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Adult Swim's Robot Unicorn Attack [$2.99 / HD] has been somewhat of a cult classic, both on the iPhone and iPad as well as online with their free flash version of the game. The game follows a similar gameplay model to so many games that involve running to the right for as long as possible, with two distinct differences. First off, you play as a rainbow colored robotic unicorn, and secondly the entire game is set to Erasure's Always. Following the success of the first, today Adult Swim released Robot Unicorn Attack Heavy Metal Edition [99¢], a heavy metal reskin of the original.

Erasure is a thing of the past, in his place is Blind Guardian singing their epic metal ballad Battlefield. In addition, all the fanciful rainbows and the fantasy motif has been replaced with fire, brimstone, and pentagrams. Also, Instead of three dreams, you get three nightmares to score as high as you can before submitting your score online via OpenFeint.

It would have been cool if the Heavy Metal Edition would have been released as DLC for the original Robot Unicorn Attack so I didn't need to keep two seperate games on my phone to enjoy both modes, but at the launch price of 99¢, I can't complain too much. If you love Robot Unicorn Attack (and who doesn't?), you need the Heavy Metal Edition. It will bring the same stupid smile to your face as busting through purple stars while you bop your head to Always. Much like people in our forums, I hope Adult Swim keeps expanding the Robot Unicorn's adventures to other genres.

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It's hard to think of anything better for long time gamers from the 80s and 90s than iOS. Classic games from our childhood have been reborn on the iPhone platform, and another one appears to be on the way.

Tower Studios and Vivid Games, in association with The Bitmap Brothers, have announced the imminent release of Speedball 2 Evolution for the iPhone and iPad. The Bitmap Brothers were the original developers of Speedball, a popular Amiga sports game that was a cross between handball and ice hockey.

Here's a teaser video they released last week:

Only a few details are available and Vivid Games has posted in our forums about the upcoming launch.

We have been working very hard over the past few months to bring this classic title to modern systems in glory it deserves. Expect very Amiga experience!

The game will be released in 20th Anniversary of Speedball 2 Brutal Deluxe.

And yes – there will be multiplayer included + many more features added on a top of original game!

While an Xbox Live Arcade version of Speedball 2 was released in 2007, Vivid says they are "far from the XBLA version". A video of the Amiga version of Speedball 2 can be viewed here.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the announcement is that they report that Speedball 2 Evolution is just the first in a series of remakes of classic Bitmap Brothers games.

The Bitmap Brothers were also responsible for Xenon, Cadaver, Gods, Magic Pockets, and The Chaos Engine.

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Retro-inspired Fumes Stunt Racer arrived in the App Store this evening. The Stunt Car Racer inspired title just appeared for $1.99.

The game offers 15 different tracks as well as support for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch as well as Retina Display support. A full list of features include:

• Classic stunt racing action
• Fifteen tracks, ranging from Easy to Hard difficulty
• Controllable and rewarding driving physics
• Great racing atmosphere
• Polished and responsive Touch and Tilt driving controls
• OpenFeint integration for online leaderboards
• Universal binary supports iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch
• Retina Display support

We haven't had a chance to put the game through its paces yet, but readers can submit impressions on our forum.

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I must mention this in every post that has anything to do with single device iPad multiplayer, but two (or more) player games on the iPad are almost always universally awesome. Everything from elaborately crafted ports of board games like Small World [$6.99] to the simplest of games like Omium [99¢] are a ton of fun when played with another person. If for whatever reason you've disregarded my previous encouragement to try out two player gaming on the iPad, you really need to download any or all of VersusPad's free games. They're all fairly simple, but serve as an excellent example of just how well two player gaming works on the device.

Also, to make things a little more interesting, all of these games were developed in PhoneGap, a cross-platform development framework that allows developers to build their games in HTML and Javascript while still being able to take advantage of the core features of the device as a native app. If you're great with Javascript/CSS, but bad with C++, PhoneGap is a free open source way for you to get started building games and apps on the iPhone. Anyway, on to the games-

Ogs, Free [Gameplay Video] In this game, players dispatch creatures called "Ogs" to defend their own island and attack the opponent's island. A bar at the bottom of the screen slowly fills up, allowing you to deploy more advanced Ogs. The game is over when either player's island is destroyed.

The Roswell Game, Free [Gameplay Video] Up to four players at once buzz around the iPad collecting crystals using virtual joysticks situated in each corner of the screen. The game is over when one player collects 75 crystals.

