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This past November we learned that Dejobaan Games and Snuggle Truck [Free/HD] developer Owlchemy Labs were in the midst of bringing a mobile version of their 2009 PC hit AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity to the App Store.

The absurdly long title refers to the sound one makes when base jumping off extremely tall buildings, which is exactly what AaAaAA!!! is all about. On the way down you perform risky and stylish stunts to earn maximum points and admiration.

The mobile version of the game is known as AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! (Force = Mass x Acceleration), and the developers have announced that it is scheduled for release one week from today, on March 1st. Check out the amusing and informative new video for AaAaAA!!! (F=MxA) below.

When AaAaAA!!! (F=MxA) launches next week it will come equipped with Universal iPad support and cost $2.99, and we’ll have more on the game once it’s finally available.

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I may be dating myself here, but there was a time when I was completely obsessed with Windows Solitaire. I wanted to see every pixel of the game’s window covered in the cards that hopped down at the end of the game, and the obsession lasted just as long as it took to make that happen. Since then, stacking cards onto other cards hasn’t held the same charm. Then I picked up Fairway Solitaire [Free / HD] and now I’d kind of like my life back, please.

It’s not that Fairway Solitaire is particularly challenging—quite the opposite, in fact. It follows Big Fish Games’ usual mandate of making everything as player-friendly as possible. But between the dead simple gameplay and the weirdly compelling golf metaphors, I’m totally engrossed. And reading around online and in our forums, I’m not alone. This game gets its hooks into people more than one might expect from a golf-themed card game.

The game is built around one-card draw solitaire. The field is covered in cards that are stacked in various piles, face up or face down, and one card is drawn from the remaining deck at a time. You can put any card on top of that draw if it’s higher or lower by one. You keep stacking them until you have no cards left within one point on either side, and then you draw your next card.

Golf provides the framework in with the game is played. Each game is a single hole of a golf course. The score for an individual hole doesn’t matter all that much because your real goal is to hit below par for the whole course. The beauty of this system is that when you get to those awful awkward moments when the last few cards on the table just won’t work, you can end your game and move on to the next hole.

In fact, a cleared table will land you well under par. Not only does this make successful games particularly rewarding, it also keeps you from getting bogged down in losses. Just pick up your clubs, dust yourself off and move on to the next hole. You’ll even it out in the end.

Speaking of clubs, they play a vital role in Fairway Solitaire. You can find them as you play or buy them with Golf Bucks, and they can be used as cards for cheating. Whenever you’re in a tight spot with few cards left in your deck, you can pull out a relevant club and build off that instead. Again, this design cuts down on frustration and adds a teensy bit of strategy thanks to the relative scarcity of Golf Bucks and the long cooldown on each club.

Not that they’re all that scarce. You earn Golf Bucks for everything you do. They come from achievements, from finishing holes, from really good shots. They also come from in-app purchases, if you’re so inclined. You can use them to buy clubs or gear that gives you other advantages, like letting you see how many cards are left in the deck or clearing away a few hazards at the start of each hole.

Fairway Solitaire starts with one course pack, which contains six courses and about twenty-four holes total. If you choose to pay a dollar to unlock the rest of the courses, there are ten course packs that open up as you progress and one that can be unlocked with Golf Bucks. The differences between holes lie in the card layouts, the hazards present (which generally must be cleared by finding a hidden card or sacrificing a card from your deck), and the number of cards you need to get through to make par. Since most of the holes have their card selections randomly assigned, you can pretty much play forever.

Quirks abound, like realistically banal golf banter (which can be turned off) and overarching story about an angry gopher. The latter only comes up when you draw a wild card, which will throw you into a random gopher-related situation. Some give you clubs or take away your cards, and some are silly little minigames that award you with Golf Bucks.

Some of the other quirks of the game are less pleasant.The HD version doesn’t include Game Center, while the standard version is about double the file size. Multitasking drops off unusually quickly and without it you’ll be sent back to the start of the hole. And prepared to be inundated with ads for other Big Fish Games titles whenever you load Fairway Solitaire up fresh.

Those annoyances aside, this is the new solitaire title to beat in my books. What it lacks in difficulty it makes up for in sheer mindless entertainment, which is arguably what solitaire does best. If you want to push for a bigger challenge you can always go for three stars on each course, but success ultimately comes down to luck of the draw. Instead, I’d recommend enjoying Fairway Solitaire as the never-ending meditative experience that it is. Let other games be challenging. For this one, compelling and fun might just be good enough.

