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In a universe in which ninja tournaments aren’t just an elaborate excuse to stage a gory multidimensional melee, there’s an adorable little ninja on his way to castle Shimawa on a hill. Hatted and garbed in his finest eentsy weentsy blacks, this little ninja is on his way to the 200th annual ninja tournament. He doesn’t know it until he gets on the stage, but he’s not skilled enough to win, at all.

And thus little ninja’s failure becomes the premise of another game on mobile platforms that revolves around fruit. And while 8-bit Ninja might roll in one of the most dry and tired design elements in today’s market, it does have something to share: simple fun.

At its core, this is a 2D side-scrolling avoidance game. You’ll control little ninja as he dodges an infinite amount of fruit being fired at him from an upset crowd. The more fruit you dodge, the higher your point value at the end of your session. The game ends when a piece of watermelon, cantaloupe, an orange, or a pineapple hits you as you glide from left to right in the cutesy, though strangely not 8-bit, playing area. I doubt that users will ever receive an emotional rise from any of this, but the action model does a decent job of engaging me. Its immediately accessible and blunt, like an everyday simple pleasure.

If this sounds like something you’ve played before, it is. I asked developer DogByte where the idea for 8-bit Ninja came from, and unsurprisingly, it’s a product of its time. DogByte loves Falling Balls and Fruit Ninja and wanted to construct something that took elements from both, but iterated in important, though non-surface, areas.

And that’s the thing about 8-bit Ninja: it does have some interesting points of design buried within its cutesy art direction and simplistic play. For one, you’ll never walk into the game carrying tools that directly interact with enemy fruit. Little ninja can, however, pick up and utilize random items that spawn on the map. Weaponry, like blades or shurikens, act like timed but stationary turrets of fruit-slicing fury. Picking up these items up is a clear choice, and one that adds a light tactical flair to the game’s action. And then there’s the progression system, which is as sweet as chocolate.

“The game features multiple unlockable characters each with unique special powers to unleash, multiple arenas with unique extras and a lot of power-ups,” DogByte tells us. But that’s selling the progression a little short. As you play, you’ll earn EXP for your character, which seems to ramp up his speed and his special ability, which in the case of little ninja, is a shield. There are two other characters to unlock down the line, each of which boasts different abilities.

Also, you’ll collect two forms of in-game currency: gems and eggs. Gems can be used to level up those randomly spawned items so they last longer and have greater effects as you play. You can also buy a nifty one-use hat that acts as armor. Eggs, on the other hand, can be used to buy new characters with new abilities, new levels, or even gems. These constituent parts all feed into each other harmoniously, and really bolster that best-in-class one-more-play kind of tone, similar to, strangely, Call of Duty’s You’ll spend a senseless amount of time powering up my guy and abilities, all in the name of superior stats. This kind of stuff gets in your head in a satisfying way.

Gems and eggs also feed into the game’s free-to-play model, but this title’s brand of functionality appears to be inoffensive. Instead of annoying or nagging, it treats the user as a premium-level consumer from the get-go. The pre-release build of 8-bit Ninja has never made me feel like I need to dip into my wallet to enjoy the progression system and what it offers. Eggs and gems rain freely, though at the cost of ad support. Ads were off in the build I played.

8-bit Ninja might be simple, and the name might be a hair deceiving considering that this plainly isn’t an 8-bit game, but this is definitely something you’ll want to check out later this April when it hits iOS and Android for the price of free.

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Simogo's new office. Look how busy these guys are!

Simogo doesn’t make games like most studios. It doesn’t do design docs, meetings strike it as silly, and it doesn’t get rattled when something isn’t working as intended or a game needs to be delayed. It can be different because its games are the product of an improvisational style of development that sheds structure when it impedes an organic flow of ideas, analysis, and feedback. Simogo calls this “jazz development.” It’s a good name.

Simon Flesser and Magnus “Gordon” Gardebäck are the two dudes behind Simogo. They’ve been working together for over five years across two different companies. They make mobile games now in Malmö, Sweden. Their office is a lively place with a pine-colored floor, a massive window, a radiator, and rainbow colored throw rugs.

