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Radiangames, an indie outfit headed and directed by Volition veteran Luke Schneider, is set to release its first iPhone and iPad game, Super Crossfire, with help from Chillingo. We’ve got the first trailer just below this text stuff.

The game caught our all-seeing eye earlier this week and we’ve gone hands-on since. Its psychedelic visuals and multitudes of explode-y bits and bobs are truly hip to experience, but the actual game part isn’t too shabby either. Basically, it’s a ramped up take on Space Invaders that lets you alternate planes of attack: you can move your ship from the bottom of the screen to the top as you please, allowing for some interesting play.

This is actually the third game in a series that started out as an Xbox Live Indie Games joint. Radian has made several games for XBLIG, including the woefully underrated JoyJoy. In our upcoming bonus podcast, we get on the honker with Schneider and talk about XBLIG, and of course, jump into some detail about his time with AAA and his thoughts on Super Crossfire.

No word on price or release date just yet, but that’ll come in time. As a side-note here, if you’re really into the business or philosophical side of why an indie studio would want to get into a partnership with a publisher, check out Radiangames' post on Super Crossfire and what went down with the title since its PC debut trailer in March. It’s a hip read.

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Infinite Dreams’ Jelly Defense [$.99] is a well-made by-the-numbers tower defense joint with an embarrassingly unorthodox and captivating art direction that arterially informs and fleshes out its otherwise boring core mechanics. Without this direction it’d look and feel as flat as a modern FPS, but its detail, vividness, liveliness, and the raw skillfulness employed in making it this way morph it into an experience.

Conventional tower defense games are demanding, punitive, and scripted pretty harshly. You usually have to “get” the vision the designer had in mind for levels, which leaves a lot to be desired from a play perspective. Jelly Defense doesn’t depart from these norms, nor does it do much to differentiate on any other level outside of its look. You build towers. Those towers fire on specific enemy types and have certain effects on them as they crawl towards an ultimate end goal. If they reach the goal enough, you lose. If you pick bad towers, you lose. If you try to be unconventional, you lose. If you spend poorly, you lose. There’s a lot of losing in general until you understand and execute on proper placements, upgrade paths, and memorize the order of waves.

Tower defense does have its charms, though. As punitive as it is, you gotta love the blood-pumping splendor of successfully completing a level without losing any of your goal, which in this specific game, are stars. I also appreciate the simple pleasures of memorization and execution, as well as the frenzied “should I upgrade this or this or put this here” thought progression that happens in every level, this game included.

I haven’t spotted any meaningful refinements on the TD formula on display in Jelly Defense, but there are some noticeable subtleties in the towers, enemies, and levels in general that make it stand out a little bit. Your team, the jellies, are composed of wavy lifeforms that jiggle to and fro and shoot adorable little bolts of lightning and big old cannonballs out of oddly placed holes or antennae. The other team, also made out of jelly like material, come in all shapes and matters of form. They’re often differentiated by reds and blues, which ties into a core mechanic — colored towers can effect only like-colored enemies. It’s a neat touch, as are the contrast-catching greyed out levels and their wavy, jelly-ish design that has enemies bumbling and swaying down paths instead of lumbering in straight lines.

Levels are divided up pretty well in small, instance-based missions with a point. Special boss conflicts, standard wave-based play, and constricting scenarios like, say, Enemies Don’t Drop Loot, all play out inside a world map-ish 3D structure.

The map in particular is a great touchstone for the thing Jelly Defense has in spades: character. The map has this super distinctive, almost… child-born doodle feel to it that compliments the overall playfulness and vividness of everything else in the game. It’s a charming world with charming characters and it looks fantastic on the iPhone and iPad. This isn’t a technical beast, but it’s easily one of the most impressive looking games on the App Store. It almost reminds me of how Wind Waker caught the eye with its starkly different look and feel without having to be some sort of graphical juggernaut.

But it’s still surprising how well Jelly Defense runs. It’s as smooth as butter, even when the action gets intense. Also, it plays well as a native game — drag and drop controls, as well as simple touches and swipes control nearly everything. As you'd hope to expect, but don't always get, it doesn’t feel like a game in a genre originally created for a mouse and keyboard.

