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Late last week The New York Times published an op-ed debate titled, “Hip, or About to Break a Hip,” a discussion about whether 45 year-old skaters are “embarrassing and risky or inspiring and life-affirming?” Opinions ranged from “inspiring and life-affirming,” to “… do something productive: become an ultimate fighter, get your G.E.D., date an 18-year old.” Um, wow, guys.

Appropriate then is the release of Brisbane-based IV Motion’s Penny Time [$0.99 / Free ], which flies in the face of that rather unnecessary conversation. Shorn of the skating genre’s mechanical trappings, the game is allowed to focus on the sport’s anarchistic roots. Its reply, “Who gives a #$%*?”

Penny Time announces its care-free absurdity with a series of vignettes that see the player character using a Penny skateboard, crashed like a meteorite from the heavens, to freeze time and subsequently summon some spirit animals in the form of a pig, dodo and porpoise. Right. So, the player is off on his or her quest to skate through a series of time-frozen environments with the aid of the aforementioned Ghost Dodo.

Play is similar to rhythm runners like Tomena Sanner [ $1.99 ] and Bit.Trip Runner. The player proceeds left to right, clearing obstacles by swiping when rolling over a series of white (up), blue (left) and yellow (down) targets. Levels consist of three sections: a standard area where one acquires points based on timing of swipes, a multiplier section, and then a “cash-in” portion where the player is given the opportunity to bank their multiplied points, or take them on into the next area and risk bailing and losing the combo.

Touch controls are a little dodgy. There are a handful of times each run where I go flipping over a guardrail or a child or something because the game’s missed my inputs. This is sometimes exacerbated not only by how unforgiving the game can be (I’ve often hit my trick on the periphery of a target only to tumble into a sad pile), but by the minimalism of the flat, untextured 3D models. It borders on gorgeous abstraction in the vein of a Katamari Damacy, but the environments are so busy it’s often difficult to tell exactly what’s ahead. Case in point, during a particularly funny intro I held the iPhone up for my girlfriend, sitting behind me on the couch, who responded, “I can’t see… it just looks like a bunch of shapes.” Indeed.

That in mind, I’m not sure that it’s going to have much of a following among the leaderboard junkies. But, in addition to Game Center leaderboards, the game has a bevy of character and board customization options, along with the requisite Facebook and Twitter support, 84 achievements and a fantastic OST.

A rhythm game lives or dies by the quality of its tunes, and electronic artist and fellow Brisbanite Hunz has crafted a score among the best on the platform. A warm, varied slice of electronica, it’s up there with the Groove Coaster [ $2.99 ] and Beat Sneak Bandit [ $2.99 ] soundtracks, well worth the dollar the game costs. It’s a trump card that staves off mediocrity in what is otherwise an “okay” game, an intelligent pairing that propelled me along on my quest to count the black cats littering the next area. Note: this game has its share of black cats.

With a smart few stylistic choices, IV Motion have made a fine if sometimes frustrating little game, worth the low price of entry. Like the skateboard brand it advertises, it is “designed and built to look good, perform well, and exceed your expectations.” A little rougher around the edges maybe, but a ridiculous, ageless thing that can be enjoyed by anyone. And that’s okay.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Season finales are undeniably difficult to pull off: they need to pull the disparate plots of the story together in a way that feels satisfying but not hackneyed, while still maintaining a sense of self-contained narrative. A serialized game like Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space carries the added weight of presenting us with the highest expression of the puzzles and mechanics its introduced thus far.

I’ve come to realize that the second half of Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space — say, starting with “Night of the Raving Dead,” [$4.99] and continuing through the finale, “What’s New Beelzebub?” [$4.99] — are funnier and generally better than the first two episodes. This is largely because the last three episodes are more tightly connected, with each cliffhanger transitioning smoothly into the next episode. They feel cohesive, and that makes me feel invested.

But it’s also because, in contrast to the procedural feel of the first two entries in the series “Ice Station Santa” and “Moai Better Blues,” these latter episodes are a perfect fit for the point-and-click adventure genre.

“Beelzebub”’s only narrative blunder comes during the series’ antagonists’ big reveal, which is funny enough on its own, but is probably much better if you’ve played Sam & Max Save the World as well. (This is a recurring problem for Beyond Time and Space as a whole, especially since Save the World isn’t available on the App Store.) Every thing else in “Beelzebub”  – every piece of dialogue, every joke, every plot twist, every fan-service callback — feels earned, not only because it has the rest of the series supporting it, but also because the audience has had to work for it.

Steve Purcell’s writing doesn’t waste time with exposition or lengthy explanations, and players who haven’t been paying attention since “Ice Station Santa” probably won’t make sense of each villain’s plans or of the haphazard and absurd sequence of events that lead up to “Beelzebub.” The jokes, the dialogue, and even the over-arching plot of the series come tumbling out, rapid-fire, and only the quick-witted and observant will get much out of it. Beyond Time and Space hedges its bets, of course: even if you miss something ostensibly important, the games are light-hearted and silly enough to keep moving forward. Nevertheless, Sam & Max hews to point-and-click mechanics that prize attentiveness and lateral thinking, and “Beelzebub,” more than any other episode in the series provides a narrative structure and presentation to match.