City Bucks, Free [Gameplay Video] My favorite of the three, players place businesses on to an initially empty city grid to lure customers in to buy things. Earning money unlocks more expensive (and attractive) buildings. Monster attacks and disasters like meteor strikes spice gameplay up, and add an element of risk to saving up for one super-expensive business. I'd love to see this game concept fleshed out a little more, as it seems like it is on the verge of something really cool.

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Yesterday we made a post listing several titles that have gone on sale for a limited time. We wanted to pass along a heads-up on a few more sales and price drops for titles we think readers may enjoy.

Soosiz, Free Ahh, Soosiz. [ review ] Touch Foo's rotational 2D platformer is one of our very favorite iPhone games, and is one of the first titles to which we gave a five-star rating. Soosiz is a stylized cartoonish platformer that challenges your brain to keep up with all of its twists, turns, and inversions. It's incredibly well executed with excellent controls, has a ton of content and is a lot of fun. And it's free this weekend (regularly $1.99). There's no excuse for missing this one.

Need For Speed™ Undercover, $1.99 [ review ] Electronic Arts' Need for Speed Undercover (down from $4.99 for a limited time) is the studio's first iPhone release in their long-running racer series. It's a mission-based racer (as opposed to the "'round the track" variety) that puts you in the role of an undercover wheel man infiltrating a series of street racer / chop-shop gangs to try and bust an auto theft ring wide open. It's a very well-done title that, at the time of its release, was perhaps the most visually impressive game on the platform.

ROCK BAND, $4.99 [ review ] EA's Rock Band, which recently hit the 2000 downloadable song mark, is one of the most immersive rhythm games in the App Store. The game sets you behind a guitar, bass, or drum kit, or lets you take the lead vocals in playing through any of the myriad songs available through its in-game song store. The game features 32 free songs and offers Facebook integration to help jam with your friends. Rock Band is, for a limited time, down from $6.99.

Rogue Touch, $0.99 [ review ] ChronoSoft's Rogue Touch (normally $2.99) is an iPhone adaptation of Rogue, the classic dungeon crawler that dates back to 1980. It's highly faithful to the feel and mechanics of the well-loved early platform releases, but has expanded the game nicely. It's my personal favorite iPhone dungeon crawler and is one of our long-time favorites here at Touch Arcade.

Worms HD, $2.99 [ review (iPhone ver) ] First there was Worms for the iPhone [ link ], then came Worms HD for the iPad. Well, actually, first there was the Worms for the Amiga, which Team 17 released back in 1995. Whichever way you look at it, it's classic turn-based artillery action in the Scorched Earth vein. And the iPad version has been reduced in price, from $4.99.

2XL TROPHYLITE Rally, $0.99 [ post ] 2XL Games' 2XL TROPHYLITE Rally (down from $4.99) is a highly impressive looking desert rally racer featuring 15 different races, WiFi and Bluetooth multiplayer, multiple vehicle views, five control schemes, and leaderboards. The iPad version has also been reduced in price ( $7.99 down to $.99 ).

Enigmo, $0.99 Pangea is running a sale on all of its multiplayer titles, physics puzzler Enigmo (down from $2.99) being one of the three games affected. Starting its life as a Mac game, Enigmo is a physics puzzle game that was voted Best iPhone Game at WWDC in 2008. In the game you move various objects around the game board to direct water droplets to their destination. Levels start easy and get so hard you will be desperately searching Google for the solution.

Nanosaur 2, $0.99 Another Pangea multiplayer title on sale is Nanosaur 2 (down from $2.99). Also starting as a Mac game, Nanosaur 2 was ported to the iPhone in late 2008. It hasn’t aged very well compared to Pangea’s other games, but the premise of piloting a massive dinosaur from the future who is equipped with a massive arsenal of weaponry couldn’t get much more ridiculous and/or awesome.

Cro-Mag Rally, $0.99 [ review ] One of the early iPhone cart racers, Pangea's Cro-Mag Rally (down from $2.99) won the 2008 Best App Ever Award for Best Racing Game. Cro-Mag Rally puts you behind the wheel of a caveman's cart in a bid to cross the finish line first through nine different race tracks, using 11 different vehicles with nine types of power-ups there to help you. The multiplayer system was recently entirely rewritten to ease the auto-matching game process.

