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Since getting the new iPad last Friday, I’ve been having a blast playing through the games that have been updated to take advantage of the beautiful new screen. Of course, gameplay reigns king when it comes to any game, but the visuals are important too, and it’s pretty crazy just how much a big bump up in the graphics department can add to a gaming experience.

So far, my favorite example of this has been Zen Bound 2 Universal [99¢], which was just updated with Retina iPad visuals. In early 2009, the original Zen Bound was a technical showpiece for the iPhone in terms of its striking visuals as well as its incredible use of multi-touch. Right off the bat, the sequel followed in these same steps by being a launch title for the original iPad back in April 2010, and a few months later for harnessing the power of the iPhone 4’s gorgeous new Retina Display and Gyroscope capabilities.

And here we are again, not even a week into the launch of the long-awaited Retina Display iPad and Zen Bound 2 Universal is again a stunning showpiece of the new technology. The high resolution textures and fancy lighting effects combine to create remarkably realistic in-game models. If there was such thing as an uncanny valley for tiny carved sculptures, this would be it. Everything runs at a silky smooth framerate too, further making the visuals feel like they just pop right off of the screen.

The enhanced visuals have got me hooked on Zen Bound 2 all over again, just as I was when it first released, and if you haven’t checked out the game previously now would be an excellent time if you’re an owner of the new iPad. It’s a perfect game to show off the screen of the new device to people, and the unique multi-touch gameplay is just as impressive as ever, too.

With its slow-paced, meticulous gameplay Zen Bound 2 isn’t for everybody. But if you’re intrigued by the look of it and want something to show off your new iPad then it’s totally worth its current sale price of 99¢. The bonus is that if Zen Bound 2 is your cup of tea, it comes equipped with more than 100 puzzles to work through that can very easily eat up your free time if you aren’t careful, made all the better with the gorgeous new Retina Display iPad visuals.

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Hot off the recently released Dungeon Crawlers [$3.99], the folks over at Ayopa Games are back with Mailmen [$1.99], an enjoyable stealth-based tale showcasing the eternal battle between mail carriers and the canines that chase them. Featuring a crazy story, good team-based gameplay, and well done level design, Mailmen is well worth checking out.

Mailmen follows the tale of three postal employees as they try to deliver letters and packages to the public while thwarting the plans of the nefarious Newman, a former member of the team that turned to evil. Standing in their way are packs and packs of dogs eager to catch, chase and bite our heroes. The story is off-beat, ridiculous, and completely appropriate for the style of game Mailmen offers. This is also echoed in the development of the team itself, which does a great job imparting personality into each of the characters in every little thing they do.

Gameplay is divided into objective-based levels. While the primary goals typically involve delivering a package or item from one part of the map to the other, each mission always has optional objectives, such as delivering letters to special mailboxes and collecting stamps. Sure, you can skip these side quests, but they’re essential if you want to get the highest score (and thus, the highest rating for the map). While some levels focus on only one of the mailmen, most of them will have all three working in some sort of tandem.

Your team members aren’t just there for show, either. A big portion of Mailmen is its team-based stealth gameplay. Each mailman has unique abilities that must be utilized if you’re going to avoid the dogs (and score the most points). For example, Johnny is the only one with that can tie up dogs with a rope, while Charlie can hide in trees and throw a reclaimable ball to distract dogs. While the gameplay elements aren’t necessarily the deepest I’ve seen (you really only have a handful of abilities), I’d rather play a game that is well-executed and slightly simpler than a complex one that’s a mess to learn and control.

Dogs, meanwhile, serve as the primary nemesis and deserve some attention in their own right. Each dog has its own cone of vision, and you’ll spend the vast majority of your time figuring out ways to move across maps while avoiding the dogs spotting you. Most dogs basically operate in one of three different modes: patrol, stationary searching, and simply stationary. Later levels introduce deviations such as a dog on top of a watchtower that can see over most items that would normally block their view.