Beyond Time and Space is at its best deconstructing horror tropes and, while I liked the time travel puzzles from “Chariots of the Dogs [$4.99],” “Beelzebub” and “Raving Dead” have the best settings and ambiance. The finale tasks the Freelance Police with scrambling between the well-worn block near their office, caught in the middle of the apocalypse, and a snarky, tongue-in-cheek version of Fortune 500 Hell. It’s clever and atmospheric, and it drives the games most interesting puzzles, which involve attempting to disrupt Hell’s operations long enough to free some damned souls.

“Beelzebub”’s narrative hook literalizes an abstract idea like the afterlife and reduces it to another explorable screen to interact with. In other words, there’s no difference between Hell and the “real” world for Sam and Max, in the same way that there’s no difference between 1967 and 2008, or between being alive and being a zombie. It’s right there in the title: Beyond Time and Space. Without intellectualizing too much, that’s a pretty sophisticated concept, but Sam & Max is charming and self-aware enough to keep it in check. Purcell doesn’t let metaphysics get in the way of Max’ fart humor, and the result is a series that allows for outlandish puzzles and silly in-game logic without sacrificing pithy dialogue or character interaction. It’s also why, for example, one of “Beelzebub”’s puzzles can call for the death of Jimmy Two-Teeth’s entire family, and no one really has to feel bad about it.

There’s a lot to admire about the way “Beelzebub” illuminates and caps off the various narrative and thematic threads running through a five-game series, but its puzzles generally lack punch, an unfortunate side-effect of following the preternaturally clever “Chariots of the Dogs.” Over the course of Beyond Time and Space, the best puzzles have challenged our perception of the game world, mutating and iterating on inventory-based puzzle design with portals, zombies, and time travel. “Beelzebub” has a few standout puzzles, including a fourth-wall-breaking language trick, but is generally less ambitious in its design than previous titles.

Telltale is, as a rule, well-versed in designing accessible, intuitive puzzle games and “Beelzebub” is generally no exception, despite featuring a few textbook examples of adventure game pratfalls: guess-what-the-developer-is-thinking crops up once or twice, as do scenarios that require thorough, exhaustive clicking and hunting instead of puzzle-solving. “Beelzebub”’s occasional clunkiness is somewhat mitigated by a retroactive appreciation of the funny in-game logic, but that’s to substitute for the thrill that accompanies solving Sam & Max‘ best puzzles.

While “Beelzebub” lacks the unified theme of “Chariots of the Dogs,” it’s no slouch. A few missteps aside, the puzzles — while of the traditional match-this-item-with-this-NPC sort — are clever and well-realized, even if they tend to be a little on the nose. It’s still one of the best in the series, funnier than “Moai Better Blues” and with clearer puzzle design than “Raving Dead.” If you haven’t played any of Sam & Max Beyond Time and Space, now’s a good time to start: “What’s New Beelzebub” is a fine capstone to a great series.

TouchArcade Rating:

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On paper, Radiant Defense [Free] doesn’t stack up when compared to other tower defense titles. It shouldn’t be as good as it is. I mean, it only has ten levels, and its free-to-play model gives you just a handful of towers to work with unless you want to pay more. But Hexage is full of surprises, and this free tower defense game is certainly one of them. It might not work on paper, but it sure works in practice.

All too often, freemium titles either lock all the fun behind a paywall or let you skip right over the gameplay if you put down your money. Radiant Defense does neither. I can’t say for sure that you can get through all ten levels without making a purchase. I couldn’t, because Radiant Defense is crazy hard. Buying any (or all) of the four optional tower packs gives you more room to strategize, but it just barely makes the game easier. Paid or free, you’re going to have to get your hands dirty.

Radiant Defense offers a mix between static path defense and the ability to create complex mazes. Players are often handed a few loose modules between waves. These can be used to build walls. Sometimes this is advantageous—drawing enemies out along long, winding paths is a good way to make sure they die well before reaching their goal. Other times it’s suicidal. Some enemies regenerate, so luring them away from your carefully crafted kill zone just means they’ll continue on, fresh and ready for more.

The tower selection adapts to any situation the game throws at you. You start out with the ability to build or research ballistic weapons for pure damage, energy weapons to take out shields, and the other usual suspects—towers that slow or weaken the enemies, and powerful area-of-effect towers. The purchasable packs add variety, with mines and blades to bar passage, weapons of mass destruction, and a few things that are just plain odd. Each has its own cost and drawbacks, though, making for a decently balanced experience no matter how many (or few) packs you own.

That balance falls on the side of intensely challenging throughout. Radiant Defense is unforgiving, with brutally long levels (making up for their limited selection) and increasingly aggressive waves. The game never lets up—every time you think you might have a handle on all the tricks you’ll need, it throws even more enemies at you in even more aggressive combinations. It can be aggravating, but it makes winning all the sweeter.

Not every part of the challenge is as sweet, unfortunately. The worst bit is dealing with frustrating tower AI. Towers will happily shoot the first thing that crosses their paths, blithely ignoring targets that are about to hit the goal. This behavior is consistent, so you can plan for it. It might even be intentional—it certainly gives players a reason not to use tight corridors to their advantage each and every time. But as difficulty goes, this isn’t the fun sort. It can leave you floundering moments after you’re sure you have everything under control.

