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Simogo's new office. Look how busy these guys are!

Simogo doesn’t make games like most studios. It doesn’t do design docs, meetings strike it as silly, and it doesn’t get rattled when something isn’t working as intended or a game needs to be delayed. It can be different because its games are the product of an improvisational style of development that sheds structure when it impedes an organic flow of ideas, analysis, and feedback. Simogo calls this “jazz development.” It’s a good name.

Simon Flesser and Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck are the two dudes behind Simogo. They’ve been working together for over five years across two different companies. They make mobile games now in Malmö, Sweden. Their office is a lively place with a pine-colored floor, a massive window, a radiator, and rainbow colored throw rugs.

Before, they made XBLA and PSN downloadable titles. Their last one was ilomilo. Simogo’s titles and that game share a lot in common. Simogo builds vibrant worlds with complimentary music, and it aims to keep its games as charming as they are simple.

Simon is the art guy. He handles concepts and music. Gordon is the “one-man army.” He codes and programs. He builds frameworks. He even tackles design concepts. The duo has a fantastic relationship that goes beyond the creative glue that binds them. When Simon talks about Gordon, he’s almost reverential. The mutual respect these two have is also a big reason why Simogo makes games the way it does. They don’t argue. They listen, and then they execute.

Simogo is one of the most fascinating mobile developers out there. It’s a brutally small studio that, somehow, drops some of the most compelling, idealistic, and fulfilling games on iPad and iPhone. Beat Sneak Bandit, a rhythm and stealth mash-up, is loud and launched with a lot of fanfare, but the studio made the most noise with Bumpy Road, a somewhat depressing one-finger side-scrolling game that features an old couple, a car, and a road that can be manipulated with touch or swipe. The development of Beat Sneak went down in the usual Simogo way, which is to say, most of the good stuff happened on the fly.

How The Sausage Is Made

A pre-release "bonus" screen of Beat Sneak Bandit. It was taken to show off the resolution of the iPhone version.

Simogo doesn’t like design documents. It’s also too small for meetings. Gordon and Simon twirl their chairs and talk when something needs to be discussed. If an idea pops up in their heads when they’re not at the office, they call each other.

Simon thinks game design documents are good tools for big teams, but they fail to communicate feel, which is important to Simogo games. Bumpy Road was ponderous with a touch of zany. Beat Sneak Bandit is hyperactive and bombastic. Simon describes game design documents “like watching sheet music and saying you’ve heard the song, but the music is so much more than the composition,” Simon tells me.

“You could say that the way we make games is like jazz music; we improvise and put in new stuff as we go along.”

Simogo begins the actual game development part of production with a prototype just like any other studio. It dreams up an idea, and then it tries to flesh that out with a rudimentary demo. Some studios like to take this process especially slow by isolating experimental mechanics to produce proofs of concept, presumably to show publishers. Simogo goes deeper. It takes its pre-production demos and adds layers of actual production. “A lot of the appeal in our games is the full package, so we want to have that early on to get a feel for it,” Simon says.

The original idea for Beat Sneak came before Simogo released its first title, Kosmo Spin. At that time, Beat Sneak was an endless runner with a musical twist. If it had come out, it would have had you jumping and ducking to the beat, as opposed to sneaking to the beat in a series of interconnected levels.

That idea morphed into something more, yet still different from what Beat Sneak is today, when the studio began working on the game in August 2011. Beat Sneak 2.0 had you swiping the floor of a level to offset the timing of the beat. Simogo called this mechanic “scratch reality.” In this version of the game, you wouldn’t have control of the Bandit directly. Instead, you’d swipe against the beat to open doors and Bandit would follow a path automatically. Simon compares the feel of this version to real-time video editing.

“This idea proved to be as complicated as it sounds, so we had a rough month in which we just simplified and simplified,” Simon explains. “The concept of looping rhythm stages was something that was very cool to look at, we just had to come up with a suitable interface.” At this point, the duo tackled the problem by thinking about the first pure idea for Beat Sneak.