If you happen to get caught by a dog, they do what any canine naturally does to a mailman: try to bite them. Mailmen features a few breeds, ranging from the small Chihuahua (which mainly just barks and alerts other dogs), to the German Shepherd (usually asleep, but can do damage if it gets woken up) to the Rottweiler (can actually free other dogs that get tied up). If you happen to successfully hide, dogs do eventually go back to the patrols. As imagined, endure enough dog bites and the game is over.

Having good team mechanics are all well and good, but they don’t mean much if the level design doesn’t take advantage of it. Thankfully, Mailmen does a great job with that aspect of its game. Introductory levels do a good job of presenting the mechanics of each of your teammates, with later levels evolving into somewhat elaborate labyrinths that hit the right balance between difficulty and approachability. Obviously with stealth being the main ingredient, Mailmen is a bit slow-going, but that really is expected for the genre. With that said, I was never really frustrated with any of the levels, although getting three stars on later missions requires a lot of patience and planning. Still, more levels would have been nice, as the game is a little on the short side.

Control-wise, Mailmen does a decent job utilizing tap-to-move mechanics for controlling your characters. However, there are some other decisions that just feel clunky. For example, I loved the top-down isometric perspective, which just works for the gameplay. However, a pinch-to-zoom scheme really would have been a nice addition for viewing the map, as the ‘satellite’ view (which lets you see most of the map on the same screen) zooms out way too far, while the normal camera angle doesn’t suffice for the bigger maps. The same goes for changing camera angles, as a multi-touch gesture would have been a lot more precise and intuitive than a ‘Change Camera Angle’ button.

UI annoyances aside, Mailmen is an entertaining game and a great addition to the iPad stealth library. The team-based gameplay and silly story simply makes for a title that’s an enjoyable experience. If you’re a fan of stealth game that requires planning and patience, you won’t be disappointed with Mailmen.

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The arcade shoot'em-up Crossfire was released for Xbox in July 2010, followed by Crossfire 2 a few months later. Now Radian Games and their publisher, Chillingo, have released Super Crossfire [99¢ / HD] for our iOS devices. This game plays like a colorful version of the classic 1978 game Space Invaders, with one key difference: When a wall of bullets and lazers rains down on you, leaving you boxed in the corner and about to be destroyed …your spaceship can flee to safety by warping between the top and bottom of the screen.

But warping to the top of the screen doesn't necessarily ensure your safety, as the aliens can shoot upwards too. Some enemies have shields and can only be hit from one side, which necessitates warping up and down to get a clear shot. By collecting the gems dropped by destroyed aliens, you can charge up segments of your super-fire meter, then briefly shoot anything, even if it's shielded.

The warp drive is an interesting twist, as it forces you to pay attention to both parts of the screen. The developers blog mentions that they once considered having enemies move like another classic arcade game, Galaga, but they decided against this as it interfered with the warping. Still, it would be nice to see some different movements or perhaps a boss appear. That said, the game  throws 19 enemies and more and more bullets at you, until it almost feels like a bullet-hell scenario, which works really well.

Periodically, a UFO flies across the screen, which is another familiar concept from Space Invaders. The flying saucer drops a power-up when destroyed. For example, it might drop a bubble shield or slow-down the enemies movements. To collect a pick-up you simply warp across it. Unfortunately the pick-ups aren't super exciting and it doesn't announce what they are when collected.  Although the bubble-shield is very handy amongst all those bullets.

The game has a fast and exciting pace, with wave after wave of vector-graphics style enemies. There's a camera tilt effect which displays the entire game on an angle which changes each time you warp. You can select high or low angle tilt, although I personally found the angled perspective off-putting and turned this option completely off, so it's great that these options were included.

After every five waves of alien attack, your ship is repaired and you're given the opportunity to upgrade it using the points you've acquired. The upgrade system works really nicely. There are ten upgrade categories, including:  Armor, speed, shot frequency / power, firing rate, shot spread / speed, super power, super segments and gem magnetism. You can also downgrade these categories mid-game and re-allocate the points to different abilities. An auto-upgrade option is available, but it's fun to customize it manually.