There are concessions to this frustration, though. Each wave can be restarted as many times as you need without penalty, so you’re free to experiment with the best possible moves you can make with the resources you have. Anything you do before beginning the wave will stick, though, and while you can sell back unused towers at cost, upgrades can’t really be reversed. Your strategy may hinge on what seems like a simple decision: whether to spend your cash in the lull between waves or save it for the madness in the midst of combat. The latter is easier to revert but much harder to pull off.

That sort of decision-making drives the strategy of Radiant Defense. It’s rarely just a matter of this tower or that tower. Instead you’re balancing upgrades, positioning, and pathing, all while you decide if you should meet the current threat with force or save up for an unknown future.

If you’re comfortable with difficult games, Radiant Defense is easily worth the download. It’s a nice little package—decent art and music wrapped around generally excellent gameplay—and the price is more than right. It’s refreshing to find a game that respects your intelligence, money, and time. All the better that it’s good fun, too. Take a look, and stop by our discussion thread to share your thoughts.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Tentacle Wars HD [ $2.99 (HD)], the new title from FDG Entertainment, is a port of the online Flash game of the same name by Lumarama. It’s a fast-paced iPad strategy game that reminds me a lot of Galcon [$1.99 / Free ], another iOS strategy game from 2008. In fact, I’d go as far as to say it’s “Galcon with tentacles” …along with superior graphics, ambient music and better sound effects.

Playing Tentacle Wars is like being a general overlooking a battlefield. Although in this case the battlefield exists inside the body of an alien life-form. The battles are between antibodies, spores, pulsars and embryos. Each cell can use DNA energy tentacles to attack each other. If your green antibody cells can turn all the other cells green, you’ve cured the zone. Once you clear all the zones, you’ve saved the alien life-form.

To launch an attack, you swipe a line from your green cell to any other cell in range. The more powerful your cell (as indicated by a number inside it), the further it’s tentacles can extend. You can target a red cell (enemy) to engage in battle, target a neutral grey cell to claim it, or target one of your own cells to transfer energy to where it’s needed.

The battles are based on a simple premise: The more powerful cell(s) always win, every time. So if your cell has a weaker strength it will slowly be drained until it’s defeated. But, if you attack the same opponent with tentacles from another cell simultaneously, you can defeat it, because your two cells are collectively more powerful. So, as in real war, choosing your targets carefully (but quickly) is important.

Once your tentacle has latched on to another cell, you can either remain connected to slowly drain it or swipe across your tentacle to cut it. Interestingly, it makes a difference where you sever your tentacle. So, if you slice it right in the middle, half the resources return to the attacking cell and the other half do a rapid attack-burst (ie: a 50-50 split). Whereas, if you cut your tentacle right at one end, all the resources in the tentacle will quickly retreat or attack, depending which end you slice.

To add variation, there’s impenetrable barriers within some levels, purple cells with superior intelligence to overcome, and limits for how powerful a single cell can become within each level. Each cell type also has a limit to the number of tentacles it can extend at one. These factors, plus some interesting level designs, encourage you to modify your strategies to suit each level.

The single player campaign (2 worlds, 40 levels total) is entertaining and satisfying, but far too short. By the time you’re settling in, the single player campaign is over. Additional levels are promised – but randomly-generated levels would be better. Lastly, the campaigns are rather anti-climatic once you complete each world, as nothing really happens, except a small note in the corner of the iPad screen confirming a Game Center achievement.

Multiplayer mode offers two-player online action via a random match-up or by challenging a friend, via Game Center. Choose an arena and color, then engage in a microscopic war ….and in my case, get totally owned by superior players. The online play worked flawlessly once started, but it was often unable or slow to complete a random match-up. That isn’t ideal since the single player mode is completed so quickly, but isn’t a problem if you’re playing friends online.

Tentacle Wars blends strategic gameplay with arcade-style swipes and cuts to create a fast-paced strategy game that’s ideally suited for touch screens. The game is similar to Galcon, but has enough innovation to feel fresh and new. Yet, it needs more levels and online players, otherwise the fun feels as if it’s over too quickly. According to our discussion thread, an iPhone/iPod touch version is expected around May or June.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Sega’s Phantasy Star Online 2 won’t cost you a dollar — unless you’d like an item or two. Sega has announced that the upcoming sequel to the everyone’s favorite “light” MMO, Phantasy Star Online, will roll with the standard MMO free-to-play model, and charge users for select item transactions from its in-game store. Also, an iOS and Android version has been confirmed. Both are slated to hit at some point in “winter 2012,” according to Andriasang.

Keep your expectations in check, though: Sega has said that the phone versions of the game are simpler and will feature “social game elements,” on top of a basic character creation mechanism, and controls. These versions will be able to loosely communicate with the PC and Vita versions of the game, but the experiences won’t had across these platforms won’t be measuring up to each other.

Images via Andriasang.

The available intel on PSO2 still isn’t fantastic, as it seems like Sega is keeping its marketing efforts for the game contained to other regions. However, we do know that PSO2 will continue to offer the franchises’ specific blend of shooter-meets-brawler combat and offer instanced-based content. Oh, and Mags are totally coming back!

Footage of the Vita version.

[via Andriasang]

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Let’s wind the clocks back to 2009, as really, to appreciate what Angry Birds has become, I think we need to go back and appreciate what Angry Birds was. The App Store was a crazy place. The “gold rush” was still in full effect. Publishers like Chillingo were trying to stake as large of a claim as possible in this brave new world brought about by the impulse-powered instant gratification of downloading a 99¢ game and the exploding popularity of the iPhone.