“Then we remembered the old rhythm-tap idea and everything just fell in place. We had two different prototypes after that. You would tap in beat to walk right, and backbeat to go to the left. That proved a little too difficult as backbeat is kind of a hard concept to grasp if you’re not a musician, so we wanted to downplay that.” The other build, which was much closer to the version we’re familiar with, had Bandit flipping when he hit walls. However, backbeat reared its head again. This build had floor security lights you had to jump over by hitting a backbeat.

One of the first Beat Sneak Bandit screens. This is the iPad version.

When Gordon and Simon do have a disagreement, it’s usually about planning. One specific instance that I had to pry out of Simon involves beackbeat, a concept that never made it to the actual game. Simon didn’t want Beat Sneak to be as easy as it is now, so he kept pushing for backbeat. Gordon was adamant that the mechanic need not exist, while Simon stubbornly held his ground maintaining that the game would suffer if it wasn’t included in the package. Gordon’s view that Beat Sneak should be as simple as possible to play eventually saw Simon agreeing with him. And just like that, the debate had a winner, and Beat Sneak Bandit became context-sensitive.

This process of simplification is a hallmark of Simogo’s games, and the source of its most spirited conversations. Gordon presses to make things as simple as possible without killing what makes a product special. Simon seems to have a hard time letting features go. He doesn’t want the users to get bored. He also knows that simple is best when it comes to touch devices, though, so these disagreements get ironed out without getting bitter.

“The thing we focus early on in all our projects is definitely the controls,” Simon tells me about production in general. Beat Sneak’s controls were a huge priority. The interface was, too. In the end, Simogo made an extraordinarily easy to play music game. Put a finger to the screen and Bandit moves. Hitting specific spots in the environment alters his direction.

This is Simogo's old office. Seems… smaller.

Simon describes the way Simogo works as a “publisher’s nightmare.” It sounds like it. Publishers want design documents. They want to checkpoint developers. They want meetings. Basically, they want to make sure their investments are being used and that a game is hitting every milestone and well on its way to releasing when agreed.

Roving deadlines, however, are a big part of the Simogo experience. Bumpy Road, its last game, released on May 19. After some contract work and work on a huge Bumpy Road update, Simogo started on Beat Sneak in August. The original release date was December. It hit this February, a couple of months past its original due date. This allowed Simogo to create more levels and that boss fight, as well as a few other features.

After the backbeat change, Simogo stopped long enough to produce a ten-level vertical slice to submit to the Independent Games Festival. That November, it revealed the game with a fun little teaser that betrayed just two things: the rhythm and sneaking. “Around then we realized we were making something special, so we wanted to do it justice and expand it a little. We added new elements, like the vacuum buster, the time stopper, the shadow stages, the phone calls from Herbie and the Duke, and then decided to skip our deadline in December.” Not competing during the Christmas rush was smart. The App Store freezes in late December. During this period, no new games are released, but the store is more vibrant than ever because developers basically dogpile it the week prior to the freeze. Games get forgotten, passed over.

Behind the Bandit

One of the coolest spots of design that Simon let me in on during our talks about the creation of Beat Sneak was origin of the game’s central figure, the Bandit. Bandit as we know him wasn’t a part of Beat Sneak at first. His final design came from a game concept called Mustache Bandits. That game’s tagline: “Every revolution starts with mustache doodles.”

Simon tells me not to ask about Mustache Bandits, but I have to press. It was a drawing game influenced by, of all things, Fruit Ninja. If it had actually seen the light of day, players would have been painting mustaches on posters guerrilla style and rewarded for factors like accuracy and speed. One of its big features would have been prompts like “UNI-BROW BONUS!”

“We wanted to wrap this in a story of a gang of bandits starting a revolution against the mayor by painting mustaches, and they’d all have their own strengths and special attacks. Silly stuff,” Simon says. I don’t think he understands how bad I want to play this game now.

We’ve got quite an assortment of concept art of Bandit and his revolution, er, evolution over the development.

This is from Rhythm Bear, which was the game that ended up being the core idea behind Beat Sneak. Notice how the hairstyle managed to make it over, as well as the expressiveness of the avatar. The little blocks, not so much.