Before, they made XBLA and PSN downloadable titles. Their last one was ilomilo. Simogo’s titles and that game share a lot in common. Simogo builds vibrant worlds with complimentary music, and it aims to keep its games as charming as they are simple.

Simon is the art guy. He handles concepts and music. Gordon is the “one-man army.” He codes and programs. He builds frameworks. He even tackles design concepts. The duo has a fantastic relationship that goes beyond the creative glue that binds them. When Simon talks about Gordon, he’s almost reverential. The mutual respect these two have is also a big reason why Simogo makes games the way it does. They don’t argue. They listen, and then they execute.

Simogo is one of the most fascinating mobile developers out there. It’s a brutally small studio that, somehow, drops some of the most compelling, idealistic, and fulfilling games on iPad and iPhone. Beat Sneak Bandit, a rhythm and stealth mash-up, is loud and launched with a lot of fanfare, but the studio made the most noise with Bumpy Road, a somewhat depressing one-finger side-scrolling game that features an old couple, a car, and a road that can be manipulated with touch or swipe. The development of Beat Sneak went down in the usual Simogo way, which is to say, most of the good stuff happened on the fly.

How The Sausage Is Made

A pre-release "bonus" screen of Beat Sneak Bandit. It was taken to show off the resolution of the iPhone version.

Simogo doesn’t like design documents. It’s also too small for meetings. Gordon and Simon twirl their chairs and talk when something needs to be discussed. If an idea pops up in their heads when they’re not at the office, they call each other.

Simon thinks game design documents are good tools for big teams, but they fail to communicate feel, which is important to Simogo games. Bumpy Road was ponderous with a touch of zany. Beat Sneak Bandit is hyperactive and bombastic. Simon describes game design documents “like watching sheet music and saying you’ve heard the song, but the music is so much more than the composition,” Simon tells me.

“You could say that the way we make games is like jazz music; we improvise and put in new stuff as we go along.”

Simogo begins the actual game development part of production with a prototype just like any other studio. It dreams up an idea, and then it tries to flesh that out with a rudimentary demo. Some studios like to take this process especially slow by isolating experimental mechanics to produce proofs of concept, presumably to show publishers. Simogo goes deeper. It takes its pre-production demos and adds layers of actual production. “A lot of the appeal in our games is the full package, so we want to have that early on to get a feel for it,” Simon says.

The original idea for Beat Sneak came before Simogo released its first title, Kosmo Spin. At that time, Beat Sneak was an endless runner with a musical twist. If it had come out, it would have had you jumping and ducking to the beat, as opposed to sneaking to the beat in a series of interconnected levels.

That idea morphed into something more, yet still different from what Beat Sneak is today, when the studio began working on the game in August 2011. Beat Sneak 2.0 had you swiping the floor of a level to offset the timing of the beat. Simogo called this mechanic “scratch reality.” In this version of the game, you wouldn’t have control of the Bandit directly. Instead, you’d swipe against the beat to open doors and Bandit would follow a path automatically. Simon compares the feel of this version to real-time video editing.

“This idea proved to be as complicated as it sounds, so we had a rough month in which we just simplified and simplified,” Simon explains. “The concept of looping rhythm stages was something that was very cool to look at, we just had to come up with a suitable interface.” At this point, the duo tackled the problem by thinking about the first pure idea for Beat Sneak.

“Then we remembered the old rhythm-tap idea and everything just fell in place. We had two different prototypes after that. You would tap in beat to walk right, and backbeat to go to the left. That proved a little too difficult as backbeat is kind of a hard concept to grasp if you’re not a musician, so we wanted to downplay that.” The other build, which was much closer to the version we’re familiar with, had Bandit flipping when he hit walls. However, backbeat reared its head again. This build had floor security lights you had to jump over by hitting a backbeat.

One of the first Beat Sneak Bandit screens. This is the iPad version.

