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On this week’s episode of The TouchArcade Show, we pummel through conversations about GenCon, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, and the McRib in order to bring you the skinny on the latest and hottest iOS games. At the top, we finish up our continuing conversation about Uppercut Games’s Epoch and then dig into FDG Entertainment’s Blueprint 3D, Kairosoft’s Oh! Edo Town, and a few other delights. In the second half, we dig exclusively into your listener e-mails.

We had a blast recording this episode and hope that you’ll have just as much fun putting it in your earholes. If you’d like, you can listen just below via these links OR you could subscribe to us on iTunes and Zunes. Doing that latter is a pretty awesome deal since you get all our podcasts and content the second they hit the Internet.

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Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-025.mp3, 45MB

We’re officially out of e-mails, so feel free to hit us up for next week’s episode. Oh! And here’s your show notes:

GAMES

JARED’S KITTY KORNER

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Flick Home Run [99¢] from Infinity Pocket has been camped out as the #2 paid application on the American App Store for a few days and hit #1 for top grossing iPhone apps, yet it’s barely been mentioned in our forums, which is rather unusual for a top-ranking game. We decided to investigate why this baseball game’s so popular. That was a few days ago …and I’m still playing it.

Rather than displaying a batter, bowler, bases and fielders, like a regular baseball game, Flick Home Run focuses entirely on smacking home runs, as the name suggests. There’s no awkward floating virtual bat displayed either, because your finger acts as the bat and your swipe is the swing. When you place your finger on the pitch button, a ball is bowled by an unseen pitcher from the right side of the screen. You flick your finger at the ball, timing it right to smack it as far as possible.

If the ball flies out of the park and into the parking lot, smashing into some parked cars or a neighboring building, that’s a good result and the crowd will cheer. But to do this requires quick responses and accurate flicking, because the ball travels further if you flick it right in the center. This game has caused some extreme flicks, right off the iPod screen and into the air (once, into the wall) which almost feels like swinging a bat.

There are twelve different ball types, but you never know which you’re facing until the last moment. As the pitch approaches, the ball type is suddenly revealed. It could be a regular baseball, a fast ball, a fast drop or notorious curving s-ball.  There’s even ninja balls. Some balls are heavier, so cant be hit as far, while others act as score multipliers. Points are awarded for distance and hitting balloons or stars, which brings in a small luck factor. These points are converted to experience points (100 points = 1 XP), for leveling-up your power, accuracy and/or the number of delivery-type reveals available, to see what’s coming next.

The five game modes are: Minor challenge, major challenge, multiplayer, moonstar mode and practice, with each mode having a separate Game Center leader-board. Practice mode lets you choose which ball types to receive and then keeps a tally of your successful hits.

The aim of minor challenge mode is to complete 15 different steps (objectives) in the same game. Each step requires you to successfully hit a certain number of balls. Each time you face a pitch, miss the ball, or don’t clear the minimum distance, your life bar decreases and the game ends once your life bar is empty. However, making big hits and scoring points will recover valuable life points.

The furthest distance allowed in the minor challenge is 1000 ft and the ball stops just after reaching that point. There should really be no barrier imposed, because it’s wrong to tell a batter he can only hit the ball a certain distance. Also, if the current pitch depletes the last of your life bar, a drum-roll plays and it’s game over no matter how hard you hit it.  The player should be given that last chance to strike the ball well and save themselves. Instead when the drum sounds, there’s almost no point swinging, because your game’s already over.

Major mode is unlocked by completing minor mode, although it’s exactly the same park setting, just with harder difficulty and some new balls. However, you can hit the ball further here, as the 1000 ft limit is extended. Major mode is presented as a separate game mode, but really it’s more of the same; just harder.

Multiplayer mode lets you compete with a friend (or a random match-up) via Game Center. This 2-player online mode has both players racing to full a points meter with big hits. You can’t see each other playing, but the opponents progress bar is visible.

Moonstar mode is like a mini-game. You’re given nine balls to hit into as many stars as possible, by bouncing the ball of various moons in the sky.Because of this, you won’t perform well at this game until your power attributes are upgraded enough to reach all the stars, which requires a lot of grinding or optional IAP upgrades.

Flick Home Run is a simple concept which is well-executed by Infinity Pocket. It’s already provided days of  entertainment, which is a dollar well spent. With so many excellent  games available, I’m a little surprised this is in the very top rankings, but this baseball interpretation is certainly worth buying.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Wonder no more: Simogo has revealed its next game alongside IGN. It’s called Beat Sneak Bandit; and as we guessed, it’s a rhythm-cross-stealth game featuring all the adorable art your eyeholes can handle and a one-touch action model that appears to be as great as the one utilized in the studio’s last game, Bumpy Road [$2.99].