Enlarge this one to see it in all its glory. The original bandit doodles all had one thing in common: a funky, defining hairstyle. This is, technically, a 3D project but Simogo uses 2D images.

This isn’t directly related, but I wanted to share it. This is a style test sheet that helped solidify the tone of Beat Sneak.

And those give you a good example of how many iterations everything – including the game’s name — had to go through. At one point, the game was called “Backbeat Bandit” or “Beat Bandit.” You can tell the backbeat discussion was still going on while Simon was working on the game’s branding.

The Release

This was the second teaser image released.

Figuring out when Beat Sneak was “finished” wasn’t hard. Its external testers and Simon’s girlfriend pretty much made the decision. “The response from our testers was absolutely phenomenal, and you know when people actually want to continue playing not because you’re watching, but because they just want to.”

“There was a much greater initial response to this one than Bumpy Road, actually, from people we showed early. But, personally for me it was when my girlfriend told me it was the best thing we’ve made. Creatively, I trust her 100 percent.”

In February, after it was submitted to certification, Gordon and Simon celebrated with beer, vague celebratory tweets with pictures of wine glasses, and a few days off. When it actually hit the App Store a week later, Simon and Gordon spent a few days telling the press and any one who would listen that it was out. “We speak to fans, to media and just focus on trying to get the word out, which is very hard when you’re this small.” It’s true. Even a site like ours misses big titles from established indie developers.

Beat Sneak is a great game bolstered by tons of high scores in the press, but its first week didn’t bust the mark that Bumpy Road set in its first days of release. In Simon’s mind, the numbers aren’t matching up to the hype press stirred up.

The fact that busted Pokemon rip-offs are able to take second place on the charts while Beat Sneak can’t crack the top ten is also frustrating. “In a week where an app that was a copyright infringing picture of a Pokémon took the second spot in the charts, that is especially heart-breaking,” says Simon. “But in the end, what matters is sales in the long run, and if we can keep steady sales, that’s good.” Simon takes the high road, always.

“We do understand that this is a bit more niche than Bumpy Road, more of a gamers game, though. Also, Bumpy Road was iPhone game of the week and Beat Sneak Bandit was iPad game of the week so I guess that comes into play too.”

The End

Thousands of words and not one mention of clocks. Well, until now.

Simogo isn’t a typical iOS developer. As cash-strapped as it might be, it still spends more than a single month on a game. It tests. It iterates. It builds the kinds of prototypes that are representative of more than just a clever mechanic.

Gordon and Simon are a strong tandem because they check their egos at the door; they’re hugely talented, but they operate as a unit without the baggage. They disagree at times, but they also find answers.

“Much like a recording artist we want our games to feel Simogo. It should feel like something that only we could make. So it’s hard to put a finger on what that is. Maybe it’s how everything produces a sound when you interact with it, how it feels tactile, the level of ‘polishness,’ or the art… I don’t know.

“I say this a lot, but there is no single aspect in a game that is more important than the other. Gameplay is not more important than presentation, art is not more important than sound. Everything plays together to create something bigger than the sum of its parts.”

Of note, Simogo develops on a special platform that gives indie developers a chance to take the risks that Simogo does with each release. You’ll never see Beat Sneak Bandit on XBLA or PSN. It’s too unusual, too unique. Maybe too small, as well.

This game deserves your attention if you haven’t bothered with it yet. It’s one of the best games on the App Store, and one of the most creative to boot. Its flavor, tone, and rhythm mechanic are all completely unique and fun.

Simogo is moving on, by the way. The studio has just now started talking about “Game 4,” and it isn’t quite sure if it’ll follow a similar development path. Simon describes this title as totally different from Simogo’s previous games, but it’s so early it might just end up as just another title that influences its next project, like Mustache Bandits.

“I’m excited about bringing in some new blood in to this project, to help out on bits we can’t make ourselves. We’d really like to have it out by this year, but you know — jazz development, you know where you’re going with it, but you never know how long the improvisations will last.”

