TouchArcade.ru

Bryan Mitchell is the the developer of the popular Geared [$2.99 / HD] and Geared 2 [$2.99] games, which have reportedly been played by over 12 million people. He’s partnered-up with an old school buddy Joshua Greenspan, who released Puzzling Penguins [Free] in 2009. Together, they’ve released a sequel, named quite appropriately: Puzzling Penguins 2 [99¢].

If you’re familiar with the original game, this latest release features more of the “move-the-penguin-to-the-water” type puzzle-solving, but the graphics and music have improved, with the most obvious changes being a new isometric view of the playing area and the inclusion of snow-coated scenery in the background.

The goal of Puzzling Penguins 2 is to swipe your penguin around a frozen 8×8 pond, collecting three golden stars before reaching a chilly water-hole. The catch is that once you swipe a penguin, it keeps moving in that direction until either hitting an obstacle, or reaching the edge of the frozen pond. The challenge is to work out how to use the various obstacles to reach the water hole. Your overall Game Center score for each level is based on the number of stars collected, time taken and number of moves required to solve the level.

There’s currently 3 worlds to play (63 levels in total), which are unlocked by collecting enough stars. The levels in the first world are all pretty obvious, so they’re easy to 3-star in your first attempt without requiring much brain activity. But just when you start thinking you’re super intelligent, the puzzles in the second world suddenly become more challenging, forcing you to actually stop, think and strategize.

New game elements are introduced regularly like blocks that can be repositioned by swiping, ‘bomb stars’ which trigger explosions and ‘fire stars’ for melting the water hole when it freezes over. Most interestingly some levels feature more than one penguin from the colony for you to swipe. This makes things trickier as your penguins must work together, using each other as barriers so they stop moving at the right spots to clear the level.

Puzzling Penguins 2 is a pleasant game to play and a definite improvement on the original, especially in terms of presentation. On the down-side, it’s not universal and there’s no native iPad version, so it will only run in 2x mode. Also, although the three “worlds” each add new gameplay elements, they all use exactly the same snowy setting and music, so they don’t really feel like different “worlds” so much as just more levels. It would also be interesting if they threw a hungry polar bear into the mix.

However, the most important thing in any puzzle game are the puzzles themselves, and in that regard the game is well-designed with difficulty levels which increase as you progress.  Of course, if you’re not certain about this game, you can grab the original Puzzling Penguins for Free and if you enjoy that, you’ll definitely enjoy this updated and prettier sequel as well.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Stretched [99¢] is a new physics-based slingshot-platformer from Chillingo, which has been receiving praise in our discussion thread.  The objective is to fling a ball between various slingshots, collecting as many bubbles from each level as possible, before reaching the exit portal. There’s no time limit or restriction on the number of turns, so there’s no hurry, but each time you fling yourself you need to land safely, as there’s no ground or safety net.

The best feature of Stretched is that new gameplay elements are constantly being introduced as you progress through the 80+ levels and 4 worlds (Sunrise, Monochrome, Misty and Desert). Each world has it’s own features and music and it’s often a pleasant surprise to discover what comes next.

Initially you’re propelling  yourself between slingshots of various sizes and orientations, or bouncing off walls. But that’s just the start. You’ll manipulate chains and sliders, use a sticky green character to your advantage by sticking to walls, explode bombs to blast yourself across the level or to move obstacles, turn wheels with your finger to rotate items and encounter various moving contraptions to master. Some levels challenge you to balance the ball precariously on the end of a stick, while also collecting bubbles! There’s a surprising amount of variety in this game (more than I’ve described here) and each new feature is carefully explained when it first appears.

The touch controls are simple and effective: Use your finger to stretch back the slingshot and determine the direction and power of the shot (the slingshots fire in either direction). A series of dots shows the trajectory path, for aiming purposes. Once you release your finger, the ball is propelled in the chosen direction. If you’re attached to a sticky green character, you can tap it to make it disappear. Or tap a bomb to make it explode.

Your score is based on the number of bubbles collected before reaching the exit portal. Collecting over half of the bubbles earns 2-stars, while you must grab all the bubbles to 3-star the level. High scores and achievements are all managed via Chillingo’s Crystal and Game Center.

