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Last October, one man indie developer Owens Rodriguez released Alien Space [$1.99/Lite], a dual-stick shooter set in – where else? – space. It’s not easy releasing a new game into a genre that is literally flooded with great games, but Alien Space managed to hold its own against the competition with excellent controls, interesting enemies, cool weapons, and a great upgrade system; and it had a fairly loyal following of fans in our forums.

Shortly after the release of Alien Space, Owens started kicking around the idea of creating an alternate version of the game that was based around a retro arcade look rather than the contemporary space setting of the original. We took a peek at an early version of this project back at Macworld in January, and after a slightly longer development cycle than was intended, Alien Space Retro [99¢] popped into the App Store just before this past weekend.

Alien Space Retro includes the same 30 campaign levels and survival mode from the original game, plus it has several new features beyond the slick retro graphics that are available as in-app purchases. There are 4 new weapons – 2 heavy and 2 light – that are available for 99¢ each, or all together as a pack for $1.99 which will also include any future additional IAP weapons for free.

Aside from the weapons, there is also a brand new game mode called Lost in Space available for a 99¢ IAP. In this mode there are no enemies or weapons, rather you are lost in an asteroid field with a heavily damaged ship where even the slightest collision will cause you to explode. Basically, you’re a 1976 Ford Pinto. To make matters worse, your energy level is constantly depleting as well, so you must be on the lookout for crystals dropped by asteroids colliding into each other in order to keep your energy level afloat.

The new Lost in Space mode is definitely my favorite part about Alien Space Retro. There is an entirely different strategy to dodging asteroids and the energy depletion factor ensures you’re constantly on your toes, in my case usually in a state of panic. If you aren’t the type that’s fond of IAP, the campaign and survival modes included in the initial price are excellent on their own, and provide a ton of gameplay. Just be aware that it isn’t a whole lot different than the original Alien Space, aside from the retro visuals.

That retro eye candy sure is nice though, with Retina Display support and more particle effects than you can shake a stick at. It’s also a universal app and plays wonderfully well on the iPhone or iPad. If you aren’t a fan of the retro look, and I know there are some of you out there, then consider picking up the original Alien Space if you haven’t already. If you were already a fan of the original game, then the new goodies in Alien Space Retro are certainly worth checking out, and players in our forums seem to be loving the game quite a bit as well.

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If you've ever played Spectromancer on PC, you know what you're getting into with Hothead Games' Kard Combat [Free, with in-app unlockables]. Not because it's been ripped off, mind you, but because the co-creator of Kard Combat is Richard Garfield, the man behind Spectromancer and the big daddy of TCGs, Magic: The Gathering.

The thing that sets Kard Combat and its progenitor apart from other card games is the complete lack of deck building. For some, building a carefully constructed deck designed to devastate your opponents is what the genre is all about, but I find it more of a necessary evil. I don't particularly want to spend all my money buying boosters, or spend hours agonizing over whether this card or that card is a better fit for my deck. If you feel the same, you'll find a lot to like here.

For starters, Kard Combat completely eschews the booster pack model. Instead, you earn your cards in the game's substantial single-player mode. There are four mages to take through the campaign, The Tower, each defined by an affinity: Death, Holy, Dominator and Machine. Whichever one you choose, your cards will be randomly chosen from four elements, Fire, Water, Air and Wind, and a fifth that matches your affinity. Each match, your deck is built out of twenty randomly chosen cards picked from those you've unlocked and spread evenly between the five categories.

When you face off against an opponent, you each get a field with six positions to fill. On your turn, you can play one card, which is either a unit that can be placed in one of those six positions, or a spell that affects you, your opponent or his cards directly. Units face off against the cards placed directly across from them. Each card has a mana cost, and you have a pool of mana for each category of card – this mana starts out at random levels and increases by one point each round, barring any cards that modify your mana growth. Both players have a pool of health, and the loser is the one that runs out of health first.

