have any reason to want to.

Then there’s the levels. There are only twelve, and they aren’t particularly long. It’s actually more like six with a hard checkpoint in the midst of each. They aren’t hard, though they’re occasionally irritating. I ran into a few bugs, places where I fell forever, coins that were stuck, that sort of thing. But more frequently I encountered areas where I’d be one death in before I could see where I needed to go next, which is simply shoddy level design. Deaths don’t mean much, though. You’ll run past several checkpoints per level, and you lose nothing for dying. It might rob the game of some potential challenge, but at least it keeps the lousy parts from getting too frustrating.

At the end of every second level, you’ll find a boss. It seems like the idea of these bosses is to provide an epic, puzzling fight, but jumping and hitting them works efficiently and universally, right down to the final boss.

Like me, you might think you’ll find some replayability in the Game Center integration. You probably won’t. Most of the achievements are for defeating the game’s six bosses. The others are for collecting all the armor for each of the characters. You can do that by grinding for coins — which just means replaying levels to collect the same coins in the same spots, not improving your performance or anything — or you can just buy the IAP. Which you should probably do if you’re really into getting achievements, since there’s one for that too. Maybe it’s just me, but achievements lose a bit of their luster when you literally need to purchase them.

When you beat the game, you unlock Survival mode, which will give you a leaderboard to climb. You get a tiny sliver of Evertales‘ least interesting level to stand on while you fight off waves of enemies. It doesn’t seem like you can earn coins this way, so forget about working your way up the leaderboard while earning useful upgrades.

The controls are another issue. By default, they’re awful. Movement is controlled with a virtual stick that hangs out wherever you place your thumb, and that’s fine. But jumping and attacking are both controlled by swipes on the right side of the screen, and more often than not the game confuses which you intend. That’s okay, because there’s a traditional jump/attack button set up available. It probably should have been the default, but that’s the least of this game’s problems.

Aesthetically, Evertales is pretty good. It looks great, sounds good, and has some cute cosmetic upgrades for its heroes. Otherwise, it’s bland and boring. I’ve always been pleasantly surprised by these studios in the past. Evertales was a surprise, but it wasn’t pleasant. Whether you love it or hate it, though, share your thoughts in our discussion thread.

TouchArcade Rating:

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