When Gordon and Simon do have a disagreement, it’s usually about planning. One specific instance that I had to pry out of Simon involves beackbeat, a concept that never made it to the actual game. Simon didn’t want Beat Sneak to be as easy as it is now, so he kept pushing for backbeat. Gordon was adamant that the mechanic need not exist, while Simon stubbornly held his ground maintaining that the game would suffer if it wasn’t included in the package. Gordon’s view that Beat Sneak should be as simple as possible to play eventually saw Simon agreeing with him. And just like that, the debate had a winner, and Beat Sneak Bandit became context-sensitive.

This process of simplification is a hallmark of Simogo’s games, and the source of its most spirited conversations. Gordon presses to make things as simple as possible without killing what makes a product special. Simon seems to have a hard time letting features go. He doesn’t want the users to get bored. He also knows that simple is best when it comes to touch devices, though, so these disagreements get ironed out without getting bitter.

“The thing we focus early on in all our projects is definitely the controls,” Simon tells me about production in general. Beat Sneak’s controls were a huge priority. The interface was, too. In the end, Simogo made an extraordinarily easy to play music game. Put a finger to the screen and Bandit moves. Hitting specific spots in the environment alters his direction.

This is Simogo's old office. Seems… smaller.

Simon describes the way Simogo works as a “publisher’s nightmare.” It sounds like it. Publishers want design documents. They want to checkpoint developers. They want meetings. Basically, they want to make sure their investments are being used and that a game is hitting every milestone and well on its way to releasing when agreed.

Roving deadlines, however, are a big part of the Simogo experience. Bumpy Road, its last game, released on May 19. After some contract work and work on a huge Bumpy Road update, Simogo started on Beat Sneak in August. The original release date was December. It hit this February, a couple of months past its original due date. This allowed Simogo to create more levels and that boss fight, as well as a few other features.

After the backbeat change, Simogo stopped long enough to produce a ten-level vertical slice to submit to the Independent Games Festival. That November, it revealed the game with a fun little teaser that betrayed just two things: the rhythm and sneaking. “Around then we realized we were making something special, so we wanted to do it justice and expand it a little. We added new elements, like the vacuum buster, the time stopper, the shadow stages, the phone calls from Herbie and the Duke, and then decided to skip our deadline in December.” Not competing during the Christmas rush was smart. The App Store freezes in late December. During this period, no new games are released, but the store is more vibrant than ever because developers basically dogpile it the week prior to the freeze. Games get forgotten, passed over.

Behind the Bandit

One of the coolest spots of design that Simon let me in on during our talks about the creation of Beat Sneak was origin of the game’s central figure, the Bandit. Bandit as we know him wasn’t a part of Beat Sneak at first. His final design came from a game concept called Mustache Bandits. That game’s tagline: “Every revolution starts with mustache doodles.”

Simon tells me not to ask about Mustache Bandits, but I have to press. It was a drawing game influenced by, of all things, Fruit Ninja. If it had actually seen the light of day, players would have been painting mustaches on posters guerrilla style and rewarded for factors like accuracy and speed. One of its big features would have been prompts like “UNI-BROW BONUS!”

“We wanted to wrap this in a story of a gang of bandits starting a revolution against the mayor by painting mustaches, and they’d all have their own strengths and special attacks. Silly stuff,” Simon says. I don’t think he understands how bad I want to play this game now.

We’ve got quite an assortment of concept art of Bandit and his revolution, er, evolution over the development.

This is from Rhythm Bear, which was the game that ended up being the core idea behind Beat Sneak. Notice how the hairstyle managed to make it over, as well as the expressiveness of the avatar. The little blocks, not so much.

Enlarge this one to see it in all its glory. The original bandit doodles all had one thing in common: a funky, defining hairstyle. This is, technically, a 3D project but Simogo uses 2D images.

This isn’t directly related, but I wanted to share it. This is a style test sheet that helped solidify the tone of Beat Sneak.

And those give you a good example of how many iterations everything – including the game’s name — had to go through. At one point, the game was called “Backbeat Bandit” or “Beat Bandit.” You can tell the backbeat discussion was still going on while Simon was working on the game’s branding.

The Release

This was the second teaser image released.

