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Back in 2009, Com2uS released Homerun Battle [Free / Free ], which was known as “Baseball Slugger” at the time. We loved it in our review, as it was among the very first iPhone games that featured really slick and seamless realtime multiplayer. Gameplay in a nutshell amounted to getting thrown into a random match with another real person to compete in a home run derby. It was really hard to put down because you could see what your opponent doing in a little picture-in-picture window in the corner of your screen, which only encouraged you to try harder when you see them blast a ball out of the park.

Com2uS followed up Homerun Battle with the sequel Homerun Battle 2 [$0.99 / Free ]. We had a love/hate relationship with the game in our review. We loved the improvements over the original, but hated the insane IAP implementation which was one of the more blatant pay-to-win schemes we’ve seen on the App Store.

Thankfully, Com2uS has listened to player feedback and went back to the drawing board with the balancing of the game. As an established player, it’s a little hard for me to get a feel for how equipment scales as I’ve already got some pretty great gear on my dude. But, if the IAP model Com2uS used previously scared you off, give the game a try again. I’d be very interested in hearing how people feel the power and unlock curve is now. Also, for a limited time the price of the premium version has been lowered to 99¢.

Aside from balance tweaks, the latest update also adds a bunch of new equipment to work towards and a Hell-themed stadium.

In other Com2uS news, they’ve also just released a new free to play game, Magic Tree [ Free ]. When I tried the game it gave me a Frontierville-like vibe, but it comes packed with 3D almost Animal Crossing-ish visuals. Check out the trailer:

So, consider downloading that if it seems interesting. More importantly though, give Homerun Battle 2 another shot. Game balance and IAP was a major point of contention on our forums. If you were one of those people miffed by this game originally, it’s worth a second look now.

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If you’ve been following along with TouchArcade for a while, then you should know that one of our favorite pastimes is playing the asynchronous multiplayer racing game Disc Drivin’ [$1.99/Lite/HD]. Ah yes, Disc Drivin’. It first released in December of 2010, and there honestly aren’t any other games that have been out for that long that I consistently play on a daily basis. Granted, it hasn’t quite grabbed everybody like it has me (but bless your heart for trying, Eli), but for those who love the gameplay Disc Drivin’ has simply incredible staying power.

Disc Drivin’ developer Pixelocity is trying to ensure that myself and those like me will continue our daily racing obsession, and have just released the biggest update for the game to date. There are five(!) brand new tracks to compete on, all taking place in a brand new snow-themed environment. In this new environment you’ll (literally) run into two new kinds of obstacles: one is a giant snowball that will explode on impact and slow you down a bit, and the other is an ice block which will block your path before finally breaking and disappearing after it’s been run into a few times.

Other improvements include a badge count that updates without needing to open the app first (finally!), support for the new iPad resolution in the HD version, and resigned games will now go into your completed races list rather than sticking around in your current games list. If you aren’t sure what this Disc Drivin’ business is all about, then definitely give the free version a try. It’s the complete game, but has advertisements that pop up in-between turns. They’re really not that bothersome, but if ads really get your blood boiling then the full version can be yours for $1.99 or $2.99 on the iPad.

Above is an overhead view of the five new track layouts and pictures of the two new obstacles in the game. Also, check out all of our previous Disc Drivin’ coverage from the links below:

• Original Disc Drivin’ Review
• Online Matchmaking Update
• iPad Version Released
• Three New Tracks Update
• Three MORE New Tracks Update
• Customizable Disc Update
• Cast of “Mad Men” Love Disc Drivin’

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Hero Academy [Free] is now a Universal app. Last week, Robot Entertainment spilled the beans on the update, confirming its existence and detailing one of the more exciting additions: a new team called “the Tribe.” It also announced the inclusion of a new game board and two new mechanics that accompany its arrival: barbed crystals and Resist boost squares. Lead designer Marcin Szymanski breaks down why these are important to the game on its blog:

Barbed Crystals are quite a departure from our board designs, giving the units responsible for our victory condition a way to fire at the enemy! We actually started off with some passive boosts for crystals on this board, such as innate damage reflection, but the active ability easily won out in playtesting. And, the new Resist boost premium square complements the Defense boosts that is already in place on other boards. On paper, it is a small change, but it actually changes various match-ups quite significantly.

This update isn’t without the usual glut of fixes and balancing tweaks. Robot has laid out everything on its blog, so if you’re into the nitty-gritty, go check it out. Also, take note that this version of the game now has an “undo” mechanic. Starting now, you can undo a single action with a tap of the AP wheel. Neat!

Hero Academy, by the way, is a fantastic turn-based strategy game. If you haven’t picked it up alongside most of the known world, you should. Our review is available for your reading pleasure here.

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When you’re playing Coco Loco, [$0.99] it’s important to remember that you’re rescuing your marshmallow brethren from chocolate guardians. You’re absolutely not rescuing your eggs from pigs. Sure, if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably Angry Birds, but Twiitch deserves credit: this particular physics puzzler with slingshot mechanics is actually pretty great.