Super Crossfire offers hundreds of control options (or to be more precise: 9). This includes 3 button, 3 tilting  and 3 slider lay-outs, with additional options for multi-touch. Unfortunately, none of these control options felt nice on the iPad, as the left and right buttons are too far apart. If you're going to put that much effort into controls, it's probably better to let the user customize the button positions themselves. Fortunately, it's far more comfortable, enjoyable and cheaper to play on the smaller iPhone or iPod touch screen, where the buttons are closer together.

The main menu has an "Unlockables" section, listing nine items to unlock with earned victory points. For example, the "doubler" makes enemies and gems worth twice as much, "Musician" enables the music-player option on the main menu, with sliders for tweaking filter and pitch, while "perfection gives you extra victory points for each perfect wave.  The most expensive unlockable is "Super Blast" which gives you a wider superfire.  You can also use your victory points to unlock chapters early. And you can buy victory points as in-app purchases.

There are five chapters to play through, with 150 unique enemy waves and three difficulty levels to unlock. The leaderboards are managed using Chillingo's Crystal as well as Game Center, along with 16 achievements. There's high score tables for 1-life and composite scores, plus a leaderboard for each of the five chapters. When you die, you can continue an infinite amount of times, without needing to restart from the very beginning, thankfully.

Personally, I didn't enjoy playing Super Crossfire on the iPad as the main left / right controls are too far apart. However, after switching to the smaller iPod screen, it was an enjoyable classic-feeling arcade experience. After 33 years, shooting space invaders is still fun! The developer advises the first update will include the "Dark Chapters", delivering some even faster-paced action and offering higher upgrade points, with an alternate background color scheme. The first update will also include additional leaderboards and achievements.

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Steph Thirion’s Eliss [Free] is a brilliant game. It launched in the App Store way back in March of 2009, when the App Store was still relatively new and trying to establish its identity in the world of handheld gaming. Eliss promptly went on to earn recognition and awards for its innovative design and outstanding use of multi-touch. Back in 2009, Eliss was a shining example of the type of game that would only be possible on something like an iOS device, which we duly noted in our review.

While Eliss is an older game, it’s no less engaging today than it was when it first launched. It’s seen several price drops during its lifespan, and has been available for the bargain price of 99¢ more than once before. However, for the next several days, Steph Thirion has made Eliss free for the first time ever. The circumstances for the sale are a bit unfortunate, though, as it’s meant as a tribute to the untimely passing of Steve Jobs. The first line of text in the Eliss App Store description reads:

Eliss could not have existed without you. You changed my life deeply. Thank you Steve.

It’s been a sad couple of days for Apple fans everywhere, but it’s been really inspiring to see just how many lives Steve Jobs has touched during his time on Earth. And of course, Eliss is a fantastic game, and should definitely be downloaded by everybody during its free promotion. We’re also looking forward to Steph’s follow up iOS title Faraway, which has been in development for more than a year and a half but last time we checked should be arriving sometime this Fall.

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So, Amazon let the cat out of the bag this morning and announced its low-cost and full-color seven inch tablet, Kindle Fire (and a less relevant-to-our-interests new touch-centric Kindle). Fire is an Android-powered device, though you wouldn't recognize that fact from its UI alone. It’ll hook into Amazon's cloud, be able to stream Amazon movies from its download service and, just like the Kindle, connect with Amazon’s rich e-books store, but the one thing that really caught our attention was, of course, the promise of games.

At the press event held today, Amazon’s demo Kindle Fire had a pre-loaded icon for Angry Birds, heavily suggesting that Rovio Mobile’s property will debut with yet another tablet computer this year. After the event, Amazon opened up its Kindle Fire advertisement page, displaying Angry Birds Rio, Plants vs. Zombies, Cut the Rope, Doodle Jump, and even Peggle on the device. That page states that every app that touches the device will be “Amazon tested on Kindle Fire for the best experience possible.” The Fire has a 16-million color display, a resolution of 169 pixels per inch, and it runs on a dual-core CPU. No camera or 3G, though.