Figuring out when Beat Sneak was “finished” wasn’t hard. Its external testers and Simon’s girlfriend pretty much made the decision. “The response from our testers was absolutely phenomenal, and you know when people actually want to continue playing not because you’re watching, but because they just want to.”

“There was a much greater initial response to this one than Bumpy Road, actually, from people we showed early. But, personally for me it was when my girlfriend told me it was the best thing we’ve made. Creatively, I trust her 100 percent.”

In February, after it was submitted to certification, Gordon and Simon celebrated with beer, vague celebratory tweets with pictures of wine glasses, and a few days off. When it actually hit the App Store a week later, Simon and Gordon spent a few days telling the press and any one who would listen that it was out. “We speak to fans, to media and just focus on trying to get the word out, which is very hard when you’re this small.” It’s true. Even a site like ours misses big titles from established indie developers.

Beat Sneak is a great game bolstered by tons of high scores in the press, but its first week didn’t bust the mark that Bumpy Road set in its first days of release. In Simon’s mind, the numbers aren’t matching up to the hype press stirred up.

The fact that busted Pokemon rip-offs are able to take second place on the charts while Beat Sneak can’t crack the top ten is also frustrating. “In a week where an app that was a copyright infringing picture of a Pokémon took the second spot in the charts, that is especially heart-breaking,” says Simon. “But in the end, what matters is sales in the long run, and if we can keep steady sales, that’s good.” Simon takes the high road, always.

“We do understand that this is a bit more niche than Bumpy Road, more of a gamers game, though. Also, Bumpy Road was iPhone game of the week and Beat Sneak Bandit was iPad game of the week so I guess that comes into play too.”

The End

Thousands of words and not one mention of clocks. Well, until now.

Simogo isn’t a typical iOS developer. As cash-strapped as it might be, it still spends more than a single month on a game. It tests. It iterates. It builds the kinds of prototypes that are representative of more than just a clever mechanic.

Gordon and Simon are a strong tandem because they check their egos at the door; they’re hugely talented, but they operate as a unit without the baggage. They disagree at times, but they also find answers.

“Much like a recording artist we want our games to feel Simogo. It should feel like something that only we could make. So it’s hard to put a finger on what that is. Maybe it’s how everything produces a sound when you interact with it, how it feels tactile, the level of ‘polishness,’ or the art… I don’t know.

“I say this a lot, but there is no single aspect in a game that is more important than the other. Gameplay is not more important than presentation, art is not more important than sound. Everything plays together to create something bigger than the sum of its parts.”

Of note, Simogo develops on a special platform that gives indie developers a chance to take the risks that Simogo does with each release. You’ll never see Beat Sneak Bandit on XBLA or PSN. It’s too unusual, too unique. Maybe too small, as well.

This game deserves your attention if you haven’t bothered with it yet. It’s one of the best games on the App Store, and one of the most creative to boot. Its flavor, tone, and rhythm mechanic are all completely unique and fun.

Simogo is moving on, by the way. The studio has just now started talking about “Game 4,” and it isn’t quite sure if it’ll follow a similar development path. Simon describes this title as totally different from Simogo’s previous games, but it’s so early it might just end up as just another title that influences its next project, like Mustache Bandits.

“I’m excited about bringing in some new blood in to this project, to help out on bits we can’t make ourselves. We’d really like to have it out by this year, but you know — jazz development, you know where you’re going with it, but you never know how long the improvisations will last.”

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Only in the indie space do we see games like Pizza vs. Skeletons. Bright and humorous, as well as off-the-walls, it’s a 2D action game that stars a 10-foot tall pizza. It has a knack for catching you off guard by design; delicately crafted to avoid the mechanical monotony so common in its space, it’s an adventure that re-imagines what it is in almost every level. Sometimes you’ll save puppies. Other times, you’ll ski. Or butt heads with gigantic skulls. Or just bash skeletons because, hey, that’s fun.

You just can’t pitch this game to a major publisher. This will never be a blown-up, $60 retail title. It’s too free-wheeling, too idealistic. It’s too … different.

I’ve had my paws all over a pre-release build for the last week or so, and I’m OK with saying that it’s looking every bit as awesome as its name implies it will be. Sure, it might not have any ultra-familiar trappings to draw connections to, but that’s kind of the point: this thing is bananas, man. It’s as far-out as a quasar.