Chillingo was incredibly successful in pooling together a library of games we called “AAA titles” at the time. iDracula [ $2.99 ] may look incredibly archaic by today’s standards, but back then, it was among the cream of the crop. In late May, Chillingo spun off a new brand called Clickgamer.com, which per the original press release was intended to “carry casual games and software applications in the Apple App Store. This new brand will fully complement Chillingo’s existing catalogue of AAA innovative titles.”

Clickgamer.com’s aisle in the App Store was (and still is) an odd assortment of ultra-casual games and apps ranging from the SAT Vocabulary Builder [ $1.99 ] to sliding block puzzle games like Pic n’ Mix [ $0.99 ]. Reading between the lines of Chillingo’s own distinction between the AAA Chillingo and Clickgamer.com brands, it wasn’t difficult to see why Angry Birds [ $0.99 ] was relegated to the non-AAA Clickgamer.com brand when it launched, as the late-2009 1.0 version of the game really wasn’t anything that special. Or, as we mention in our original review which almost seems laughable now:

When you see a game with a name as nondescript as Angry Birds, it’s pretty hard to get excited. Even after playing through the first few levels, I was enjoying this game, but failing to see the real appeal.

The original release had a barebones array of birds, 63 levels, no leaderboards, no achievements, and no, really… anything else. Angry Birds wouldn’t even strike it big until months later in early 2010, when Chillingo announced that the game had been downloaded over half a million times. Whether that sales surge was a result of Chillingo’s marketing prowess or creative consulting as a publisher or the product of Rovio’s hard work seems to be a matter of perspective, and the answer to that question depends more on who you ask. Regardless, Angry Birds has yet to let go of a position on the top ten iTunes sales charts.

The Angry Birds kingdom expanded into the Angry Birds empire with the self-published release of both Angry Birds Seasons [ $0.99 ] and Angry Birds Rio [ $0.99 ] over the next couple of years. Since then, Rovio has grown further yet, and now days it’s difficult to find a platform that doesn’t have Angry Birds on it as the brand has made its way to the browser, smart TV’s, and even feature phones being sold in emerging markets. Think about that. People in African countries rocking series 40 Nokia phones have Angry Birds.

Despite Rovio’s unprecedented levels of success, recently it has been hard to dispute the argument that the Angry Birds formula might be getting a little stale. I’ve always been excited to play through the levels added in new updates, but for a while now I’ve felt like I’m just going through the motions of figuring out the weak points in the pig defenses, launching a bird, collecting my three stars, and moving on. This lead to the inevitable question of what could Rovio do in a sequel to not only revitalize the brand to players who have grown bored, but also provide a big enough twist on gameplay to make it worth having a fourth installment in the series?

It turns out the answer was to head to space.

Angry Birds Space [$0.99 / $2.99 (HD)] is close enough to the rest of the Angry Birds family that anyone even vaguely familiar with the games will be able to hop right in. It features the same premise of flinging birds in a big slingshot into dastardly egg-stealing pigs, but this time, your shots are assisted by a dotted line coming off the front of the slingshot to make the aiming process a little more transparent. The boss battles from Rio even make an appearance.

It comes packed with the familiar family of birds, with some minor modifications. All of the birds got a cosmetic upgrade, with snazzy looking space outfits. More importantly, some of their functionality has changed. For instance, the new version of the yellow bird doesn’t just dash forward. Instead, tapping on the screen sends it homing in on that specific location, even allowing for complete trajectory changes in flight. The force exerted by the bomb bird seems to focus more on pushing things rather than destroying them, and a new freezing bird turns anything inside of its blast radius into ice, allowing for easy cleanup with blue birds.

The magic of Angry Birds Space comes from the physics tricks Rovio is able to pull off by leaning on the gravitational fields of the various planetoids that make up many of the levels. Birds shot into space fly straight as an arrow, as obviously, there isn’t any gravity to make them do anything differently. Gravity fields are indicated by faint blue halos, and completing each level (particularly with three stars) involves the intelligent mastery of both zero gravity as well as the (potentially) multiple gravitational pulls of the different planetoids that the pigs have set their forts up on.

This varying gravity system allows for some incredibly elaborate level design, including puzzle elements that would never have been possible with the “traditional” gravity model of previous Angry Birds titles. One early level that exhibits this in a particularly clever way involves the introduction of the bomb bird. Players are faced with a bunch of pigs hanging out and being smug on a gravity-rich planetoid.

There isn’t a clear shot to be had between the slingshot and the pigs themselves, as there are all sorts of asteroids littering the top half of the screen. Completing the level actually requires delicate use of the bomb birds to gently push the asteroids down into the gravity field, at which point they come smashing down on the pigs. Other levels involve shooting your birds to catch the rim of a gravity field, placing them in an orbit of sorts to slingshot around to hit an otherwise unreachable target.

The truly interesting thing that I’ve found is that this gravity mechanic has allowed for some incredibly creative ways to complete levels. The comparison may be a bit of a stretch, but in Scribblenauts Remix [ $0.99 ] the way to truly have fun in that game was to come up with the most absurd and imaginative solution to each puzzle. Sure, nearly every level can be solved by equipping yourself with some wings and a gun, but there’s just a certain sense of satisfaction to be had when you figured out how to somehow work Cthulhu into your solution. Similarly, while most levels in Angry Birds Space often have a fairly clear-cut solution, I’ve been having way more fun coming up with the most convoluted flight paths for my birds, with personal bonus points awarded for as many orbits as possible before expertly slamming whatever bird I fired into a pig.