The App Store is clotted with tons and tons of tower defense games and Jelly Division doesn’t have a mechanical spark that differentiates it from most others. It is however a decent-enough tower defense game with an utterly fantastic look and vibe. Its art alone is worth the price of admission, but the game part holds up alright despite the orthodox approach.

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You might remember back last month when CAVE announced that their excellent manic shooter Espgaluda II [$11.99/Lite] would be gracing the larger screen of the iPad in the near future. We even caught a quick glimpse of the title in action during their UStream broadcast, though it didn’t offer much insight due to some dodgy camerawork. Well today CAVE has sent along a brand new trailer for what will be known as Espgaluda II HD, along with some other interesting new details.

First off, and probably not coming as a shock to those familiar with CAVE’s work, Espgaluda II HD will only be compatible with the iPad 2, and won’t support the original iPad. The extra horsepower and especially the extra RAM afforded by the iPad 2 is a necessity in pushing the crazy amount of bullet and explosion sprites that are a hallmark of CAVE games.

The next bit of info we’ve learned is that the title’s special “iPhone Mode” created specifically for the iOS release of Espgaluda II will be getting a brand new BGM soundtrack and will be rebranded “Smartphone Mode”, likely due to the game’s intended release on additional platforms like Android. This mode change will be part of the new HD version of the game and will come as a free update to the regular versions as well, along with the new music.

Finally, and the part that I found most interesting, is that CAVE is planning on spinning off both the retooled Smartphone Mode as well as the original Arcade Mode into their own separate games. You’ll get the full versions of each mode from the original Espgaluda II game, just in individual app form. These spinoffs will be available in iPad 2 HD flavors as well as smaller versions for 3rd generation iPhone and iPod touch devices and higher.

I think this is a neat idea since CAVE games are on the higher end of the App Store pricing spectrum, though quite worth the price of admission as evidenced by our review of Espgaluda II. These spinoff games featuring just a single mode each should come in at a cheaper price than the full experience, giving a broader spectrum of players the chance to get in on the action.

But therein lies the problem, we don’t actually know any pricing information for these spinoff games or for Espgaluda II HD, and a release date doesn’t get any more specific than a Fall 2011 window. CAVE promises to drop this information on us soon over on their Cave World website, so we’ll keep a set of eyeballs planted in that direction and bring you those additional details as soon as they’re divulged.

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Metro Games’ Pixel Ranger [$.99] is a deliciously offbeat vertical shooter that executes on its old-school SCUMM-like art direction and its jokey It Came From Outer Space vibe well, but it’s an otherwise forgettable game on a mechanical level. A crippling jump mechanic that feels out of place, a horrific control scheme, and poor checkpointing hamstring the action and combine for a storm of constant frustration. Pixel Ranger looks good, is hilarious when it intends to be, and it has a lot of potential, but it falls flat in the face of its issues.

Like most of its breed, Pixel Ranger combines tons of overhead enemy archetypes and power-ups into an increasingly feverish orgy of upwards-based shooting and pixelated vomit. Its angle is that shooting should be methodical: ammunition is a finite resource and in order to get more, you’ll need to take out enemies and gather up what they spill onto the ground.

Bullets pass through enemies and ammunition counts stack from level to level, which puts the emphasis of the action on multi-kills. Pixel Ranger does a good job incentivizing the multi-kills specifically with rewards, but power-ups in particular provide the heaviest relief and the most tactical opportunities. They’re pretty powerful in general — a great touch.

The balance being struck between the ammunition and kill count goes haywire when you’re asked to start running around and handling ground-based opponents. Basic side-to-side movement is tilt-based while shooting and jumping are handled with touches to the screen. When the action gets hot, you’ll need to jump, tilt, and shoot at the same time, meaning you need Twister two fingers on the screen and tilt your phone to and fro simultaneously. It’s hard to do with any sort of panache and often impossible depending on where you are when ground enemies emerge.