Take the mechanics, for example. In the game, you control a house-sized pizza that can roll, stomp, and jump. Rolling requires a simple tilt of the device. Tap the screen and the pizza jumps. Tap again while in the air and the pizza unleashes a devastating stomp.

Rolling automatically obliterates enemies into plumes of grave dust — provided they aren’t hoisting an over-sized, pizza-skewing spear in front of their bodies. If this is the case, a physics-bending jump and stomp will do the trick. As you play, you’ll start running into a few enemies that twist this basic combat model. There’s a flying skeleton that requires a bit more touch, as well as other minor iterations on this specific idea.

If that was the game, I’d still be as into it since, you know, you’ll be controlling a giant, grimacing pizza on a quest to kill all the skeletons ever. But that’s not all there is. Pizza vs. Skeletons is like a conga line of levels and different systems, each one bolting onto the back of the last and making the stream stronger and crazier.

In the first chapter, you’ll be introduced to a skiing mini-game that doesn’t task you with killing. Instead, the objective is to hit the ramps perfectly in order to collect the most currency possible. Later, you’ll be balancing the pizza on the top of a huge skull while crossing a pit of spikes, pummeling telltale Angry Birds structures into oblivion, or even bouncing on rocks in a timed adventure that has you knocking skulls off of the tiny platform you’ll be forced to work with.

There’s a lot more, and I won’t spoil it all. I will say, though, that nothing I’ve been doing is striking me as particularly interesting. Everything in the game exists in the service of fun, kinda like a Rock Band. You’re just playing to act out weird power fantasies, and that’s cool.

Also, while there’s a level of schizophrenia inherent in this kind of design, Riverman ties all of the bits and bobs together into a coherent whole; the sound design is as kooky as the game, and the art direction? It’s like something Tim Burton would do if he could (a) draw and (b) chill out every once in a while. The game is bent, but lightly so; its style and its tone fits well with the oodles of off-the-wall content.

There’s a good story about this game’s design in this week’s show. Riverman is composed of two brothers, Jacob and Paul Stevens. Jacob, the art dude, dreamt up the scenarios. Paul, the programmer, then had to figure out a way to not only make it work technically, but also make them fun.

The prototyping phase took awhile and the duo had a lot of back and forths on the subject of dreams vs. the reality of having to make solid, fun-to-play content within the technical parameters of the game.

“There are a few levels that have the theme of your sort of crushing a structure in a way like how you fling birds in Angry Birds at something and destroy it. We thought could we make that fun as a pizza? Well, if you actually physically control your character and just crush, say, the Great Pyramids, that could be interesting.” Paul told us earlier this week.

“Jake’s ideas probably come from a totally different place than mine do. In mine, I was thinking what’s fun being a huge, powerful character? Crushing structures.”

Another fun thing that comes hand-in-hand with the conceit of driving around a huge pizza is topping customization. As you beat levels, you earn currency which can be dropped into extra vegetables or meats, new faces, new glasses, and even hats. Each is lovingly animated, and most are pretty hilarious. I’ll go on record here and say that nothing comes close to being as cool as a 10-foot tall pizza with a top hat.

I’ve held back my progression in the game so I wouldn’t get too review-y in this, but I think it’s pretty obvious that I’ll be embracing the game with open arms when it hits a little later this month on the 16th. We’ll be bringing you more around that time, too.

For now, though, keep your eyes on this and Riverman. The studio has never attempted a game this ambitious, this out-of-the-mold, and it seems like it has hit a new stride in the process. I’m excited, and I think you should be, too.

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It’s 2012, and I’ve had a few years to conjure a snappy explanation of what Eufloria is and how it rolls. I haven’t. So, before I even get into how much I dig it on iPad, I’ll let my main man Rudolf Kremers — one of the handful of dudes behind the original release — do the talking. In our latest “bonus” podcast, he cheekily broke it down like this:

“Eufloria is a game of space, conquest, and exploration based on themes of plant life and flowers rather than space marines and spaceships.”