In Beat Sneak, you’ll play as the Beat Sneak Bandit as he reclaims all the clocks Baron Von Clockface has stolen and tucked away in his curious mansion. You’ll move by pressing a finger to the screen in beat with the game’s oddball music. The wrinkle here is that you’ll also need time your timing in order to avoid roving guards or other things that can spot you and end your home invasion.

Simogo is one of the most creative App Store developers out there, so we’re definitely stoked to give Beat Sneak Bandit a go. In fact, we’ve been talking with Simogo and it seems like we’ll be able to give you a pretty good taste of what’s to come in the very near future.

Oh! Speaking of the future, Beat Sneak Bandit will release at some point in early 2012 for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

[Via IGN]

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It’s easy to see why cover is so widely used in every modern game with a gun in it, but it doesn’t excuse how boring the systems usually are. Epoch [$5.99] stands out because its cover mechanics are actually fun to play with. They smartly combine agility and athleticism to the standard pounding and popping, while also offering an alien uptempo pacing, courtesy of Uppercut Games’s exploitative enemies. The cover system is strong enough, actually, to carry the game to completion, which is an important note to make since, aside from the story hooks, the game doesn’t have a lot more to offer outside of a standard weapons / items upgrade model.

Think of Epoch as a bizarre “what if” scenario come true. It’s sci-fi Infinity Blade with guns, and it’s pretty thorough with its adaption of that game’s upgrade model and on-rails structure. The key departure is within Epoch’s action model — instead of hacking and slashing, you’ll be whipping, sliding, jumping around, ducking or crashing your robot into pieces of cover as enemies sling bullets and lasers at you. If you’re moving tactically, enemies will lose their bead on your metallic frame, and you will then be subsequently free to target them and fire without worry.

The enemy AI is aware of what you can pull off, and the way they coax you out of a flow or a dead period is one of the more exciting aspects of Epoch. Some enemies fire timed grenades that you’ll need to avoid, while others can fire sweeping lasers that you’ll need to jump over, and so on. Mitigating these hazards, while also handling the other enemies firing at you at different speeds and rates, keeps the volume of battle on 11 and makes you to consider options and moves ahead of the one you’re currently executing. I like this approach to battle; it’s kinetic, but forces some thoughtfulness.

Moving in cover is a simple, visceral joy, by the way. The animations are smooth, the swipe controls are intuitive, and you get a palpable sense of power, speed, and actual control as you bound from pillar to pillar, barrier to barrier. Epoch does a great job at mixing up the action, too, by bringing in new enemy types, compelling waves, and generally keeping you on your toes throughout the game. Though, with that said, it lasts just shy of an hour.

Shooting is a side-bar, much like cover is for most cover-based shooters. It’s automated, but based on who you target. There are, on the other hand, some user-controlled special abilities that essentially act as upgradeable crowd-thinners on cooldown clocks. Think magic but in the real world explode-y sense, and you’ve got the ticket.

Epoch … encourages its users to play through sequences multiple times in order to earn more income to buy new guns and new abilities from its in-game store, which is brimming with high-cost content. There’s a stumble here. Re-runs though a level you’re previously beaten doesn’t appear to yield new fights or content outside of difficulty. The kickback is that, even though the combat is awesome, you’ll find yourself doing the maneuvers in the same spots.

Another point: even though the on-rails approach that Epoch takes to guide you through its narrative element is effective, the lack of control can become grating when you’re just re-loading the same content over and over again. Infinity Blade disguises this same problem effectively by giving you the ability to pick where your character goes. It also dishes out some optional side paths and item pick-ups. Epoch doesn’t, so you’re left with zero to do outside of fighting whenever you’re stuck in a grind cycle.

If you’re into upgrades and that rinse and repeat model of progression I doubt you’ll have any qualms with Epoch because, otherwise, it’s a good game that really executes on what sets it apart from a billion other titles: it’s cover-system. You’ll jump, glide, and whip all over the place while executing on some cool on-your-heels strategy padded out by a host of competent mechanics and systems. I recommend it, but also excuse the game time and a lot of the pacing issues.

Oh! And check out the game’s story. It’s a delight and delivered just right.