Jumping in particular just feels like an afterthought. It doesn’t jive with the core action, and in the worst cases, just gets in the way of it. When you have to stop and consider jumps over environmental or enemy obstacles, you take your eyes off of the prize.

The lack of checkpointing stacks on the finger frustration. If Pixel Ranger wants to punish you for not having the finger dexterity and muscle memory of a Rubik’s Cube enthusiast, fine, but the price of not being god-like is a total restart of an entire chapter. The pixel count you have in a previous level carries over to the next, so it’s easy to see why you can’t just “reload” a level, but this fact doesn’t negate the pain of having to start over.

The glaringly awesome part of Pixel Ranger, which at times override whatever bitterness I feel when I think about the game as a whole, is its art and sound direction. It reminds me of zoomed out Version 1 Maniac Mansion. The cowboy avatar has that blockiness and feature set of Mansion’s characters and the color selection utilized in the intro scene had me re-calling some weird, totally unrelated experiences. The cutesy “aliens stole my lady and I’m also a cowboy” contrivance somehow works and brings a flavor that informs everything in the title thematically well, including even the (hilarious) power-ups.

Excluding the wonky jumping mechanic, I like all of the ideas in Pixel Ranger. Its look and style, its enemies, its attrition-based vertical shooting, and its power-ups are strong parts of a whole that, unfortunately, doesn’t feel cohesive. This is the kind of game that sort of flat-lines itself over the haul and that’s unfortunate. Granted, it’s not terrible, but it’s not a great game, either. We suggest that if you’re into its style and methodology, to go ahead and give it a try, but just be wary that it has its share of faults.

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A few days back we posted word that John Calhoun would soon be launching an iOS version of his classic early Macintosh game, Glider, in the App Store. Glider Classic [link] is now available for download and I've had a chance to put it through its paces. Let me share my impressions.

The good news is that Glider Classic for iOS is just what Glider was for the early Macs: quaint casual gaming with nicely frustrating puzzle elements and a simple visual aesthetic.

That simple assessment should be enough to let those familiar with the original title know that it's definitely worth a grab. For the uninitiated, let me explain the magic of the formula. (But I'll go ahead and toss out a spoiler: you want this game, too.)

Glider was originally released by Soft Dorothy in 1988 as shareware. It presents a simple proposition: fly your paper glider through a house filled with obstacles, room to room, and get it outside. The only controls were (and are) "move left" and "move right." Air vents on the floor and sources of heat, such as lights and stereo equipment, keep your glider aloft. And don't land on anything. That's it. It's a task that sounds far simpler than it is, and giving it your best is a whole lot of fun.

The original game featured modest aesthetics — line drawn shelves, simple dithered object shading, etc. — and that was, in part, forced by the limitations of the original platform, which was a Macintosh with an 8MHz CPU and a 512×384 pixel black and white display. The developer made the best of it way back when and the result was a charmingly simple, yet complex, casual game. The formula worked, and worked well. And so, in bringing Glider to the staggeringly more powerful iOS platform of today, Calhoun has maintained the control and visual aesthetics — the former by way of left / right tap controls, and the latter by entirely re-creating the visuals, but doing so in an intentionally minimalist fashion. The result is a game that looks and plays like the modern analog of the original that it is.

For those familiar with the earlier versions of Glider, Calhoun indicates that Glider Classic, from a gameplay perspective, is something of a mix of all of the titles from version 4, on down. He considers his commercial release of the game, Glider Pro from Casady & Greene, to have strayed a bit from the solid formula of the earlier releases, and so it was not a basis for the iOS version.

The house in Glider Classic features five different floors plus a basement level to fly through. The first floor is a pretty easy run, but the challenge ramps up notably as you progress. The developer not only hopes to add more houses to the game in a future update, but may also bring the classic Mac OS "house editor" to Mac OS X Lion, which would allow users to create their own play areas for the iOS version as well as the possible Mac App Store version that he indicates is likely to arrive at some point.

The current v1.0 release of Glider Classic runs on the iPhone 3GS and 3G iPod touch devices, on up, including the iPad (it's a universal application). Calhoun let me know, however, that he has already submitted the v1.0.1 update to Apple, which enables support for earlier iPhones and iPod touch devices, and squashes a few minor bugs, as well.