There are two ways to unlock cards. You can play through the Tower, which is free for the first few levels and can be opened up with a $0.99 in-app purchase for each mage (or $2.99 for all four). Each opponent you defeat on your way up the tower gives you a new card or an item. If you'd rather just hop straight into multiplayer fully armed, you can unlock all the cards, mages and items with a one-time purchase of $9.99.

Kard Combat has asynchronous multiplayer through OpenFeint. Strictly speaking, this means you can walk away and take your turns whenever you want to, but most of the community seems to play as though this is a synchronous game. There's nothing to stop you from playing in real time, and with such a fast, strategic game, you'll probably prefer it that way.

That's a lot of technical stuff, but the technical stuff is pretty important here. You know what else is important? The art. The card art in Kard Combat is pretty great, in a moody, gothic sort of way. Unfortunately Hothead has chosen to only let you see it in tiny little boxes to keep the game's file size low. Since the game's interface isn't much to speak of (it's functional, but with an unpleasant 90s-retro-gothic style), and the art is so small, the whole thing is a bit bland to look at. The sound design is also underwhelming, leaving us with a somewhat uninspiring package.

But looks aren't everything, and thankfully Kard Combat makes up for its weak points with a great personality. It's a fun game, and the lack of deck-building means it's easy to get into — even for card game newbies. The single-player campaign has three difficulty modes, so you should be able to find a challenge no matter your skill level, and the multiplayer is both functional and well-balanced. Our forum users are pretty into it, too. Kard Combat has a bright future ahead of it, and Hothead Games has given every indication the plan to keep it growing for a long time to come.

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Before I get started with this, let's get folks up to speed that might not be aware of what cocos2d is- Cocos2d is an extremely popular totally free framework that provides core functionality for developers to use to build their games. The basic idea behind cocos2d and other similar projects is to provide easy to use tools to do things like handle sprites, sounds, physics, and more so developers can focus on building their games instead of, for example, investing time into writing their own text rendering or texture handling.

For examples of the kinds of things I'm talking about, check out the following demo video for cocos2d:

As of yesterday, cocos2d went 1.0.0. This is the product of 2600 commits to the codebase from 140 different contributors, with the first commit taking place just a little over 3 years ago. Cocos2d even saw 63 releases before it officially went 1.0.0.

It's been a long road too, cocos2D started as a Python project by Ricardo Quesada with some friends of his in the Argentinian town of Los Cocos, hence the name. The coconut logo comes from the spanish meaning of "cocos," although Ricardo admits that when it was originally named they didn't exactly have coconuts in mind. Oh, and check out the original roadmap as it was sketched out, emphasis has been placed on the original planned 1.0 release in February of 2009:

Even though cocos2d took forever to hit the 1.0.0 mark, it's easily among the best frameworks out there for iOS developers to use, and chances are you already have several games on your device(s) that utilize it. Ricardo estimates that more than 2500 iOS games are using it now, along with 50 or so on the Mac App Store. Feed Me Oil [99¢], League of Evil [$1.99], heck even FarmVille [Free] uses it.

Congratulations on turning 1.0.0, cocos2d team!

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In celebration of the July release of Battle Slugs [$.99], a hexagonal strategy game that has you, as a storm of slugs, claiming territory, German creator GameProm has slashed the price of one of its key releases to pennies, while also cutting cost of a select group of games to $0, which is always a great price.

Think of the money you’ll save as you devour the following free offerings. Now you’ll finally be able to afford Netflix! Or detergent! Or cat food! I’m screaming!

• Wild West Pinball – $.99 → Free
• The Deep Pinball – $.99 → Free
• Jungle Style Pinball – $.99 → Free
• Magnetar: Space Fighter – $.99 → Free
• Crimsonworld – $.99 → Free
• Crimsonworld HD – $.99 → Free
• Crimsonworld for Mac – $.99 → Free

One other game thus far has received a discounted price, which you know, will still save you a little bit money.

• Thunder Ball Pinball – $1.99 → $.99

I'm currently checking out Wild West Pinball. The other night, actually, I started thinking about how badly I wanted to see "Young Guns" again. Hopefully, this'll sate my grit and sand desires until the work day is over. If not… well, there's always Thunder Ball Pinball, which is alright but has nothing to do with cowboys.

