TouchArcade.ru

Shark Dash [$0.99 / Free ] features all the trappings of a classic love story. At the tale’s outset, we meet our protagonist, a toy shark enjoying a romantic swim around the tub with his gal. Suddenly rubber ducks, the most vicious of water fowl, come splashing onto the scene and restrain our hero, who flails about while the diabolical ducks spirit his fair maiden away. Rather than flexing his fins, the shark sets off on his quest to save his lady love by solving a series of physics puzzles.

Swapping hungry sharks for Angry Birds [ $0.99 ] and googly-eyed ducks for slovenly hogs, Shark Dash oozes personality. Each level takes place in a tub filled with a mix of bath-time implements: Salts, soap bars, plastic rings, beach balls, and several unique props like explosive mines and inflatable blocks that burst at a touch.

Positioned around the tub are the scumbags that made off with your girl. Your goal is to pull back on your shark and line up your dotted trajectory like an expert billiards player, then release to send him careening into bath-time accessories like a pinball—blasting through speed tubes that fire you into the air, cleaving through chains that hold hanging platforms, knocking over structures to dump their feathery cargo into the water, swooping beneath the surface to gobble up stragglers. Once you’ve devoured all your prey, you move on to the next stage.

Besides dining on duck, each level poses two additional challenges: collect every coin, and try to meet the minimum number of moves needed to win. Hitting par or less on each level is optional, but presents the game’s greatest thrill. As you progress, levels gradually introduce new elements that make up Rube Goldberg-like constructions. Dots lining the bathtub drain show how many moves you have to finish the level until the game pulls the plug and throws victory out with the bath water.

You can spend all your available moves throwing yourself at ducks, brute-forcing your way from one level to the next. Or you can join the Shark Dash elite who analyze each layout, painstakingly calculate trajectories, and slingshot their sharks in just the right way to kick off a Goldberg sequence that ends with every last duck into your belly—usually in two moves or less. Watching a well-laid plan come off without a hitch brought about immense satisfaction and prompted me to retry stages until I scored a perfect rank.

Unfortunately, the game’s economy is its biggest flaw. Collecting the coins scattered around levels gives you the funds you need to skip tougher levels, buy elixirs to call mulligans on poorly executed moves, pick up new sharks, or break your bank and open up every level. The problem is, even netting every coin on every stage doesn’t fill your wallet fast enough.

You can get by without retry elixirs and new sharks (the game’s levels are divided across themed bathtubs, and you automatically receive control of a new shark whose abilities Gameloft designed specifically for his tub’s challenges), but at some point, you won’t have enough to skip a stage giving you trouble. That means either banging your shark’s head against a level’s porcelain walls until you figure out how to pass it, or admit defeat and buy IAP coin packs.

Don’t let an unbalanced economy make you shy away from Shark Dash, though. Cracking a level’s puzzle-like configuration is a real kick that comes wrapped in a fun theme, vibrant graphics, and, quite likely, the first and only time you’ll ever root for a shark.

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Say what you will about Gameloft, the developer occasionally does a good job of filling the App Store void with iOS versions of console staples. N.O.V.A. 3 [ $6.99 ], the third game in the company’s perennial FPS series is one such title.  Capitalizing on the success of the previous two titles, as well as offering full support for the latest and greatest in Apple hardware, N.O.V.A. 3 offers a great action-packed single player experience complete with some very impressive visuals.

Following the never-ending trials and tribulations of Kal Warden, N.O.V.A. 3 continues the story as Warden is yet again recalled into action, this time to the ruins of San Francisco to aid an old friend. From there, you’ll travel to several more planets, a derelict ship, and even the home planet of the Volterites. I’ll save the spoilers for those of you that care about the story, but suffice to Kal gets tasked with saving the human race (again) from certain doom and will go through humans, Volterites and Judgers alike to accomplish that feat.