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We've been following the development of Aralon: Sword and Shadow for quite a while now. The game actually has an incredibly interesting history which we covered in one of our early previews in that it originally was an amazingly expansive 3D RPG with absolutely horrid placeholder art. Crescent Moon Games got onboard for what they called an "Extreme RPG Makeover", and later provided us with some comparison screenshots showing their work in progress. Today they've released a brand new trailer showing tons of iPad in-game footage which looks amazing:

For an idea of just how far the game has come, here is the original trailer for the game:

For more information on Aralon: Sword and Shadow, stop by the thread in our forums which has taken on a life of its own while RPG fans anxiously await its release. Also, in other semi-related Crescent Moon Games news, Rimelands: Hammer of Thor recently received an update with several bug fixes, so if you own the game you should probably download that if you haven't already.

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There has been a surprising amount of great HD versions of games popping up on the iPad side of the App Store lately. If you've been playing some of these games pixel doubled, or have been waiting for a native iPad version to pop up, any of these games are definitely worth downloading:

Across Age ™ HD, $7.99 We liked the original Across Age a lot in our review, and really consider it a must-have for any fans of Zelda-like games. The HD version is home to some incredibly detailed hand drawn art, and even a new dungeon (and boss) exclusive to the iPad.

Baseball Superstars® 2010 HD, $4.99 I can’t get enough of the Baseball Superstars games, as the light RPG elements combined with arcade-style baseball makes for a package I can’t stop playing. Check out our review for more details, but beware, getting involved in this game could suck up a dangerous amount of your time if you’re like me and enjoy filling experience bars.

ARKANOID HD, $4.99 You don’t get much more classic than Arkanoid when it comes to brick breakers, and while we liked the iPhone version a lot, single device multiplayer works really well on the iPad. If you’re looking for a blast from the past, or another fun two player game, give this a shot.

Meow Meow Happy Fight HD, $0.99 This has been one of my favorite iPhone dual stick shooters since it was released in August. The iPad version looks great, and is much nicer to play with proper iPad controls instead of playing the iPhone game pixel doubled.

Cut the Rope HD, $1.99 I gushed over the iPhone version of this game in a big way in our review, and the iPad version is just as good. There isn’t much sense in re-buying this as it plays fine pixel doubled… But the graphics do look awfully nice on the iPad screen.

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The current trend in iPad game releases seems to be for developers to take an existing iPhone game, append "HD" to the end of the name, and increase both the resolution of the graphics and the price– and maybe add an iPad-exclusive feature of two. iPhone developer One Man Left have significantly upped the HD ante this week, releasing one of the best HD remakes I've played in quite a while of an existing iPhone game. We loved the original in our review where we explained the basic premise behind the game:

Tilt to Live [$2.99] is at its core, an object-avoidance game wholly utilising the accelerometer of the iPhone or iTouch to maneuver your arrow around the battlefield. I say battlefield, because that's exactly what is going on here– the dots are out to get you and will stop at nothing. And it is remarkable just how much personality One Man Left have managed to inject into such a straightforward concept. These are certainly no ordinary dots– these perilous periods make a point (ha!) of chasing you around the screen; coalescing into arrows and other shapes then hurling themselves at you at breakneck pace, or circling you like vultures, slowly closing in until it is impossible to escape. Make no mistake, touch even one of the hundreds of dots on screen at once, and you are history.

Tilt to Live HD [Free] offers identical gameplay, with a major twist: Instead of simply making everything bigger, they kept all the in-game objects the same size, and quadrupled the size of the battlefield. In our early previews, I wasn't really sure how much of a difference this would make when you're actually playing the game, but after spending a considerable amount of time with it (in fact, this review itself was delayed because I simply couldn't put it down), I'm totally sold on this HD remake.

Increasing the size of the battlefield makes playing the game much more exciting because of just how many more red dots appear on screen, and how much farther power-ups spawn away from you. Not to say the original Tilt to Live was boring by any means, but this is one instance where much more going on at once on screen is actually much, much better.

To further kick things up a notch, Tilt to Live HD is available for free. With your free download you get full access to a limited classic mode with only a few of the available weapons. If you're happy with this, you can play to your heart's content, competing in a free mode online leaderboard until you're blue in the face. For a $3.99 in-app purchase you then unlock the rest of the game. This opens up additional power-ups to earn, and three additional game modes: Code Red which is just classic mode but much faster and more difficult, Gauntlet Evolved which is pure avoidance, and Frostbite which has you shattering red dots before they thaw at the bottom of the screen. Each game mode plays differently, and has its own associated online leaderboard.

