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Linux Tycoon, in case you’ve never heard of it, bills itself as “the world’s premiere Linux Distribution Building Simulation Game.” It’s got similar gameplay to the many other Tycoon-style games out there, with one gloriously nerdy twist. In Linux Tycoon, you’re not building railroads, managing hospitals, or anything like that, you’re trying to build the world’s greatest Linux distro.

You’ll analyze and select the software packages included in your distro, fix bugs, and manage both your volunteers and paid staff while trying to keep the file size of your distro reasonable… And much more. There’s even an online component, which will turn Linux Tycoon into the world’s first MMOLDBSG, or, for those of you playing along at home, that’s a “Massively Multiplayer Online Linux Distro Building Simulation Game.”

If all goes as planned, Linux Tycoon will be submitted to the App Store for approval sometime next week, and released as soon as Apple gives the thumbs up. Pricing is yet to be announced, but it sounds like it’ll be in line with what you’d expect.

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For the last couple days, I’ve been turning a dilemma around in my head. Do I tell you guys how fun Sky Gnomes [$0.99] is, and thereby increase the number of people who are likely to defeat me in a given tournament? Or do I just keep raking in the sweet, sweet prizes for my wins?

I suppose I’ll take the high road and let you in on it. Here’s how Sky Gnomes works: each day you face a new slate of players in a series of races. You launch a garden gnome on a little airship straight down at top speed, dodge storm clouds and ice balls, collect coins and snowflakes, and try to smash perfectly into the landing pad ahead of your foes. Do so, and you can turn your winnings into new parts and upgrades for your ships. Seriously, there is no way I could avoid getting obsessed with this game.

I’m not surprised it’s a solid title. It was developed by Foursaken Media, the folks behind the Bug Heroes titles. I expected it to live up to that pedigree. I just wasn’t expecting it to grip me so completely. I’m checking my phone several times a day to make sure I’m still ahead of the pack and furtively sneaking in extra rounds if I’ve slipped down the ranks.

The game’s tournament structure is brilliant, and it’s what drives my obsession. There are four race cups to compete in, three of which can be unlocked over time. Each one has its own theme, length and difficulty level. Each day you’re placed into groups based on your previous results, so everyone starts on even footing. You play against ghosts of your group mates, aiming for a quicker completion time than the rest of them—especially the one randomly assigned as your nemesis.

The more successful you are, the better you’ll be rewarded. After each race your performance is broken down by your placement in that race, the accuracy of your landing and the things you pick up along your route. You earn coins for those, and overall rank for your finish time. You also get a random part from a selection of nuts, bolts and gears. At the end of the day you’re compared against the rest of your group. If you place high enough you take home a big bag of coins, and if you beat your nemesis you’ll get even more.

There are other rewards, too. Each cup has achievements to earn, and earning a set of them bumps you up to a new tier. That unlocks the next cup and gives you coins and parts to mark your success. Each day also offers up a new, special goal. It might be something as simple as taking gold in a race, but it’s often something more esoteric like finishing with an exceptionally low time. Having all these different things to work toward makes it easy to enjoy yourself even when you’re not always winning.

In fact, even when you’re losing you’ll still have fun pulling in coins and parts. Then you can use them to upgrade your ship. Each upgrade costs a mix of things, usually a few thousand coins and a handful of assorted parts. The economy is most limited by the rarity of gears—you only earn one randomly every few races, and most upgrades cost one or two for the first tier alone. But those upgrades are so very worthwhile.

You can upgrade the engine of your ship, improving its speed, acceleration, afterburner and efficiency. You can unlock and rank up a host of powerups. You can also get yourself three slots for trinkets, and that’s where the real fun comes in. Trinkets can do all sorts of crazy things. They can magnetize your ship so you pull in coins more easily, they can improve your steering, or they can make it so dangerous obstacles like storm clouds can be used to boost your speed. They’re costly to upgrade, but they can make or break a run.

Choosing them is a strategic process, or at least it’s meant to be. You can check the weather before each race and adapt your plans, focus on speed or survivability or income. Unfortunately right now it seems like certain combinations outdo others significantly, but Foursaken is keeping a close eye on the trinket balance and plans to adjust it if necessary. Even if the popular combos are great fun to play with, it would be nice to have more viable options.

I should also give you a heads up: you can purchase coin and part packs. These aren’t quite your typical consumable IAP items since they’re used for permanent upgrades, but they feel pretty similar. The way your daily groups are selected keeps upgrades from offering a significant advantage, thankfully. They do offer a bit of one, though, since you can use your upgrades to boost your capabilities after you’re placed. At least the IAP packs are well balanced, so purchases won’t put people far ahead of the folks that are willing to grind. And frankly, the grind is pretty fun on its own.