You’ll be saving humanity via gameplay that should be largely familiar for genre veterans. Like its predecessor, N.O.V.A. 3 has you exploring a wide variety of locales while battling enemy archetypes and hitting objective-marker based goals that shouldn’t offer much in terms of surprise. Also, you can expect the occasional break from the on-foot battle heroics by piloting Mechs, manning the weaponry on top of AI driven trucks and serving as sniper support for other NPCs. By now, it should be apparent that Gameloft has uncovered the formula for a successful FPS, and while N.O.V.A. 3 doesn’t offer much in terms of revolutionary gameplay, it certainly succeeds in what it does implement.

One interesting inclusion is an in-game store that offers unique weapons and upgrades that takes currency you earn by completing single player levels. It’s nice to see a system that actually provides rewards proportionally to how well you complete a level run. Unfortunately, the inclusion of IAP to bypass said currency collection lessens experience somewhat.

A well-done FPS is in some ways far more reliant on its controls than other genres. Thankfully, N.O.V.A. 3 works within its limitations to provide a competent scheme for a touch screen. The standard dual-stick controls are available, as well as generous use of a swipe gestures for swapping weapons and powers. I was particularly a fan of the gyroscope inclusion, as proper use of that option goes a long way towards making the game’s aiming accurate and fun.

N.O.V.A. 3 plays well on the iPhone, but I found the screen to be a bit cramped compared to the roomy iPad controls. Either way, a host of options such as auto-aim, attempt to help even touch-screen novices blast away with ease. While I imagine there are some folks that will never get used to touchscreen controls for an FPS, the fact remains that N.O.V.A. 3’s control schemes do a decent job of letting you take out baddies and navigate the environments with ease.

By the way, those environments you’ll be traversing across look absolutely gorgeous. N.O.V.A. 3 takes full advantage of the hardware offerings of the iPhone 4S and new iPad, which leads to one of the most visually impressive FPS titles I’ve played on iOS. The textures, weather and visual effects – even the shadows are all well done and simply stunning.

As nice as the game looks on the small scree, N.O.V.A. 3 begs to be played on a new iPad. The larger retina-display of the tablet lets you truly appreciate just how far the visuals have come in the series. The fact that the game manages to look this good while successfully running (for the most part) at a decent framerate is probably the most impressive accomplishment. Granted, there were a few mishaps with the graphics engine, such as a few instances of falling through environments, the occasional slowdown when there’s a lot of action on the screen and the unusually lengthy loading screens (that occasionally make you think the game crashed), but these do little to detract from what is an otherwise impressive visual system.

It would be easy to simply classify N.O.V.A. 3 as impressive eye candy and leave it at that, but Gameloft deserves credit for continuing the trend of creating a well-rounded FPS experience complete with a full story-driven campaign, a plethora of control and gameplay options and a balanced gameplay experience. We sometimes talk about games that possess that certain something that make them ideal for showcasing the might of iOS. I’d argue that, while N.O.V.A. 3 may not necessarily be at the top of that shortlist, it has enough going for it to warrant being close to such a classification.

This is part one of our two-part N.O.V.A. 3 review. In previous N.O.V.A. games, multiplayer played a very large component of how much our community enjoyed the game. With our early review copy, there obviously wasn’t anyone to be found to play with online. As soon as the game is released, and we can spend some quality time with the multiplayer we’ll post a follow-up focusing on the multiplayer aspects of N.O.V.A. 3.

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Already excited for the release of N.O.V.A. 3? Well, try this new trailer on for size. It focuses on the multiplayer component of the game, and looks downright impressive. I can’t wait to see this running on my iPad:

The release date is still a vague “May 2012,” and it hasn’t been spotted yet in tonight’s roundup of games on the verge of releasing… So, fingers crossed for next week?

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Three upcoming games recently popped up on our radar, and while we don’t really have enough details on any of them yet, smashing all three games together sort of makes a story, so strap in for this.

Inotia 4: Assassin of Berkel – When it comes to Korean action RPGs, the App Store seems to have two main staples, Gamevil’s Zenonia, and Com2uS’s Inotia. Zenonia is up to four different games on the App Store, and this upcoming title will be the fourth installment in the Inotia family. The “party battle system” in Inotia 4 sounds pretty cool, and like previous entries in the series I’m sure we’ll see all sorts of incremental improvements that these yearly sequels always seem to have.