Fire will hit this November 15 at $199 — a price that, if the device turns out to be good, gives potential owners a legitimate low-cost option to play Android games. This is an opportunity we haven’t really seen yet from an actual company with chops in the tablet space (excluding the HP Touchpad ridiculousness), so we’ll definitely keep our eyes on Fire as it grows and hopefully becomes the iOS-y platform that Amazon wants it to be. Also, it plays Angry Birds, guys! Whoo!

[Via Gizmodo, Engadget]

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One of my most favorite puzzle games that I played while growing up was Lemmings. Sure, there were plenty of games before that required thinking and coordination, but there was something about being in charge of a group of characters and having to lead them across maps of perilous obstacles that I loved.

BridgeTheGap [$0.99], a pirate-themed puzzle game, attempts to recreate a portion of the classic Lemmings formula while infusing it with even more strategy and precision than its spiritual predecessor. While BridgeTheGap certainly brings some good ideas to the mix through its bridge building mechanics, atrocious controls and poor execution prevent it from being little more than a subpar puzzler.

Your mission in BridgeTheGap is simple: a group of pirates need to get from one end of the level to the other. In your way are a variety of gaping chasms that require bridges to be built over them. The only tools you have at your disposal to build said bridges are barrels, which act as your weights, and bamboo rods, which allow your pirate buddies to cross those gaps. In addition, littered throughout each level are gold coins which can be collected by your pirate crew and typically require more complicated bridges in order to reach them. As you get towards later levels, you will also encounter ‘natives’ which will attack your pirate companions unless you take them out first with your pistols.

BridgeTheGap can be separated into two different phases. In the building phase, you have twenty building supplies (either rods or barrels) to work with. Once you feel you have a legitimate path to the end goal, you activate the movement phase which has your pirates start moving forward indiscriminately (a la Lemmings). The only commands you can give them are to jump or shoot their pistol. Otherwise, they’re going to keep moving forward. I would have really preferred the option to continue building during the movement phase, as it would allow players to make on the fly adjustments and possibly bring more excitement to the overall game.

Initially, levels are extremely easy to get through. However, they quickly become harder and more complicated, especially if you’re trying to get to the gold coins. Considering that those gold coins are necessary in order to unlock future levels, you quickly learn that they’re less of an optional quest and more of something you have to take into consideration if you want to be able to play through the whole game.

Overall, BridgeTheGap manages to create a decent bridge building game. The later levels require some pretty complicated designs in order to collect all the coins. Thankfully, there’s an adequate tutorial, along with some instructional screens showing some recommended bridge designs (although I hate the fact that you can’t access these designs in-game). There’s definitely a feeling of accomplishment once you manage to get all your pirates safely across all obstacles in a level.

Unfortunately, what little enjoyment BridgeTheGap provides is outweighed by a multitude of design blunders throughout the game. First off is the use of a virtual gamepad for moving about the level during the build phase. I would have much rather have seen a two-finger scroll or some other multi-touch gesture, as the virtual pad definitely gets in the way when you’re trying to do some precise bridge placement. Relatedly, the button placements during the build phase just seem to get in the way of the action. I can’t count how many times I was trying to place a bridge and then I accidentally hit the ‘Ready’ button in the bottom corner. Since there’s no confirmation dialog, my pirates would just start moving and I’d have no choice but to reset the entire level and try again, which becomes increasingly annoying due to load times that really shouldn’t exist in a game like this.

There are also a few other annoying minor issues, such as the main menu being a blob of selection choices without much organization and the fact that the game won’t even automatically reset once all your pirates are physically unable to reach the finish line.

These design issues are really a shame, considering how much potential the underlying game actually has. Unfortunately, in its current state, I can’t recommend BridgeTheGap for anyone other than the most diehard of puzzle fans that are willing to look past all the problems. For everyone else, it’s best you steer clear.

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The first thing that struck me about Contre Jour [$0.99 / UHD] was how beautiful it was. Everything about this game is lush and gorgeous — the art, the music, I could just bury myself in it. The second thing that struck me was that everything seemed a little familiar. Was the art too World of Goo? Or maybe too Limbo? Was this mechanic borrowed from Cut the Rope? Or was that one from Bumpy Road? Or, heaven forbid, Angry Birds?

