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Last week indie developer James Gamble released his newest iOS game SpikeDislike [99¢], and I've been enjoying it a lot ever since (while simultaneously beating my head against the desk due to its difficulty). The goal is to move your bouncing ball to the right as far as possible while avoiding an endless series of spiky objects. As the name implies, you dislike these spikes, as hitting just one will instantly end your run. SpikeDislike is a game that is painfully simple to play, incredibly difficult to master, and even harder to put down.

Your ball will bounce automatically at its own pace, and holding down on the screen will advance it to the right. Spikes are set at various heights throughout the level, and each one you successfully jump over (or bounce under) will net you a single point. A gauge at the top will slowly decrease after clearing a spike, and quickly jumping additional spikes before the gauge runs out adds a combo to your score. Play continues in this fashion as you see how high of a score you can rack up before fatally running into one of the spikes.

It's so simple, yet strangely compelling. The single control mechanic works perfectly, so you always have good control of you ball. The difficulty lies in the risk/reward factor of the combo meter. Playing it safe and carefully jumping each spike one by one will ensure you live a long time, but you'll never approach a meaningful score in this fashion. Trying to move at a brisk pace so as to keep your combo going is what this game is all about, and you can reach some pretty insane scores if you manage to keep it up.

SpikeDislike originally launched with just a single game mode, but has already been updated with a lot more options. You can now choose from 3 overall difficulties, as well as 3 different speeds for the movement of your ball. There's the choice of two different paths of spike placements or the option of having them be randomly placed. Each combination of these options has its own high score associated with it, too. Additionally, there are 4 different graphical skins for the game, which are all various types of retro goodness.

SpikeDislike is one of those games that is frustratingly fun. Every time you die you know exactly what you did wrong, and it's both quick and easy to jump in and give it another shot making it hard to quit playing. The number one thing this game is missing is online scores, as it's just tailor-made for such a thing, and hopefully the developer can add Game Center functionality in the future. He is active in our forums taking in any feedback or suggestions, and although it won't be everybody's cup of tea, SpikeDislike is a simple and fun challenge that's worth checking out.

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A couple of weeks ago 5th World Media released Bouncer Boot Out [99¢] into the App Store. It's a fast-paced game built upon an extremely simple gameplay mechanic, and features a wonderful art style with a nice dose of humor. There isn't a ton of depth here, but I've been enjoying the gameplay which is perfect for quick bursts of play. The premise is that you play the bouncer at a series of different clubs who must sort the wheat from the chaff in an endless stream of partygoers trying to get in the entrance to the club. You do this by literally flicking the losers out of the line before they have a chance to enter, while letting all the hip, beautiful people inside. Yes it's a judgmental job, but somebody has to do it.

In the Timed mode of Bouncer Boot Out you have 90 seconds to work the front door. Each successful boot out earns you points, and you can even switch the position of people in line and group the unwanted guests together before flicking them out in unison to earn some combo points. Every time you let in an unwanted guest, or accidentally flick a cool person out of line, you'll lose points. There's even a cute little child that will occasionally try to skip her way into the club, and accidentally letting her through the door results in the round immediately ending.

There are 6 different clubs in Bouncer Boot Out, 5 of which start out locked, each with their own sets of unique patrons. New clubs are unlocked by meeting set score criteria in your persistent score total from previously played games. In addition to the Timed mode, there is also a Survival mode that can be played at any of the unlocked clubs. Here you will face an endless line of people that enter the club in an increasingly rapid fashion. You try to earn as high a score as possible before making 3 mistakes, which will bring the game to an end.

What makes playing Bouncer Boot Out so enjoyable is the humorous looking characters that are full of personality. There are 30 different characters, and although there is a visual indication of who to boot out of line at the beginning of a round, this quickly fades away and you must rely on visually recognizing who doesn't belong in line. It's easy to tell that the pregnant lady, blue-haired granny, and homeless fellow are amongst those who don't belong thanks to the great art. One drawback however is the lack of Retina Display support, and for a game with such a huge focus on visuals it would be nice to see this added in the future.