Alexandria Bloodshow – A strategic card-centric battle game from Sega. Gamezebo got a preview of it, and used games like Plants vs Zombies to describe how gameplay works. I’m not too familiar with the original Samurai Bloodshow, but I’m all about any strategic game with online multiplayer.

N.O.V.A. 3 – Gameloft is teasing quite a bit of their upcoming Halo-like first person shooter these days. We expect it to be pretty similar to the previous two installments in that it’ll likely come packed with an awesome online multiplayer component to compliment the single player campaign. If that is actual in-game footage we’re looking at in the above video, it should be pretty rad.

We’ll have more details on these games as soon as we get them. Unfortunately, the best we’ve got right now is they’re all coming to iOS devices, and they’re all coming “soon.”

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George Washington’s birthday is coming up soon, and in our neck of the woods, this means one thing: sales. Check the list of notables below if you’re into saving some dough.

Ever wonder what’s up with these holiday sales? There are a couple of good reasons. The biggest of which is that Apple generally doesn’t bother with coordinated “sale” events like Valve does with its platform, Steam. So, App Store publishers target holidays to do their thing instead since they’re notable days on the calendar anyway.

And now for that list:

• Dead Space – $6.99 – $.99
• Reckless Racing HD – $4.99 – $.99
• FIFA Soccer 12 for iPad – $9.99 – $.99
• End Night HD – $2.99 – $.99
• Plunderland – $1.99 – Free
• ASH II: Shadows (Gold Edition) – $4.99 – $2.99
• Grand Prix Story – $3.99 – $.99

This is just a Cliff Notes version of what’s out there and on sale, by the way. The usual suspects like Telltale and Gameloft, for example, are slashing prices across the board. Check out their respective publisher pages linked above.

[killer image via lustidrike on deviantart]

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Yesterday, Gameloft announced the release of a standalone app for their online gaming network Gameloft Live for Android devices, with the app scheduled to hit the iOS App Store in the near future. In case you’re unaware, Gameloft Live is a service baked into all of Gameloft’s games that allows for persistent tracking of achievements and leaderboards, as well as a friend list and social features, across their library of titles.

While I prefer Game Center nowadays as it’s the Apple standard, I’ve always felt that Gameloft Live provided one of the strongest 3rd party social gaming networks. Perhaps true to Gameloft’s form, Gameloft Live reminded me a lot of the Xbox Live service on consoles. The standalone app will allow you to access Gameloft Live from outside of a game, and looks to offer a lot of new features. You can meet up with friends in the app and chat, check out each other’s gaming progress, and of course play games together. Check out some screens below from the Android version.

You’ll be able to create an avatar and customize its appearance with a bunch of clothing items and accessories, and Gameloft says there will be ways to earn such items as gifts through continued activity in the app and with their games. It looks like you’ll even get a little house for your avatar to live in, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s items to deck that out too.

Obviously, you will also have access to Gameloft’s entire library from within the app. But it sounds like they’ll be offering exclusive promotions from in the app only, and they’ve stated they’ll eventually be releasing new game information in the app first as a reward for active users.

Much like the Gameloft Live service itself, the app reminds me a lot of the recently released My Xbox Live [Free] app in terms of some of its functionality and purpose. With 7 million users on Gameloft Live, I can see this type of app being pretty handy if you’re heavily into Gameloft games. At the very least I’m interested to check it out, and we’ll let you know if we hear word of when it’ll be hitting the App Store.

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I was able to stop by Gameloft’s San Francisco offices while at the conference, and chatted with them about some of their recent releases as well as some of the backlash they’ve received over them. First was the issue of how they put advertisements into Hero of Sparta II [$4.99], and after an overwhelming amount of negative feedback they decided to take them out. I think it’s good when a company goes out on a limb to try something, and then can admit they were wrong about it and make things right in the end.