That’s the thing of it: while it’s pretty obvious that Sky Gnomes is using a grab-bag of standard psychological tricks to keep players coming back every day, I can’t bring myself to mind. The racing is seriously fun. Once you manage to gear yourself up enough you can compete with players for top overall scores, hitting the Platinum league in each race and ranking at the very top of the daily leaderboards. If you get there, make sure to spend some time in our discussion thread—our forum users are dominating the charts. By the time you reach that point you’re travelling through races at insane speeds, sucking up coins and snowflakes, dodging obstructions like a champ. It’s a great time.

And that’s what keeps me coming back. There are small issues aside from trinket balance—setting your time early in the day isn’t worth much, and even at the highest ranks your success will be partially based on luck—but they are hardly a blip in the fun to be had. There might be an end somewhere in sight, a time where the grind outweighs the entertainment, but the hours of fun to be had in the meantime are well worth the initial purchase. Don’t miss this one. I’ll know, because I’ll be waiting for you out there on the podium.

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This past February I was very pleasantly surprised with the quirky title The Hacker [Free], a story-driven collection of puzzle mini-games that put you in the role as a member of an international computer hacking ring. The storyline itself was interesting if not a bit cliche, and the mini-games that served as the “hacking” in the game were both clever and challenging.

But where The Hacker really won me over in our review was in its level of immersion and attention to detail. It did a fantastic job of making you feel like you’re really the protagonist programmer in the story who must utilize an 80s-era computer and unravel an evil plot surrounding your former employer, the sinister Glider Corporation. It’s really an entertaining little escape from reality.

Currently, you can grab all this hackery goodness for the very affordable price of zero dollars. You should get at least a few solid hours of entertainment from the main campaign, not to mention the inclusion of fictional arcade games that are “emulated” on your system and come equipped with Game Center integration. Additional content packs are available as IAP if you crave more puzzle solving, but aren’t necessary to enjoy the main story.

The Hacker is a surprisingly fun experience that feels right at home on iOS, and everybody should make sure to check it out while it’s free.

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After releasing the well-received Sonic 4: Episode I way back in October 2010, everyone was pretty confident that Sega would be releasing the next episode in the rebirth modeled after the original Sonic trilogy shortly after. Well, it took more than a year, but they did finally officially announce Sonic 4: Episode II this past December, and I even enjoyed some hands-on time with an early version of the game at GDC last month.

Today, Sega announced on their blog that owners of the original Sonic 4: Episode I are in for some bonus content if they get Episode II on the same device/platform. Doing so will unlock Episode Metal, a set of 4 reworked levels from Episode I that you will be able to play through as Sonic’s arch rival Metal Sonic. Episode Metal will also bridge the story gap between Sonic CD and Sonic 4: Episode II where Metal Sonic makes his return.

Sonic 4: Episode II is slated to release on practically every platform including iOS on May 17th, and you can bet we’ll be all over the highly anticipated platformer when it hits the App Store then.

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Let’s face it, kids: If you are going to become a giant, fire-breathing monster and take over a city by way of stomping on it, you want to do it right. In style. So if I play a videogame that puts me in the role of said monster, I have one rule — I want to have fun. Glorious, building stomping, people eating fun.

That’s why the original Rampage was such a bounding success. When I saw screens of Monster Takedown [$0.99], I thought I was looking at the same kind of thing. You get to be a big octopus or monster with too many eyeballs or whatever and fend off flying helicopters and incoming bombs. The art looked crisp and cute, and I thought if the gameplay hit the mark, we could have a winner on our hands here. Could. Maybe.

Unfortunately, I can’t report that, because Monster Takedown is pretty boring despite its good looks (and oh, haven’t we all fallen for that formula a few times).  It goes with a very pared down approach, which goes something like this: pick a monster out of five, find yourself splayed over a city doing basically nothing, and wait with a glazed look while helicopters and bombs fly in to attack you. You can’t even move, which really takes the fun out of being eighty feet tall with giant eyeballs stalks.

Seriously though, the lack of movement wouldn’t have bugged me that much had there been something more exciting going on. The helicopters and other flying stuff can be taken out with the touch of a finger, and that can get more complex as you go, although it’s nothing to complain to your friends about.

But the killer is when a nuke flies in from above, which you are supposed to be able to swipe away. I say supposed because no matter how much I swiped or in how many directions, I had trouble getting the game to be responsive when it came to this. It did happen a few times (try a quick left to right swipe), but considering that if that bomb touches your monster, you instantly die — well, let’s just say this little snag took quite a bit of the fun out of things.