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Apple has been doing some maintenance on iTunes Connect, which is the glue behind the scenes that holds together the family of iTunes stores. As part of some planned downtime, they've also adjusted pricing in some international markets with currencies that have fluctuated. Some price points have done up, while others went down.

Here are the new low-end pricing tiers for regions that have changed, and the rest of the tiers fall in line accordingly with the new pricing:

UK: £0.59 → £0.69
Australia: AU$1.19 → AU$0.99
Japan: 115 → 85 Yen
Mexico: $10 → $12
Switzerland: 1.10Fr → 1.00Fr
Norway: 6.00Kr → 7.00Kr

It seems the only countries affected were those that were furthest out of line with current conversion rates. Congratulations, Australia, Japan, and Switzlerland, you'll be saving a little cash. Sadly, iTunes gift cards aren't going to stretch as far as they used to in the UK, Mexico, and Norway, but that's the way of the world I suppose.

[MacStories via MacRumors]

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Back in March 2008, when Apple announced the iPhone SDK and the then-forthcoming App Store, many people immediately though: GAMES. I know we did — that's why we started TouchArcade that very month. Another person who felt that gaming would be huge on the iPhone is Craig Rothwell of OpenPandora. Seeing an opportunity there in the button-lacking iPhone, Craig and company began designing the iControlPad, a gaming accessory originally designed to mate with the iPhone and provide a D-pad plus four buttons. We first caught wind of this effort quite a while ago — over three years ago, in fact. In that time, the iControlPad has changed shape more than once, changed interfaces, and, finally, become a real product that can be ordered online.

Yesterday, we received a test unit and I've been putting it through its paces and learning its ins and outs all day. Let me share my impressions.

The first thing that strikes you about the iControlPad when you unpack it is its myriad inputs. There's a D-pad, a four-button diamond, a Select and Start button, two back buttons, and two analog sticks. Best of all, the glorious analog sticks! And…the first disappointment comes when you, iOS gamers, discover that they're rendered unusable due to Apple's restrictions on the type of Bluetooth devices that can interface with iOS.

The iControlPad is a complex device that features many different modes of Bluetooth operation: keyboard emulation, Serial Port Protocol (SPP), a slew of Human Interface Device (HID) modes, as well as custom combinations of several. What's more, it features firmware that can be flash-updated from Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. While, due to the aforementioned restrictions, the iControlPad can only interface with un-jailbroken iOS devices by way of keyboard emulation, it can interface with other platforms, including Android and WebOS, via the more robust protocols and, thus, deliver its full range of capabilities. Keyboard emulation does allow all other controls on the device to work under iOS — but no analog sticks, which need to send a constant stream of positional data to the host device.

Jailbroken iOS devices can take full advantage of the analog sticks, as demonstrated in this iPhone demo video.

The iControlPad's keyboard emulation mode interfaces with iOS devices in a similar manner as the iCade, with one "keypress" being sent to the iPhone when an action begins, and another when that action ends. The following diagram, kindly provided by Stuart Carnie of Manomio, illustrates the basic event flow in this mode of operation.

Under the keyboard emulation mode, the native iControlPad key protocol is a bit more complex than that of the iCade, and as a result it should exhibit slightly more latency than ThinkGeek's control device, though happily, it's not easy to see. No big worries though, as an imminent firmware update will allow the iControlPad to go into an iCade emulation mode, of sorts, using its same key protocol, which will allow it to work with any game coded to take advantage of the iCade controller.

A little more concerning is a situation I noticed when playing games that require a great deal of button mashing (like R-Type). At times in such games, the onscreen ship would continue going in the last direction I triggered, ultimately flying off the screen or into a wall. I'm not certain, but it seems more a key signal issue than a physical issue of the D-pad sticking. If that's indeed the case, I hope a firmware update will resolve the matter.