TouchArcade Rating:

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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.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Inco is alone. His parents are dead, and so is his universe. He’s the last living human, and a survivor of a horrible, no-good, very bad event that turned his universe’s suns to char. He doesn’t brood, which is a good thing since no-one likes a crybaby, but I really feel for the guy: he lives among broken toys and dwells in total darkness. When Incoboto opens, you’ll see him peering into an especially black space with his telescope, perhaps searching for answers.

He finds one in a curiously sentient, but obviously mad sun named Helios. Helios is babyish and overexcitable. He giggles like an infant and devours like one, too. But he is also odd and knowing in the way that he floats about pointing to the things he can fix if, and just if, Inco can find more fuel for him.

They’re as perfect of a fit as Inco is going to find considering everyone is dead and all, so the two strike up a friendship set off across the universe. Helios wants stars, while Inco just wants to find someone. Conveniently, when Helios gobbles a star, he gains enough power to turn on the world’s contraptions.

This is the premise of Dene Carter’s imaginative 2D side-scroller Incoboto, a game that we’ve had our hands all over for the last week or so. Carter is an ex-Lionhead Studios veteran, and you can see that studio’s creative spirit all over it. It’s the end result of hundreds of different ideas that have been mashed together into an imaginative romp that has things to say about death, living, corporate control, adventure game design, exploration, and many other things.

Breaking it down mechanically into a snappy phrase isn’t easy. In our audio interview this week, Dene said he gave up trying to pitch the game. Incoboto is too odd, too much its own game.

“I kind of gave up doing all of that,” Dene told us. “While you’re developing a game, of course, what you’re trying to do the whole time is try to emphasize the fundamental thing that makes your game, your game, and not a game. It’s so easy to describe your game as other games, with bits of this and bits of that or whatever else, as soon as you start doing that it’s very easy to get distracted.”

“After literally a year doing that and just kind of going ‘god, this is ridiculous, this is turning to Nethack, this is turning to god-knows-what-else. How the hell did we get here?’ And my wife literally beating on my ass for about three weeks, I just said you know what, this is a strange, strange game and I will just make sure everything that I do with this game from now on reflects that.”

The core components of the game’s overall structure and design seemingly owes a lot to the small creative team at Nintendo behind the original Super Mario Galaxy. Incoboto is the end result of what would happen if that team squashed that experience into 2D, and in the process of torturing, manipulating, and cleansing it, injected new features and the bent, almost dreamlike signature whimsy of a Lionhead production.

I don’t want to sell this short; Incoboto clearly is its own title. But its core action revolves around loosely adapted concepts and mechanics popularized by Galaxy. It plays around with physics a lot, and you’ll find yourself pulling a ton of levers and scaling a lot of oddities in a quest to collect stars across a series of interconnected globes that you can travel to and from freely.

If you’re still lost, take a gander at this trailer. This should put you in the right head space. Note the almost total lack of UI:

The game’s camera acts as a rod, slowly spinning the world as you move around it. One of the coolest elements of Incoboto is its one-touch controls. To run, press a finger in a direction. To jump, press that finger down again. It’s really simple, and it works. One of its other cool elements? The Corporation. In the game, you’ll discover that everything in Inco’s world has been created by an overly-observent mega-company that seemed to exist simply to create the most inane things ever invented, and then post PR-friendly signs about them everywhere.

At its heart, Incoboto is a puzzle game. Collecting stars allows Helios to open brand new passageways to other worlds. However, most of these stars are tucked out of reach, or require some fanciful solutions to get to.

You’ll run across puzzles that will have you lining up rods to complete an electrical circuit. In one specific case, we rotated a physics-based puzzle box with a ball on the opposite end of where it needed to be. Sometimes, you’ll be smacking switches with rocks or explosives. Other times, you’ll be scaling a world in a precise way to reach a star.

The puzzle design is lightly schizophrenic; there’s a lot of ideas floating around in the game, and you’ll see a lot of different puzzles as a result. The kickback is that you’ll hit a lot video game logic walls. New puzzles just don’t jive with the old. I got stuck within the first hour, and then again in the second, and then big-time during the third.

Seriously, Dene says this is basically the point: he wants you to get stuck or feel funny, and then to have to probe your friends for answers. He views this as a mechanic in an age where everyone wants to hold your hand. How indie.

