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Zeboyd Games radical 16-bit parody RPG, Chtulhu Saves the World, is coming to mobile devices this year. And sooner than you’d think. On Twitter, lead designer Robert Boyd says the studio held this announcement until work was almost finished, and he expects the game to hit at some point this quarter. Nice guy!

Meaningful details, like, how this version will control, if it’ll include any extras, or its price point aren’t being discussed at this time. A note on the game’s blog does say that more information is coming in the next few weeks, but since we’re so nosey we’ve reached out to Zeboyd for more anyway.

If you’ve played Breath of Fire or an old-school Final Fantasy, you’ll be able to get your head around Cthulhu’s systems and mechanics pretty quickly. The awareness of what genre its in, the sharp improvements it makes, and the humor is what makes it pretty great. Here’s hoping the mobile ports rock just as hard.

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Looks like we’ve got one more big release to add to today’s list. Kairosoft has just released their latest simulation title called Pocket League Story [$2.99]. By now you’re probably familiar with Kairosoft’s method of operation: pick a theme and develop a simplistic but deceptively deep simulation around it, then fill it to the brim with cute and colorful retro-style visuals and mobile friendly gameplay.

Pocket League Story appears to be no exception. The theme of choice this time around is soccer, or football depending on which country you hail from. You’ll build up a team of players, train them, and then take on the rest of the league. You also have the ability to sell your team’s own merchandise, build a gym for training, and even build your own stadium. The goal is to increase your fan base as you progress your team’s abilities through competition.

It looks as though all the components are here of another solid Kairosoft simulation, especially if you’re a fan of footy. We’ll be digging in a lot deeper before passing final judgement on Pocket League Story, but if you’re generally a fan of Kairosoft’s work you probably can pretty much guess what you’re getting here. You can pick it up for $2.99 which is an introductory price, and at some point it will raise up to their usual $3.99.

We’ll have a full review of Pocket League Story in the near future, and until then you can check out impressions in our forums which are starting to trickle in.

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Walkabout Journeys [$0.99] is a game of almosts. It’s almost a puzzle game, almost a platformer. It’s almost beautiful enough, almost clever enough, almost deep enough – but always falls just short.

It’s love at first sight, too, with its striking visual style and a solid central conceit. A little bit Lemmings, a little bit And Yet It Moves, Walkabout Journeys gives you a handful of Burton-esque characters to shepherd, characters that will die tragically given the slightest neglect. Rotating the world around them, you have to ensure they stay alive and stay together as they slip back and forth across each level. It’s almost wonderful.

For a short jaunt, Walkabout Journeys is a delight. I adore the nameless characters – the tall one, the tiny one, the one with the umbrella and all – the cheerful music and the colorful backdrops. The gameplay is no slouch, either. It’s quite fun to rotate the game world to and fro, tilting the little fellows just far enough forward to clear the next obstacle, or back just a touch so they don’t smack into something deadly. You can even choose your flavor of controls – slider, tilt or a dragging rotation. The last of those is, by far, the best.

There’s a sing-song, storybook quality to the whole experience, brought together with charming bits of doggerel on each loading screen. You march the characters through the season in a world scattered with names like “The Pumpkin Promenade” and “Persephone’s Fall.” Almost, almost worth it alone.

But not quite. Though the game grows more difficult over the course of its 16 levels, its formula never really grows. You may encounter a few tricky gates, or clever platformy sections, but what works in the first level will work in the 16th. Similarly, the music and aesthetic never much change or grow. What’s terribly sweet for the first few levels grows cloying without variety.

What results is a game that feels under-developed. The sixteen levels go by in a flash, and the addition of four with Christmas themes doesn’t much help. More length would only be a band-aid fix, highlighting the lack of variety, and an unfortunate opacity in the scoring mechanism. The more survivors the better, true, but what marks a high score beyond that? Players can’t play faster as the camera moves at a steady pace. There’s nothing to collect, no clever techniques to pull off or secrets to find. So why have a star system and a high score system at all?