Besides the lack of Retina Display support, Bouncer Boot Out could really benefit from some sort of online high score tracking, such as Game Center. But even with these two shortcomings, it's still a really solid game. The art and music are excellent, the controls are super tight, and the gameplay is simple and well-suited to the touch screen. There's a lot of positive impressions in the discussion thread in our forums as well, and Bouncer Boot Out is recommended if you're looking for a fun high score game with loads of style.

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Sega's Virtua Fighter series literally spawned the 3D fighting genre back in the early 90s. It has also been one of the most well-received and successful fighting game franchises of all time, spawning numerous sequels, alternate versions, and spinoffs over the past two decades. That's what makes tonight's release of Virtua Fighter 2 [$1.99] on the App Store so disappointing – it's not the highly refined arcade sequel to the groundbreaking Virtua Fighter, but rather its severely gimped Genesis version running in Sega's iOS Genesis emulator.

I have mixed feelings towards the iOS Genesis games. Some of the titles they choose to bring to the App Store turn out pretty good, and remain highly fun and playable even after many years have passed. Some, though, are completely ill-suited to a touch screen platform, and merely serve to scratch my nostalgia itch when needed. The Genesis version of Virtua Fighter 2 is neither of these.

Since the 16-bit Genesis was incapable of doing a 3D fighting game, Sega created a 2D version of Virtua Fighter 2 for its popular home console to take advantage of the huge popularity of the Virtua Fighter series in arcades. It only slightly resembles its arcade counterpart, and honestly it wasn't even that good of a 2D fighter when it released 15 years ago. It completely baffles me that Sega would opt to bring such a poor example of one of its strongest brands to iOS rather than the excellent arcade version, or at least the Sega Saturn version, both of which should be totally possible with the iOS hardware.

This is a random YouTube video of the Genesis version, just so there's no mistaking what the gameplay is like if you're curious about picking up the game:

Chances are there are some folks out there who never knew the beauty that was the Virtua Fighter series in arcades, but had Virtua Fighter 2 on their Genesis and played the snot out of it back in the day. To those people you will be happy to know you can now carry that experience around in your pocket, running fairly smoothly inside of Sega's no-frills emulator. There's even a nifty Bluetooth local multiplayer mode for you. Unfortunately I am not one of those people, and in fact, I don't even know anybody who is. The forum discussion has echoed a similar disappointment to my own, and I can only hope that someday we will see a proper version of a Virtua Fighter game on the App Store.

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Ahoy, Catan [$4.99 / HD] for iPod Touch and iPhone owners! Man the poop decks, tow in the anchor, and put on your eye-patch. Catan has just went 2.0 with the “Seafarers Expansion,” an in-game download that adds two new Catan variants and 16 new scenarios within a new, sea-themed campaign. The price? $3.99.

That name should sound familiar to board game enthusiasts. To get specific, the Seafarers expansion adds ships, which are basically over-water roads.  Hilariously, pirates — another new concept in this expansion — can steal from these ships. Gold rivers (which give you a mineral of your own choice per adjacent city) and extra victory point tiles are also part of the package.

Other than the whole "new content" thing, the coolest part of this expansion is that you can test it out without ponying up the dough — USM has also released a “Lite” version of which includes “The 4 Islands” scenario (of the sixteen) and the two additional game variants.

This delicious game of Catan is brought to us by Deviant Art user Luluriel!

We weren’t too crazy about Catan back when it was released, but this kind of support is always awesome — especially for the people who really love the game being targeted for extra content drops. Hopefully, this’ll give the Carcassonne [$9.99] team a little bit jumpstart. I am more than eager to get my ‘sonne on with some Rivers content or something.

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You may remember last October when a little app called iDOS snuck its way into the App Store. Every once in a while the review team at Apple falls asleep at the wheel and approves an app that probably shouldn't be allowed in the App Store. iDOS was one of those apps. It was a version of the DOSbox emulator that let you run DOS on your iOS device and load up all sorts of crazy old PC software.

Ah yes, I remember the iDOS day well. It was so much fun watching our article on iDOS constantly getting updated with whatever new feat of magic was discovered by the eager members in our forums. Many classic PC games ran incredibly well in iDOS, with full keyboard and mouse support, and the coup de grace was actually installing Microsoft Windows 3.0 on an iPad and playing the classic version of Solitaire included with it.