As you progress, you’ll find tools and other objects that expand what you can do while digging for stars. Early, you find a glove that allows you to throw rocks at springy targets. The first item gives you the power to find hidden buttons and switches with a gentle pinch and zoom motion.

My time with Incoboto has been short, and I got stuck a lot. It’s a discouraging kind of feeling, so I’m not quite sure what that says about me or how I’m clicking with some of the fundamental design. It’s nice to have an actual challenge, I guess, but I don’t want the difficulty to keep me from seeing everything Dene has created. This is a beautiful, beautiful world with music that blends into the atmosphere as smoothly as a smooth thing.

I’m eager to see more in the final version, which by the way, should appear at some point this March on iPad. If you’d like to hear Dene talk about his game, consider checking out our most recent podcast. If you’d like to see more of the game, there is a really, really thriving discussion in our message board right now.

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One of the coolest things about the rise of mobile games is watching the platform evolve in fast-forward. Every day we see new ideas forming out of old ones, business models adopted, abandoned and rebuilt, and the capabilities of iOS reaching brand new heights. Case in point: Ragdoll Blaster [$0.99]. In 2009, this was a doodle-style physics puzzler with a barebones interface. It was massively popular, but the App Store was young. In 2011, Ragdoll Blaster 3 [$0.99 / HD] is an explosion of color and whimsy, with few sacrifices made to what makes the series great: damn fine physics puzzles.

I love how these games make you think a bit about applied physics. It’s not just knocking over this tower, stacking that block without letting the whole works fall, it’s levers and pulleys and magnets on top of all that. So it’s great to see the puzzles wrapped in a much more appealing package. That’s the best sort of makeover, wouldn’t you say—one that makes the outside as fine as the inside?

The new look has something for everyone, except perhaps lovers of doodles or dark, moody steampunk. If you’re into cute things, you’re set. The art is colorful and bubbly, the ragdolls have reached their ultimate Sackboy evolution and the whole interface looks like it’s been sewn and glued and stuck together out of cardboard and plush. If you’re more into high-score hunting and precision, Ragdoll Blaster 3 has you covered too. The interface now has space to drill down to more detailed ratings: the number of dolls blasted, time taken, and buttons collected contribute to your total score and star rating.

If you’re new to the series, here are the basics. Each level has at least one cannon and one target. You need to shoot a ragdoll from one to the other by touching the screen, with a visible firing guide helping you on your way. You control each shot’s power, arc and aim with a single touch of a finger, with distant shots firing with more force than close ones. The ragdoll launches on the arc you set, interacting with everything in the level and hopefully reaching the goal, or at least the next cannon, at the end of it all.

The ragdolls come in five flavors, all of which are stupidly cute. You’ve got your standard ragdoll, who does nothing more than flop on command. You’ve got an Ice doll that slides like mad on frozen surfaces. Pudge dolls are heavy and look it, and the rather unhinged Fire dolls burn any wood they touch. Then there’s the robot, who’s as attracted to magnets as his metal body implies.

Ragdoll Blaster 3 doesn’t give you free reign with the dolls (though wouldn’t it be cool if it would?). Instead your options are limited by the cannons present in any given level. Each cannon is set to a single type, and you can activate new ones by firing dolls into them. This lets Backflip Studios create adorable things like a cupcake cannon that launches Pudge dolls, and it lets them keep control of the ways you can complete each level. On the flip side, though, it keeps your solutions from ever feeling particularly inventive. If there’s a second cannon, you’ll need to reach it. If it’s a fire cannon, be on the lookout for wood. It’s a little too cut and dry, especially since the more creative levels are wildly entertaining.

That’s not to say there aren’t many creative levels, but in a list of 100 physics puzzles there’s certain to be a few duds. I’d happily pass on pixel-hunting levels, and there are a few of them. Whether by design or by accident, certain levels don’t seem to work quite how they need to work, and getting through them requires either great luck or a growing pile of carefully flung dolls. This is where a level skip would come in handy, and while Ragdoll Blaster 3 has one, it’s not the best kind. As in Angry Birds, you can pay to unlock a Mighty Eagle-style Rocket Ragdoll. It’s on an hour cooldown, and you can pull out in-game currency to speed that up. There are also solution hints (read: “spoilers”) for every level, if the problem you’ve run into is more where to fire your shot and less “why won’t this bloody doll hit the block so it moves the other block like it needs to?”.