Next we discussed the reception to Dungeon Hunter 3 [Free], which was pretty mixed. The game itself was actually pretty good, but so drastically different from the previous two entries that I think it alienated the established fan base of the series. Had they positioned it as a spinoff rather than a direct sequel, I think the outcome would have been a lot more favorable. Plus, it’s a freemium title, which is the type of thing that will always draw criticism from some folks.

Finally, we talked about their recent release Urban Crime [Free], which was essentially a repackaging of an older Gangstar title into a freemium model. The game has not gone over well with either critics or players, and we didn’t have too many good things to say about it in our review either. The combination of outdated visuals, a rehashed game world that many people had already played to death, and tough freemium restrictions was just a recipe for disaster with Urban Crime.

(Left to right: Hero of Sparta II, Dungeon Hunter 3, and Urban Crime)

So what do these three games all have in common? Well, they’re all examples of Gameloft trying to find out the best way to sell their brands in a turbulent market like the App Store. Honestly, I think putting ads in Hero of Sparta II and making an old game into a freemium game with Urban Crime were just their way of experimenting to see what works, and although neither of those really went over so well with gamers the negative feedback was actually invaluable to Gameloft moving forward. And as for Dungeon Hunter 3, I think they made a good game but just didn’t position it right, which is another lesson learned the hard way.

What I did take away from our meeting is that Gameloft is not going completely freemium with their games from here on out, as some people have been quick to conclude. Part of these experiments is finding the best way to go about selling their future titles, and with nearly all of their development cycles lasting from 10-14 months, it can be hard to keep up with a market that moves as quickly as the App Store. But they assured me that they do have a mixture of the types of premium games that they’ve built their iOS reputation on still coming down the line, as well as titles that take advantage of the freemium model, which seems to be the prevalent model in the App Store as of late.

To wrap up our meeting, they let me get some hands-on time with their upcoming Unreal Engine title, which is still extremely early in development and doesn’t even have a title just yet. I’m sworn to secrecy on most of the nitty gritty details for now, but let me say that I was really impressed with how good the game is shaping up to be, and of course it looks absolutely gorgeous with the Unreal tech under the hood. About all I can say is that it’s a fully 3D real-time action game that will have a full storyline to play through. It will be a paid game, but will have some in-app purchase items. Finally, we should be seeing the game in the second quarter of this year, which should be by this summer.

I’m really hoping to be able to share more on the upcoming Unreal game as it gets closer to release, and after meeting with the representatives of Gameloft in person, it’s easy to see that they’re a passionate bunch who care a lot about putting out products that their customers will enjoy. Their recent missteps really seem like a part of a larger learning experience in a marketplace where traditional rules are pretty much thrown out the window. I’ll look forward to seeing how Gameloft adapts and grows on the App Store this year, and if they’re able to unlock the key to a happy medium between being profitable and keeping their huge stable of fans happy.

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They say that bad luck comes in threes, and that definitely seems to be the trend in last week’s news cycle. First Zynga ripped off Tiny Tower [Free], then Glu fired up their copy machines, and then some similar although unrelated drama hit the land of Triple Town [Free]. Gamasutra is all over this recent story, but I’ll provide a quick rundown-

Spry Fox’s Triple Town hit the App Store a couple weeks ago and it was clear that we loved it in our review. It’s even sort of an interesting take on the free to play model, as you can download and play the game for free and play for a limited number of turns. You can buy more turns with in-game coins which you can earn (and buy with real money) or just download the unlimited turns unlock for (currently) $3.99. If you don’t play much, or get bored easily, you might not ever need to buy anything… But once you get to the point where you need unlimited turns, chances are you’ve gotten way more than four bucks of entertainment out of the game anyway. I like that.

Anyway, according to the Spry Fox blog, they’ve filed a copyright infringement suit in federal court against 6Waves LOLAPPS due to Yeti Town [Free] which actually beat Triple Town to release by nearly a month. It’s the same sad story we hear way too often on the App Store in that Yeti Town relentlessly copies absolutely every aspect of Triple Town.