Glider is just a great little game with a lot of personality. And whether or not you've spent time with it in the past, it's a treat to play on modern iOS devices. The only criticism I can make. based on my time with the title so far. is the lack of online leaderboards. However, I discovered in a recent conversation with the developer that Game Center integration is on the list for a future update.

As indicated in our earlier post, John Calhoun recently left Apple after 16 years in order to bring Glider Classic and other titles to iOS. Last month he released Lab Solitaire [App Store], a photo-realistic version of Free Cell. For a bit more history on his days as a Mac game maker, I recommend checking out Bitmob's article entitled "Dreaming of a thousand-room house: The evolution of Glider," as well as MacScene's two part interview.

Glider Classic is currently available for a limited time at an introductory price of $0.99.

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I'm a bit of a closet Sims admirer. Not exactly a die-hard fan, but I appreciate what the series does in a lot of ways. I've still kept up with each release and although the iOS ones haven't been constantly solid, The Sims: Medieval [$4.99] still stuck out to me as playing to two of my weaknesses, wizards and sandbox play.

The most obviously different thing about The Sims: Medieval is the directed nature of it (aside from the setting, clearly). After picking your social type and designing your character, you're immediately struck upside the head with a few quests and tasks to complete that don't inherently feature screwing around, socializing and trying to make your Sim make kissy faces at other Sims.

The experience simply isn't as random as most Sims games. For a lot of people, that's going to be a good thing, for others, it's going to completely defeat the purpose of a Sims game. The Sims: Medieval ends up playing out more like an extended version of Fable than a traditional Sims game, minus the hack-and-slash portions.

The game is designed around these new rules though, so it works surprisingly well. You'll spend most of your time venturing around the tiny village and completing tasks for people, which include the likes of fishing and the occasional fight. Your character will advance along depending on how you act, but unlike many previous games, The Sims: Medieval seems more interested in seeing you succeed on a larger level.

You'll still get the bulk of experience you expect from a Sims game — you can outfit your home (but not design one), socialize, fall in love, become evil, sleep, eat, and everything else, but the sandbox nature is played down in importance. It's all about forward momentum — you want to complete quests to master skills to become a wizard to join a party so you can run a castle. It's not as much about setting up a world with circumstances and seeing what happens.

It might be best to just describe the course of my Sims life. Upon waking in his house, he wandered off to complete some tasks, including picking flowers, starting a fight and fishing. Bored with such trivial things, he decided to instead concentrate on religion and in turn, began appealing to people to join his new religion, Thoronian. If the other Sims were not willing to join the cult, he would hit them — you can't kill people, unfortunately. Bored of these tasks, I sent him along to steal chickens, pickpocket and do otherwise dastardly things until he eventually built up enough rep to keep a kingdom of his own. He then married a fair maiden with a metal hat and a pike, and they slept together for all eternity.

The games shortcomings are on par with other Sims releases, music is repetitive and features far too much flute and some of the touch commands don't seem to respond very well. The larger town map is also a disaster to use, as the marked spots you can visit don't have obvious touch-locations to get to them. It's also iPhone and iPod Touch only, which is too bad, because The Sims: Medieval would be terrific on an iPad.

So, for all intents and purposes, lets call this a light RPG with mild sandbox elements — one that's trimmed a bit from its PC counterpart — it's a tiny, handheld version of a game that's already a bit scaled big from its originals. Still, it's one of the first truly different experiences of the Sims in a while and although it's a more directed experience, it offers enough new to keep casual players happy. If you're partial to medieval fantasy settings, this might be the one Sims title to really draw you in.

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I want to love Madfinger's Shadowgun [$7.99]. I really do. It's a lovely looking game, one of the best on iOS, but it's so riddled with holes, crashes, bugs and repetition, it's easier to walk away frustrated than in awe of it.

You play John Slade, a brute with a gun hired to bring back a mad scientist. There's a whole back-story about how corporations rule the world and whatnot, but none of that makes a difference to the core of the game. It's basically you and your A.I. making bad jokes at each other while a mad scientist is on the loose causing havoc.

