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It was nearly a year ago that developer Juicy Beast Studio announced an iOS port of their popular Flash game Burrito Bison, so where the heck is it already? The team seemed enthusiastic about the port when we spoke to them about it shortly after the announcement, and Ravenous Games was on board to facilitate the porting process.

Well, according to a November blog post from Juicy Beast revealing the sequel to Burrito Bison, the developer stated that they felt that this new game, called Burrito Bison Revenge, would be an even better fit for the iOS platform, and thus decided to focus efforts on porting it instead. Then yesterday, Juicy Beast tweeted this teaser.

So, does that mean the iOS game is close? Are we getting the original Burrito Bison, its superior sequel Burrito Bison Revenge, or perhaps both? Or maybe something entirely different? These are burning questions which I’m sure will be answered in due time, but after a year of relative silence, and since I really enjoyed Juicy Beast’s previous iOS port of Gobtron [$1.99], I’m really looking forward to Burrito Bison hitting the App Store in one form or another soon.

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Ion Racer [$0.99] from Nawia Games (makers of Flick Champions) is an endless tunnel runner with a visual style that looks suspiciously like Wipeout (a franchise we’d love to see on iOS). Unfortunately, any similarities with the futuristic racer are skin-deep, as Ion Racer stays close to its roots, offering a score-based reflex-oriented endless gameplay experience. Unfortunately, gameplay stagnation, a somewhat heavy reliance on IAP, and some minor control issues hold this title back.

Like most ‘endless’ games, gameplay in Ion Racer is score-based. Players guide their ship along a never-ending corridor filled with blue and red barriers along with small orbs called ions. Running into red barriers takes away a bar of shield strength, and if you lose your entire shield, the run ends. Blue barriers, meanwhile, offer additional points or shield bars and should be hit as much as possible. Ions serve as a perpetual source of points and energy to refill your energy meter.

The energy meter adds a small amount of strategy as it allows you to enter into either focus or strike mode. Focus temporarily slows down your ship, allowing you to dodge red barriers with ease (focus also increases the score multiplier of ions). Strike provides a burst of speed which also lets you smash through red barriers without a shield penalty. Both focus and strike modes offer some variety to what is otherwise an exercise in collecting ions and avoiding red barriers.

Ion Racer features a currency/upgrade system that is simultaneously interesting and frustrating. On one hand, there are a few different ways to collect kions, the in-game currency. Players earn kions by either collecting ions or passing missions which reward a small amount of kions for completing all objectives. You never feel like you’re not working towards a greater goal, which is essential for replayability.

On the other hand, kion collection just doesn’t occur fast enough. Individual runs typically provide a small amount of kions, with missions offering a bit more (although objectives quickly become difficult). Meanwhile, ship purchases and upgrades cost a lot more than you’d typically earn. Ion Racer also has perks ranging from auto repair to a score multiplier, which are one-use extras that cost a decent amount of kions to purchase. Suffice to say, folks looking to partake in even a modicum of upgrades and purchases are in for a lot of playing.

Of course, IAP comes to the rescue to address the perpetual grind. Based on the entry price, as well as the current state of its IAP, I don’t have too big of a problem with Ion Racer’s implementation as it seems like you could alleviate a great deal of the grind for a decent price. Still, kion rewards should be tweaked somewhat to provide non-IAP driven gamers an easier time.

Controls are another frustrating aspect of Ion Racer. The game defaults to a tilt-based scheme that has the potential to offer precision but feels unreliable. The second, touch-based scheme places left and right buttons on each side of the screen. While the touch controls feel more stable, they are a bit more imprecise in practice. Neither scheme necessarily leads to a poor gaming experience, but they could have been implemented better.

The biggest issue I have with Ion Racer is that the game never really evolves beyond what you see at the onset. You can buy different skins and upgrade attributes, but the gameplay never really feels different. Even the environments hardly change, with the same futuristic tunnels with each run. It’s a shame, because the visuals are excellent and, when combined with the framerate and sense of speed, look very much like Wipeout.