A “skip level” option is available and there appears to be no limit to how many times you can use it, as I skipped several levels in a row. However, a certain number of stars is required to unlock each subsequent world and skipping levels doesn’t earn any stars, so there’s some incentive to actually play through the levels. An In-App Purchase can be made to unlock all levels, although there’s really no need.

Stretched was released without much fanfare, so it’s quite a pleasant surprise. The bubble graphics are not overly impressive, so the screenshots don’t look too flashy, but don’t judge this game by it’s screenshots alone as the variety of gameplay is excellent. The puzzles are interesting and varied, rather than intellectually complex, and the various soundtracks sound good without feeling repetitive. You’ll get a few hours entertainment for a dollar, with more levels promised in the future, making this an easy game to recommend.

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Judge Dredd vs. Zombies [$.99] is what you think it is, which is to say, it’s an over-the-top dual-stick shooter that pits the equally over-the-top dystopian cop against hordes and hordes of the undead. Despite all signs of the End Times have come pointing to “Yes,” Dredd is as moronically meat-headed as ever. The slick Versace-wearing, line-slinging judge, jury, and executioner has his hands full with himself throughout the entire experience. It’s as if, in a weird twist, this game is more about Dredd’s need to stroke his own ego than his desire to purge his precious and pure Mega-City One of zombies.

Hearing “I am the law” or some other ridiculously chest-puffing line every 15 seconds isn’t this game’s biggest problem, though — the free-to-play model is. It comes across as much too pushy and needed and, as a result, it consistently strikes me as gross.

Sure, you can upgrade your weapons and bring along “special equipment” like “Instant Reload” or “Body Armor” using in-game credits, but they quickly end up costing too much in comparison to the amounts you can earn. The difficulty curve on zombie damage models are pretty sharp, too, so you’ll feel naked in short order — and grinding on previous levels, for whatever reason, won’t net you any extra credits.

Dredd sure doesn’t seem to mind. Like a 50-year-old wrestler who keeps taking bumps because he filed bankruptcy one too many times and still has a camper on a line of credit, an under equipped Dredd is consistently revved to keep battling against increasingly bad odds. His confidence and enthusiasm are off the wall.

What really salvages this entire experience is  its combat model. It’s really, really enjoyable. Movement is a snap, while the shooting in particular is great. There’s a brilliant auto-aim mechanic that flawlessly moves from threat to threat as smoothly and intelligently as if you were the one making the choice. And even when you do want to control where you shoot, you can just tap on the screen to target.

A combo system, the reload mechanisms, and item pick-ups alter the pacing of the combat in consistently entertaining ways. As you kill, you’ll steadily earn more bonus points as a combo meter builds. The catch is that, whenever you stop to reload, the meter has a chance kick back to zero by virtue of inactivity. This is where the Dredd badge pick-ups littering the game come in: not only do they give you points, but they also keep that combo meter going when you’re not actively blasting zombies into re-oblivion.

This isn’t ground-breaking stuff, but it works and it works really well. Dredd’s other constituent parts, on the other hand, are merely competent: the UI is inelegant but alright, the level selection and rating system are industry standard, and the visuals are OK. Nothing outside of the shooting feels particularly inspired. The lackluster and oftentimes barren level, sound, and presentation design leave a lot to be desired.

But… as far as fundamentals go, the fact that Judge Dredd vs. Zombies’s combat rocks is a pretty big boon to what is otherwise a fairly competent, yet  occasionally annoying game. The bad parts, and particularly the greedy free-to-play hooks and the barrage of Dredd-isms, are the big stains. The shooting makes up for a lot of this, but there’s a whole lot of ugly to wade through before you get to the good.

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Assassin’s Creed, as far as I can tell, is about stabbing dudes and pushing down NPCs while on the way to stab more dudes. The upcoming board game for the iPad, on the other hand, is about building a beastly deck of cards and pummeling dudes into submission and taking their territories in real-time. Intrigued? We still are, even though the new details out there are still pretty vague.

IGN recently got their hands on with Assassin’s Creed Recollection and are reporting that it features several mechanics from other collectible card games, but fiddles with pacing by introducing a “looping timeline” as seen in, say, Lumines. Cards apparently have the power to attack players or seize a territory, so that’s how the action part of the game works, at least.