Did your ears perk up at the mention of in-game currency? Don’t fret, it’s not a big thing. Every level has buttons you can collect, and they contribute to your level score and ranking. You can then use them to unlock adorable costumes for your dolls—I was tempted to grind for the Robot Knight. If you’re short on buttons and you don’t want to grind, you can pay for them.

While grinding gives you a way to pass the time once you’ve burned through all 100 levels, and you can always hunt achievements or work on your scores for the Game Center leaderboards and hidden stars, what I’d really like to see is an update with a few more levels. Ragdoll Blaster 2 was a bit tougher and more inventive on the whole, and I’d love to see Backflip take this game to that level. With its looks it could easily be an App Store darling, but right now Ragdoll Blaster 3 is a bit lacking in longevity. The game could hit a sweet spot for challenge with a few of the missing elements from 2, like portals, and a few more levels that combine all the different dolls.

As it stands, the game is still easy to recommend. For long-standing fans, it might be a little too simple, but there’s a lot of promise and plenty of new content. For new players, it should be just right. Ragdoll Blaster 3 is more inviting than the series has ever been before, and it’s filled with fun physics challenges at the cost of relatively little frustration. If that’s not enough and you want a serious challenge, swing by our forums. There’s an ongoing competition for fewest shots, and I assure you it will leave your ragdoll blasting skills sorely tested.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Last week, TouchArcade hooked up with Fluttermind’s Dene Carter to talk about his studio and its first release, Incoboto. If you’ve been following the production of the 2D side-scrolling puzzle, er, experience on our forums, you’ve seen enough to make one of those purchasing gut checks. You’ve noticed how good it looks. You’ve got a sense of its scope and scale and tasted its tone. If you’ve been reading especially closely, you might have even been infected by Dene’s quirk and enthusiasm. He got us, at least.

This isn’t an easy game to talk about off-handedly. It’s not as derivative as most mash ups, and it’s also really strange. We asked Dene for his elevator pitch, which revealed something vital about the project as a cohesive whole: it’s about embracing the odd or the irrational.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-Bonus-033.mp3, 20MB

“I kind of gave up doing all of that,” Dene told us. “While you’re developing a game, of course, what you’re trying to do the whole time is try to emphasize the fundamental thing that makes your game, your game, and not a game. It’s so easy to describe your game as other games, with bits of this and bits of that or whatever else, as soon as you start doing that it’s very easy to get distracted.”

“After literally a year doing that and just kind of going ‘god, this is ridiculous, this is turning to Nethack, this is turning to god-knows-what-else. How the hell did we get here?’ And my wife literally beating on my ass for about three weeks, I just said you know what, this is a strange, strange game and I will just make sure everything that I do with this game from now on reflects that.”

You’ll see what he’s talking if you give the game’s trailer, which is embedded below, some of your time. Incoboto’s look is bent, yet whimsical. Its devilishly constructed puzzles are, too.

In our minds, Incoboto has the most in common in Super Mario Galaxy. It revolves around similar physics-based hooks and trickery. Also, its moment-to-moment play, boiled down, is all about traversing and progressing through a series of interconnected “planets” with stars to collect.

When we brought this up, Dene was cool with the comparison. He added, however, that his title departs quickly with its difficulty and puzzles. He’s right. Within an hour of play, you’ll realize that difficulty spikes define the experience. This is a game that isn’t afraid to throw you under the bus with new, unexplored mechanics and puzzles.

In fact, getting you stuck and frustrated in its odd world is kind of the point. Dene told us that he realizes that, in this age of in-game guides and hand-holding, this is a crazy plan. He called it suicide, actually, but he likes the idea of people having to talk to each other about solutions, or having to come back to the game later when their heads are clearer.

“I’m doing things with this game that’s kind of suicide from a business point of view. I kind of decided I didn’t care. One of the things I will not be doing — this is not a game that is ever going to be free. I’m not going to suddenly whack the price down as it nears Christmas. This game is going to come out and be one price, so I already know I’m not going to make any money,” Dene said.

“The difficulty level is another part of that really. I want people to discuss it. If you make it so people are kind of tourists through the entire experience, then it’s literally basically like putting someone in a shopping cart and drag them all the way past everything in the game as quickly as possible so they can move on to the next thing.”

“I want people to get stuck. But because it’s not a game that where get stuck by dying the whole time — I mean there’s no death in there — you get stuck because you haven’t really understood the implications of everything around you. I think that’s a lovely position to be in, when you know that all you have to do is pick up the game again and have another go, and you probably find that it’s something you missed the last time. There’s usually clues around, some kind of hint as to what’s there.”