Like all good things though, the iDOS phenomenon quickly came to an end, and the app was removed from the App Store almost as suddenly as it appeared. Being able to load and run entire outside programs from within the iDOS app is a big no no according to Apple, and the thousands of people who had downloaded iDOS quickly backed up the app to their hard drives for safekeeping.

Then last night, iDOS surprisingly showed its face again in the App Store. In order to get it through the approval process, developer FAST Intelligence closed up the iTunes file sharing rabbit hole that was the gateway to loading whatever DOS programs you wanted, but has added some other nice functionality to try and compensate.

There are now 6 legal shareware games preloaded in iDOS which can be downloaded for free from the new “iDOS Store” within the app. The games can then be launched easily by selecting them from your collection, and no knowledge of DOS commands is necessary to get them going. For those that want to though, there is still access to the full DOS prompt for launching games.

Other additions include a full virtual joystick/d-pad and buttons rather than just a virtual keyboard, the ability to play on the iPhone/iPod touch in portrait mode just like the iPad, and Bluetooth keyboard support for text-based games. The virtual gamepad is actually really good, and makes playing games like Wolfenstein 3D a whole lot more enjoyable.

While it is pretty disappointing that you won't be able to go nuts running programs using the new iDOS, it's actually a pretty solid little emulator and still fun to play around with. Word on the street is that jailbroken devices can still load whatever games they want into this new version using file managing programs, but that doesn't seem very exciting to me since iDOS has been available as DosPad in the jailbreak App Store Cydia for a long time now, and offers that same functionality.

These screenshots show the new portrait mode gamepad controls for the iPad (left) and the iPhone (right). Click either image to enlarge.

If you missed out on iDOS the first time, it's still worth checking out this new version despite its limitations, especially as it's now free to download. Be warned though – if you have the original version of iDOS in your iTunes library, this new version is actually an update that will replace that one, so it's suggested that you back up the original app before downloading version 2.0. There's a brand new thread in our forums for discussing this rereleased version of iDOS, and hopefully this time Apple will let it stick around for longer than one day.

App Store Link: iDOS, Free (Universal)

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I love sprawling multi-million dollar platformers as much as the next guy, but I’ll take a small indie-developed project over the Super Mario Galaxies of the world any day. It boils down to execution, really. The good indie devs distill their games and bring to the fore one single, sometimes miraculous mechanic. Then, our underfunded heroes iterate and eventually offer us good games that lack the big budget fluff or unrealized stuff that sometimes worms its way into huge projects.

Yeah, yeah, you heard this all before. Welcome to mobile, Brad, you say. We see this all the time, you say. And to that I reply: hey, have you played They Need To Be Fed [.99 / HD] yet? Because even though it has problems, it could be the poster child for what we’re talking about here. It’s a no frills platformer with near perfect execution on a simple and entertaining mechanic. Oh, and it’s made by a single guy — that’s, like, eight billion less people than the core Ratchet & Clank teams!

Provided you don’t already know about TNTBF, let’s talk about what it has to offer. It’s a 2D, physics-based platformer with hardly any plot to speak of and an art style that would melt any HAL Laboratories employee’s heart. But despite it being filled with so much color and life, it’s got a grim undertone. In TNTBF, you play as a silhouetted avatar with an endearingly misshapen head across a variety of levels in which the point is to die. Specifically, the end goal is always a squiggly monster’s gullet.

No worries. The sacred gameplay loop — progress, fail, and die — is still in effect, though in a more tortured way than normal. In TNTBF, it’s more like progress, fail, die… and then die again.

Fun stuff, sure, but the core mechanic is easily the most compelling thing in TNTBF. To move around and meet your doom as the game demands, you’ll need to get good at moving around platforms. Each level is littered with various geometric objects, all of which the daring silhouette clings to via 360- degree gravity. So, when he jumps to, say, another platform, the game negotiates that platform’s gravitational pull versus the platform he just left. If the silhouette is closer to the latter, it'll cling to that one. Progress!

Momentum factors in as well. The faster your avatar moves, the more he’ll be able to bounce out of a platform’s pull. This leads to some interesting platforming, made all the more interested — and dangerous — when the game starts throwing in nasty stuff like rotating platforms laced with spikes, exploding platforms, cannons that shoot bullets at last known positions, and more.