Ubisoft is still tossing out phrases like “deep tactical gameplay” and “challenging political battles” in regards to what Recollection will offers, but we’re not sure how it’s going to execute on these promises. We’d look to the new trailer to see what’s up, but Ubisoft is still in full-blast mystery mode for its November-bound game.

Regardless of the lack of intel, this continues to be something our all-seeing eye is keyed in on. Assassin’s Creed fans should definitely stay with Recollections, too, as it’ll deliver collectible assets from all the games, as well as reconnect you with characters and “memories” from Brotherhood and Assassin’s Creed 2.

[Via IGN]

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When Top Spin was released for the original Xbox, I became an instant fan of tennis games. I would crank up the difficulty to max and give myself bad stats and play the top players, just to make it more challenging. But until recently my iOS device had no tennis games installed, even though there’s a few out there.

Flick Tennis: College Wars [99¢ / HD / HD Free] by Rolocule has come to the rescue, providing me with a challenging touch-based tennis game to conveniently carry in my pocket. The iPad version was released in August, but this review is based on the iPhone version, which has just come out. And I’m really enjoying it, because although it starts out pretty easy, the later matches are challenging and can be real nail-biters.

Three modes are provided: Story, exhibition and head-to-head multiplayer. Unfortunately, there’s no tournament mode, which would have worked perfectly with this game, although story mode does tie multiple matches together in a sequence.

In story mode, you play the role of Kevin Adams, a talented young tennis prodigy who wants to succeed on court to make his wheel-chair bound father proud and to be selected for the college / university team.  Kevin’s story spans 11 episodes, with 35-pages of comic-based cut-scenes between episodes (ie: about 3 pages worth per episode.)

Comic-strips and tennis are not an obvious combination, but the simple storyline works nicely enough, painting Kevin as an under-dog and explaining his motivation to win each particular match. If you’re not interested in the storyline, it’s easy to skip through the comics quickly to focus on the tennis. The story episodes include both single and multiplayer matches of increasing difficulty. By playing through the episodes, you unlock players, courts and subsequent episodes.

Exhibition mode includes singles or doubles matches. The doubles matches include an AI-controlled partner for you to play with. This introduces the additional challenge of ensuring the court is always covered by the two of you.  In multiplayer mode two players square off on the same device, taking turns at swiping. I didn’t try this mode with another player, but it would probably work better on the larger iPad screen.

The AI opponents play intelligently, with four different styles of play (Defensive baseliner, aggressive baseliner, volleyer and all-court players). The help screen explains the traits of each style and lists some real-world examples, listing Pete Sampras as a volleyer and Roger Federer as an all-court player. The opponents also have a skill level, ranging from beginner to professional. There are 11 courts (including grass, clay and synthetic) starting with practice courts with bird noises, to sports stadiums with an appreciative applauding audience. And an umpire announces the score verbally, which adds to the tennis atmosphere.

Flick Tennis is totally designed around swipe controls, so there’s no joystick or buttons cluttering the screen. You can do four different shots by swiping your finger. The basic ground-stroke is done by simply swiping upwards in the direction you want to hit the ball. The accuracy of the shot depends on how close you swipe from the position of the player and the timing. If you swipe too early, the shot will be inaccurate, but swiping too late will cause you to miss the ball entirely. Swiping downwards does a drop-shot, which is effective if the player is hanging back at the baseline.

The other two shots require two-finger swipes. A slice is done by swiping two fingers upwards. While a two-finger downwards swipe lobs the ball, which is useful for hitting the ball over a players head when they’ve cheekily approach the net. But be careful, because if you lob to a player at the baseline, he (or she) might SMASH the high ball back at you. Likewise you can smash it if you receive a lob in the right court position. Each of the four shots is drawn on the screen in a different color, to confirm your chosen action.

The one finger swipes are easy, but it took a little practice to nail the two finger swipes. Once you recognize that the first finger to touch the screen will draw the line, it’s a lot easier to play accurate shots more consistently. Plus, there’s an interactive tutorial which introduces you to the four different swipes. It also explains that you can tap the screen to walk in that direction, however the player will automatically run to the ball by default, allowing you to focus mostly on the shots unless you specifically want to run to the net, baseline, center or sides. One cool feature is that if you’re running, it has a bearing on the shot, so if you draw your line early, you need consider where you’ll be standing by the time you swing. Often it pays to aim a little in-court just to be safe.