That’s the thing about Eufloria: it’s an RTS that goes against the grain. It doesn’t have any big dudes in big armor smashing space orcs in the face with apartment-sized space maces. It also doesn’t subscribe to any particular feel or taste, or really, any action-y RTS conventions. It’s a minimalist strategy game that has some cool, laid-back creative touches, and it’s all wrapped up in a sensitive production overhead that conveys the game’s core design ideals and gentle pacing well.

This much has been proven in past iterations. And for the most part, what you’ve seen is what you’ll be getting Day Zero on iPad. Eufloria on iPad still looks gorgeous, it still runs as smooth as ever, and all the little technical touches on the movement, placement and execution phases of the game have made it over. But, on the other hand, I’m not seeing a major adjustment on anything anyone has complained about before — the balance appears to be still a little touch and go, and in some of the levels I’ve been playing, the pacing is brutally, brutally slow.

What the iPad port does bring, though, are new ways to interact more intimately with the experience. Pinch and zoom can be used liberally to explore every little nook and cranny of each level. Satisfying drag, hold, and swipe gestures take care of the rest. It’s all good stuff.

I asked Kremers after the show to explain what he was shooting for with this version’s controls. He said that the main idea was to strip “all barriers between playing the game and the device you play it on.” Mission accomplished as far as I’m concerned. This is appears to be as much of a lean-back experience as ever before, and delightfully so.

Here’s a breakdown for those of you just seeing Eufloria for the first time. This is a game about asteroids, trees, and tiny, winged seedlings. In almost every scenario, the goal is to take these seedlings to an asteroid, build a tree or two, and then usher even more seedlings on to other asteroids. The tech tree is simple: trees build seedlings and asteroids have one of three different effects on seedlings, either making them strong or fast or energetic. As trees age, they become more potent and harder to kill. Eventually you’ll see some variations on unit types as well as a defensive tree that’ll keep enemy seedlings off of your rock.

The strategy factors into the picture in a variety of ways. You can’t hit up an asteroid unless you have an asteroid connected to it. Also, most asteroids are inhabited, so you’ll need to kill the enemy seedlings and then destroy their trees, which are jacked into that asteroid’s core. Cracking the core boils and tearing down an impromptu space settlement boils down to a numbers game: basically, whoever has the larger wad of dudes wins. Much later in the game, you’ll be given very specific tasks, like say, defending or finding a path through a system.

On our show, Kremers explained where these ideas came from. Eufloria proper is based on a proof-of-concept called “Dyson,” which is named after a british physicist who theorized that you could explore space by growing mechanical trees on asteroids. It’s neat to see this crazy idea living on in a game.

The beauty of Eufloria is in its simplicity; it’s artfully stripped of graphical clutter and is fairly bare-boned on the UI and sound front. It’s also strikingly easy to play for a strategy game since most of the action happens on a macro-level: clicks, drags, and drops compose all you’ll need for galactic takeovers. This type of game feels great on iPad, and it seems like Team Eufloria and Tunatech pulled it off.

My time with the preview build, for reasons of avoiding anything other than modest scrutiny at this phase in its pre-release form, has been artificially shortened, so I don’t have a verdict for you. You’ll get that later at some point this month when the game sees a release across iOS at an unannounced price. We’re expecting more details to roll in shortly. Fingers crossed.

All the screens in this write-up are from the PSN version of the game. I can’t tell a difference between the two in picture-form.

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Let’s wind the clocks back to Tuesday when news hit that Zynga was relentlessly ripping off NimbleBit’s Tiny Tower [Free] with their Canadian pre-release “beta” of Dream Heights [Free]. Dream Heights is basically identical to Tiny Tower in every way, except for the lack of the Bitbook and a different art style. News of this spread like wildfire, and it wasn’t long before even the mainstream media was reporting on it. (These are crazy times we live in, I tell you.) Well, Zynga has been silent on the matter as far as we can tell, which you’d think would result in a dead story.