This is exacerbated by the lack of achievements or leaderboards. There’s a bit of artificiality to extending a game with achievements, but they’re also a challenge to developers to expand a game’s horizons. Walkabout Journeys doesn’t feel intentionally minimalistic, so why not throw in some additional objectives and give players a reason to replay and improve? Instead it feels more than a bit unfinished.

Ultimately, Walkabout Journeys never arrives at its full potential, but as it sweetly proclaims at each of our deaths, “this place is nice too.” It is for a time, and that’s almost enough. It’s a lovely little lark, so if you enjoy the screenshots it’s certainly worth a go. Just don’t expect more than a stroll.

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Attention League of Legends fans. If you’ve found yourself wanting to get your LoL on while on the go, then Maya Games might just have the prescription for you with their just released Legendary Heroes [Free]. While I don’t think it was the intention of Maya Games to have Legendary Heroes be a straight up rip of Riot Games’ super popular free-to-play action strategy title, it certainly seems to take some heavy cues from it in the visuals department, the gameplay, and the free-to-play structure.

Legendary Heroes gives you several different classes to play and progress with, and lets you control up to 3 of them simultaneously as you defend your own team’s base and attempt to destroy your enemy’s. Like many free-to-play games, Legendary Heroes utilizes a dual in-game currency of gold and crystals. Both can be earned in game through play or bought as IAP to speed up your progression.

While Legendary Heroes looks like a pretty solid League of Legends wannabe for iOS, it is missing one huge component – multiplayer. Currently, it’s solely a single player experience. Maya Games is incredibly active in our forums though, and states that multiplayer is one of the top priorities for a future update if the game can do well enough to justify it. Until then, Legendary Heroes still seems like it might scratch that LoL itch if you’re on the go, even as a single player game. If local or online multiplayer reaches the title in the future it could really take off in a big was, as the foundation of the game now seems pretty good.

We’ll be diving deeper into Legendary Heroes in the coming days, but if you’re curious, there’s really no reason not to give the game a free download and check it out for yourself, and be sure to check out the forums where more player impressions, gameplay videos, and information straight from the developer can be found.

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Justin Smith from Captain Games is probably most widely known for sparking off the Enviro-Bear 2010 phenomenon of 2009. The world’s first bear driving a car simulator made a huge splash on the App Store, and proved that beyond the surface of MS Paint quality visuals and purposely awkward control schemes could lie a surprising amount of depth and replay value. Also, you play as a bear driving a car through a forest. Not every video game lets you do that.

Those same principles of low-fidelity visuals, unwieldy controls, and high playability carried through to his next iOS release So Long, Oregon! [$1.99], and they are ever-present in his latest bit of zaniness know as Justin Smith’s Realistic Summer Sports Simulator [99¢]. Don’t let the ironic title fool you, there is absolutely nothing realistic about Summer Sports Simulator. In fact, it’s greatest attraction is just how NOT realistic it portrays the various Olympic-style events it contains.

Your job is to pick a fictional country and compete in up to 14 events against three other fictional countries to see who can win the most gold medals. The events themselves are simplistic 2D affairs that are what you might have expected to find in an Olympics game for the Atari 2600 in the early 80s. Pretty standard retro-inspired stuff, but where things start to get really Enviro-Bear-y is in how you control your athletes.

Rather than traditional controls featuring d-pads and buttons, you’ll direct your athletes in Summer Sports Simulator with a spring attached to their bodies (and sometimes, the athletic equipment itself). So for example, to run the 100 meter dash you’ll touch the runner directly and drag him down the track by his springy attached string, over and over, as he clumsily tumbles, cartwheels, and flies towards the finish line.

I just cannot stress enough how terribly awkward this is, and yet, it totally works. Plus, it’s downright hilarious at times watching your blocky athlete stiffly flop around the screen. I’ve easily had more laugh out loud moments with Summer Sports Simulator in the past week than I have with any other game, book, or movie this past year. It’s the game I immediately gravitate to on my springboard when I know I need instant fun and a hearty chuckle, and so far it hasn’t disappointed once.