You do start each level with one Slow power and one Bomb power, and you can guess what they do by their names. And that’s about all I have to tell you. Oh, except you can post your scores to Facebook and Twitter as well as the Game Center leaderboards, but I’m guessing you already figured that out.

Monster Takedown is completely mediocre, but I think what hurts here is that the look is so cute and you can really see they could have done a lot more with just a little bit of effort. Ah well, there’s always next time. For now, save your dollar, or put it towards a better game.

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Today, at The Gadget Show Live in Birmingham, four teams of student developers will bring Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone’s Fighting Fantasy series to the iOS audience in a brand new way. We’ve had the chance to look at the games in development, and they’re looking pretty hot.

The Make Something Unreal Live competition is the sort of opportunity most folks who’ve dabbled in game development would kill for. It’s organized by Epic Games and Train2Game. Student teams were given access to the Fighting Fantasy IP and, basically, told to go nuts with it. They’ve spent the last few months building games based off that IP using the Unreal Development Kit. Working with industry mentors, they’ve created new interpretations of the beloved books. Now they’ll go on stage and put the finishing touches on their titles with help from some of the industry’s biggest names.

If you don’t know the Fighting Fantasy IP, it’s a series of roleplaying gamebooks that were super popular in the 80s and 90s. A number of them have been brought to iOS in classic interactive fiction form by Big Blue Bubble, but this is the first time they’ve been reimagined for the platform as full 3D games.

There are four teams of students competing in Make Something Unreal Live, each with members with expertise in art, design, programming and QA. Each team set out with a different title: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Armies of Death, The Citadel of Chaos and Deathtrap Dungeon. We’ve had some time with each of the titles, and they’re shaping up nicely.

Digital Mage is the team responsible for Armies of Death: Rise of Agglax. It turns the tale of Armies of Death on its head. Players will command the undead forces of Agglax as they travel down lanes destroying the heroes and defenses of the kingdom of Allansia. Defeating enemies releases their souls, which provide the power needed to raise the undead.

The levels of the game are inspired by events from the original book. Though we were only able to try out the early stages of the game, Digital Mage says that the final product will boast a lovingly crafted story that expands of the tale of Armies of Death.

Indigo Jam showed us its take on Deathtrap Dungeon. Like the book, the game pits players against rooms of devious traps and vicious enemies. It’s a first-person action adventure with areas and traps designed on a grand scale. From what we’ve seen so far, stealth will play a large role in the game, and sneaking around unseen is the surest way to survive while you try to solve the deadly puzzles of the dungeon.

The Citadel of Chaos: Dire Consequences is a wave-based first person action game built by Derp Studios. Players are tasked with protecting Dree Village against waves of monsters. You begin with a sword and shield, but with each wave you survive you’ll have the opportunity to purchase and upgrade spells with the souls you earn in combat. Players who survive 10 waves unlock new levels, and ultimately win after 20 waves.

Derp Studios plans to bring in a story mode as well. This will take place after the final moments of The Citadel of Chaos.

Finally, we took a look at The Warlock of Firetop Mountain: Lost Chapters, by Commando Kiwi. Though we won’t know which game takes the grand prize at Make Something Unreal Live until next week, this one really caught our attention. Built as a third-person RPG, it already has a progression system in place and some promising looking item collection. But the combat system is where it stands out.

Lost Chapters uses an active-time style combat system, with a selection of abilities that operate on individual timers. To capture the element of luck that the Fighting Fantasy titles so relied on, blocking is left to good fortune. Each time an enemy attacks the player is presented with three cards. Each has a shield on the other side, one red, one yellow and one green. If the green card is drawn, damage is escaped. The red card hits twice as hard.

The four teams will show their games off today at The Gadget Show Live, and they’ll receive feedback from the advisory board. The judges include Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone themselves, as well as industry leaders that include, no joke, Peter Molyneux and Cliff Bleszinski. Teams will work to bring the games to their full potential over the course of the show, providing regular updates and showing their work off to an audience of over 100,000 attendees on the show floor. The winning team will be announced on Sunday, and it will get to take home a commercial Unreal Engine 3 license.

The games should all be heading to the App Store soon, though it sounds like the winning team might have a leg up on the others. The builds we played were still far from being ready for release, but they had real potential. Here’s hoping the final releases follow through, because we’re pretty jazzed about seeing more original RPGs and action-adventure titles on the App Store. So good luck to all the teams—we’ll be keeping an eye on what comes next.

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Being called a “Child of the 80s” has made me more aware of my mortality recently, than it has conjured memories of the actual time period.