Originally I was thinking that Tilt to Live HD wouldn't be that fun to play because I haven't really found myself liking tilt controls much on the iPad due to the weight of the device. Oddly enough, this doesn't seem to be an issue at all, and hasn't stopped me from sitting perched on the edge of my couch completely focused on my iPad as a bob my head to the music for hours on end.

If you own an iPad, you owe it to yourself to at least try out the free mode of Tilt to Live HD.

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As someone who was completely engrossed in the console wars of the 16 bit era, I took great pride in boasting about all the things Sega did that Nintendon't. (Of course as soon as I discovered RPG's on the SNES I flip flopped, but I digress.) The original Sonic the Hedgehog was an amazing game, and the rest of the series on the Genesis was just as good, if not better as they introduced both Tails and Knuckles. Unfortunately, with the advent of 3D gaming came 3D Sonic, and since then Sonic games haven't really been the same. Sure, there have been some fantastic 2D Sonic games for handhelds (the Gameboy Advance ones were particularly good), but the flagship Sonic games have been bad for years. That is, until today.

Sonic 4 [$9.99] has likely been in development for quite some time now, but was only first announced in late 2009 as the cryptic "Project Needlemouse" which was later revealed to be a return to classic 2D Sonic gameplay. Since then, the Sega hype machine has been in full force releasing various mysterious updates to the Sonic 4 web site, teaser trailers, screenshots, and development delays. In other words, Sonic 4 has a lot to live up to.

Sonic 4 is being released in episodes, with today's release as the first installment. Episode 1 comes packed with four zones: Splash Hill Zone, Lost Labyrinth Zone, Casino Street Zone, and Mad Gear Zone. Each of these zones are flavored with themes from classic levels of Sonic's past, with Splash Hill and Casino Street by far being the most memorable. Each zone is host to three acts and a boss fight. After beating the zone's boss, you unlock Time Attack mode which switches the game in to what Sonic games are best at: Going as fast as possible. Also worth mentioning are the two levels that are exclusive to the iPhone, but until the other versions of the game come out it remains to be seen how much different these exclusive portions are.

Controls are surprisingly decent for a game series originally designed with a physical controller in mind. By default you use a virtual joystick of sorts and a single button which handles everything else. Alternatively, a tilt control mode is included, but I found touch controls to feel far more natural. Like previous Sonic games, you can spin dash, and Sonic 4 implements a new lock on system of sorts which targets enemies and obstacles you can jump on to. When the game targets something, tapping jump sends Sonic shooting that direction, allowing you to precisely bounce off multiple enemies with ease.

Since Sonic games are all about speed, performance is arguably just as important as gameplay. Because of this, I busted out my entire library of iOS devices to see just how good of a job Sega did at optimizing Sonic 4 for the iPhone. After syncing the device to everything from the original iPhone to the iPad and iPhone 4, I'm more than a little surprised by the results. Performance obviously suffers with older devices, but Sonic 4 is completely playable even on the original iPhone. Oddly enough, the 3rd generation iPod touch seems to boast the highest frame rate, followed by the iPad pixel doubled, then the iPhone 4.

The level design is classic Sonic, with tons of loops, corkscrews, rings, recognizable power ups, and bonus stages. While Sega seems to have succeeded in bringing back the classic Sonic feel, the content included in the first episode seems like a tease after so much waiting. Sonic 4 is a ton of fun, but it's over before you know it, and without online leaderboards of any kind, I'm not sure how much appeal there will be in replaying levels for higher scores or lower times.

While the performance is certainly good enough to be fun, it's nowhere near the solid 60 FPS I had hoped for– even on newer devices and to make things worse, Retina Display support is nowhere to be found. The first episode of Sonic 4 will also be available on the Wii via WiiWare, the Xbox 360 via XBOX Live Arcade, and the PS3 via PSN in the next couple days. So, if you own any of those systems, you can consider waiting to see how those versions of the game are reviewed, especially considering the fact that Sonic 4 will be in 1080p on both the PS3 and 360. Otherwise, if you're looking for a very fun taste of what a Sonic game should be like on the iPhone, we recommend Sonic 4… Just be fully aware that it will likely leave you unsatisfied with an intense longing for the release of the next episode, and I'm not entirely sure if that's a good thing or not.

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