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I came to Jeff Minter’s oeuvre late, around the time of the XBLA release of Space Giraffe. I mention this not (only) to display the depths of my ignorance, but to provide context: there’s more to love in Gridrunner [$0.99] than just nostalgia. For anyone who missed the heyday of the Commodore 64, Minter’s iOS titles might seem a bit unapproachable, but consider giving them a shot – they might surprise you.

Gridrunner wears its roots proudly, but it isn’t a dogmatically faithful recreation of the 1982 original. Or, rather, it isn’t only that: both the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 version of the title are present here as optional modes. The real fun is in the remake, which takes the things that made Gridrunner great from the start and runs with them. The grid and its cruel lasers, the little ship that faces them down alone, the flying droids and the missile pods they leave behind – all these things return. This time they bring along retina graphics, power ups, new foes and moments of bullet-pulsing glory.

This isn’t the first time that Minter has revisited Gridrunner—it’s the third in the last decade alone. Gridrunner++ was released in 2002 and Gridrunner Revolution came out in 2009. Both brought in big changes. They were trippy, colorful departures, introducing features like score multipliers and ship rotation. This new iteration hews a little closer to the original, but Minter has clearly brought in much of the game design wisdom he’s picked up in the interim. The resulting game looks and plays like the original – assuming your memories of the original come with a big helping of rose-tinted nostalgia.

This new Gridrunner is a great little vertical shooter, the classic turned on its side. There is only one potential problem standing in the way of enjoying it as much as any retroesque shooter on iOS – its controls. If you play on an iPhone or iPod touch, you might be in for trouble. If you play on iPad, have patience. Once you’re past the learning curve, things will be just fine.

The controls feel quite a bit like Mage Gauntlet’s [$2.99] Pro Stick. As with that game’s superb virtual joystick, you can put your finger nearly anywhere on screen and move your fingertip minutely to move your ship in any direction. This took some adjustment. Most vertical shooters I’ve played use 1:1 movement ratios, and emulating that had hilarious but wildly ineffective results. I had to learn to move gently, and to stop lifting my finger (for goodness’ sake). Once I got over that hump I was very satisfied with the precision of the controls, especially once I switched to my iPad. They’re equally precise on smaller devices, but I can’t find a spot to comfortably rest my finger without regularly blocking important stuff like my ship and the things coming to kill it.

After moving over to iPad, I could finally see what all the fuss was about. It’s hard to survive in the world of Gridrunner. As with any shooter, there’s a mess of enemies to deal with. Centipedes that travel back and forth and diagonally, blobs that travel erratically, shrapnel bombs, ships that hunt you—the list goes on. Some leave behind static pods that must be destroyed before they drop missiles (though those missiles are worth quite a few points if shot down…), and all the while a laser travels across the edge of the grid, firing downward every few seconds.

Defeating enemies is particularly rewarding in this iteration, as many drop rings that power up your shots. There are eight different powerups, and they can be stacked and combined in interesting ways. There are spread shots and directional shots that can speed up, spread out, last longer and ultimately explode into bullet hell when upgraded far enough. This lasts only moments, but it’s an incredibly satisfying few seconds while it does.

Without multipliers or any other finicky scoring mechanics to worry about, surviving is the only real mark of success. With so much out to kill you, you can’t afford to let your focus drift for even a moment. You’ll die a lot, but Gridrunner has that covered: at the end of each level it awards an extra life. This won’t always be enough. Eventually you’ll burn out your last life, and then it’s game over.

For players who are more concerned with seeing all the levels than earning the most prestigious scores, Gridrunner has a casual mode. This saves your best scores and life count every four levels and lets your restart there when you fail. Casual mode is ranked on its own leaderboard, but it’s still worth playing for those of us who need a little help progressing. For the hardcore, Pure mode is where it’s at.

As I mentioned, you can also play the original Vic-20 and Commodore 64 versions of the game. It took me a little while to find them, but I adore the way they’re accessed: just turn your device on its side. Either side will do, as each offers its own alternate mode. Cool, no? Also a bit opaque, but them’s the breaks when Minter’s involved. Similarly, the game is paused by tapping a spot in the middle of the upper half of the screen. There’s an invisible paw/heart shape there, I’m sure you’ll manage to find it.