So while the simplicity and absurdity of Summer Sports Simulator come together to create a fun experience, the game does lack a sense of direction that holds it back a bit. There’s no persistent player data, so each time you start up the game you begin as a new random country. It would be cool if you could pick your own country to play as every time where it kept careful track of all your stats and high scores.

For such a high score focused game, some persistent game save tracking is essential to keep me coming back to play. On that same note, an online network like Game Center would be great to compete against the scores of other players around the world. Based on the developer’s comments in our forums, it looks like more country customization options and better high score tracking will be coming in future updates. Right now, although still incredibly fun, the entire affair feels a bit too much like a one-off arcade experience each time you play.

Finally, I’m not a huge fan of the pay model used in Summer Sports Simulator. The initial game costs 99¢ and comes with 4 events, and 10 more events can be unlocked via a $1.99 IAP. I definitely feel like the entire package is worth the $3 you’ll end up spending to get the whole thing, but with such a “love it or hate it” type of gameplay I think it would have been beneficial to let players try out those initial 4 events for free, to make sure it’s something that would suit them. Lowering the barrier of entry for a game like this is important, and I’m not so sure how many people will be willing to pay a dollar to try out what essentially feels like a set of demo events.

Despite my minor complaints though, Justin Smith’s Realistic Summer Sports Simulator is some of the most fun I’ve had with an iOS game in recent memory. It’s the perfect game to jump into and play around with in short bursts, or focus hours of your attention on trying to earn high scores. The complete lack of instructions on how to complete the events is part of its charm, as it’s actually fun to experiment with different techniques trying to find the best one for each event.

I’ve also dumped an embarrassing amount of time into playing around with the interactive torch lighting ceremony before your events begin, or the medal ceremony at the end where it rains hundreds of medals on the athletes which you can fling around the screen. There’s no gameplay benefit to these things, but they’re the type of silly little details that I love. Seriously, I can’t think of any other game that let’s you grab a jet out of the sky by its rainbow contrail and spin and flick it around to your heart’s content.

If you don’t mind dropping a dollar to see what it’s all about, Summer Sports Simulator offers a deceptive amount of depth and playability. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but if it clicks for you then you likely won’t hesitate in dropping an extra couple of dollars to unlock all the events. If a couple of future updates can tighten up the experience with persistent profile saves and online scoring features, then Justin Smith’s Realistic Summer Sports Simulator will end up living a long happy life on my springboard right next to its brother Enviro-Bear 2010.

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Some of you are unfamiliar with Vlambeer’s Super Crate Box. Let’s fix that real quick — and for the pleasant price of $0. Hit up this web site, download the client, give it a few minutes, and then come back to us. We’ll wait. We’re patient.

We on level, yet? If you were playing along with us, you’ve discovered that SCB is a quirky 2D side-scroller that has all the action of a Mario plus the fury of a frenetic shooter. Enemies spew from the top of an instance-based level, and it’s your job to evade or kill them while also collecting devilish crates that dispense weapons. The play is blazingly fast and chaotic, and the rewards — all the new guns, new levels, and new characters — come at a satisfyingly awesome drip. It’s hard to put down, to say the least.

We’ve asked for so much of your time up-front because what you saw is what you’re going to get in the upcoming iOS version — Vlambeer and co-developer Halfbot nailed it; this seems like nothing short of a great port, based on our hands-on with a final build.

Functionally, some things have changed. Touch controls — two buttons and two movement arrows — have replaced the keyboard inputs. I also think the action has seen the slightest dip in speed, perhaps to make up for users’ natural lag-time with the virtual controls.

Don’t take this the wrong way; the action is still oh-my-god fast in comparison and somehow, someway, the development duo managed to make it all feel good on iPad and iPhone. Your delightful little avatar, which is always random, responds sweetly to your nudges and frantic pulls. The shooting part of the equation, also feels pretty satisfying with the button.