Per Spry Fox:

Yeti Town, as launched by 6waves, was a nearly perfect copy of Triple Town. We’re not just talking about the game’s basic mechanics here. We’re talking about tons of little details, from the language in the tutorial, to many of our UI elements, to the quantities and prices of every single item in the store (how exactly did 6waves “independently” decide to price 200 turns for 950 coins, or 4 wildcards for 1500 coins each? That’s quite a coincidence!)

This exact copying is also one of the things that really amused me about all of these Tiny Tower clones which all featured 5 categories of skills, 5 people per apartment, 3 people to a floor, 3 products per floor, 5 elevator upgrades, and other exact copies of core game mechanics. Unfortunately, you can’t copyright a game idea, which is why companies like Gameloft are able to do what they do. Yeti Town is different through, as allegedly Spry Fox was in intense negotiations with 6Waves to publish Triple Town on the App Store which abruptly ended when Yeti Town was released.

As part of this, 6Waves had closed beta access months before Triple Town went public and had been “pumping [Spry Fox] for private information” which included design ideas, Facebook launches, as well as revenue and retention figures. This sort of elevates the Yeti Town clone to an entirely different level of shadiness, at least in my eyes.

If you want to read the full text of the lawsuit, you can here. Now, let’s all go back to making our own original games, eh?

[via Gamasutra]

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If you’re looking to game on the cheap this week, you’re in luck: a couple of big-time publishers and studios are offering a healthy swathe of their catalogues for $.99 right now. For example, Telltale is throwing yet another free-for-all. Until the end of this month, you can grab the Puzzle Agent and Hector series at a more wallet-friendly price. Gameloft is celebrating the Chinese New Year by killing the prices of nine of its premium offerings, while EA is still rocking price tags with its Daily Deals program.

Here’s a list, and note some of the odds and ends, too — Bard’s Tale and Puzzlejuice are in the mix, as well as a few other cool notables. This, by the way, is by no means a comprehensive list. We’re just highlighting.

Telltale

• Hector Episode 1 HD – $6.99 → $2.99
• Hector Episode 2 – $4.99 → $.99
• Hector Episode 2 HD – $6.99 → $2.99
• Hector Episode 3 – $4.99 → $.99
• Hector Episode 3 HD – $6.99 → $2.99
• Puzzle Agent – $4.99 → $.99
• Puzzle Agent HD – $6.99 → $2.99
• Puzzle Agent 2 – $4.99 → $.99
• Puzzle Agent 2 HD – $6.99 → $2.99

Gameloft

• Assassin’s Creed – Altair’s Chronicles – $4.99 → $.99
• Assassin’s Creed – Altair’s Chronicles for iPad – $6.99 → $.99
• BackStab – $6.99 → $.99
• Fast Five the Movie: Official Game – $4.99 → $.99
• Fast Five the Movie: Official Game for iPad – $4.99 → $.99
• James Cameron’s Avatar - $4.99 → $.99
• James Cameron’s Avatar for iPad – $4.99 → $.99
• NOVA 2 – $6.99 – $.99
• NOVA 2 for iPad – $6.99 – $.99
• Silent Ops – $6.99 → $.99
• Spider-Man: Total Mayhem – $6.99 → $.99
• Spider-Man: Total Mayhem for iPad – $6.99 → $.99
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard – $ 6.99 → $.99
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Shadow Vanguard for iPad – $6.99  → $.99
• Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction – $4.99 → $.99
• Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Conviction for iPad – $4.99 → $.99

EA

• Command and Conquer Red Alert for iPad – $4.99 → $.99
• Tetris for iPad – $6.99 → $.99
• Trenches 2 – $1.99 → $.99

Odds and Ends

• Monkey Quest: Thunderbow HD – $1.99 → $.99
• Plunderland – $2.99 – $1.99
• Puzzlejuice – $1.99 → $.99
• The Bard’s Tale – $5.99 → $2.99

There you go! I heartily suggest Puzzlejuice if you still haven’t gave it a shot. It’s a really, really well-made puzzle game.

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