TouchArcade Rating:

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I expected to love Evertales [$0.99]. Its trailer is stylish and charming, it looks a tiny bit like Trine, and it’s by Thunder Game Works, the folks who made the Trenches series, and Crescent Moon Games, the studio that brought us Pocket RPG, Aralon, Gears and other great games. We were optimistic in our previews. But here’s the thing about expectations — sometimes they leave you disappointed.

Despite its impressive pedigree, Evertales falls totally flat. It’s short, and it’s got a few kinks that still need working out. It’s excessively straightforward. But far worse than any of that, it’s just not very much fun.

The formula should work. You’ve got three heroes, each with his own set of abilities. Sort of. You have platforming, combat, and something that could resemble puzzle-solving if you squint hard enough. You’ve got upgradeable weapons and big boss fights. You’ve got great looking environments — I’ll give this game that much. But you haven’t got much else.

The trouble starts with those three heroes and their abilities. They just aren’t all that unique. The archer can shoot, but so can the mage and warrior if you buy their extra weapons. The mage can cast spells, which is a lot like shooting but much more useful. The archer can double jump, and the mage can float slowly to the ground. There will be areas where you need to use those abilities. The warrior can’t do much, but he seems to hit pretty hard. You can switch between them, but for the vast majority of the game you won’t have any reason to want to.

Then there’s the levels. There are only twelve, and they aren’t particularly long. It’s actually more like six with a hard checkpoint in the midst of each. They aren’t hard, though they’re occasionally irritating. I ran into a few bugs, places where I fell forever, coins that were stuck, that sort of thing. But more frequently I encountered areas where I’d be one death in before I could see where I needed to go next, which is simply shoddy level design. Deaths don’t mean much, though. You’ll run past several checkpoints per level, and you lose nothing for dying. It might rob the game of some potential challenge, but at least it keeps the lousy parts from getting too frustrating.

At the end of every second level, you’ll find a boss. It seems like the idea of these bosses is to provide an epic, puzzling fight, but jumping and hitting them works efficiently and universally, right down to the final boss.

Like me, you might think you’ll find some replayability in the Game Center integration. You probably won’t. Most of the achievements are for defeating the game’s six bosses. The others are for collecting all the armor for each of the characters. You can do that by grinding for coins — which just means replaying levels to collect the same coins in the same spots, not improving your performance or anything — or you can just buy the IAP. Which you should probably do if you’re really into getting achievements, since there’s one for that too. Maybe it’s just me, but achievements lose a bit of their luster when you literally need to purchase them.

When you beat the game, you unlock Survival mode, which will give you a leaderboard to climb. You get a tiny sliver of Evertales‘ least interesting level to stand on while you fight off waves of enemies. It doesn’t seem like you can earn coins this way, so forget about working your way up the leaderboard while earning useful upgrades.

The controls are another issue. By default, they’re awful. Movement is controlled with a virtual stick that hangs out wherever you place your thumb, and that’s fine. But jumping and attacking are both controlled by swipes on the right side of the screen, and more often than not the game confuses which you intend. That’s okay, because there’s a traditional jump/attack button set up available. It probably should have been the default, but that’s the least of this game’s problems.

Aesthetically, Evertales is pretty good. It looks great, sounds good, and has some cute cosmetic upgrades for its heroes. Otherwise, it’s bland and boring. I’ve always been pleasantly surprised by these studios in the past. Evertales was a surprise, but it wasn’t pleasant. Whether you love it or hate it, though, share your thoughts in our discussion thread.

TouchArcade Rating:

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It’s sort of a slow news day, and it’s no secret around here that we love cats, so chew on this: Halfbrick’s movie tie-in follow-up to Fruit Ninja, Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots just had a solid update land that you should totally wrap your proverbial claws around. We thought it was great in our review, and the new bandito mode makes Puss In Boots well worth the price of admission:

Bandito mode is new, and very cool. Fight your way through a gauntlet of randomly chosen challenges. The challenges are all about slicing, of course, but they mix the situation up. You may need to slice 15 apples in amongst an intricate and ever-changing pattern of bombs, or 20 lemons while a giant bomb bounces around the screen. There’s quite a variety. Each challenge is on a tight time limit — fail or hit a bomb and you’ll lose one of your three lives.

Those lives need to keep you through 12 challenges across three areas that also serve as difficulty levels. Each challenge you complete adds to your score, ranking you on speed, precision, and just how thoroughly you can obliterate your goal. Your total score for the mode hits the leaderboards when you finish the final bonus challenge, which a cute departure from the game that I won’t spoil here.

