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I like to imagine there’s an Oberlin burnout somewhere who’s made a living getting bent on ayahuasca and pitching music-history based games to different companies. My hypothetical game designer, wide-eyed and euphoric, is responsible for games like Boom Boom Rocket, Eternal Sonata, Jazz: Trump’s Journey [$2.99], and now Frederic –Resurrection of Music [$1.99/HD/Lite], by Forever Entertainment S.A.

In the first scene, set in present-day Paris, Fryderyk Chopin climbs out of his grave, speaks with the Muses, and rap-battles a French DJ with dual-wield keyboards and a jetpack. After this, he rides a horse-and-carriage to Jamaica and gets high with a reggae artist named Rob. Amazing.

As he travels the world in his mystic carriage trying to unravel the circumstances of his undeath, Chopin runs through a series of musical duels with local artists. Mechanically, this translates into a rudimentary version of Piano Hero: notes travel on a track toward a touch-screen piano keys, and players are scored on their accuracy and combo streak.

The songs in Resurrection are modern remixes of Chopin’s most famous waltzes, nocturnes, études, and marzukas, re-imagined in the style of whichever locale our hero finds himself: country in Texas, Celtic dance in Ireland, chiptunes in Tokyo. I actually like most of the music — the Resurrection soundtrack is available for purchase on iTunes [$5.99] — but they all tend to suffer from repetitive melody and relatively simple arrangements. Still, the lighthearted pop remixes fit into the game’s absurdist aesthetic much better than an orchestral score would.

With only nine songs, Resurrection is relatively short, though some players might be able to extend its shelf-life by trying to improve their scores. But even on its hardest difficulty, at its most complex, Resurrection goes out of its way to indulge and empower the player, not defeat them with impossible challenges.

Like Climber Brothers [$0.99], the real joy of Resurrection is the one-to-one relationship between tactile input and feedback: tapping the screen of my iPad is more or less a reasonable facsimile of pressing down a physical key. This is a relatively simple pleasure, but Resurrection goes to great lengths to extend it by being overly-generous  in its design — players have a relatively large window to hit notes in, and it’s almost impossible to miss enough notes to fail a song. The goal here is to listen to the music and soak up the strange animations going on in the background.

Since failure — and, by extension, most of the game mechanics — is largely an illusion, Resurrection’s real hook is its insane premise and matching art direction. In both its art direction and treatment of ethnic stereotypes, Resurrection draws on the bande dessinée style of mid-80s Lucky Luke. The voice acting, too, is hard to place: British English re-routed through Forever Entertainment’s Polish roots.

But Resurrection’s essential Europeanness isn’t limited to animation and cut scenes, and this isn’t a game so much as it is a rewriting of Chopin’s cultural identity. During the Cadet Revolution in 1830 Chopin, the son of a Franco-Polish immigrant, fled Warsaw for Paris, never to return. Resurrection ultimately leads him back to a culturally reinvigorated Warsaw, but only after he uses his musical gifts to destroy the stereotyped, corporate shills that populate the rest of the world. Chopin is cast as the savior of music, but it’s odd that he uses modern remixes, not his traditional compositions, to further his cause.

By fudging its rhythm mechanics, Frederic — Resurrection of Music actually presents itself as more of an interactive cartoon than a game. But when viewed as such, Resurrection often comes off muddled and directionless and, even at the end of the game, it’s not clear why Chopin was resurrected, who he’s “saving” music from, or if he really succeeded.

Nevertheless, Resurrection is a bold product, unafraid to be campy, kitschy, and surreal, and presented as a labor of love from a team full of ideas. This game is larger than the sum of its parts and everyone I’ve showed it to has enjoyed basking in the art and music and in the fact that Frederic Chopin uses his second chance at life to smoke dope on the beach and learn the keytar.

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Super Crate Box’s [$.99] five million crate update is now available as a free download for all of its crazed, crate-nabbing fans. Starting now, Vlambeer and Halfbot are giving us all the power to pick and play with our favorite characters. Also, it has added a total of five more to earn through rigorous killing and crate obtain-ation.

Another milestone-tied update is being teased in the game’s patch notes. According to the notes, at 20 million crates users will receive another update that’ll “unlock more iOS-exclusive content & features!” Oh, and speaking of exclusive, check out the game’s new virtual control functionality — it’s been tweaked and now allows for customization. Neat!

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If you were to tell me that I’d be able to play a hockey game featuring Enviro-Bear [99¢] as a player, I’d say you were crazy. Yet, that’s exactly the case with Ice Rage [99¢], a simple arcade hockey game from Mountain Sheep. While Ice Rage doesn’t quite feature the deep gameplay found in previous Mountain Sheep titles, it’s still an enjoyable little arcade game, especially on the multiplayer side.