It’s a breeze to shake bullets and jump around with the on-screen controls, but the jumping itself is a hair too floaty for me. Overall, the game is flat-out missing a layer of accuracy that’s seems warranted for some of the more nontraditional platforming sections. Also, some of the levels expect way too much in terms of object avoidance, which kinda complicates this basic, but annoying problem.

The good news is that this isn’t a punitive joint. Levels have smart checkpoints and accidental deaths are infinite. You’ll just get slapped on the wrist with a restart for your buffoonery or complications with the level design.

They Need To Be Fed is indeed, a smart, simple, and endearing platformer. The core mechanic might sound a little abstract, but don’t let that get in your way. In fact, just play it for free on the PC first. You see, this game used to be just a web-based project before publisher YoYo Games decided to bring it to iOS. Both versions of the game are a ton of fun, and it really comes down to whether you value portability or the ability to play it with your keyboard.

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If you've somehow gone this long without being familiar with Donut Games, here's the gist: They consistently release some of the best 99¢ pick up and play games the App Store has to offer. All of their games are simple to play and feature a three star grading system where only a tiny bit of skill is required to earn one star, but getting all three is generally easier said than done. This gives their games a surprising amount of replay value, especially if you're the kind of person who insists on mastering every game you download.

The latest game from Donut Games is Cave Bowling [99¢], and somewhat similar to the Geico commercial features cavemen bowling, or what I suppose Donut Games imagines prehistoric bowling to be like. Apparently, bowling in the caveman era involves chucking your bowling ball to hit a series of bowling pins set up on different terrain while nearby cavemen (and cavewomen) watch in amazement.

At its core, Cave Bowling is very similar to the numerous catapult games available on the App Store as your control is limited to the angle and power of your shot. If you knock down all the pins, you unlock the next level. The game is scored by collecting bonus bones scattered about the level by hitting them with a pin or the bowling ball itself, and there's additional bonus points to be made by chaining pins on to one another. Points are deducted if you hit any spectators.

As you progress further in the game, Cave Bowling turns in to an entirely different animal. New gameplay elements are introduced such as turtles which you can bounce your bowling ball off of, snakes and other critters that periodically get in the way, and movable objects which can be positioned along a track. Like other Donut Games titles, difficulty scales well as each of these new elements are introduced one at a time.

Cave Bowling is a fun physics game that comes packed with everything we've come to expect of Donut Games. My only real nitpick is I wish it came loaded with Game Center, as Donut Games' web-based scoring system leaves much to be desired. Either way, I'm having a great time with Cave Bowling, as are people in our forum. We've basically been at the point where it's safe to just blindly download anything Donut Games releases, and I'm glad to say Cave Bowling continues that tradition.

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Last week a trailer for a mysterious fantasy-based game by Gameloft hit the internet, causing rampant speculation across the iPhoneiverse (If that's not a word, it should be) regarding which game it was that Gameloft was setting its sights on next. We speculated this could be Gameloft's take on Zelda, and from the looks of it, that's exactly what we're getting.

Check out the new trailer:

Sacred Odyssey: Rise of Ayden seems to have everything a good Zelda-esque game should have: A horse to ride around, items to use to get passed various obstacles, sliding block puzzles, and massive bosses. I'm excited to give it a try as Darksiders basically proved that I will play any game with similar gameplay mechanics to completion regardless of how good or bad it is. (Or in the case of Darksiders, how much headache-indusing screen tearing it has.)

Sacred Odyssey is landing on the App Store next month, likely launching at Gameloft's typical price point of somewhere between $4.99 and $6.99. In the meantime, we've got a thread for the game in our upcoming games forum if you're looking for even more speculation about the game.

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Have I ever told you that I love the Seahawks? I do because if it weren’t for Marshawn Lynch’s thunder thighs and ridiculous stiff arm, the New Orleans Saints would have had another chance at the Superbowl.

I bring this up because first off the Saints beat out my Colts last year and that still bothers me like an eternal pimple on an otherwise spotless forehead and secondly there’s a new version of Madden 11 [$4.99 / HD / Lite] on the App Store, a free version that lets you play out the first quarter of a Colts vs. Saints exhibition match-up. That's not the Superbowl, but it's just close enough for me.