I feel as if the Wipeout vibes may have created unrealistic expectations in Ion Racer. As it stands, it’s still a decent endless racer that’s a bit heavy on the IAP with issues that can be addressed in future updates. As long as you understand that this isn’t a true racing title (and thus, not a Wipeout clone), you should enjoy the experience.

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Reviewing games you have a history with is always difficult, especially when they’re derivative titles from a series you hold dear to your heart. Looking back on it, at some point I’ve owned each of the eight Burnout games that make up the franchise going back to the original that was released all the way back in 2001.

If you’ve never played a proper Burnout game (which is a problem you really should look into solving) here’s what the series is all about- Imagine a high-octane arcade racer that not only has a fabulous sense of speed, but takes the typical car damage system dozens of steps further into a car crashing system. Instead of merely beating the competition to the finish line, gameplay focuses on making sure your your opponents never actually make it there.

Subsequent sequels took this many steps further, even evolving into entire game modes that focused entirely on orchestrating the most elaborate pile-ups you can. It’s from these game modes that Burnout Crash [ $4.99 ] is distilled from, making its original appearance on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN late last year.

In Crash, the familiar racing game camera angle is replaced with an overhead birds-eye view of your car. The game consists of a series of intersections, each with slightly different layouts and traffic patterns, and you need to unleash as much damage as possible. Initially, you drive in, and slam into some cars. Cause enough damage, and you’ll be able to explode again, and vaguely control where your car gets blasted to in the process. This continues until you’ve either let five cars escape off screen, or you’ve reached the damage threshold for the level.

Burnout Crash perfectly embodies the horrid cliche of “Easy to learn, but difficult to master.” It’ll only take you a few tries to get a handle on the game physics, but actually learning the nuances of where to try to stack up cars on each intersection and how to position your own car to not mess up existing piles almost turns Crash an entirely unexpected physics puzzle game, especially if you jump into it expecting something like previous Burnout titles.

Gameplay is further spiced up by special cars that appear such as a wave of police cars that block part of the intersection to the insufferably terrible driver Dr. Beat who will restore one of your missed cars if he survives his drive on and off screen. (However, as Penny Arcade points out, he’ll crash into anything.) Additional game modes also add a decent amount of replay value.

My first experience with Burnout Crash was on Xbox Live Arcade, as a $15 title. Like most Burnout games, the overall energy of the game was amplified by a real soundtrack, heavy amounts of voice work, and a fabulous tutorial, creating an absolutely fantastic first impression. Those last two things? Nowhere to be found in the iOS port of the game. I could understand cutting a lot of the voice overs if EA was shooting for the 3G download limit, but the game weighs in at 146MB currently. The lack of any kind of tutorial is even more puzzling, and has left players in our forums confused as to what you’re even supposed to do in the game.

That’s not what has me personally disappointed the most though, as I already know how to play and usually play iOS games with the sound very low or off so voiceovers don’t do much for me. What I’m bummed about is that for whatever reason, EA thought the best (and only) way to control the game was via a weird system of swiping gestures to move your car around after each crash breaker explosion.

If you can “see the Matrix” behind Burnout Crash, it’s apparent that what you’re playing is a very elaborate and cleverly disguised ball-rolling game. Imagine something like Labyrinth 2 [ $4.99 ], except instead of freely rolling the ball you can only move when a crash breaker triggers, and instead of trying to make it to the end, you’re trying to roll into as much as you can. It’s because of this that tilt controls, even when playing on the Xbox 360, felt like they’d make the most sense- as they often do in top-down games.

On the technical side of things, given just how long EA has been working on the iOS port of Burnout Crash, there’s some odd flaws. While I’m thankful the game is universal, some of the textures in game are blatantly low-resolution on the new iPad. I’ve experienced Game Center weirdness, with popups often telling me that the game is not recognized by Game Center. Additionally, most intersections start with some noticeable frame rate drops as you race towards them. Also, the little springy “boing” sound that plays each time you swipe the screen really needs to go.