Shadowgun is a looker in all respects and running it on both an iPhone 3GS and an iPad produces amazing results (although, text is incredibly blurry on the 3GS). If you look closely, you can see some of the tricks Madfinger used to make it run and look the way it does, but as far as the environments go, it's hard not to sit with your mouth agape in awe.

There has been a lot of speculation that this is a Gears of War clone, but it's not as blatant as it appears. Yes, it's a cover-based shooter with enemies that appear to dig bondage, but the comparisons pretty much stop there. The guns aren't as fun to play with as Gears and the lack of any squad mechanic ensures Shadowgun won't be confused as a Gears clone by anyone who's actually played it. The weapon variety is stagnant, all feeling relatively similar and none of them standing out from the usual suspects in action games — shotgun, SMG, rocket launcher, grenade launcher — you get the point.

For movement, the controls work well and cover is handled automatically when you get near a wall. However, I was either running into a bug or an odd feature on both devices that would lock my gun in place while shooting a little over half the time. It was never consistent when it would decide to do this, and was amazingly frustrating during portions of the game that had enemies who actually moved. Maybe it's supposed to be like this, but if it is, it doesn't work well.

It's a good thing the enemies don't move much. Most of them will be content appearing on screen, running to cover, then popping up to shoot at you. There are a few different types of enemies who don't do this, but their movement is mechanical and predictable throughout. They're not stupid so much as programed to only follow a set path, regardless of where you are or what you're doing.

Then there are the crashes. So many crashes. In around four hours, the game had crashed around twenty times on my iPhone 3GS, then, after the third hard-reset, it decided to delete my save game on the second to last level. Full disclaimer: I didn't bother going back to it at this point.

I've learned to deal with a lot of technical issues with games in the past, but the one I have no tolerance for is a deleted save game. It's the gaming equivalent of blacking out at party and finding pictures of yourself making out with a goat in the morning. It's heart breaking, frustrating and there's nothing you can do about it.

Maybe if Shadowgun was a little more diverse I would be interested in pushing through it again, but the bulk of the game follows the same formula on repeat: walk into area, trigger event, enemies rush out, hide behind cover, shoot. There are enemies later on with different attack-styles, but most of your time will be spent in long corridors with unexplainable cover, shooting at grunts.

All of that said, there are a few interesting mix-ups throughout the campaign worth noting. Boss fights, for example, are well thought out and shift from combat to minor puzzle solving. There are also Simon style hacking mini-games spread throughout to mix things up, as well as light environmental puzzles here and there. They work as a nice respite from the game's shooting heavy tone, but are never challenging enough to offer more than a quick stop-gap in the action.

I have a whole list of pet peeves Shadowgun manages to break – poorly chosen checkpoints, unpredictable splash damage, and the bizarre choice of chapter ends – all things that will frustrate some more than others.

If Madfinger can fix the crashing and save-game deletion issues with a patch, they're still left with a repetitive, but lovely looking shooter. There are hints of true quality in the boss fights and some minor sections of the campaign, but the majority relies on a simple, corridor design that's hard to find engaging for very long.

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Earlier this month we brought news of Elite Systems' initiative to expand on their ongoing retro rebirth efforts and bring a host of classics of old to iOS — those that originated on platforms beyond the ZX Spectrum, which was their initial source platform. Studio co-founder Steve Wilcox was kind enough to provide us with builds of the first wave of titles that will soon arrive in the Elite Collection of 8-bit home computer games to share with our readers.

The first Elite Collection titles that will arrive in the App Store are Datasoft's 1987 magical platformer Black Magic, Image Works' lovely 1992 release First Samurai, and the frantic 1992 space shooter Enforcer from Manfred Trenz. Every one of these titles is very well implemented in iOS and is among the top tier of games to be found on the 8-bit platforms of decades past.

Let's have a look.