“If it’s not there, then hell, go out and discuss it with your friends. Please, talk about it. Tell people where you go stuck. That’s part of the fun of the game really. There are no people to talk to in this world, they’re all dead, so go talk to some real ones.”

We’ll have much, much more on Incoboto later this week so we’re going to hold back on the game’s nitty-gritty for the moment. If you’d like to learn more about the game from the guy who made it, however, give this week’s interview podcast a listen. Sound issues aside, it was easily one of our smoothest, most informative we’ve done.

Other topics we cover include Dene’s past relationship with Lionhead, his future with a new studio composed of a few key Lionhead members, acorns, and his thoughts on iOS as a whole.

We’ll be back next week with another bonus podcast.

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There’s always room for another point-and-click on iPad and iPhone as far as we’re concerned, so we’re pretty pumped about today’s big news: Lume, Story Book Games award-baiting and artistically gifted PC adventure game, is coming to iOS later this week. There’s been no official word on if this port will be packing any original tablet- or phone-specific content, but according to Story Book, it’ll at least feature new sounds and a higher resolution.

That’s important, too. Lume has a gorgeous paper and cardboard art style that just … pops off the screen as you play. An even higher resolution could only make it better, right? We’ve embedded a video of the PC version below for your viewing pleasure and vow to bring you a better look down the road.

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I created my Yelp profile in early 2010. I’d used the site for years before then, but for whatever reason, I didn’t feel compelled to start writing reviews until a few years ago. Yelp, in the off chance you’ve never heard of it, is a massive community-driven site which primarily focuses on offering honest customer reviews for all sorts of businesses. It’s equally useful to find a place to get lunch, somewhere to get your hair cut, a cool shoe store, or a million other things. Taking a step back, there’s tons of similarities between Yelp and the App Store, but Yelp does two things that make a massive difference.

Just like how you can find listings for anything from a roller-skate repair shop to a studio to learn fencing, you can equally come up with just about anything on the App Store. Both feature an insurmountable amount of content that’s hard to even imagine, and both Yelp and the App Store orbit around an equally important customer review system. Sure, sites like ours provide a more “official” venue for long-form reviews, just like a proper newspaper columnist would offer restaurant reviews, but I’d argue that a platform for legitimate customer reviews is just as useful.

“Legitimate” being the key word here. Developers on our forums have encouraged players to leave reviews for their games since, well, the birth of the review system. This sort of vague motivation generally results in reviews which I’d describe as both thoughtful and extremely useful for fellow App Store shoppers. Whether the particular review has a positive or negative slant usually doesn’t matter, as people who are leaving reviews just for the sake of leaving reviews often form at least a semi-intelligent argument for why you should (or shouldn’t) download something.

Then two things started happening.

Developers started putting these sorts of annoying pop-ups in game, interrupting gameplay to pressure players into leaving a review. Also, they forged this strange ultimatum of sorts, dangling the potential promise of future updates in exchange for five star reviews. In my opinion, both of these things taint the entire review process to the point of bordering on complete uselessness.

If you’re already into the second world of Ragdoll Blaster 3 [99¢] and you get this confusing pop-up asking if you like the game, why would you tap “no”? So, you hit “yes,” but at this point your head isn’t in a “alright I’m going to sit down and write something useful” space, you’re thinking, “I just want to get back to the game.” Similarly, if you’ve got a game you even vaguely enjoy and you notice the all-too-common update text that mentions something along the lines of “your five star reviews keep updates coming!” you’re not leaving a review because you want to assist in the purchasing decisions of the iOS gaming community, you’re doing it because you like free stuff.

I can’t really fault developers for this behavior either. It’s difficult to keep your head above water on the App Store, especially when there’s only space on the top lists for around couple hundred apps/games to be even making a decent amount of money at a time. Deciding you’re going to take the moral high ground and not beg for reviews could make the difference between keeping the lights on in your studio or not.

So, anyway, switching gears back to Yelp, if you’ve used it at all you’ve likely noticed that nearly all reviews you come across are at least somewhat useful. You almost never see reviews like these on Yelp:

You might stumble across the occasional funny but vague review, or reviews that are as simple as “Try the tacos!” but I’d argue that both of those are more useful than “love it” or “hate it” with an accompaniment of one to five stars.

Yelp accomplishes this in two interesting ways.