Some other changes have been made to Angry Birds Space, namely, the addition of a new in-app purchase system. In previous games, the Mighty Eagle is a one time 99¢ purchase which allows you to skip one level every hour. The Mighty Eagle also adds an entirely new (although not necessarily immediately apparent) game mode where you can go back to previously completed levels and fire off the Mighty Eagle shooting for destroying everything on screen.

Unfortunately, now not only is the Mighty Eagle a consumable item, but it also doesn’t automatically skip a level. When you fire out the sardine can, the Mighty Eagle can totally miss, leaving whatever smug pigs are left on screen laughing at your failure. Additional Mighty Eagles are awarded in small quantities by just playing the game. Alternatively, 20 Mighty Eagle shots can be purchased for 99¢, with additional packs of Mighty Eagles ranging all the way up to 980 for $19.99.

Out the gate, Angry Birds Space comes loaded with two level packs: “Pig Bang” which serves as more of a tutorial for the new space-centric physics and “Cold Cuts” which introduces the new freezing bird. A third (very difficult) level pack entitled “Danger Zone” is available via a 99¢ unlock, and if you even find yourself vaguely enjoying the two included packs, the third one is basically required.

This raises the question of what is going to come of the future of Angry Birds updates, as the tea leaves of this IAP-unlocked level pack can be read in numerous ways. Angry Birds has been known by its seemingly never-ending stream of free content via updates, and I find it to be a little hard to believe that Rovio would put a stop to that with Angry Birds Space. My gut is telling me that future updates might follow a path of offering up a free pack and an optional ultra-difficult paid pack like “Danger Zone” for hardcore players… But, we’ll have to wait for the first update to land to know for sure.

If you’re playing on a new iPad, you’ll be happy to know that the HD variety of Angry Birds Space comes with crisp Retina Display-friendly graphics. Neither the HD or standard versions are universal, so, having the optimal Angry Birds Space experience requires some App Store double dipping if you want to play on both your iPhone and iPad. Sadly, there still doesn’t seem to be any way to sync progress between versions of the game, so, in that regard, there isn’t much point in buying it twice anyway.

Angry Birds is the unlikely candidate with meager beginnings that somehow managed to redefine both mobile gaming and the levels of financial success that are possible in the mobile space. The brand is known worldwide, and the series is enjoyed by everyone from hardcore gamers, to celebrities and athletes, to my own father who couldn’t possibly be more of a non-gamer. Angry Birds is the Super Mario Brothers of mobile devices, and Angry Birds Space is so successful in redefining the Angry Birds formula that everyone should give it a try.

TouchArcade Rating:

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There are many ways to envision Mars. It could be a barren world, perhaps host to life once but certainly no longer. It could be a thing out of science fiction, teeming with hostile life we haven’t yet met. Or it could be the future of our species, our best hope to leave a planet growing ever-smaller.

Tiger Style imagines a future that brings us to Mars to discover the truth. As the developers of Spider, The Secret of Bryce Manor [$2.99], the company has a lot to live up to, but they don’t falter. In creating Waking Mars [$4.99], they have crafted another game built around storytelling. It is a brave game, one that is willing to think the best of us: that we could discover new life and seek to learn from it, not exploit it.

Liang, the star of the piece, is a Chinese astrobiologist who is part of a tiny team responsible for researching the red planet. This is done from a safe distance, with the help of rovers and computers. When the rover goes missing, it’s up to Liang to recover it.

This means descending into Lethe Cavern, a Martian cave system that has only barely been explored. What should be a brief jetpack jaunt becomes an incredible journey. Liang encounters the Zoa, and begins to bring Mars to life.

The Zoa are Martian lifeforms, essentially plants. Tiger Style has researched and weighed every aspect of the Zoa ecosystem: each plant has its own dietary needs, soil pH requirements, vulnerabilities and biomass. Each contributes to the system in some way: one’s seeds feed another, one releases spores that prepare the soil of others, one predatorily dines on lesser types. A careful balance is required at all times.

The caverns are protected by cerebranes, Zoa that react to nearby biomass. Just as many plants need to be pollinated or processed by other species to reproduce, the Zoa need Liang’s help, and the cerebranes ensure he must give it. By raising the biomass in each cave, he can keep progressing deeper.

In practice, this means collecting seeds and planting them appropriately. ART, Liang’s A.I. companion, keeps track of biomass, tracking it with a five star system. Three is often enough to pass through a cavern, but five is better for reasons that will become clear as you play.

As Liang travels deeper into the caves, a larger story unfolds. It’s the story of the Zoa, and of Mars. It is not the story of Liang. He is stoic, quiet. He rarely discusses his own experiences. He is here to learn, to explore, and to complete his mission.

Aside from ART’s occasional interjections, Liang has one more companion: Amani. She stays back at Base Camp, reaching out to Liang with encouragement and information.

If I have one complaint about Waking Mars, it is this: Amani’s portraits don’t feel appropriate. Where the art is otherwise excellent, Amani’s is bold and out of place. Her portraits look a little too much like a series of stock photos. This is a small problem, but a jarring one.