The iControlPad itself feels pretty substantial. It consists of a core rectangular control unit with rubber end-caps that can function as a free-standing Bluetooth control unit for many types of devices. The standard end-caps can be removed and replaced with a locking plastic frame that allows various phone-sized devices to be physically connected to the unit. For iPad use, you'd want the generic end-caps, while you'd want the iPhone end-cap-frames to attach an iPhone. Other phones can use other end-caps.

The unit features a non-removable, rechargeable 1350 mAh battery that can be used to charge your iPhone's battery by way of plugging a USB OTG adapter into the iControlPad's USB port. Given that the iPhone 4's battery is 1420 mAh, the unit can deliver a notable boost in usage time for the host device. A very nice feature.

As mentioned previously, I tested a number of games on the iControlPad-equipped iPhone, including R-Type. That's Amiga R-Type running under a build of Manomio's iAmiga emulator with iControlPad (and iCade) support built-in, kindly provided by Stuart Carnie. Any joystick-based game running under the developer iAmiga build in question can be played using the iControlPad. And played well — the experience feels great, aside from the occasional "sticking" issue that I spoke of earlier. If and when that gets ironed out, the iControlPad unquestionably delivers a far superior game experience than any manner of on-screen D-pad.

That said, I only have this iAmiga build thanks to a developer connection. I am not aware of a single game sitting in the App Store at this moment that natively supports the iControlPad. Several currently support the iCade, and when emulation for that device arrives, iControlPad users will have more to play with. I am sure that, in time, the device will gain app support, but it's something of a bleak playing field right now.

After spending a long day with the unit, I cannot recommend that the typical gamer run out right now and grab one. It's true that I recently praised the iCade in my review, but as a physical arcade machine replica, it delivers more of an overall retro "experience" than simply a new method of control. And, there's value there, to me and the other retro goons, I feel. I think the iControlPad needs to see some issues ironed out and a bit more adoption before it becomes a desirable accessory for the typical iOS gamer. For the hobbyist developer or the hacker sort with jailbreak in their blood, however, it's a pretty great device to tinker with. I am definitely intrigued and think it's got potential as something that might find itself on an iOS gamer's wish list.

Here's hoping Apple loosens up its Bluetooth restrictions so that the iControlPad and devices of its sort can deliver their full functionality to iOS gamers.

We'll keep readers updated as the iControlPad evolves. Stay tuned.

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Jeff Minter’s latest creation, Deflex [$1.99], a psychedelic puzzle game inspired by a previous Llamasoft release for pre-1985 machines like the VIC-20, is now available on the App Store.

As Blake discovered when he got his hands on a pre-release build a couple of weeks back, Deflex isn’t the easiest game in the world to pin down. The goal in each of its 52 levels is to take a ball and ‘absorb’ on-screen objects and characters with it. That's simple, but the core mechanic makes this a trickier task than it appears on paper.

Here's the rub: the ball needs to be controlled like a pinball does in a machine, so you’ll need to put down flippers to propel it into objects. The more flippers you add, though, the more intense and mind-boggling the action gets. Blake spent many a word describing this and the game’s constituent parts, so check the write-up out if you’re interested.

I’m continually fascinated by the ideas and visuals used in Minter’s games, so I’ll be checking this out alongside those of you who choose to dig in now. Also, we’ll be doing more with Deflex in the future, so stay tuned if you’re on the fence.

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Earlier this month, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Cowboy Rodeo, who lovingly ported the classic Amiga titles Pinball Dreams [$4.99/Lite] and Pinball Fantasies [$5.99] to iOS, were getting set to release a brand new version of Pinball Dreams that was fully remade with 3D graphics. Just a few days ago that game, known as Pinball Dreams HD [$4.99], arrived in the App Store.

I was sort of confused as to why they would decide to remake the game seemingly out of the blue, but according to the developer they had been getting requests for iPad versions of their games ever since the iPad’s release last year. But redrawing the old graphics to suit the new screen size and resolution would have been too large of an undertaking, so they started toying around with the idea of building the tables in 3D to solve those problems. After being happy with the results, they took the project full steam ahead.