There are more than a few other Minterisms to be found – odd text splashes as you progress, ridiculous kudos for passing each level, that sort of thing. Still, this is one of the more restrained games of his I’ve played, easy on goat breeding, llamas, wacky visuals and awkward sound effects. I rather miss those things, but I suppose we’ll always have GoatUp [$1.99].

Whether you have reason to be nostalgic for Gridrunner or not, it’s worth checking out. It’s a best-of-both-worlds sort of remake: faithful to its forebearers but filled with clever modern enhancements. If you’re dead-set on believing that the original is best, you can go ahead and play that instead. It even has its own leaderboard. Really, though, newer is better in this case. Hopefully we’ll see an alternative control set for the iPhone and iPod touch crew, but if you’ve got an iPad it’s all systems go. Enjoy, and pop by our forum thread to brag about your high score.

TouchArcade Rating:

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The creator of Xbox Live Arcade sensation Limbo, a Denmark-based studio that goes by the name of Playdead, is looking for a “platform programmer” who can port games to several different mobile platforms, including iPhone and iPad. The job listing doesn’t get into specifics about what games, and it only betrays that Playdead is “investigating” mobile platforms. Still, you can’t help but to wonder if this studio’s only game is up for a little bit of phone and tablet love in light of this listing. Of note, the is also working on a new IP, so that’s a port possibility, too.

Limbo is certainly making the rounds, at least. After a very successful launch on XBLA, the title has seen a PC, PSN, and a Mac release on top of an On Live launch. We’re going to take a wait and see on this one, since, well, that’s our only option. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from Limbo, it’s that assumptions, like spiders and hotel signs, are dangerous.

[via Destructoid]

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Lost Mars, or as its known now, Waking Mars, is on its way to iPad and iPhone this March 1, and will hit at an agreeable $4.99. That’s kinda old news, but no worries. We’ve got something a little fresher to share today: the game’s expertly produced teaser trailer, which, conveniently, does more than stoke your fire. It also shows off what developer Tiger Style’s Metroid-ish game is all about.

About that name change, by the way. According to Tiger Style’s blog, Tiger Style got a little worried about a trademark dispute, so decided to switch from Lost Mars to a name that it could totally own. We would have went with Martha Mars, but hey, we’re not in the titling business for a reason, we suppose.

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In mid-December, Mountain Sheep quietly dropped their one-on-one arcade hockey title Ice Rage [99¢] into the App Store. We thought it was a pretty fun little game in our review, but Ice Rage was so severely lacking in content it was kind of hard to know what to make of it. Since its initial release, the developers have been addressing this problem with a decent stream of updates.

A week after its launch an update added the Bike Baron as a playable character, and then an update in January added another new character as well as a fun single-player tournament mode with a simplistic stat upgrading system. Then earlier this month, yet some more new characters were added to the playable roster.

Slowly but surely, Ice Rage was getting fleshed out, and today a brand new update has been released that continues that progression. In fact, it’s probably the biggest Ice Rage update yet. A new skater, the big Swedish bruiser Svensson, has been added to the roster, and he looks ready to party. Also, each of the characters have been given their own individual “weight” in the game, giving them a more distinctive feel from each other as opposed to just feeling like different skins of the same player.

What I think is the biggest addition in this update to Ice Rage is iCade support. For such an arcade-y arcade game, mashing away at a physical joystick and buttons can only add to the experience. If they could at some point figure out a way to get multiplayer between two iCades to be a thing then I would be in miniature arcade heaven.

iPhone 4S and iPad 2 owners also get treated to anti-aliasing courtesy of the latest update, as well as enlarged touch zones during multiplayer and huge memory optimizations. The core gameplay in Ice Rage is so much fun that I’m really hoping Mountain Sheep keep on making the overall game more robust. But for a dollar, even as a simple arcade experience, Ice Rage is a blast so be sure to give the latest update a spin.