It might take users a few minutes to get accustomed, but the buttons translate. The game’s formula also seems to, too. Got a few seconds? Great, because 90-percent of the time you won’t last that long anyway if you come across a disc launcher. Have some minutes? Play a ton of sessions, and unlock some new stuff to play around with the next time you’re able to pick up your device and give it a go.

Probably the biggest challenge SCB on iOS faces as it sees a release is the usual one: grabbing the attention of the casual base. The look is easy on the eyes, but its remorseless play is definitely geared towards the core crowd. It doesn’t seem to have an answer for players who want a little less chaos… or disc launcher.

This isn’t a problem with us, though, so whatever. We dig the arcade vibe. Super Crate Box will see a release on January 5th as a Universal app. We’ll have a full review around then, so stay tuned.

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It isn’t a surprise to us that 60beat’s new GamePad controller made some major waves last week. It’s a proper, corded controller with a full range of button and joysticks. Also, it requires zero technical savvy. Just plug it in and go.

This all sounds great… but since we still don’t have a GamePad in our hands, we decided to quiz Pangea Software’s Brian Greenstone about it. Pangea is behind Bugdom 2 [$2.99], which is one of the two games currently supporting the controller.

I asked him three questions. The first was what it was like to develop for the device, and if it was easy or hard. Greenstone’s answer leaves us hopeful that other studios will pick up support, provided the GamePad sells well enough.

“It was very easy. All I had to do was add their SDK to my project, change my Audio Session type, and then make some basic calls to start the data flowing. Bugdom 2 already used a virtual gamepad in the game itself, so the code to work with that kind of control scheme was already in place which made things very easy.

I had it all up and running in less than an hour.”

There are no developer  or game limitations, by the way — all the buttons and directional control work, straight-up. It sounds like voice-chat support is out, though, when the device is plugged in.

“No developer limitations other than the forced use of a particular Audio Session mode, but I don’t think that would affect most games, unless there are games that require the microphone to be working. So, probably no voice-chat games.

The user limitation is just that having the gamepad plugged in causes the audio on the iPhone / iPad to go thru the audio jack. That means that you have to use the supplied splitter and listen to the game with headphones.”

Greenstone said Pangea will continue to support the device if its successful and Bugdom 2 sees a sharp spike in sales. That sounds pretty reasonable.

We’re looking forward to telling you all about this thing first-hand in the coming days. Come on, Mr. Postman!

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If the golden days of Lucasarts adventure titles such as Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders recall fond memories, there’s a good chance you’re destined to love any and everything about Kaptain Brawe: A Brawe New World [Free / HD]. After all, who didn’t get a perverse joy out of wandering aimlessly and trying to figure out puzzles that were so odd that using basic logic on them meant you would never advance?

Those types of puzzles make their appearances here, but so does a lot of solid gameplay. Kaptain Brawe opens up with an intro to the title character, a big goofy dude who somehow managed to get hired as a space officer despite the fact he’s clearly not the brightest bulb in the room. Already, we have a recipe for some laughs — that’s what adventure game fans are used to. You’ll start out solo, but eventually meet new characters like Row Boat (a robot of few words) and Luna (a bit of a mystery all around) who you can swap between at different points in the game, offering a bit of new perspective.

What starts out as a basic exploration of a ship on a deserted island segways into Brawe stumbling headfirst into a complex conspiracy that will send him across the galaxy searching for answers. It’s a proper adventure game story, and it never failed to entertain. The humor of the game is pretty spot-on, although I felt it fell a little short from time to time (but in that cheesy way that all adventure games seem to touch on at one time or another.)

Speaking of genre tropes, one thing that Kaptain Brawe also has nailed when it comes to adventure game homage is the difficulty level of the puzzle solving. While there are options here (Casual and Hardcore), some of the solutions to puzzles are so downright ridiculous that it reminded me of playing Myst back in the day. A hint system proves helpful if you get really stuck (Lord knows we never had THOSE back in the day), but there are times when it won’t reveal missing something very small and you will just kind of be sitting there without a clue on how to proceed. In other words, get ready touse your noggin in the most creative of ways.