Black Magic

The evil wizard Zahgrim has turned good Aganar to stone. Being a ghastly sort of wizard, Zahgrim has removed his six eyes and placed them in different locations across the land so they may view the destruction being wrought in his name. Your task is to recover each eye and place them, one by one, into the empty sockets of the Blind Statue. Hordes of monters roaming the land make this a challenge, but you've got your arrows and magic to aid you, and a bit of help from a somewhat fiendish troll.

In researching Black Magic for this post, I found a great many fond recollections gamers shared of hours spent chasing down the six eyes of Zahgrim. The title is very well loved and secured an 8.2 user rating from Lemon64.

Enforcer

Enforcer: Fullmetal Megablaster is an excellent side-scrolling space shooter released for the Commodore 64 in 1992. That it is, indeed, excellent should come as no surprise, given that it was written by Mafred Trenz, the developer behind the Turrican series, the C64 version of R-Type, and The Great Giana Sisters. Enforcer features some of the best graphics ever to grace the C64's screen and the on-screen action is furious and maddeningly difficult.

The game features six levels through a range of space and cave backdrops, with an boss waiting at the end of each. It is a very well-received title that has secured an 8.3 user rating on Lemon64.

First Samurai

First Samurai, released for the Commodore 64 in 1992, puts you in the shoes of the first samurai in history. You start out as a hermit travelling through an ancient land, but with enough food — and sake — you will grow stronger and stronger, gaining power and eventually becoming a samurai. That is, if the daunting enemy creatures don't do you in first, which they probably will.

First Samurai is, without question, one of the five best looking C64 titles I've ever encountered and features very nice platform combat action. Elite's iOS version features glass-smooth sprite animation and brings a truly worthwhile platformer to our favorite mobile game devices. First Samurai got an 8.3 user ranking at Lemon64.

The Elite Collection titles detailed here will be available in both standard (iPhone, iPod touch) and HD (iPad) versions that are playable in both portrait and landscape orientations. (All videos in this post are of the iPad HD versions of the games.) Each title features the latest implementation of Elite's iDaptive control system, which allows highly customized placement of both virtual joystick and virtual key controls on the game screen, as illustrated in the embedded videos. I am in hopes that Elite will consider the addition of iCade support for all of these titles, to allow for an even more authentic retro game experience.

Elite has gathered quite a collection with which to launch their new retro effort, and I must confess it's been rather painless labor running through these titles in preparation for this post. For the retro fans out there, each of these titles is a no-brainer buy — obviously — but, as I am one who appreciates the simpler formulas of old, I must urge even those without a nostalgic bent to have a close look at the provided videos and consider giving these titles a shake.

My crotchety old self is often of the mind that "they don't make 'em like they used to," when it comes to games I really want to spend time with. This initial Elite offering is a rather good representation of "the best they ever made 'em." And there's much more of this ilk on the way from the studio. It's a pretty great time to be a (retro) iOS gamer.

We will let readers know when the first three Elite Collection titles go live in the App Store this weekend and will keep the news coming on future titles in the collection, as we hear it.

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When Madfinger Games said that Shadowgun [$7.99] was going to be available on the 28th, I think most of us assumed that they meant at 11:00 PM Eastern like most iPhone games with planned release times. If you were planning on spending the day jealously cursing New Zealanders who have been able to get their hands on the game nearly a day before you, I've got a better plan: Just go download it now.

While we prepare our review, the best place to head is our forums where initial impressions and comments are rolling in. It seems the main criticism is lack of multiplayer, but Madfinger says they have "a lot of plans" for it. Some have even already beaten the game, and are reporting back that completing Shadowgun's single player campaign on medium takes around 5-6 hours.

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Depending on how closely you follow the Apple rumor mill, you likely already knew this was coming, but now it's official. Apple will be holding a media event at their Cupertino campus on October 4th at 10:00 AM Pacific time. The invitation itself is also incredibly elegant, and manages to convey everything you need to know in four iOS icons:

Details other than that are non-existent, although it seems safe to assume we'll see some kind of new hardware, whether that's a spec-bumped "iPhone 4S" or a newly designed iPhone 5. iOS 5 and iCloud also likely will launch either at or near the event as well.

Let the speculation begin, you've only got a week left to do it before Apple pulls the curtain!

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