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It’s been over six months since Final Fantasy Tactics [$15.99] hit the iOS scene, and while the port largely survived the move to the iPhone we noted some issues that kept the game back from a universal recommendation. Even worse, the iPad version that we thought was on the horizon disappeared from the radar, leaving the small screen as the only avenue for playing the game for quite some time (iPad 2x mode notwithstanding). Now with Final Fantasy Tactics for iPad [$17.99] here, we can finally see if that half a year waiting period was worth it. While the port certainly improves in a variety of different areas (mainly due to the increased screen space), it’s still far from perfect.

For folks new to Final Fantasy Tactics, I recommend that you read our original review of the iPhone version (along with the recommendation to just check around the internet for the multitude of views on this classic). For everyone else, this is the same War of the Lions version found on the iPhone/iPod touch and Sony PSP (except for the multiplayer in the PSP version). It’s still the same, extremely deep strategy RPG that has kept its appeal even over a decade later.

One of our primary issues with the iPhone version of Final Fantasy Tactics dealt with an inherent limitation of the device. Specifically, the screen just felt too small for the amount of information displayed. Thankfully, the iPad version rectifies some of those concerns. The text is a lot less blurry (something that had been fixed in an update to the iPhone version since our original review), the added buttons and menus feel more spaced out, and the game just plays more comfortably in long gaming sessions. Unfortunately, the larger screen size also leads to a clearer view of just how pixelated most of the visuals are. However, I doubt most veterans of FFT are going to care about pixelated sprites.

Gameplay slowdown, another nagging issue that detracted from the iPhone experience (and has been somewhat addressed in recent updates) has improved in the iPad port. Strangely enough, not all abilities/spells seem to benefit from the additional quickness. For example, jump into the prologue and you’ll see that Agrias’ Holy Sword abilities (as well as Summoner spells later on) are greatly sped up. However, Squire Fundaments, as well as some black mage spells, still seem to suffer from noticeable slowdown. This inconsistency seems to exist across a variety of abilities, although the slowdown seems to affect far less abilities than previously. It’s important to note that despite the speed improvements, there’s still a disappointing lack of smoothness which continues to detract from the experience.

Gamers holding out hope that Final Fantasy Tactics for iPad features a revamping of controls are in for a disappointment. The touch controls, along with the general interface, continue to be a mixed-bag. The larger screen space of the iPad means things are generally easier to read and navigate, but there are still too many button presses, confirmation windows, and virtual buttons to be considered streamlined. Still, with enough playtime to get used to the controls I found the iPad version to be far preferable than the cramped iPhone/iPod touch screen.

Other elements, like sound quality and music, make the transition to the iPad with little change. MIDI effects still continue to occasionally sound odd, most likely due to the porting process. The music, meanwhile, is still one of the strongest suits of Final Fantasy Tactics, and remains one of my favorite gaming soundtracks to date.

When all is said and done, the iPad port of Final Fantasy Tactics can be summed up in two statements. First, this iPad port, while long overdue, is superior to the iPhone version (primarily due to larger screen) and should be considered the preferred iOS experience (assuming you have an iPad 2). Second, while the iPad version makes improvements, it still doesn’t match the feel of the original PSX version, which has yet to be duplicated on any platform.

For previous fans that haven’t checked Final Fantasy Tactics on iOS yet, your enjoyment will be based on how well you can check your nostalgia and overlook the nuances of porting. For everyone else, it’s safe to say that you should try this classic turn-based RPG any way you can, iOS or otherwise.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Last month we reported that an iOS remake of Barbarian – The Ultimate Warrior, aka Death Sword, was in the works courtesy of developer Microids and publisher Anuman Interactive, and after a couple of false starts in the past week, the game does appear to officially be available in the App Store.

Renamed Barbarian – The Death Sword [$1.99/HD] for iOS, the game is a one-on-one fighting game that originally released in 1987 for the Commodore 64 and most of the other popular computers at the time. Gamers lauded the competitive gameplay of Barbarian in the burgeoning fighting game genre, but most of its widespread notoriety was due to some racy packaging and the ability to lop off your opponents head in a shower of blood during battle.