The USSR? Gone.
Hair Metal? Mostly gone. (Thanks for this.)
Reaganomics? Relegated to post-punk indie hardcore band names.

These days you will be lucky to find any kind of media that doesn’t have 1 or 2 glassy-eyed teenagers waiting anxiously for “The Drop.”

Thankfully, the Wonder-Twin powers of Mighty Rabbit and Joystick Labs has manifested a game that absolutely drips 80s nostalgia and helps me forget that the twilight years are quickly approaching. Saturday Morning RPG [ Free ] is as close to a physical manifestation of my childhood as I am going to find, without a truckload of Pixiesticks.

Inspired by the JRPGS of the 80s and 90s, Saturday Morning RPG is nothing special on the surface. Its battle system, littered with quicktime events that modify damage done and taken, is straight forward and pedestrian. In fact, the game’s story (the supposed hallmark of the RPG genre) has the literary alacrity of an R.L. Stine novel. Luckily, none of this matters. One would argue that that is exactly the point.

Episode 1 of Saturday Morning RPG (which comes free of charge) has the game’s hero, Marty, fast asleep on his bed. In his dream, he is spending the day with his sweetheart Samantha, when she is kidnapped by Cobra Commander Hood. Hood intends to wed Samantha, whether she wants it or not. After being beaten down by Hood and his minions, The Wizard (and his powerful glove – which is (so) bad) appears before Marty to offer help. He gives Marty his Trapper Keeper, the spell book Marty can use to defeat Hood’s Army and rescue Samantha. And that is what Marty (and you) set off to do.

The Trapper Keeper enhances the vanilla battle system by throwing in spells and other wild cards. It’s first feature is customizable scratch and sniff stickers. Using up to five, the stickers provide benefits like +15 health or -2 Enemy strength for the length of the battle. The trick is that you have to scratch them to release their bonus, and you are only given a small amount of time at the start of the battle to do so.

Once the battle begins, your Trapper Keeper functions as your spell book. Spells vary from the mundane (a flaming basketball) to the awesome (a glittery-glove-clothed punch, delivered via Moonwalk). There are some balance issues that become apparent, such as getting more bang for your buck via spells and, therefore, not focusing on leveling up melee attacks, but I’m not sure the developers care. The actual gameplay is the plain cracker on which the aged nostalgia cheese is served. No one should complain about the cracker.

When you aren’t battling Lizards or Hood Soldiers, you walk 8-bit Marty around the episode’s environment (they are different in each episode) talking to people and, occasionally, collecting a quest or two. The quests don’t do much to flesh out the universe, instead trading lore for laughs. They vary from the eye-rolling “stop all the downloadin”, to the morbid task of setting animals free by flushing them down the toilet. Completed quests offer you either XP, Spells, or stickers, so they are worth doing when you find them.

If there were any complaints to be leveled against Saturday Morning RPG, they would be the ones I’ve already mentioned. The game is a very basic RPG. Encounters are not random (your character and my character are probably going to be pretty similar by game’s end), quests and quest completions are very linear, and the story lines are pretty dumb. There just isn’t much substance here…much like a Saturday Morning Cartoon.

In that respect, one could argue that this game captures the spirit of the Saturday Morning Cartoon perfectly. And, in the process, litters the game with wonderful nuggets of 80s nostalgia. To play Devil’s Advocate a bit, if the game is called Saturday Morning RPG, and playing it perfectly recreates the spirit and feeling of an 80s Saturday Morning cartoon, doesn’t that make it the perfect game?

You and I could argue about this all day, but I don’t think we could argue as to whether or not you should give this game a shot. The first Episode, which took me 2 hours to complete (I try to be thorough), is completely free. If you like it, you can unlock Episode 2 for a measly 2 bucks. That, to me, seems like an awesome way to sell your game. More Episodes are in the pipeline of course, with Mighty Rabbit shooting for a May/June release for Episode 3.

All in all, Saturday Morning RPG is exactly what it promised. A fun, easy going, RPG with a heavy coating of 80s nostalgia. With an upfront cost of “free”, it’s hard not to recommend it.

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Today’s Dark Meadow [$5.99] update smells like damage control, but that’s not a bad thing for the folks expecting the premium title to stay premium. With the latest update, all the costs of weapons and amulets have been converted back into gold from Sun Coins, robbing the incentive to buy the weapons with real-world currency. Also, creator Phosphor Games has tweaked loot drops to “be more generous” and has tooled around with health drops. As explained on our message board, this is a permanent shift for the app.