The interface and controls are pretty basic — an icon rests in each corner of the screen, and all movement is produced by the touch of a fingertip. It makes the game easy to get lost in, but the visuals also take a hand in that, and they do a grand job. The game has a sweeping cartoon feel, but the style is very distinct and memorable. 2D backgrounds and 3D characters work together nicely, and there’s a lot of locations to explore, all of them rendered in loving detail. I personally loved the world of Kaptain Brawe, as it offered a tone and setting that you can mostly only find in Telltale Games titles these days.

While Kaptain Brawe may not be the perfect intro to the genre due to its difficulty levels, it does offer an excellent story and clever writing that ought to draw longtime fans of adventure games into its clutches quickly. There’s no denying the retro appeal, but overall this is a solid title even by today’s standards. If you like the taste offered by the initial free download, you can unlock the full game via IAP, which will set you back $4.99 on iPhone and $6.99 on iPad. If you ever passed time on a game like Leisure Suit Larry or Space Quest, you will adore Kaptain Brawe and all of his fumbling attempts at saving the galaxy.

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There’s something about puzzle games that seem to attract the cutest, most vibrant visuals to the genre and SubTub [$0.99] is no exception. However, despite the bright and cheery graphics, this action-puzzler is no slouch when it comes to difficulty. In fact, if you can get past some control issues and bouts of shallow gameplay, SubTub has enough content and challenge for completionists to possibly be worth checking out.

SubTub is a game of naval superiority. You control a cute red sub through four sets of 18 missions that have you destroying the opposition on the open sea. In the case of SubTub, the open sea is a 6×9 grid of blue filled with other subs, aircraft carriers and more. Your weapons are underwater mines that are placed on the grid. While you have an unlimited amount of mines, each one has a fixed timer and a range slightly more than a single square. Complicating matters are a variety of other seafaring units, such as the rubber ducky, a ‘friendly’ unit that you can’t blow up with your mines (or touch on the grid, for that matter). In addition, mines are chainable, adding to the overall strategy.

Players are scored simply by the amount of time it takes to complete each level, with three tiers of medals available depending on how fast you are (you can also simply ‘pass’ the level if you take long enough). While SubTub’s gameplay foundation is sound, there just isn’t a lot of depth to the game, even when you take into account the different enemies you encounter. Your sub doesn’t gain any new weapons or upgrades, which may make your sense of progression seem a bit passive compared to other titles. In addition, the majority of the new enemies you encounter in later levels don’t add much other than slight variations and different skins.

Despite its cuddly exterior appearance, SubTub is actually a pretty challenging game, especially for folks that like to show their supremacy by collecting medals. Once I got passed the first set of missions, I found myself taking too long to even get the lowest tier medal. Granted, for those looking to simply try and pass the levels, SubTub is somewhat lenient as most levels can eventually be completed with patience and some timing. However, if you really want to earn the medals, you’re going to be doing a bit of practice on each level. This is the sort of balance I actually like to see in puzzlers – providing ample opportunity for casual players to pass levels, while still preserving the challenge for those that want it.

One complaint I have with SubTub is with its controls. Specifically, the swipe mechanism for controlling movement isn’t as precise as I’d like, particularly when it comes to sprinting (which is a double swipe in the direction you want to go). This is especially true if you’re trying to go for the medals, which require both pattern memorization and precise timing. Granted, it’s relatively easy to compensate with enough practice, but it’s still annoying nonetheless.

Don’t let SubTub fool you as this puzzler certainly has enough content and difficulty to keep genre fans occupied. On the other hand, casual gamers that may be looking to purchase SubTub simply from its visuals may be surprised at the difficulty of the title. Regardless, if you’re looking for a puzzler with some bite and don’t mind the cartoony visuals or occasional control issues, I’d recommend checking out SubTub for a quick fix.

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