The iOS version of Barbarian is completely redone with 3D visuals, several new modes and unlockables, and cross-platform local multiplayer. I’ve spent a few minutes with the game on my iPhone, and although I never played the original, it seems like it might be kind of cool. It’s certainly got raciness and gore in spades, but I’m not so sure about the gameplay. It feels very basic and clunky, but it also feels like there might be some underlying depth to the whole thing that I have yet to figure out.

We’ll be spending much more time with Barbarian – The Death Sword in the coming days to adequately get a feel for it, and there’s currently a discussion of the game and further impressions in our forums.

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So this is pretty weird. Last week, the classic Japanese role playing game from Atlus, Shin Megami Tensei [$13.99], appeared in the App Store.

Originally released for the Super Famicom in 1992, the game was re-released for the PlayStation and the Game Boy Advance about a decade later, but the game has never been released outside of Japan (though unofficial English-translated versions do exist around the web). The original Shin Megami Tensei has spawned tons of sequels and spinoffs, and the entire series has an extremely dedicated following.

Now, when I first saw Shin Megami Tensei in the App Store, I was almost certain it wasn’t a sanctioned port. In this line of business, unauthorized ports or ripoffs of popular games appear fairly often, especially as of late it seems.

The iOS version of Shin Megami Tensei definitely did not look legit. It had an atrocious virtual control overlay that took up more than half the screen, and the app description sounded like it had been carefully reworded from the Wikipedia entry on the game.

Oh, and the entire game was still in Japanese only. Let me repeat that: the game is entirely in Japanese with no English whatsoever.

So based on that, and given the fairly hefty price tag, I was ready to write Shin Megami Tensei off as just another unauthorized cash grab. Except, upon further snooping, it’s not.

It’s published by Index Corporation, the Japanese company that bought Atlus several years back. A tweet from Atlus Japan’s Twitter account confirms that they are officially behind this iOS version. It appears to be a bare-bones emulated port of the 2003 Game Boy Advance version, with no special care put into translating it to iOS. But hey, it’s Shin Megami Tensei on your iPhone, I guess.

If you know Japanese and can deal with a no-frills port, then this is likely your dream come true. For anybody else, this is probably just a frustrating example of what could have been. A proper, English-translated port of Shin Megami Tensei that has been carefully crafted for the iOS platform would make a lot of people happy, and although I don’t think it’s likely, I’m holding out hope that Atlus is considering something like that for the future.

For now, if you are down to drop $14 just so you can carry around the original Shin Megami Tensei in your pocket, then I won’t judge you.

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If you’re a fan of things that are awesome, you should be intimately familiar with Robot Unicorn Attack [$.99], Adult Swim’s popular Flash game that rainbow dashed itself onto the App Store in mid-2010. If you aren’t familiar with the title, well, I’m not so sure we can be friends. Robot Unicorn Attack is an endless runner that is chock full of robot unicorns (duh), magical fairies, a pod of leaping dolphins, and colorful visuals that would make any 7-year old girl (and myself) squeal with delight. All set to a looping soundtrack of Erasure’s Always.

Robot Unicorn Attack was such a success that it saw two follow ups on the App Store, Heavy Metal Edition [$.99] and the festive Christmas Edition [$.99]. A few months back, all 3 RUA titles were updated with Retina Display visuals, something fans had been clamoring for since the release original release of the iPhone 4. Today, the original Robot Unicorn Attack got another dose of update love, turning it into a Universal build and improving its performance on all devices.

If you recall, the Retina Display updates to the 3 RUA games were kind of staggered, taking about a month for all 3 to finally receive their updates. This means that it’s possible the other 2 RUA games will be getting a similar Universal treatment, though I haven’t heard confirmation of this just yet.

Also, in kind of a strange move, the iPad native Robot Unicorn Attack HD has disappeared from the App Store. It makes sense with the new Universal version to not have 2 iPad versions, but I don’t really know what that means for previous owners of the HD iPad version. We’ll be getting to the bottom of this query as well as what’s in store for the other Robot Unicorn games, but for current owners of the original release make sure to grab the latest update, throw that bad boy on your iPad, and rainbow dash your way to ultimate happiness.

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