Aside from some bug fixes and additional customization options (new swords), the meat of this update is 10 new challenges in bandito mode. Bandito mode was already our favorite addition, and seeing such a massive content boost for it is always welcome. If you were holding out on picking up Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots to wait and see if Halfbrick was going to give it their normal update love, I’d say it’s safe to download now.

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Playing Junk Jack [$2.99] for the first time, you may experience a strong sense of déjà vu. It brought to mind my first delve into Minecraft, with the feeling of overwhelming choice, the lack of any clear idea what to do next, the need to visit YouTube and wikis to learn exactly why I was punching all those trees. But while there are any number of blatant Minecraft knockoffs on the App Store, Junk Jack distinguishes itself in nearly every category — but one.

One of Minecraft’s biggest weaknesses (one that’s improved over the course of its development) is its lack of direction, and Junk Jack takes that flaw and runs with it. For a game designed around crafting, building and exploration, Junk Jack is aggressive in its lack of assistance, leaving you without even a way to keep track of your craft notes (schematics) until you find the right note for the job. Luckily, developer Pixbits has already acknowledged that problem and is working up a fix as we speak, so we can focus on this game’s charm and potential.

It has charm in spades. While it isn’t the first 2D sandbox building game out there, it is a particularly attractive one, sporting crisp pixel art and gorgeous lighting effects. Then there’s the excellent chiptune soundtrack by Bright Primate. Combined, you get the sense that you’re building one of your favorite classic games.

But don’t go into Junk Jack looking for a classic game experience. At the moment it’s an untouched sandbox. Aside from a selection of Game Center achievements, there are no set goals to the game – just explore, build, and create whatever you can imagine.

Exploration is both better and worse than it is in Minecraft. Above ground, you won’t find many truly unique or interesting vistas. Since the game is limited to two planes and a fixed size, crazy mountains or overhangs would largely just get in your way. Under ground, however, there’s lots to find. New schematics are everywhere you dig, and boxes full of tools, treasures and materials are scattered throughout the depths. I’m still finding strange new areas, biomes I haven’t seen before living deep underground. Still, there’s no risk of getting truly lost.

Building has its ups and downs too. With only two planes (background and foreground), there are plenty of things you can’t build. Don’t expect full-scale replicas of the Millennium Falcon to pop up in Junk Jack. But the things you can build can be filled with all sorts of neat little things. Not only can you create all manner of furniture and decor with a familiar grid-based crafting system, but you also find treasures and statues and artifacts in your journeys, and you can display them proudly in your home.

Speaking of which, Pixbits has done something interesting with its save system. Say you build a gorgeous home underground, and you want to keep it pristine. You can load up one of the other two world slots and strip mine it, because your inventory travels between worlds. This opens up a lot of possibilities for creating linked worlds, but it does seriously limit your ability to share a single copy of the game with, say, your kids.

There is one outstanding caveat to my love of Junk Jack, and that’s its controls. They aren’t terrible, but they take some getting used to. You can swipe/drag to walk in any direction, and swipe up to jump. You can’t do both those things at the same time, though, so jumping is pretty much pointless, though a diagonal swipe jump can sometimes get you where you need to go. Managing your inventory is also harder than necessary, requiring a lot of care and precision while selections hide under your fingertips.

But the real problem is tapping: prepare to do a lot of it. Digging requires aggressively mashing your finger on the spot you want to clear, at least until you have high quality tools. My wrist isn’t thanking me for playing this game.

If you can adapt to the controls, you’re left with a game of great potential. Pixbits plans to keep building on the foundation they’ve laid, so hopefully we can expect to see quests, farming and cooking soon. I’ll also keep my fingers crossed for bigger worlds with ever more to discover. Even as it stands, though, Junk Jack is outstanding. Just make sure to take a guide, or look to our discussion thread for help — it’s a complicated world in there.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Hey, guys, Atari is resurrecting Asteroids and making it a free-to-play game — no, really. The other afternoon, Atari sent us its first word on Asteroids: Gunner, a re-imagined take on the classic arcade space rock-obliterator that combines new dual-stick controls, fancy 3D visuals, wave-based play, power-ups, ship upgrades and the usual free-to-play trimmings including IAP ad removal and IAP unlocks.

Obviously, this isn’t the Asteroids we grew up with, but this is definitely the kind of game that’s doing particularly well now and the kind of game that fits Atari’s new metric-driven direction. If you’re especially interested in diving into Gunner, but want to get your expectations in line beforehand, go give the Slide2Play preview for it a read. Spoiler: Gunner sounds like a well-rounded and easy to pick-up-and-play action game built for all audiences.