Now, if you’re going to download this I humbly request that you put up as many points on the Saints as humanly possible. Honestly, it’s only proper that you give the virtual Colts their chance at the Lombardi trophy. The Saints stole that thing, man. Stole it!

In all seriousness, you need to download this free app if you don't already own Madden 11 iOS proper. We liked Madden 11 quite a bit in our review, and thought the new automatic play picking system was a great addition. If you like the free version, cool, the main game is for you. If not, well, you probably want to stay away.

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Before I get started with this, please take everything in this post with a grain of salt. The accuracy of the Apple rumors community historically has varied widely between spot on, and, well, about as good as the ancient art of Tyromancy. That being said, because of how secretive Apple as a company is, following these rumors sure is a lot of fun– Regardless of whether or not they turn out to be true.

First off, since we learned about the Retina Display of the iPhone 4, the Internet has been rumbling with the potential of a similar "Retina" display in the successor to the iPad. According to Mac Rumors, this might not be as far fetched as originally thought. Apparently, version 1.1 of Apple's iBooks [Free] "accidentally" included some graphical resources that are twice the size of the ones currently in use on the iPad.

Now, depending on how you read these virtual tea leaves, this could mean one of two things: Someone at Apple knows that rumor hounds will dig through absolutely everything they can for any kind of hint, or the screen resolution of the iPad 2 will be double that of the current iPad. This would put the screen resolution at 2048×1536, sporting 260 DPI. It's not quite the pixel density of the iPhone 4's Retina Display, but you typically hold the iPad much farther away from your eyes. This means that even at a lower DPI this screen could potentially provide a similar "Retina" effect. (I suppose there's a third alternative that this means neither of these things, but how much fun is that?)

Things get even more interesting though when you consider that Global Direct Parts, the guys who had the "iPhone 5" parts video (which actually turned out to be the CDMA Verizon iPhone), also have their hands on a screen that fits the previously mentioned description. The price of this part? $218.19, compared to the original $144.99 the original iPad screen cost at launch from the same site.

But what does the higher price of the components have to do with anything? Well, as appleguy123 points out on the Mac Rumors forums, according to Apple's 2010 Annual Report:

The Company expects its gross margin percentage to decrease in future periods compared to levels achieved during 2010 and anticipates gross margin levels of about 36% in the first quarter of 2011. This expected decline is largely due to a higher mix of new and innovative products that have higher cost structures and deliver greater value to customers, and expected and potential future component cost and other cost increases.

Whether this refers specifically to the increased cost of the components in the iPad 2, or something else entirely is anyone's guess, but it is a curious coincidence. If the screen does turn out to be 2048×1536, there's an entirely new issue to be addressed: The sheer number of pixels the iPad GPU is going to have to push. For the sake of comparison, the resolution of a 30" LCD is only barely higher, at 2560×1600. Gaming at that resolution is a formidable task for even dedicated gaming PC's, much less a mobile device. That's higher resolution than what we consider "HD" these days as well, which only weighs in at a paltry 1920×1080 in comparison.

Mac Rumors has an answer to this too, courtesy of Apple Insider. If these rumors turn out to be true, both the iPad 2 and iPhone 5 will use a dual-core SGX543 GPU from Imagination Technologies. What makes this rumor hold more water than your typical bean spillage by an "industry insider" is the fact that the iOS 4.3 beta already includes drivers for this GPU. Odd coincidence, eh? What's even cooler is that not only do these GPUs boast some incredible performance figures, they also support anywhere between two and sixteen cores handled entirely by hardware, without a single change to any software required to scale performance.

Again, I'm not entirely sure how true these rumors are, but there is something strange afoot. It would make the most sense to double the iPad screen resolution, as it would allow graceful upscaling via pixel doubling much like running a non-Retina Display app on the Retina Display of the iPhone 4. If Global Direct Parts' pricing can be trusted, the component cost of the screen doesn't seem that far out of line. On top of all that, it's really hard to deny the coincidence between the GPU rumors and Apple actually including the drivers for that very GPU inside of their own operating system.

We'll have to wait and see what Apple reveals as the inevitable iPad 2, but if the Apple rumors scene is to be believed, it has potential to be an insane gaming machine.

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