A few general observations: Firstly, when two players are both at the net, the ball is sometimes hit backwards and forwards several times rapidly, with multiple sound effects in quick succession, which never occurs in real tennis and ruins the otherwise tennis-like atmosphere (only happens rarely). Secondly, there’s no leaderboard or achievements, which is desirable in a competitive sporting title. My skills deserve some recognition! And lastly, the lack of tournament thing I mentioned earlier.

Flick Tennis: College Wars is a welcome addition to my iPod Touch and won’t be deleted any time soon. The controls work well once you’ve mastered them and it’s a blast to swipe a variety of shots, making the opponent run around the screen, just like I used to on the Xbox. Or some of the time I’m getting thrashed, but either way, I’m loving it. The game is currently on sale through today only, so don’t hesitate to grab either version of the game for 99¢ before they return to their normal prices of $1.99 and $3.99.

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Last week we posted details surrounding the then-upcoming bundles of retro Elite Collection and Elite Collection HD for the iPhone and iPad, set to launch this past weekend. As we’ve learned from Elite Systems, the collections are still upcoming, unfortunately.

Elite Systems‘ Steve Wilcox explains,

We spend countless hours tracking down the current owners of the classic 8-bit home computer games (and the associated intellectual properties) which we include in our Apps. We come across some fascinating people and stories whilst doing so.

Earlier this week, an organisation – from whom we’d previously received a written “clearance” – claimed an interest in a trademark in one of the twenty five games in the Apps. This interest does not appear on the public records.

Since one of our declared goals for the “Elite Collection” Apps is, “to restore some order to the market for 8-bit home computer games” we needed some time to check the claim. At the time of writing, that claim is still being reviewed and we felt it would be inappropriate to release the Apps until it had been dealt with.

Wilcox, at the same time, took the opportunity to share some rather good news concerning his studio’s forthcoming 8-bit offerings. He indicates that the delay should provide the opportunity to include some additional “AAA” titles to the mix when, or shortly after, they are released. The coming titles he speaks of are likely to include an excellent collection of games from Interplay Productions: the classic fantasy RPG The Bard’s Tale (I, II & III), the post-apocalyptic RPG Wasteland, as well as Dragon Wars and Neuromancer.

Elite expects the delay of the Elite Collection and Elite Collection HD to be brief — perhaps a couple of weeks. For details on the (at least) 12 titles launching in the collections, have a look at our post from last week.

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Starbase Orion [$4.99] is a space-based 4X strategy game from Chimera Software, the makers of Starbase Command [99c] . If you're not familiar with the 4X genre, it stands for "explore, expand, exploit and exterminate." You navigate your space fleet around the galaxy (on a map) exploring various star-systems and colonizing planets. Your planets can be customized with buildings, farmers, scientists, and/or workers. You research new technologies, spy on other races, design new spacecraft, and engage in space combat. Phew! There's plenty of stuff here for strategy gamers to totally geek-out on!

Two game modes are provided. There's a single player mode against AI players, or asynchronous turn-based multiplayer modes (1 vs 1, 2 vs 2 team-play, or free-for-all). It uses the cool new iOS 5 Game Center features to manage the asynchronous play, letting you play against an online opponent, each taking turns at different times during the day (or night) without necessarily being online at the same time. The game will automatically quick-match you with an online opponent or you can invite a specific friend to a custom match. It also supports the new iCloud functionality, so you can switch your iOS device and keep playing from where you left off. Starbase Orion does run on iOS 4, but without multiplayer or iCloud support until you're on iOS 5.

At the start of the game, you choose the size of the universe (small to huge),  the number of opponents (1-3) and the difficulty (easy to impossible), after which a random map of the galaxy is displayed. You can use your finger to pan around the galaxy, and then tap a star system to display its planets.

There are five predefined races available to play. The Isather are a tribal bunch who solve problems with brute force, the Cyban are robots with advanced researching abilities, Draske are winged serpents and skilled pilots, while the Vass are a shared-intelligence life-form which is dependent on its population size. The boring old human race are stereotyped as crafty smugglers. But if none of these races appeal, you can create your own custom race by selecting 10-points worth of racial attributes from a list. Your choice of race shapes your strengths and strategies.