Now, two and a half years after the first iOS release and nearly twenty years after the original Amiga release, Pinball Dreams HD breathes modern life into a retro classic. Purists tend to get up in arms when people go fiddling around with their classic games, but before you go blasting hatred over your IRC channel or start calling for Cowboy Rodeo's head over the Usenet boards, you should know that Pinball Dreams HD uses the exact same gameplay code as the original iOS version. And, in practice, it plays nearly identical to how you remember it. It also features all the original music and sound effects.

Although I’m not an original fan of the game from back in the Amiga days, I did fall in love with Pinball Dreams back in ’09 on the iPhone, and it pleases me as well to see the game’s integrity retained. It actually feels pretty surreal to be playing Pinball Dreams HD with fancy 3D graphics in your face but sweet retro sounds hitting your ears. It feels like I’ve entered some sort of bizarro time warp, but I’m loving every minute of it.

One thing to note is that because the game is in 3D, there is a dynamic camera that follows the ball around the table. It’s not quite as dramatic as the camera in Gameprom's pinball games like War Pinball [99¢/HD], so if you’re prone to nausea from those then you’re probably still safe with Pinball Dreams HD. But the lack of any kind of camera options is annoying, especially the absence of a single overhead shot of the table.

Thankfully this should be rectified with the first update to the game which Cowboy Rodeo has said in our forums will include additional camera options as well as a few other minor fixes. They’ve also pretty much confirmed that Pinball Fantasies will be getting this same HD treatment down the line too, and that Pinball Dreams HD will be hitting the Mac App Store soon. I am definitely looking forward to both of those.

One of our forum members has recorded this extremely lengthy video of Pinball Dreams HD so you can see what it's like in action:

If you’re a fan of the original Pinball Dreams, whether on the Amiga or on iOS, then don’t be scared of checking out Pinball Dreams HD. The game still plays and feels like it always has, but now it looks fantastic in high resolution on the iPad and Retina Display devices. If you’re new to the Pinball Dreams world, then know that you’re getting 4 extremely well designed tables and one of the best digital representations of pinball ever released. It’s not a very realistic pinball simulation, but in 1992 it was the pinnacle of video game pinball and that has held up incredibly well over the years.

Pinball Dreams HD is an excellent example of how to modernize a classic while still remaining true to its roots, and it’s one that pinball fans shouldn’t hesitate to pick up.

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The long awaited iControlPad is finally shipping. We last reported on this iPhone-controller in February when they began accepting pre-orders for the device. As proof, they've sent us a review unit that we just received today.

The device works like the iCade by emulating a Bluetooth keyboard. This should make it easy for developers to add support for the add-on device. We'll have a full hands on report of it shortly.

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We’re back with another BONUS episode of the TouchArcade Show. This week, Phil Larsen from Halfbrick joins us in an hour-long discussion. Unlike our previous bonus episodes, this isn’t a strict interview. Instead, Phil, myself, and Eli talk about whatever floats into our heads as we gently move from topic to topic. I think Pokemon, actually, ends up being the thing we stick on for the longest, but we also dive into Machinegun Jetpack, free-to-play versus premium, Microsoft’s Kinect, our fake iOS-centric E3 idea, and Australian beer. Like I said, this isn’t a traditional bonus episode.

Want to give it a listen? Fantastic! You can do so just below via direct download or by stream. If you’d like to subscribe to us on iTunes or Zune Marketplace, you can also do so. Heck, you could even rate us there if you want!

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-Bonus-004.mp3, 34MB

In previous episodes we’ve featured music from Jim Guthrie and then music from the developer we’re speaking with. This week is strictly Jim Guthrie. The theme song is "Audio Pepsi" off the album A Thousand Songs. You can buy the entire album or stream all its songs on Guthrie's Web site. Guthrie is also responsible for the Sword & Sworcery [$4.99] soundtrack, which we used in this episode to break up some of the talk. You can give Halfbrick a visit at its official Web site here or via Facebook and Twitter.

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