Some of Coco Loco’s levels could be pulled straight out of similar games—let’s just say there isn’t much difference between an egg-shaped mallow and an egg-shaped bird. But those structural similarities surround cunning levels designed for more than brute-force thinking. The formula takes another sharp turn with terribly entertaining liquid dynamics. It plays like a brand new game, even if it doesn’t look much like one.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the Marshies were enjoying a simple dip in the hot chocolate springs when the cocoa guardians took them prisoner. Now it’s up to you to get revenge, rescue your pals, and free them from their, err, celebrity-costumed captivity. That sort of quirkiness gives Coco Loco a fresh angle to build on, and it extends through every bit of the game’s visual design.

From there it’s a matter of differentiating itself through gameplay. The liquids make up a big part of that: the Marshies can be freed by being swept up in cocoa, and the chocolate guardians can be melted away similarly. Many levels will see you redirecting cocoa, breaking through dams and barriers and generally splashing around.

Lest I give the impression this is just a damp Angry Birds (probably an obvious mashup in this post-Where’s My Water world), I should emphasize that the level design in Coco Loco is very, very good. Rarely are you left to smash down a structure with however many projectiles you feel like using. Instead, you’re often given exactly what you’ll need to solve a puzzle, one with moving parts, flowing liquid and tight corridors to aim your way through.

The tools you’re given are a good mix of familiar and new. You’ve got your standard Marshie, the one that knocks over the things it hits. Another one explodes on your command. But there’s also one that expands into a gelatinous wall on demand, and another that shoots cocoa out of a cannon, amongst others. Combined, they can pull of some excellent tricks.

You have to be creative when using them, as much as you need to be precise. Most of Coco Loco’s 75 levels are set up for specific solutions: toss this dude at that spot to clear the way for the next guy to knock over the cocoa just so, and the whole thing comes together. Or take each of your Marshies and land them in just the right places all over the screen. You’ll need to use your brain more often than you will your pixel-hunting skills.

I just wish the same creativity that’s been brought to bear on the level design had bumped into the rest of the game at some point. We have the three star rating system, “Fluffy,” the IAP that finishes any level for you, extra points for having Marshies left over, and that’s just scratching the surface. Coco Loco is strong enough to stand on its own, and hanging a lantern on its similarities to Angry Birds does it no favors.

Just don’t let that stop you from checking it out. Coco Loco isn’t a strikingly original game, even without the checklist of familiar interface elements, but it is one of the most thoroughly solid and entertaining physics puzzle games I’ve played in some time. Taken in a vacuum, it could have blown me away. In the context of the rest of the App Store, it’s still a heck of a lot of fun. Don’t just give it a look, give it a play and you might be impressed.

TouchArcade Rating:

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I’ve made no attempt at hiding my love affair with the Azkend series of puzzle games. The original Azkend [$2.99 / $4.99 (HD)] was (and still is) one of my favorite puzzle games of all time. It had a great difficulty curve, a constant stream of unlockables to keep you interested, and did a fabulous job at dangling the next unlockable in front of you to endlessly keep you playing one more game. Oh, and the chain-forming matching mechanic is pretty sweet too. Not too long ago, Azkend 2 [$2.99 / $3.99 ] hit, and I was ready to shout out my window and tell the world how incredible it was… That is, until I got a little deeper into the game.

As Nissa explains in our review, the sequel features everything we loved about the original Azkend, and provides some great first impressions. Then the difficulty curve ramps up, and the game introduces more types of tiles. It’s at this point that Azkend 2 turns into the best part of any LMFAO song, which, in a puzzle game, is not a good thing. In other words, you’d reach a point where there were just too many types of tiles, leaving no available matches, forcing the game to re-shuffle the tiles. Sometimes you’d even get multiple re-shuffles in a row.

Well, an update hit earlier today which seems to totally fix this. The puzzles are now rebalanced in a way that you’re not hunting for the single match before the board reshuffles. If you were (understandably) holding off on the game after reading our review, it’s safe to pick up now. Or, if you were like me, and just shelved the game after getting frustrated, snag the update and give it another shot.

They’ve made some other tweaks and bug fixes too, including doing some logging to potentially further improve game balancing as well as adjusting the colors of some tiles to make them more distinct. The one down side of this update is that I’m pretty sure that Azkend 2 is now going to completely suck up my free time this evening.

I’m OK with that, I think.

NOTE: Right now I’m only seeing this update for the universal HD version, but it’d make sense that the iPhone-only version should be following very shortly.

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Here’s an interesting rumor: Apple has worked on a controller for its devices, according to a couple of lines in Anandtech’s iPad review. Here they are in all their glory:

I know of an internal Apple project to bring a physical controller to market, but whether or not it will ever see the light of day remains to be seen. As smartphones and tablets come close to equalling the performance of current game consoles, I feel like the controller problem must be addressed.

Play with us for a second and consider this: what would the easiest way to stop all the fracturing inside of fracturing going on in the third-party controller space? If Apple was to do something with a peripheral, we wouldn’t be writing a story every week about a brand new controller that has its own proprietary code that studios’ need to plug into their software. Everyone would just automatically support Apple’s New Thing, and there would be no other viable market.