Billed as bringing the “8-bit hockey experience” to iOS, Ice Rage plays less like a hockey game and more of something akin to Pong. Games are played 2 vs 2 (one goalie and one attacker) on a very small rink. There’s also very little strategy involved; if your player has the puck you take shots at the opposing goal, and if you don’t have it, you smack the opposing attacker until you get it back. The controls also share Ice Rage’s simplicity: a virtual joystick and a button that doubles as the offense/defense action are the only buttons you have.

Ice Rage does offer three different difficulties, with the hardest also giving you control of your goalie (which is not the easiest task considering that your joystick will control both your players simultaneously). Also featured are a variety of characters including John Gore of Minigore fame and Enviro-Bear (who needs no introduction). A brand new update has already hit for Ice Rage, which adds the Bike Baron as a playable character as well. While some of the characters do have hidden stats such as being harder hitters, as far as gameplay is concerned Ice Rage is about as basic as they come.

While the gameplay may lead to some lackluster single player games, it’s actually well suited for multiplayer and becomes the biggest highlight of Ice Rage. Multiplayer adds another set of controls and sets them opposite of each other table-top style. On an iPhone or iPod touch, the whole experience is a bit cramped, but on an iPad it’s actually well-done. The controls are easy enough to pick up and play, and the time period (all games are 1:45 long with no customization) is short enough for spontaneous games with local friends. There’s just something about frenetic gameplay combined with a human opponent that brings out the fun in simple arcade games and Ice Rage is no exception.

Once you get past the initial appeal of playing hockey with the likes of John Gore or Enviro-Bear, you’ll quickly find that Ice Rage doesn’t have much of anything else up its sleeve. There are no achievements, career mode, or really anything other than quick-play with the three difficulty options. Multiplayer is nice, but single-player really doesn’t have anything to offer after the first few playthroughs. I understand that the developers were looking to create a classic arcade hockey title, but even features as simple as a leaderboard or ‘tournament’ mode would have gone a long way towards increasing replay ability.

Seeing as how the game has already been updated, it’s not hard to imagine that it may include more robust single-player features in the future. Along with Bike Baron as a character, the new update made some minor tweaks to the gameplay, including an upgraded goalie AI and the ability to play as either the red or blue team. It will be interesting to see how the solid foundation of Ice Rage gets expanded over the long haul.

In the end, Ice Rage really is a game about tempered expectations. If you go into it expecting any kind of depth, prepare to be disappointed, as that’s not the intent of this title. However, if you go into it knowing that it’s a simple arcade hockey game, you should have a good time, particularly with its multiplayer.

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Games that tie in to major properties are sometimes, shall we say, a little lacking. So you might be tempted to think that Assassin’s Creed Recollection [99¢] is just your average cash-in, perhaps a standard collectable card game with images of franchise heroes Altaïr ibn-La’Ahad and Ezio Auditore da Firenze slapped on the cards. You can stop thinking that right about now, because this game is something far more interesting.

That’s not to say it’s without its problems — Ubisoft has been chasing down some big-time bugs since the game was released — but Assassin’s Creed Recollection is more than just another coat of paint on the traditional CCG. It takes the formula real time, pitting you and your opponent against the clock as well as each other.

Once you get past the game’s peculiar jargon (cards are Memories, decks are Sequences, creatures are Agents, mana is Gold — it’s all very Assassin’s Creed), you’ll find a CCG with several creative tweaks. Turns are gone, period. Instead, everything is measured by day. You get one new card in your hand each day, and summoning agents takes half a day. You and your opponent do everything simultaneously, something that would get messy in your average CCG but is handled elegantly here.

You see, you aren’t playing directly against your opponent, who has no health or tokens to speak of. You’re sending your agents out to campaign in regions that dominate the play field. To win, you need to control the majority of those regions at the same time. If one of your agents finishes a campaign in a region without being opposed, you earn that agent’s attack power in points. Ten points and you control the region. So off you go, slapping down agents, throwing them in front of your opponent’s agents and claiming regions until one of you is victorious.

There’s quite a bit more to it — you can place Sites on each region that earn points every day, and you can also throw down Actions, which are used to interrupt enemies or boost your own cards. And you have to control your income, the amount of gold you earn each day, because every card has a cost and most of those costs are steep. It’s a bit complex, but Assassin’s Creed Recollections does a great job of walking you through the basics with a thorough tutorial.

Unfortunately, you come out the other side of that tutorial and slam directly into a wall. The first real mission in the single-player campaign pulls exactly no punches, and your default deck is more than a little lackluster. So, in a move that should come as no surprise to CCG players, you’ll probably need to buy some boosters.