Admittedly, I’m probably being overly nitpicky because of my experience with this game. However, the things Crash feels like it’s missing don’t make a whole lot of sense, especially when it comes to the game’s tutorial. Regardless, I’m still going to play through Crash over and over again on my iPad, with my fingers crossed that EA eventually addresses some of these things. And even if they don’t, if you’ve never played the console version, I’m not even sure you’ll care or notice.

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Eerily similar to getting Samsunged, iPad-owning Tetris fans got EA’d today. iPhone Tetris fans will know this song and dance all too well, as EA pulled it on them late last year. In a nutshell, the Tetris for iPad that you may know, love, and already own now ceases to exist. EA pulled it off the App Store to make room for the “new and improved” Tetris for iPad.

What’s new with this version of the game? A whole hell of a lot of in-app purchase, extending as far as monthly and yearly memberships to the T-Club, which will get you a 15% bonus on top of the lines and T-Coins (the game’s consumable currency) that you earn by playing. Oh, EA’s Origin has also been shoehorned in.

The sad part is that the Retina-ready graphics in this new Tetris look great on the new iPad, and the addition of the “one touch” control method make the game a lot more fun to play. But, again, much like the iPhone version, it makes absolutely no sense why this couldn’t have been an update to the existing game that everyone already paid anywhere between 99¢ and $7.99 for.

It’s really hard to get behind EA as a developer or publisher on the App Store when they’re more than willing to pull these kind of hijinks. It’s one thing to submit new users to a bevy of IAP options, but by pulling the old game from the store entirely, if you lose the original Tetris .ipa file for any number of reasons, getting the game again is going to set you back the full purchase price.

So, if you’ve got the original Tetris for iPad, make sure you keep it backed up in a safe place.

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If you’ve ever thought that the classic edutainment title The Oregon Trail was lacking in the zombies department, developer The Men Who Wear Many Hats (yes, that is their name) have got you covered. They’ve taken all the core mechanics of the original game and plopped them down into a modern post-apocalyptic setting that is littered with the undead.

Your goal is to make it from Washington DC to Oregon via a long and drawn out route that will take you through a host of cities and landmarks. You’ll forgo a covered wagon for a station wagon, and the looming threat of zombie infection is added to the laundry list of other calamities that can befall your group while on the road.

This unholy combination of historical education and zombies is known as Organ Trail, which was released more than a year ago and can be played via a free Flash version on The Hats’ website. Here’s a few screens from that version.

The reason I’m bringing all of this up is because The Hats are in the midst of porting a Director’s Cut version of Organ Trail to iOS, and they were showing off a playable version on iPad during PAX last week. Kotaku has a hands-on video of the iPad game complete with some commentary from the developer, who notes that Organ Trail on iOS will have several enhancements over the original Flash game, including a reworked interface for the touch screen.

The Hats team hopes to have Organ Trail: Director’s Cut out by the end of May, and in the meantime I’d definitely suggest checking out Kotaku’s video as well as the Flash version of the game, which is a ton of fun.

[Via Kotaku]

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The most influential man at hardware and software powerhouse Nintendo has found at least one phone game he enjoys. Visionary Shigeru Miyamoto recently name-dropped Rovio’s Angry Birds in a conversation with Hookshot, Inc, noting that it’s one of the few phone games he can dig. “There aren’t many games that I’ve played recently that have been truly convincing to me,” he said at a Paris event. “That said, I have very much enjoyed Angry Birds — especially the way in which it combines traditional and new game elements in exciting ways.”

Miyamoto later praised the surprising depth of the game’s flinging mechanic and the overall simplicity of its design. “Angry Birds is a very simple idea but it’s one of those games that I immediately appreciated when I first started playing, before wishing that I had been the one to come up with the idea first,” he said.