But Amani herself is a welcome distraction. Early in the game, ART and Amani interrupt Liang’s journey near-constantly, walking him through all the basics. As time passes, they pop in less and less. The solitude of the caverns is a wonderful thing, enhanced by the game’s gorgeous soundtrack, but it’s also lonely in there, deep below the surface of Mars. On those occasions when Amani’s signals break through, it usually begins a much-needed moment of human connection.

Otherwise, Liang is alone with the Zoa, working to build enough biomass to continue his journey. Each discovery he makes is noted in a research journal, each cave he visits is marked on a map. The only thing left to remember is the composition of each cave. At first, resources are plentiful. Later, you’ll need to revisit caves to find the seeds you need. 

Waking Mars is never truly difficult. Some of the Zoa are carnivorous and must be avoided, but there’s no real penalty to letting Liang’s health drop. Similarly, some of the Zoa are very vulnerable, and can be killed. Keeping them alive is rarely completely necessary, however, as most caverns can eventually be brute-forced into growing sufficiently with enough persistence.

In place of difficulty, Waking Mars has intelligence. A clever game, it pushes players to contemplate its mysteries while they solve its smaller puzzles of ecosystem and biomass. Most of your questions will be answered by the time the curtain falls; in fact, I’d consider this one of the most satisfying gaming experiences I’ve had on this platform. Most of that satisfaction is down to the story and its presentation.

In the end, you’ll be left to decide the fate of the Zoa. Though the story can play out in multiple ways, there isn’t a wrong answer among them. You can always reload your final save to try things out differently. This is a blessing, one that lets you find every answer before putting the game down for the last time. This isn’t a game that will stand up to being replayed for most people, but at 6 to 10 hours it should provide entertainment enough.

Waking Mars has everything: a compelling story, beautiful environments, a gorgeous soundtrack and gameplay worth playing. Though it is, in some ways, less risky than Tiger Style’s last game (though I’d argue a game about a Chinese astrobiologist studying Martian botany is not completely risk free), it’s a worthy successor. Spider was an amazing experiment in storytelling; Waking Mars raises the bar on quality in long-form iOS games. Neither should be missed under any circumstances. Get this game. Whether you adore it as I do or not, it’s worth experiencing.

TouchArcade Rating:

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I created my Yelp profile in early 2010. I’d used the site for years before then, but for whatever reason, I didn’t feel compelled to start writing reviews until a few years ago. Yelp, in the off chance you’ve never heard of it, is a massive community-driven site which primarily focuses on offering honest customer reviews for all sorts of businesses. It’s equally useful to find a place to get lunch, somewhere to get your hair cut, a cool shoe store, or a million other things. Taking a step back, there’s tons of similarities between Yelp and the App Store, but Yelp does two things that make a massive difference.

Just like how you can find listings for anything from a roller-skate repair shop to a studio to learn fencing, you can equally come up with just about anything on the App Store. Both feature an insurmountable amount of content that’s hard to even imagine, and both Yelp and the App Store orbit around an equally important customer review system. Sure, sites like ours provide a more “official” venue for long-form reviews, just like a proper newspaper columnist would offer restaurant reviews, but I’d argue that a platform for legitimate customer reviews is just as useful.

“Legitimate” being the key word here. Developers on our forums have encouraged players to leave reviews for their games since, well, the birth of the review system. This sort of vague motivation generally results in reviews which I’d describe as both thoughtful and extremely useful for fellow App Store shoppers. Whether the particular review has a positive or negative slant usually doesn’t matter, as people who are leaving reviews just for the sake of leaving reviews often form at least a semi-intelligent argument for why you should (or shouldn’t) download something.

Then two things started happening.

Developers started putting these sorts of annoying pop-ups in game, interrupting gameplay to pressure players into leaving a review. Also, they forged this strange ultimatum of sorts, dangling the potential promise of future updates in exchange for five star reviews. In my opinion, both of these things taint the entire review process to the point of bordering on complete uselessness.

If you’re already into the second world of Ragdoll Blaster 3 [99¢] and you get this confusing pop-up asking if you like the game, why would you tap “no”? So, you hit “yes,” but at this point your head isn’t in a “alright I’m going to sit down and write something useful” space, you’re thinking, “I just want to get back to the game.” Similarly, if you’ve got a game you even vaguely enjoy and you notice the all-too-common update text that mentions something along the lines of “your five star reviews keep updates coming!” you’re not leaving a review because you want to assist in the purchasing decisions of the iOS gaming community, you’re doing it because you like free stuff.

I can’t really fault developers for this behavior either. It’s difficult to keep your head above water on the App Store, especially when there’s only space on the top lists for around couple hundred apps/games to be even making a decent amount of money at a time. Deciding you’re going to take the moral high ground and not beg for reviews could make the difference between keeping the lights on in your studio or not.

So, anyway, switching gears back to Yelp, if you’ve used it at all you’ve likely noticed that nearly all reviews you come across are at least somewhat useful. You almost never see reviews like these on Yelp:

You might stumble across the occasional funny but vague review, or reviews that are as simple as “Try the tacos!” but I’d argue that both of those are more useful than “love it” or “hate it” with an accompaniment of one to five stars.

Yelp accomplishes this in two interesting ways.