To Ubisoft’s credit, they don’t start you off with a paywall. You’ll have quite a few credits by the time you emerge from the tutorial, enough to buy quite a few packs if you’re thrifty. They don’t do such a good job of explaining the difference between the inexpensive Templar packs and the rather pricey Assassin’s packs. As it turns out, they give cards from separate pools, and the Assassin’s cards are not so much stronger as they are targeted to advanced play styles. So go for the Templar packs at first.

The cards you’ll receive from these booster packs are sure to delight any Assassin’s Creed fan. They, and the game’s story, are largely pulled from Assassin’s Creed 2, and they feature plenty of familiar faces. The cards cover everyone from Rosa the thief to Rodrigo Borgia and every Assassin, Templar, courtesan and scholar between. They’re separated into factions, and while each of your decks can only contain two factions and the unaffiliated gold cards, you’ll collect plenty of each in your booster purchases. You can’t currently complete your collection with single-card purchases, but the upcoming Auction House sounds like it will address that problem.

The single-player campaign, which has you winding your way through fair Italia as an inexperienced Templar, will take skilled players a couple hours, and CCG newbies a fair bit more. It has limited replayability since you can’t continuously earn extra credits or experience by replaying old missions. At that point, if not before, you’ll need to move into multiplayer, where you can stomp friends and strangers alike.

Overall, I’m more than satisfied with the core game. The rest of the trappings are a bit less impressive. The out-of-game interface is governed by a confusing mix of swipes and taps, which is compounded by a lack of responsiveness in certain menus. Miss the fact that you can access the menu at any point by swiping down with two fingers (mentioned once and otherwise never indicated) and you may end up wondering why there’s no way to pause or forfeit a match. There are Game Center achievements, several of them, specifically for buying credits with IAP.

More damningly, there seem to be issues with the purchase of booster packs. If the Ubisoft servers are down when you buy a booster, you may not be able to open it until they’re back up. According to some folks in our discussion thread, this may sometimes result in lost cards, though we haven’t been able to confirm the problem. I’m sure the server check-in cuts down on cheating, but it also cuts down on players’ ability to access the content they’ve purchased. Add to that a crash bug effecting existing players that was introduced in the current patch and I grow wary of recommending this game before these issues are ironed out, though a just-released patch looks to address some of this. Also, the game is currently on sale for 99¢, which might make it a worthwhile deal for putting up with some bumps in the road during post-release updating.

If you’re a CCG lover who also happens to be a fan of Assassin’s Creed, though, Recollection really is worth a look. It doesn’t add much to the mythos, but it makes great use of the IP. As a bonus, the short film Embers is included, along with a gallery of concept art for Uplay users. But Assassin’s Creed Recollection isn’t just for fanboys — it’s a genuinely engaging card game with a surprising depth of strategy. Hopefully Ubisoft will be prompt in fixing the bugs, but the core game is intact in the meantime. Just go easy on the IAP.

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We spied Oh! Edo Towns [$3.99/Lite] on the App store in early September, and ever since, I’ve been wringing my hands in anticipation at the thought of a new Kairosoft game to fill up my free time. After all, Game Dev Story earned our coveted five-star score, and we’ve enjoyed the clever and cute take on the pleasures of city sims every since. Throw in my slight obsession with historical Japan, and then tell me I get to build my own town in Edo-period Japan, and here you have a very excited gamer. Can I be a shogun? Paint some ukiyo-e? Maybe even thwart Saigo Takamori before he reaches the borders of my humble town?

In all seriousness, though — if you have ever played a Kairosoft title, you will know what to expect here. Oh! Edo Towns follows the formula of the previous games by kicking it off giving you your own plot of land to build up into something spectacular. Considering the theme, everything plays on Japan’s Edo period, from the ability to build things like Public Baths and Dumpling Shops to small details such as character dress and design. If you’re a fan of Japanese history, as I am, you are sure to have a soft spot for this one.

Just in case you have never played a Kairosoft sim before, here’s how it works: the clock ticks as you survey your land and make choices about how to build it up. A full menu is available at the touch of a finger, and from there you can build everything from fields for crops to homes, and even eventually castles. As you make your town more appealing, more people will move into it, and as you build more structures that your residents can use to educate themselves, such as libraries, they can then better themselves and therefore benefit the town and boost your ‘Yield” (meaning how much money your town makes).

To keep the flow of your town building going, you’ll get periodical updates from the local newspaper. This is Kairosoft’s gentle way of nudging you and giving you hints as to what to do next, such as what to build to help your town prosper. Oh! Edo Towns is a great game for anyone with a hardcore case of OCD (cough, cough) because you can also examine the stats of your residents, town, buildings and finances at all times and analyze how it can be improved.