You're given a small space fleet initially, although the vessels are different each time. There's a range of vessels like cruisers, frigates, and destroyers. There's also a ship designer, which let's you add weapons systems and ship systems (eg: fuel reserves) into slots on a few base models of ship. The number of slots varies depending on the base ship model. Or, if you need money, you can always scrap a ship for galactic credits.

To explore the galaxy, you tap on your fleet, then select specific vessels, before tapping on the destination star system. You might send a scout ahead to determine if any planets are viable for colonization, since they have more fuel. If something's suitable, you can send a colony ship to claim the planet and expand your empire. There's no story-line or missions to direct you, it's more like a sandbox game, where you choose what to do next.  If you research fuel technology or add fuel tanks, you can explore further afield.

Once you've colonized a planet, you can tap it to access its information and determine how to exploit it. Some planets are suitable for colonizing, some for mining, while others are inhabitable. The game shows a picture of the planet's surface and plays some environmental sound effects, like wild-life or wind, depending on the habitat. Each planet has a certain number of land plots depending on its size, where you can construct buildings like a marine barracks to create defensive ground troops and transports. You allocate the population of the planet to specific roles, including: farming (food), workers (buildings and ships) or science (technology), and they'll pay you taxes.

While exploring, you might make contact with other races and engage in some space combat. When a conflict situation arises, you issue the orders to your fleet, controlling the ships movement, formation, targeting or evasion. The targeting orders include attacking the closest, weakest, smallest or largest enemy ship. Orders are applied to one ship, a class of ships, or to the entire fleet. Once your orders are issued, the combat doesn't commence until you end your current turn.

During combat, you don't actually control the ships, but you watch them move and shoot at each other based on your earlier orders. You can tap a ship to see information about it, choose the playback speed or use a slider to move to any part of the battle you want to watch. Combat can span a number of turns and continues until all enemies are destroyed. Watching combat sounds boring, but it's actually interesting to watch the battles unfold and to see how they follow your instructions.

Since larger battles span multiple turns, you can adjust your orders during the battle, if you choose. You can also send in reinforcements, and if you've got a ally (2v2 multiplayer mode) they can come to your assistance, as space battles are not restricted to two empires. Combat is not your only option for foreign relations, as you can build an agent training camp to produce spies. Your agents can sabotage other empires or use espionage to steal their technology.

Also, you can research to improve your own race's technology. A list of astrophysics, military, and civil projects are proposed, but it's your decision which proposals are funded. You might study weapons, a star-base, or perhaps a hydroponics center as you progress through the technology tree. If a proposed research project is unfunded, it turns yellow, then red in the list, before eventually expiring and being replaced by new research proposals. If you build a research center and add scientists, your research occurs faster.

Once you've determined your various strategies, you tap the 'turn' button to action your commands. Instead of each player taking turns in sequence, the time speeds up and it's only your turn again when an event occurs in your empire, such as research or a new building being completed, a ship reaching it's destination or your population starving to death because you thought robots didn't need food! This means the seemingly daunting 18-turns required to research hydroponics might actually occur within a couple of presses of the turn button. In single player mode you can exit this "turn compression" whenever you want, to issue new instructions sooner.

Like many strategy games, Starbase Orion has an initial learning curve. There's help pages for the screens, which are helpful, but they don't explain everything. I had trouble deleting programmed vessel movements and also discovered a worm-hole but had no idea how to view or use it, as it didn't show up anywhere (apparently you can enter it). The developer is already extending the in-game help and writing a players guide, plus our useful discussion thread answers questions and includes video footage and a tutorial which is recommended viewing for new players.

When selecting a huge universe with 3 enemies and impossible difficulty, the turns were significantly slower, taking over a minute rather than seconds on an iPad 1, although most players would probably be selecting a smaller, less complicated galaxy which is far more responsive. And if you're playing asynchronous multiplayer, the impact of these delays would be less noticeable.

Starbase Orion has an "epic-feeling" as you strive to expand your empire across the galaxy. There's several facets to this game, as described above, but the interface pulls it all together nicely, so everything is easy to find. Once the help screens are expanded and a user guide produced, this will be a solid game from Chimera Software. However, the true measure of this new game's success won't be known until more people have had time to play the multiplayer modes.