Not so fast though, as Glu also seem to be anxious to hop on the relentlessly ripping off Tiny Tower bandwagon with a similar Canadian release of Small Street [Free]. Small Street is arguably an even bigger knockoff than Dream Heights with the only changes being the tower laid vertically into a street and the elevator car replaced with a taxi.

Fans of Tiny Tower will find these screenshots curiously similar:

I guess when it rains it pours in regards to cloning NimbleBit games. The only question left, is which company is going to release their own Tiny Tower knockoff next?

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Last month, after basically zero pre-release hype, we were pretty surprised to see Batman Arkham City Lockdown [$2.99] pop up in the App Store. Perhaps even more surprising was that NeatherRealm Studios, developer of the recent (and excellent) Mortal Kombat reboot on consoles, was behind the iOS title.

And, even more surprising still, Batman Arkham City Lockdown was actually pretty freaking awesome. It was built using the Unreal Engine, so the graphics were definitely up to snuff. And the gameplay took a tiny page out of the Infinity Blade handbook, having you face off against baddies in one-on-one battles using swipe controls to dish out the pain. The combat didn’t quite have the complexity of an Infinity Blade, but it was fun nonetheless.

Now, Batman Arkham City Lockdown has just received its first ever sale, dropping from its normal $5.99 price point down to $2.99 for a limited time. If you’re wondering if this is the game for you, then be sure to give our full review a read for some insight. Personally, I had a ton of fun with Arkham City Lockdown, and thought it was well worth its original price. For $2.99 I think it’s a steal, especially if you’re a fan of the Batman, as the developers have done a wonderful job of making the game feel like a fully realized Batman experience. Definitely check it out and take advantage of the sale while it lasts.

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Buckle up; Adventure Bar Story appears to be pretty radical. I just spent a good chunk of time with a pre-release build of the PSP port, and while I do have a reservation or two about its virtual controls, I couldn’t be happier with the overall port job and its core play, which is satisfyingly genre-bending.

Imagine if your everyday 16-bit JRPG hooked up with a management sim. In Adventure Bar Story, you control a young girl attempting to save her bar from being stolen or bought out by a renowned and rival neighborhood restaurant. In order to prevent this, she’ll need to learn how to cook, buy or gather ingredients in RPG-like zones complimented by random battles, assemble the ingredients into a dish, and then profit.

Mechanically, there’s a lot going on. In order to cook food, for example, you need recipes and the right tools for the job — blenders, pans, and so forth. The Item Shop stocks new stuff every day, but you can also get recipes from talking to NPCs or even experimentation. The cooking UI has several layers, but they’re all straightforward.

Dungeon diving — and I’m using that loosely here since the first few zones are set in fields — has several components. There’s the turn-based battle system, which packs in all of your usual RPG trimmings such as special attacks and in-battle item usage. But there are also food drops littering the ground that you’ll want to pick up at the risk of random encounters, and a leveling system, that, in a weird turn, has nothing to do with battle. Eating what you make levels up each character. Battle just earns you battle skills. Progression to new areas seems to be contingent on in-game cooking goals.

The entire experience is split into days and months. A typical day goes a little like this: I run to the item store to stock up on curing potions, and then I travel to the latest dungeon in order to pick up all the free food. When I get out of the zone, I shoot over to the bar’s kitchen and start looking at what I can assemble. After I make the food, I take a gander at which ones will give me the most EXP and then I eat a few to power up my dudes. After that, I select the dishes I want to serve and open the bar.

There’s some nuance to everything. The ingredients that you pick up aren’t always main ingredients; rather, they’re just component parts of a single ingredient. Wheat, for example, has to be used with a blender to create flour. Flour and water make pizza dough, and so on and so forth. Customers also appear to like different things more on different days, so there’s a little more to becoming the next great bar.

I’m so high on this because it’s the best of every world. I’m not spending hours and hours senselessly grinding, and I’m not cooking fake food until my eyes bleed. The mix of action and simulation feels right. The pacing is good.

Also, if I didn’t know this was a PSP port, I wouldn’t have guessed. This game feels and looks good on iPhone. The team has added a lot of touch-centric stuff to the UI, which goes a long way in making it relatively friendly to the platform. The virtual d-pad is a tad too touchy for my tastes, but it’s not an end-of-the-world problem, and more than likely, it’ll get ironed out well before the game is released.