Keep working, and your town will grow into a burgeoning community. The pace is well set and helps to allay boredom by keeping updates consistent as your new residents move in and your town flourishes. Planting trees and other landscaping near buildings or paying close attention to what buildings are compatible with one another is a key tactic to making sure your town ranks high when the time comes around to win some awards. Get to buildin!

The only pitfall I can see when it comes to Oh! Edo Towns is someone saying, “This is the same game as the others with a new skin.” Technically, they would be right, as it does follow the same formula, though the flow of gameplay and hints are better than ever before. If you’ve had enough, you can probably replay the ones you played before. On the other hand, if the idea of having a slew of new possible combos at your fingertips to transform your little town into a booming rural metropolis makes you salivate a little, what you want is here, and there’s even a brand new lite version to try out. Time to carve your own spot in Japanese history, my friends.

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Not to be left out in the holiday liquidation going on in the App Store at the moment, Namco Bandai has been conducting some price-slashery magics of its own. Starting today and rolling into the weekend, you can save oodles on the publisher’s stable of titles. Games like Pac-Man and Mr. Driller and even its Universal selection of titles including Fossil Feast are available at either at $.99 to $3.99. That’s not bad, really, considering what price these things usually sit at when there isn’t a holiday to celebrate. Yay, Halloween!

Here’s the full list of the sales we’ve caught so far:

• Buccaneer Blitz – $2.99 → $.99 [Universal]
• Fossil Feast – $1.99 → $.99 [Universal]
• Isaac Newton’s Gravity – $2.99 → $.99
• Mishap – $4.99 → $1.99
• Mishap for the iPad – $4.99 → $1.99
• Mooniacs – $1.99 → $.99 [Universal]
• More Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima – $4.99 → $1.99
• More Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima for the iPad – $6.99 → $1.99
• Mr. Driller – $1.99 → $.99
• Ms. Pac-Man – $4.99 → $1.99
• Ms. Pac-Man for the iPad – $4.99 → $1.99
• Pac-Man – $4.99 → $1.99
• Pac-Man for the iPad – $4.99 → $1.99
• Pole Position: Remix – $2.99 → $.99
• Pool Pro Online 3 – $1.99 → $.99
• Pool Pro Online 3 for the iPad – $1.99 → $.99
• Puzzle Quest 2 – $4.99 → $3.99
• Star Trigon – $1.99 → $.99
• Tamagotchi: ‘Round The World – $4.99 → $1.99

I’m a huge fan of Puzzle Quest 2, and even though it’s hovering around a “premium” price point during this ale, it’s still worth picking up. The match-3 component is as rich and strong as ever, and the dungeon-crawling and RPG aspects do wonders for the title. You can check out our review here.

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We’ve been eagerly anticipating Rocketcat Games’ newest upcoming iOS game Mage Gauntlet since it was first revealed back in July, and that anticipation has only intensified with the newest gameplay trailer that was released for the game late last month. The funny thing about game development, though, is that projects tend to go through a pretty intense evolution from their beginnings until the time a finished product hits the market. One of my favorite things is to see early prototypes or concepts for a game and then compare them to later versions, much like the incredible transformation that Aralon: Sword and Shadow [$4.99] underwent during its development cycle. There’s even an entire thread in our forums dedicated to developers showing off their before and after work on their games.

Mage Gauntlet is no different, and Rocketcat has recently released a short video showing the earliest version of their game, which charming as it may be, looks like the nasty gas station hot dog that’s been sitting on those spinning heat roller things for the past week compared to the filet mignon that is the latest Mage Gauntlet trailer. Ok I’ll admit, sometimes I have a hankering for those crazy hot dogs, but still, Mage Gauntlet has come a long way since its humble beginnings:

Pretty crazy, huh? In the YouTube description, Rocketcat explains that Mage Gauntlet was originally planned as a top-down arcade shooter, sort of like an 8-bit fantasy-themed Minigore [99¢/HD]. It then changed to a randomly generated dungeon crawler, and finally morphed into the action RPG with an SNES-era aesthetic that it is today. Interestingly, through this growth process, the story remained unchanged, and they’ve even held onto certain gameplay mechanics from that first version like having 4 spell slots and an emphasis on powerful but quick-burning spells. For reference, here is the latest Mage Gauntlet trailer for you to compare:

I think it’s pretty safe to say that we’re all glad the game has evolved to where it’s at now, though to be honest that game in the old trailer does look pretty cool. And Rocketcat, please, tuck away that “randomly generated dungeon diver” idea for a future game. At any rate, Mage Gauntlet has been in Apple’s possession for a couple of weeks now, and barring any more snafus it should hopefully be available extremely soon. Rocketcat’s best guesstimation is next week, October 13th, so keep your eyes glued to this space and we’ll let you know just as soon as it’s available. You can also get plenty more information and lively discussion on Mage Gauntlet in the thread in our forums, so be sure to check that out as well.

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