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Like most, I think of myself as a reasonably intelligent person. I'm no genius, but I'd like to believe I've got a few brain cells to rub together. SpaceChem Mobile [$5.99], a puzzle game that's just made its way from PC to iPad, shakes my confidence about my own intelligence — and then it leaves me feeling brilliant, just moments later.

Zachtronics Industries' puzzler hit the PC indie scene earlier this year, wowing critics and players alike. I tell you this to keep you reading, because the other shoe is about to drop: this is a game about chemical synthesis. And it's not some sort of dolled up, sexy chemical synthesis. This game puts players to work creating chemical products from their raw elements in the simplest terms possible. You'll be bonding one chemical symbol to another, creating workflows out of color coded paths to move them along. And you'll (probably) love it.

I say "probably," because SpaceChem isn't for everyone. You'll need a heavy dose of curiosity and creativity, plenty of patience and just a dash of masochism. But if you're still reading this review after seeing the screenshots and learning what it's about, I'm pretty sure you'll love this game.

As mentioned, SpaceChem is all about chemical synthesis. You're responsible for turning elements and compounds into the required chemical products, and then mass producing them. At the game's most basic, a level requires you to bring in two elements, bond them together and output the correct compound. To facilitate this process, you have a pair of red and blue waldos, remote manipulators that will follow the paths you lay down and the commands you place in that path. You create the program, and they'll follow through, red on red, blue on blue.

From that simple input/output beginning you'll learn to break and create bonds, combine and discard the fruits of multiple reactors and set up conditional commands. The outputs get more and more complicated, but the game largely lets you muddle your way through unassisted. Aside from introducing you to each new command with a tutorial screen, you'll be left on your own to work through each level. This left me hitting my head on any number of walls while I worked my way through, but there are few feelings as good as finally solving a tricky level and watching your quota fill up.

Each time you get that thrill, though, there's another level waiting to defeat you. There over 40 levels to work through in the main campaign, and most leave you longing for the comfort of your last completed level. Once you're through those, there are well over 100 more puzzles available in ResearchNet with more to come. These are community created and carefully curated, and yes, you can contribute your own assignments as well.

One of the coolest things about SpaceChem is that each level has a near-endless number of potential solutions. Each solution you come up with is ranked against the community, so you'll know if you could have done better, with fewer cycles spent or symbols used. Then you can go back and increase your efficiency. If you're so inclined, you can also see what players from the desktop version have done by visiting SolutionNet. It's cheating, a bit, but it's also extremely educational to learn how efficiently other people are pulling these things off.

Playing SpaceChem feels like learning a new skill. It's a slow education, but you can build on what you learn until you no longer feel like you need to start each challenge from scratch. The light-bulb moments are frequent and motivating. This game should feel like work, but it's insanely fun.

Unfortunately, the iPad version is missing a little bit of the desktop version: namely, the story and boss battles. The boss battles didn't work with the iPad's setup, and the story had to be chucked without them. So if you can't bear to go without, you might want to consider making your purchase on desktop. But everything else about this port is top notch. After an early patch the interface works beautifully on the touch screen. The music is fantastic, and, for what it's worth, the game looks as good as it could on any desktop monitor.

SpaceChem is an easy purchase to recommend. It's not as if I can tell you to buy it if you're into puzzle games about creating workflows for chemical synthesis — you're looking at a rare breed. If any part of you thinks you might be interested in such a thing, then congratulations, you're the target market. Play SpaceChem. If you don't, you're depriving yourself of one of the smartest, coolest puzzle games around. Why would you want to go and do a thing like that?

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Free-to-play and I don’t get along too well. If it’s not the embedded ads turning me off, it’s the oddball paid power-ups and the off-kilter balance and experience boosters. In the worst cases, it's the lack of fun because a developer pulled it out  and made it a paid feature to sponge revenue. I’d rather just pay up-front and get the entire experience from the get-go. It saves me time and frustration.

Steambirds: Survival makes F2P an exceedingly easy pill to swallow. It looks sharp, it seems to function just fine on a mechanical level, and its fun without needing to immediately pump money into it. In the early going of our preview build, at least, it appears to have all the functionality and fleshiness of a paid game, minus the paid part. This is what this new-age of free-to-play is supposed to look like, right?