One thing that’ll ruffle some feathers is the IAP. You can buy in-game jewels with real money, and with them, you’ll be able to buy special “rare” or “import” weapons, recipes, or even ingredients. The IAP doesn’t feel necessary, and heck, it’s not even a part of the core experience — it’s a bolted on, iOS exclusive feature that compliments the full PSP offering.

We’ll get much more evaluative in our official review, but I definitely think this is a game you should keep your eye on. Tentatively, it should see a release on February 28th at $.99. The usual base price will be $2.99.

UPDATE: We got some word on the IAP, so we changed some wording around. The complete PSP game is all here without the need for IAPs, according to the developer. Neat!

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Ayopa Games‘ and Drowning Monkeys‘ next title is a 3D, close-quarters strategy RPG with the usual trimmings: ghouls, ghosts, swords, sorcery, dungeon crawling, and leveling are all a part of the package. It’s as functionally classical as its name, Dungeon Crawlers, implies, and nothing mechanical I’ve seen seems to be breaking any mold.

There is this one thing, though. It’s kinda quirky. In the opening moments, one of the party members clearly references Ghostbusters. Roy, the healer, carries around a weapon called “The Unreturned Library Tome.” When you search the first weapon rack you find, it calmly tells you that while there’s tons of weapons here, none of them are indeed yours.

Dungeon Crawlers, which is due out later this month, is straddling a fun line. It’s the video game equivalent of a mullet, reserved and business-like, yet fun-loving and goofy. What makes it a strategy RPG isn’t messed with, but the story, the weapons, and even the item pick-ups are all tinged with a lightheartedness that I’m OK with seeing — especially since fantasy is so stale.

The business part is good, by the way. After putting some time into a preview build, I feel like I can lazily sum up the mechanics as “Shining Force Meets Diablo.” There’s a lot of traditional strategy RPG in the combat, but you also freely move around and explore a dungeon in-between fights.

A typical confrontation goes a little something like this: the battleground morphs into a series of tiles, all of which can be accessed through turn-based play; blue titles indicate a movement can occur, red alerts you to the fact that you can attack, and green lets you know that healing can happen. Simple taps activate the action, while swipes allow you to move fluidly through skill menus. Pop an enemy enough, it dies. Rinse and repeat.

Kill enough dudes, and you level up and gain access to new skills that, of course, allow for a wider range of tactical options. Cleave, for instance, hits in a three square arc, while magic missile attacks from four spaces away. The overall strategy boils down to a touch of structural awareness, a heavy helping of positional wrangling, and a solid understanding of skill sets and AI behavior.

There’s some wrinkles. Boss fights promise some more interesting situational content. In the first fight, for example, the goal is to reach a goblin king in his throne instead of delivering his head on a platter. Later, you’ll see some puzzles and solo action.

Speaking of characters, you start out with three knuckleheads: a womanizing barbarian, a nerdy sorcerer, and a gluttonous healer. Their banter is inviting, and the situation the trio find themselves in is something straight out of Ghostbusters.

Weird influence, right? I asked Drowning Monkeys what’s up, and I was relieved to find that I wasn’t crazy.

“… the actual idea for the story came while we were prototyping the game, and we had created our archetypes. We were designing the characters and noticed the similarities to Ghostbusters, so we ran with it and started creating a story around that basic element.”

“The idea that something ‘big’ was happening, and that the characters were initially motivated by money and not because of a ‘call’ to do great things. I think in the end though, we actually have created a story that is unique and keeps the player interested in seeing what happens next.”

Humor is subjective kinda like quality is, so it’ll be interesting to see how Dungeon Crawlers clicks with everyone. I dig it. More importantly, though, I think the game part of it is on the right track. In its pre-release form, it feels almost as good as any of the great games in the genre, and I’ll be excited to dive in for the haul.

If all goes well, Dungeon Crawlers will see a release this January 26 across iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone. We’ll definitely keep our eye on it, and I’m thinking you should, too.

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