First off, there’s a real motivation to build your own profile up on Yelp. They’ve done an outstanding job of making your Yelp profile something you’d link your friends to show them what sort of things you enjoy locally, or maybe places you went to on vacation. It features all the social networking tropes that make it feel like home, complete with a basic avatar system and space for superfluous personal details such as “favorite thing.” As a Yelp user, you don’t want to leave a useless review because the profile creates a feeling of ownership to your reviews, and provides a record of all the places you’ve been. Comparatively, this is about the closest thing you have on iTunes.

There’s no ownership to that page. No customization, and no reason at all why you’d ever link it to someone or include it on the links on the side of your blog, or anywhere else that you’d normally put links you care about. There’s more to it than that. Even with a profile, some people will just flat out never get invested enough into things to put forth that effort to produce good reviews. Similarly, automated review spammers don’t care at all that they can have an avatar. This is where the truly ingenious Yelp review filter comes in to play.

Check out this fantastic video which details how and why it works:

The crazy part about the Yelp review filter is it works so well you don’t even know it’s there. As mentioned, I’ve been using Yelp for years. Yelp explained how the filter worked around the same time I officially joined the site. I discovered that it existed only a few weeks ago when I noticed that I could solve a CAPTCHA at the bottom of a restaurant’s review listing. Doing so revealed reviews of the same caliber of App Store reviews, what have systematically been deemed worthless by the Yelp review filter.

Apple has the resources to make the App Store incredible, and make app reviews just as useful as Yelp reviews for a new restaurant. They’ve already dabbled in building a low-level social network inside of iTunes via the Ping music service. A similar feed or apps that friends of mine are buying (and hopefully reviewing) would be immensely useful. From there, you’re only an avatar, a tidy URL, and a few silly profile data points to having something that people would genuinely want to link people, and in the process, pour effort into maintaining beyond “★☆☆☆☆ sux” or “★★★★★ ownz”.

Genius for apps already exists, and provides great recommendations for things you should try based on your previous purchases. I can’t imagine it being much effort to massage that same algorithm into flagging drive-by low-content reviews from people who can’t be bothered to spend more than 10 seconds typing out a coherent thought, review bots up voting, or people mudslinging with one star reviews of apps/games they don’t like- Especially if it falls out of line with what this customer would typically enjoy per Genuis.

Can you even imagine how different the purchase experience would be on the App Store if reading customer reviews was closer to reading product reviews on Amazon? Comparatively, just think for a second how much a wild west style review system like the App Store currently has would completely ruin sites like Amazon, Yelp, and others that are dependent on honest and thoughtful customer reviews for purchase decisions.

And no, the “Was this review helpful?” system is not a solution. All that seems to have proven is that, in some strange way, the App Store hive mind believes that of the 11,546 reviews for the current version of Angry Birds, this is the most useful:

This is one of the best games I’ve ever played! Plus it extends your time on the toilet by a good 10 hours.”

I rest my case.

The Yelp system is by no means perfect. Yelp has been the the target of all sorts of accusations both from business owners and internet conspiracy theorists. However, the fact remains: When I read Yelp, I almost without fail genuinely feel like the reviews are useful to me. App Store reviews, on the other hand, generally just result in a whole series of face palms.

I’d love if that changed.

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Dodonpachi Blissful Death [$4.99] is a port of Cave’s 2002 arcade title Dodonpachi Dai Ou Jou, and is a direct prequel to their previous iOS effort Dodonpachi Resurrection [$7.99/Lite] (which also happens to be my favorite of the Cave iOS shooters, FYI).

Blissful Death is similar to its sequel at a basic level, but it lacks some of the complexity and strategy found in Resurrection. But, like Cave’s last release Bug Princess [$4.99/Lite], its simplicity is also its strong point for those who maybe aren’t hardcore bullet hell people or those who just like to blast the crap out of everything without much fuss.

If you’re familiar with other Cave titles then you should feel right at home with Blissful Death. You have 2 different ships to choose from, each with a normal cannon and a laser weapon to switch between while playing. There are also 3 different Elemental Dolls to attach to your ship, which augment its abilities to suit your play style. One doll gives you an increase in your regular shot damage and 3 bombs to start with. Another increases your laser weapon’s abilities, but you’ll start with just 2 bombs instead. The final doll powers up both your regular cannon and laser, but starts you with just 1 bomb.

The scoring system is always a big part of any Cave title, and again in Blissful Death this takes a more simplistic approach over previous iOS releases. Continuously shooting enemies builds a multiplier. Your laser isn’t as powerful as your cannon, but keeping it trained on enemies can keep your multiplier active. So intelligently switching between your cannon and laser is key in order to keep the multiplier increasing while the waves of enemies come pouring from the top of the screen.

Blissful Death plays pretty similarly to Dodonpachi Resurrection, and although it’s not quiet as complex it still has a good amount of strategic depth. One thing that’s very different from Resurrection however is the inability to cancel bullets. This automatically makes Blissful Death one of the more difficult Cave shooters, because you generally have to deal with everything that’s thrown your way without much help.

One of the things you can do to deal with that problem though is drop a bomb, which will clear the screen of any enemies and bullets, and by default will automatically detonate if you get hit by enemy fire and have at least 1 bomb in your reserve. You can also use your laser on enemies to increase a hyper meter, which when filled can trigger a powerful hyper shot that will blast through just about anything.

Dodonpachi Blissful Death is a really straightforward shooter. It doesn’t get too cute with itself and lets you get right into the thick of the action with a very small learning curve. Newbies should feel comfortable with one of the 4 difficulty settings, and veterans can go directly to the Hell difficulty and pick apart its nuances.