Back in March, Phosphor caught wind that free-to-play was The New Thing and planned to update its offering with F2P mechanics. Fans weren’t pleased, and so Phosphor decided to release a free version of the game instead. Oddly, it then decided to stick all of those elements into the paid one anyway, which didn’t make people happy, either. But, hey, now the app is basically back to normal. Neat!

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While iOS has become a haven for a large variety of strategy games, good RTS titles seem to come few and far between. Enter Amoebattle [$4.99], the latest title from Intrinsic Games and Grab. Hitting all the cues, Amoebattle does a good job providing a full RTS experience while making its own mark on the genre.

Amoebattle’s tale centers on your role as a new microbiologist exploring the microscopic world with the Amoeba Control System along with your AI assistant AMI. After some introductory research, you encounter rogue amoebas disturbing the ecosystem, which leads to a quest to discover the origin of these hostile beings. The overall narrative does an adequate job moving the story forward while not detracting from the overall experience. For most RTS titles, that’s all you can really ask for.

When it comes to gameplay, Amoebattle implements the standard RTS mechanics while infusing it with some novel elements. Missions are primarily linear advancement, with some stealth, defense and open-ended objectives thrown in for good measure. Amoebattle is also very unit-centric – there aren’t any buildings to produce units or gather resources.

Instead, your amoeba can simply replicate if they have a full ‘Food Point’ (FP) meter and sufficient power. FP can be acquired in a variety of ways depending on if your amoeba is an omnivore, carnivore, or herbivore (each classification also affects other attributes). For example, carnivores gain FP exclusively through attacking other units while herbivores can eat various plants to build FP. While you can use a full FP meter to reproduce, it also bestows increased stats, adding to the strategy.

Power, meanwhile, is a secondary resource that is slowly produced in the background (but can be sped up by capturing fossil artifacts). Players can utilize power to replicate or to launch a variety of probes onto the battlefield. Probes range from slowing down opponents to infecting them with a long-term poison and work well in providing additional battle options.

In addition to replication, your amoebas can also mutate into a variety of different units. Initially the unit pool is small, but as you journey through the campaign you unlock stronger and more varied units, each with their own stats and appropriate strategies. Mutation also requires power, meaning you can’t just wield it arbitrarily.

The above elements lead to a surprisingly deep gameplay experience. Each mission provides suggestions for completion, but as you unlock more options players can begin to experiment with different play styles. Whether you choose to bum-rush with close-range carnivores or utilize a balanced approach with ranged and support units, Amoebattle certainly keeps your options open.

Props also go to the control scheme, which offers an intuitive approach that works well on both iPad and iPhone. Amoebattle uses a combination of taps, drags, and scrolls (single and two-fingered) to control all aspects of the game. Admittedly, it’s a bit tougher to control on the smaller iPhone screen, but it still works surprisingly well. As expected, the game works best on the larger iPad screen.

There’s something to be said about Amoebattle’s difficulty. In short, this is one challenging game. The tutorial and introductory levels do an excellent job introducing core concepts, but once you reach the middle tier of missions, the game quickly stops holding your hand and leaves you to figure out the increasingly tough objectives. It’s important to note that despite the challenge, Amoebattle’s levels are fair. Just don’t expect to steamroll through all the levels with relative ease (especially if you’re new to RTS games).

Amoebattle’s other weaknesses are few, but do hold the game back from RTS perfection. The lack of a skirmish mode hurts replayability, as the game certainly has a deep enough system to make it enjoyable. The same goes for multiplayer, which would be perfect for this style of RTS. As it stands, Amoebattle has a decent amount of content with its campaign, but it would have been nice to have more to do outside campaign completion (besides achievement hunting).

Regardless, Amoebattle succeeds wonderfully at creating a touch-based RTS for iOS. When you take into account the deep gameplay, beautiful visuals (iPad-retina compatible, no less) and approachable control scheme, Amoebattle is a title well worth checking out and joins the short list of great iOS RTS titles.

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Late last month we caught the first video for Everplay’s upcoming hack ‘n slash platformer Spellsword, and thought it looked pretty darn cool. It’s an arena-style game similar to Super Crate Box but with larger environments, more enemy types, and many upgradeable items. It also features a more structured campaign with 90 levels in addition to unlockable endless arenas. In case you missed it before, you can check out Spellsword in action in the following trailer.

Yesterday in our forums, Everplay announced that Spellsword has an official release date, which will be two weeks from this Thursday on April 26th. We’ve been anxious to get our hands on Spellsword since it was announced, especially since it’s from the same team that did Terra Noctis so we know they can do platforming right. It all sounds good so far on paper, but the real test will be when we can get our hands on the final version of Spellsword when it hits later this month.

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