First off, there’s a real motivation to build your own profile up on Yelp. They’ve done an outstanding job of making your Yelp profile something you’d link your friends to show them what sort of things you enjoy locally, or maybe places you went to on vacation. It features all the social networking tropes that make it feel like home, complete with a basic avatar system and space for superfluous personal details such as “favorite thing.” As a Yelp user, you don’t want to leave a useless review because the profile creates a feeling of ownership to your reviews, and provides a record of all the places you’ve been. Comparatively, this is about the closest thing you have on iTunes.

There’s no ownership to that page. No customization, and no reason at all why you’d ever link it to someone or include it on the links on the side of your blog, or anywhere else that you’d normally put links you care about. There’s more to it than that. Even with a profile, some people will just flat out never get invested enough into things to put forth that effort to produce good reviews. Similarly, automated review spammers don’t care at all that they can have an avatar. This is where the truly ingenious Yelp review filter comes in to play.

Check out this fantastic video which details how and why it works:

The crazy part about the Yelp review filter is it works so well you don’t even know it’s there. As mentioned, I’ve been using Yelp for years. Yelp explained how the filter worked around the same time I officially joined the site. I discovered that it existed only a few weeks ago when I noticed that I could solve a CAPTCHA at the bottom of a restaurant’s review listing. Doing so revealed reviews of the same caliber of App Store reviews, what have systematically been deemed worthless by the Yelp review filter.

Apple has the resources to make the App Store incredible, and make app reviews just as useful as Yelp reviews for a new restaurant. They’ve already dabbled in building a low-level social network inside of iTunes via the Ping music service. A similar feed or apps that friends of mine are buying (and hopefully reviewing) would be immensely useful. From there, you’re only an avatar, a tidy URL, and a few silly profile data points to having something that people would genuinely want to link people, and in the process, pour effort into maintaining beyond “★☆☆☆☆ sux” or “★★★★★ ownz”.

Genius for apps already exists, and provides great recommendations for things you should try based on your previous purchases. I can’t imagine it being much effort to massage that same algorithm into flagging drive-by low-content reviews from people who can’t be bothered to spend more than 10 seconds typing out a coherent thought, review bots up voting, or people mudslinging with one star reviews of apps/games they don’t like- Especially if it falls out of line with what this customer would typically enjoy per Genuis.

Can you even imagine how different the purchase experience would be on the App Store if reading customer reviews was closer to reading product reviews on Amazon? Comparatively, just think for a second how much a wild west style review system like the App Store currently has would completely ruin sites like Amazon, Yelp, and others that are dependent on honest and thoughtful customer reviews for purchase decisions.

And no, the “Was this review helpful?” system is not a solution. All that seems to have proven is that, in some strange way, the App Store hive mind believes that of the 11,546 reviews for the current version of Angry Birds, this is the most useful:

This is one of the best games I’ve ever played! Plus it extends your time on the toilet by a good 10 hours.”

I rest my case.

The Yelp system is by no means perfect. Yelp has been the the target of all sorts of accusations both from business owners and internet conspiracy theorists. However, the fact remains: When I read Yelp, I almost without fail genuinely feel like the reviews are useful to me. App Store reviews, on the other hand, generally just result in a whole series of face palms.

I’d love if that changed.

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Hear ye! Hear ye! A new Angry Birds approaches. Details basically couldn’t be more vague at this point, as all we really know is this will be a totally new Angry Birds game, and it’ll be landing on March 22nd along with an absolutely massive marketing blitz which will span a complete cross-platform launch, potentially an accompanying animated short, even more Angry Birds swag, and who knows what else.

For more information, keep an eye on the Angry Birds Space web site. Hopefully at some point in the next month it’ll change to something other than an image of the moon.

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Weirdly enough, today has been filled with cool freebies. Assuming you’ve already scored the two free PONOS games, and The Blocks Cometh, here’s two more great iOS games to keep you busy this weekend:

Assassin’s Creed Recollection, Free – We were a little disappointed that Recollection did almost nothing to enhance the amazing mythos of the Assassin’s Creed universe, but if you’ve got an iPad and like card games, this is an unexpectedly great use of the IP. For more details, check out our review.

Prose With Bros, Free – Much like Words With Friends, Prose With Bros has always had a free version with ads. Well, today the full ad-free version can be had for free. I’ve had a lot of fun with Prose With Bros, as we’ve mentioned in previous posts. Games can be a little hit or miss though, and Prose With Bros seems to be more fun to play with friends than random internet weirdos trying their hardest to string together all sorts of innuendo.

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