And of course, everybody is able to enjoy the trademark Cave style, with brilliant bullet patterns, excellent sprite-based visuals, interesting character designs, and a million things exploding on your screen at any given time. It has OpenFeint and Game Center if you want to get competitive with your achievements and leaderboards (though annoyingly, that awful OpenFeint News Feed is uglying up the title screen).

It really is just what you would expect – another solid Cave release. However, as good as all of their ports are, I can’t help but wish that Cave would come up with another built-for-iOS experience like Bug Panic! [$6.99/Lite]. Hopefully they can go that route again someday, but until then I have absolutely no problem buying ports of their catalog on iOS if they keep being as good as Dodonpachi Blissful Death. If you’re a “try before you buy” type, a lite version of the game should be released in the next day or so.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Sick of dual-stick shooters? Gunning down spaceships lost its shine? I hear that. But let me just say this: unless you’re really, truly, and utterly sick of the genre, you really shouldn’t miss Beat Hazard Ultra [$0.99], an outstanding music-generated shooter from Cold Beam Games.

It has a few problems – awkward menus, fiddly controls, limited music sources – but I can’t think of a more compelling reason to grab a pair of virtual sticks and let the bullets fly. This version is just about on par with its PC and PSN counterparts for a fraction of the price. There’s no better way to light up your screen with insane strobes of gorgeous color. Just mind the photosensitive seizure warning, because it’s not kidding around.

If you haven’t played the desktop or console versions, Beat Hazard Ultra might seem to stand out uncomfortably in the realm of dual stick shooters. There aren’t really any levels, the enemies don’t sport much variety, your ship isn’t at all interesting to look at—not a great package by traditional metrics. But the game’s beat detection and intense visuals easily make up for those deficiencies.

The soundtrack is your iTunes library (specifically your .mp3 files), a few included Internet radio stations or a handful of baked in tracks. If you can, bring in your own music—it makes the game so much more fun. Each time you play, the game builds a level around your song of choice. The music is monitored on three levels—the energy of a particular movement or verse decides the boss encounters and enemy waves that will appear, the beat creates the pulse and intensity of your weapons fire, and everything in between controls enemy numbers and movement and shot patterns.

Because this works so well, it’s hard to care that you’ll be seeing the same few enemy types and the same handful of bosses over and over again. Or possibly not seeing them—you can crank the intensity of the visuals up to 200%, and at max firepower you’ll hardly see what’s happening as your screen pulses with light and color. The intense visuals pulsing in time with your favorite tracks is something to experience.

The controls make this a little harder than it needs to be. There are several power-ups you can collect and use in Beat Hazard Ultra, bombs and homing missiles and the like, but the way they cluster around the joysticks on screen makes it kind of hard to trigger them. Single-stick modes avoids this, but it’s too uncontrollable for practical use. The floating joysticks are also an exercise in frustration—choose the fixed option for more control. For some of us, even the menus are weirdly awkward. If that describes you, then drag them, don’t tap them.

While I can manage higher scores and longer runs on other platforms, this version is just as fun. Running through songs, collecting multipliers and cash, and blowing up ships for high scores could get old, I suppose. Then you can switch to Survival or Boss Rush to change your focus, and increase the difficulty up to five steps from Easy to Suicidal. I’ve still got a long way to go to be able to survive a track on Suicidal, but the journey is worth it.

You want to be well rewarded for your time? Play on a high difficulty in a long-running mode. You’ll watch the experience bar fly up when you’re done, levelling you over and over. Each time you finish a run and level at least once you get to unlock a perk of your choice from a huge list. They focus on aggression, power-ups, scores or endurance, and you can upgrade each of them with virtual cash as you go. There’s strategy here: you can only equip a few perks even after you unlock the one that gives extra slots, so you have to choose them carefully before each attempt.

You might also want to curate your music collection carefully. I have no complaints about how the game handles its beat detection—it isn’t always obvious, but the changes between different songs are considerable (and consistent through replays). I do wish, however, that Beat Hazard Ultra was a bit more intelligent about managing play order. When you set up the game you can choose a particular song from a full list of your library, or you can play a random track. The non-standard modes go on for longer than a single song, though, and there’s no way to choose what will play after the first.

Thankfully, Beat Hazard Ultra is still fun with slow tracks. The best are the ones that vary their beats, since those are the levels that really get wild. Hard thumping bass might be more intense, but it can also get a little repetitive. My white whale is Girl Talk’s All Day – I figure I can top the Game Center leaderboard for songs 7 minutes and up if I can just master the full hour and eleven minutes of it. Unrealistic, maybe, but I’ll keep trying. I’m racking up a lot of achievements on the way.

I can’t think of many reasons anyone should pass this game up. If you truly loathe dual-stick shooters, there’s no escaping that Beat Hazard Ultra falls in that genre. If you hate music you should probably pass, and if you’re badly affected by full-screen strobing lights you’ll want to stay far, far away. Otherwise, it’s a heck of a game, gorgeous, challenging and long-lived in turn. I’ve hardly been able to put it down, and listening to music without the game just doesn’t feel as cool right now. Let us know what you think on the forums, but don’t miss this one. Your eyes deserve a little excitement, don’t you think?

TouchArcade Rating:

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