I don’t think fans of Steambirds [$1.99 / HD] are going to be disappointed or overjoyed with what’s going on in Survival — it’s essentially the same game with free-to-play currency bolted on. Just like in the original, it’s a turn-based 2D strategy game that revolves positioning the gun-equipped side of your plane in smart firing positions. What makes this particularly engaging is the fact that you need to account for enemy movements before your own. The more enemies, the finer the strategy gets, even though there’s all sorts of explosive power-ups that give you a slight edge in confrontations.

It might just be me, but I love this kind of ramped back and dry action experience. I get the same kind of enjoyment from meticulous placement and observation in Survival as I do in a more intellectual puzzle-y type game.

We’ve been told that Survival has 64 different missions and while that’s probably true, the first handful look, feel, and play pretty similar. This is natural issue since Survival is primarily a wave-based “go get the enemies” type of title and all, but the same-yness makes me wonder where the legs are if it has any at all. I think the core mechanics are good enough to keep people interested in bursts, but beyond that?

You know, maybe the legs are in the currency. As you play, you earn coins that you can then turn and use to unlock new aircraft, recruit AI pilots to join you, and buy new levels. You can, of course, buy these coins with real cash, as well as pay to unlock all the levels in the game and disable its atrocious ads. Considering the prices on this stuff, it appears as though it'll take some time to unlock everything.

Survival is coming pretty soon, so we’ll give the full build a good look and probably report back to you on what it has in store. Based on what I’m seeing now, though, Survival seems to be a friendly F2P title that doesn’t dole out the fun part in exchange for money, and that is a pretty big deal in my book. Oh! And the game part is pretty hip.

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While Apple keynotes themselves are always a lot of fun, I actually almost like the day immediately before the keynote more. Speculation on what's coming reaches a climax, and all you've got to do is wait a day to see who was right and who was wrong. MacRumors provides a rundown of possibilities from the hardware lineup, and subsequent rumors make an iPhone 4S seem even more reasonable as more and more vague leaks of "iPhone 4S" branding appear. Following case leaks and a few other shaky rumors, there hasn't been a very strong indication that the redesigned iPhone 5 is coming at all– At least not yet.

Regardless of what the new iPhone looks like, the addition of the A5 processor should make the iPhone 5 (or 4S) a pocket-sized power-house. Anandtech recently posted a set of benchmarks of mobile GPU's, and the GPU in the iPad 2 is still blowing the doors off the competition:

The rumor mill seems to be in agreement that the "main" feature to be touted at this keynote will be an entire new voice-powered "Assistant." Check out a demo video that MacRumors compiled based on rumors of how it will work:

9to5Mac has an interview with the co-founder of Siri, the company who is believed to be behind this new technology, who has the following to say:

Make no mistake: Apple’s ‘mainstreaming’ Artificial Intelligence in the form of a Virtual Personal Assistant is a groundbreaking event. I’d go so far as to say it is a World-Changing event. Right now a few people dabble in partial AI enabled apps like Google Voice Actions, Vlingo or Nuance Go. Siri was many iterations ahead of these technologies, or at least it was two years ago. This is REAL AI with REAL market use. If the rumors are true, Apple will enable millions upon millions of people to interact with machines with natural language. The PAL will get things done and this is only the tip of the iceberg. We’re talking another technology revolution. A new computing paradigm shift.

So here comes the fun part, what do you think is going to come of tomorrow's keynote? A spec-bumped iPhone 4S? A surprise reveal of an entirely new iPhone 5? New iOS 5 features that haven't been revealed yet like Assistant? New iPod touches to coincide with the iPhone launch? Or will something come out of left field like the iPad 3 with Retina Display, or a million other things that could potentially happen that Apple managed to keep a total secret?

Personally, I think the iPhone 4S is happening but I just can't shake the thoughts of the potential redesign. I'm not sure how credible the weird case "leaks" we've seen are, but the rumored redesign appearing in an Apple app I just can't rationalize in any way other than a design like that is coming. What reason could Apple, a company who historically has put immense importance on a refined user experience place that icon in their own apps? It just doesn't make sense!

I guess we'll find out tomorrow, but, in the time being, we can let our speculation run wild– At least for another 24 hours or so.

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