Here’s some screens:

Gunner is set to hit this coming November 10 at $0, so the wait isn’t much longer. Oh! And for this generious price, you’ll get the first 50 levels.

[Via Destructoid]

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At first glance, Sad Robot [Free] doesn’t seem to offer anything that hasn’t already been done on iOS. This is simple obstacle-avoidance arcade game that offers pseudo cave-flyer gameplay. Similarly, the retro-inspired graphics have been seen countless times during the resurgence of retro in the iOS games universe. But while Sad Robot’s components are not unique, they’re executed well and form a cohesive whole that has some equally good core action to offer.

In the game you control a humanoid as he goes from galaxy to galaxy dodging obstacles while collecting coins and power-ups. Mechanically, Sad Robot plays like most other vertical cave-flyers, with the difficulty always starting slow and ramping up the longer you stay alive. There really isn’t much else to the core experience, although the game does manage to pace itself in such a way that each run doesn’t appear to be too easy or hard. However, Sad Robot is probably not for gamers looking for substantial depth.

Sad Robot manages to supplement its simple core gameplay with a few elements to extend its shelf life. In addition to the standard high score leaderboard, it has both an experience system as well as a coin/inventory system. The experience system doesn’t appear to have any affect the gameplay and is used mainly as a self-progression tool. The coin collection, however, is a bit more substantive. In addition to using coins to purchase additional robots, each with different attributes, you can also use coins to purchase and upgrade power-ups.

Oh, and while the upgrades don’t substantially change the gameplay, they do offer enough of an advantage to keep you coming back to collect coins. There’s an option to purchase additional coins in-game, but it’s certainly not necessary as you can quickly collect lots of coins with a few playthroughs.

Like most other games in its genre, Sad Robot relies heavily on the precision of its controls and it offers both tilt-based and touch options. While the game defaults to the tilt controls, I found the touch-based controls to much more manageable (once you take a few minutes to get acquainted with the quirks). My preference was mainly based on the lack of calibration with the tilt controls, which made it hard for me to find my sweet spot controlling. However, I’ve also heard reports of the tilt controls being manageable without calibration, so it may just be my experience. Creator Colorbox has stated that an update fixing the controls is in the works, so this issue may be settled soon.  Regardless, Sad Robot’s control scheme does work in its current incarnation, which is important part of its gameplay.

I feel compelled to give a special mention to the music, which I thought was amazing. There is only one song, Pornophonique’s Sad Robot. While not composed for this game, the song is surprisingly appropriate (and, based on developer comments, a chief inspiration while creating the game). Since there’s only one song, and it starts over again with each new game, monotony can become a problem after playing the game many times. However, I personally never got tired of it, as the song continued to enhance my experience every single time. This is one of those elements that really makes or breaks the overall presentation of a title, and I think Sad Robot succeeds from a music standpoint.

As mentioned earlier, Sad Robot is truly an example of the sum of its parts being greater than each element taken separately. Both the graphics and music do a great job in enhancing the experience of what is otherwise a simple game. Everything just flows well in a sort of existential way, which is a feeling I do not get often while playing games. If you have any interest in arcade games with retro graphics, Sad Robot is definitely worth a download, even more so since it’s currently being offered for free.

TouchArcade Rating:

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On November 10, FDG Entertainment, makers of Beyond Ynth [$1.99 / HD] and Cover Orange [$.99 / HD], is planning to release its next big thing: a puzzle game going by the name of Blueprint 3D. That name might not be the imaginative one in the world, but it appears as though the is poised to offer a lot of amusement, if not some possible head-scratching challenge.

In a nutshell, Blueprint 3D is one a rotation-based puzzler with a natural world twist. In the game, you start out with a chaotic blueprint that you’ll need to manipulate and torture until the mess of lines form a coherent picture. As its name implies, you’ll be working with all the planes of reality available to mortal men, which sets this apart to some degree on a mechanical level and also introduces the possibility of some crazy puzzles. But if anything, it’ll rock a lot of content: 240 levels and seven themes, including architecture, medieval, and electronics, have been confirmed to be in the release version.

Not many of these games nail their look and tone, so this this’ll definitely be something we’ll follow as it hits the App Store in a couple of days. Speaking of that, expect to pay $.99 on the iPhone and iPod Touch or $2.99 on the iPad.

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