Nintendo does its best to totally dismiss the App Store and phones in general, so these quotes strike us as a particularly notable. It’s acknowledgment that something great can happen on our platforms of choice, from the mouth of Nintendo’s visionary designer.

In an interview with Edge at the same event, Miyamoto admitted that he keeps tabs on the mobile space, but noted that Nintendo can be just as creative.

“I check up on them sometimes, but I don’t have a lot of time,” he told Edge. “I think we also have a history of having certain fun ideas and making a game out of it, and there’s lots of other people also doing this [now].

“This kind of environment inspires us to try even harder, and create even more unexpected new things.”

Miyamoto is in the middle of some sort of slow (and disputed) stepping down process that’ll see him working on smaller games with smaller teams instead of big, blown-up AAA Mario and Zelda titles.

[via Hookshot Inc, via Edge]

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If you follow me on Twitter, which you totally should, you’ll know that I’ve been having what amounts to a full-blown love affair with a 2011 Prius for the past six months or so. The car is great, gets fabulous milage, is chock full of gadgetry, and really, is only lacking in one department. See, the Prius is a really quiet car. So quiet, that it’s even been the center of jokes on The Office. And, sometimes, you really just want to hear the throaty growl of a V8 engine.

That’s where 2XL Games’ XLR8 [ $0.99 ] comes in:

In a nutshell, you download this 99¢ app, plug it into your car stereo, crank it up, and throw your iPhone into a cup holder. Then, with some reasonable precision, it makes your car, truck, minivan, or whatever else you drive sound just like a sports car. The initial purchase comes with a generic V8 sounding engine, and additional engine sounds can be unlocked via IAP. It’ll even throw in burnout, braking, and drifting noises.

I imagine XLR8 would work better if you had an actual mount for your phone, as getting jostled around in the cup holder sometimes confuses it. Regardless, driving around in your non-sportscar with some fairly realistic engine noises of an Italian super car? Totally worth it.

Just, you know, drive responsibly and all that.

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If you’re still in the honeymoon phase with your new iPad, know this: Tilt to Live HD [Free] has joined the family of retina-supported titles, which has given it some fresh legs in yet another new generation of hardware. One Man Left tells us that it had to dig through all of its old assets and code to make this happen, but the end result of that work is paying off. The dots look so much more… red. And round.

For those of us looking ahead to One Man’s Outwitters instead, don’t worry about new iPad support. According to One Man, it’s currently in the process of upgrading all of its gorgeous assets for the device’s retina screen. We’re especially pumped for this one, if you couldn’t tell by our excited GDC 2012 ramblings for the new-look strategy game with a dab of StarCraft-inspired multiplayer.

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Go somewhere quiet and you might just hear us screaming “yes” at our monitors. Wizards of the Coast has confirmed that we won’t be waiting long for Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 iPad. It’s coming this “summer,” and launching alongside the 2013 Core Set of playing cards, which will be featured prominently in the game, too. Ten fresh decks are expected at launch, and more presumably will come down the pipe as downloadable content.

We still don’t know a ton about this version of the game, but a dude at Wizards of the Coast did recently blast out a statement name-dropping one of our platforms of choice, and seemed tickled by the prospect of opening up Magic to a hungry and new base:

“We’re excited to make Magic: The Gathering even more accessible to our growing player base by adding iPad iOS to the suite of platforms that Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 will be available on this summer,” director of Digital Games for Magic: The Gathering Worth Wollpert said in a statement.

“Given that the original Duels and Duels 2012 have been downloaded well over 2 million times combined since its launch in June 2009, our customers are clearly enjoying what we’ve done with the game to this point, and we’re thrilled to be able to offer both new and existing Magic fans exciting content and gameplay options on a world-class tablet platform that many of our customers have been asking for.”

If you aren’t familiar with Duels, it’s a little like Magic for Babies. It gives you pre-built decks, holds your hand if you aren’t familiar with the rules, and lets you play against AI until you’re good enough to take your game online. The previous two iterations have been fantastic, and we can’t wait to see this new one on iPad.

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