Familiar elements litter Contre Jour, and I've already seen some people write it off for that reason. Let me be frank: this would be a mistake. This isn't some cheap knock-off that's stolen something from your game of choice. If anything, Contre Jour is an elegy to games past. Developer Mokus has taken the best aspects of any number of physics games and platformers and recreated them into a single imaginative whole.

You control the world of Contre Jour, not its hero Petit (named for La Petit Prince, an inspiration for this game). It is a hostile world, but you have the tools you need to see him safely through. Over the course of 60 single-screen levels, you will nudge, swing, shoot and fling Petit to the safety of a glowing blue light.

To get Petit moving, you can nudge the ground he sits on, lifting it and lowering it to move him into place. Rarely will this be enough to get him to his destination, however. In most levels, you'll employ tentacles, both elastic and not, that can be attached to him and detached at will. Timing perfect swings and launching him with a variety of these tentacles is a skill you'll need to pick up quickly.

There are other tools to play with, too. Some levels have movable tentacles, which you'll need to maneuver carefully to keep from impaling Petit on a lurking spike. Air geysers shoot him away. And, in a pleasantly familiar touch, you can toss Petit through a portal and trust that he'll fly through the other side, inertia intact.

The levels themselves range from simple to sadistic. Nothing actively opposes Petit, but gravity, spikes and hungry plants do an admirable job of standing in his way. Should you find the challenge too much, any level can be skipped freely — but you need to collect a certain number of lights (there are, of course, three in each level) to unlock the second and third worlds.

Each of the three worlds is lovely and distinct from its fellows. Three instrumental themes accompany your journey, and they deserve a listen through a good pair of headphones. The worlds also manage to look quite different from each other while maintaining Contre Jour's monochromatic aesthetic. The neon glow of the Night world is particularly appealing.

The one drawback of Contre Jour is that on smaller devices some of the later levels require a bit too much coordination. The game supports multi-touch input, so it's possible to tap, nudge and launch all in a few moments, but it's awfully hard to be precise about what you're touching when you're covering the screen with several fingers at once. If you want to collect all the Game Center/Crystal achievements and top each chapter's leaderboard you may find it easier to do so on the iPad where you'll have a bit more room to pull off some of the more complicated maneuvers.

If there is room in your heart for another three-star, one-screen platformer, Contre Jour is more than worthy of your purchase. It's a beautiful, challenging experience. Our forum users seem impressed so far, and I am too. I can't wait to see what's still to come for this game.

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The third episode of Agharta Studios’ conceptually brilliant and artistically inspired adventure game series, 1112, has been submitted to Apple and if all goes as planned it should be available on the App Store this coming Tuesday the 23rd. Regardless, it’s out the door and essentially finished after a year or so in development, which is an incredible about of time for a touch game.

Agharta sends word that this episode, naturally, introduces new characters and locations to explore. More importantly, it features several fresh multi-touch “experiences” or puzzles, as well as an intense soundtrack. To get a taste of the latter, just watch this:

We’re also being told that Episode 3 features a longer campaign than the initial two episodes combined. Does that make up for the wait? I don’t know, but we’ll definitely be diving in as soon as we possibly can. Man, that trailer was awesome.

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This past June at WWDC, we sat down with the folks from Illusion Labs to dish on all things Touchgrind [$4.99] related, and the team revealed to me that their original iOS mega hit would be coming to the Mac App Store this Summer. Illusion Labs showcased a proof-of-concept video in January of 2010 showing Touchgrind being played on a MacBook Pro using the multi-touch trackpad, which led to our speculation that the game would come to the Mac with the announcement of the Mac App Store last October.

It may have taken a while, but Touchgrind has indeed launched in the Mac App Store, and it’s currently completely free. The game controls well with the multi-touch trackpad, though it definitely feels different than the iOS touch screen and does take some getting used to. The view is nice and zoomed out, similar to the iPad version Touchgrind HD [$7.99], which makes it a whole lot easier to tell where you are going while cruising around the skatepark.

If you’re a trackpad-equipped Mac owner, there’s really no reason not to head on over to the Mac App Store and grab Touchgrind while it’s free.

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