But, that’s just reading tea leaves inside of tea leaves. Also, there’s a billion ways to read into this, if it’s even accurate, which we doubt, since a controller compromises that vision of iPad and iPhone. These things were meant to be used with our fingers, not with styluses or controllers or other peripherals.

Then again, who knows. Maybe this will be a “one more thing” at a keynote.

[via MacRumors, via AnandTech]

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There are some games that try to impress by offering a well-rounded gameplay experience. Others meanwhile try to latch onto one or two key elements and hope that it’s enough to make up for other potential shortfalls. Violet Storm [$0.99 / HD] squarely falls into the second camp. While the dual-stick shooter impresses somewhat with its take on weapons and visual overstimulation, it may not be enough to overcome the otherwise generic gameplay and presentation.

As a dual-stick shooter, Violet Storm plays it safe with its gameplay offerings. Players have a choice of three different single-player modes: Sniper Mode, which is a timed run scored by accuracy, Speed Havoc, which challenges gamers to destroy a set amount of enemies as fast as possible, and Campaign.

Campaign is the most complete mode and pits you against a never-ending onslaught of enemies separated by timed waves. Survive a wave and you’re given a break (as well as a score bonus) before bigger and more difficult enemies come at you. There isn’t an artificial barrier around the playing field (like Geometry Wars, for example) so players are free to move in any direction for as long as possible. However, enemies will continually spawn near you and blindly running in one direction is a sure-fire way to get cornered and lose health.

As you battle enemy ships, you are rewarded with an occasional power-up (invincibility, damage boost, bombs) as well as weapon upgrades. The weapon upgrades are one area Violet Storm attempts to differentiate itself from other shooters. Weapons are relatively simple at the onset, but quickly build up to ridiculous multi-tracking lasers of various spreads and homing missiles (all being shot simultaneously no less). Last longer, and you even get to play with lighting. While Violet Storm obviously isn’t the first game to pioneer ridiculous weapons, I was impressed with the showcase nonetheless.

Keep in mind all these weapons lead to a dazzling display of visual elements and intensity, which is another area Violet Storm looks to improve upon. It really is a sight to behold when you combine lasers and missiles, along with the large influx of simultaneous weapons and their projectiles on the screen at the same time. In fact, the visuals may be a little too intense, as later levels definitely border on ‘bullet-hell’ extremes (without the precision, unfortunately). Disappointingly, Violet Storm occasionally doesn’t handle all the graphics well, as I encountered some slow-down across all current generation devices during the more hectic scenes.

Notice I didn’t say the game differentiates itself via graphical style; Violet Storm looks very much like a Geometry Wars clone in most ways besides the sheer amount of graphical elements and the weapons. Granted, the game still looks great on most iOS devices, including the new iPad. Oddly enough, while Violet Storm is a universal app, gamers looking for iPad retina assets will need to pick up Violet Storms HD, which is an iPad only app.

Once you get past the weapons and visuals, Violet Storm falters somewhat. The music becomes repetitive rather quickly and ends up detracting. Also, while Sniper Mode and Speed Havoc are nice twists on the standard gameplay, there’s little in terms of actual variety, (save for three difficulty levels) to keep you coming back. The game experience just feels as if it was designed simply to showcase the crazy visuals.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call Violet Storm a one-trick pony, but in terms of bringing things to the genre it’s pretty close. The over-the-top weapons and graphical effects look great, but even those aren’t implemented perfectly. Regardless, outside of those features you’re still left with a competent arcade dual-stick shooter. However, considering the wealth of choices already on the app store, anyone other than fans of the genre may end up deciding to pass on this one.

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Penny Arcade On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode Three, the long-awaited follow-up by Cthulu Saves The World developer Zeboyd Games, is coming to the iPhone and iPad, according to a recent Joystiq preview. This version will hit this summer alongside the PC, Mac, Xbox Live Indie Games, and Android versions of the game. These guys have all their bases covered, right?

If you’re not in the loop, Episode 3 is a… change of pace. It has the look, and what seems to be the feel, of an old-school RPG. In a chat with Joystiq, Zeboyd said that its major influencers were Final Fantasy V and Grandia, so go figure.

Zeboyd says this will continue the story Hothead Games and Penny Arcade set out to tell before things didn’t pan out, but it’ll also operate as a stand-alone title, which is a great thing for us. I mean, we didn’t even see the previous two games on our tablet and phones of choice.

We’ll definitely keep our eyes on this as it nears release, but you should definitely go read what Joystiq has to say. Episode Three sounds pretty hip.

[via Joystiq]

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I’ve never really been able to figure out what Square Enix’s deal is with the App Store. They go from releasing full iOS-exclusive titles like Chaos Rings [ $12.99 ] to flat-out weird “games” like Voice Fantasy [ $2.99 ] (among other zany titles). The just-released 774 Deaths [ $0.99 ] seems to come from the same “why does this exist” department as Sliding Heroes [ $0.99 ].

Billed as a “murderously difficult action platformer” 774 Deaths, according to Squeenix, is “certain to chew up and spit out even the world’s best gamers.” The format of the game goes a little something like this- You play a pixelated little dude going through rooms filled with locked doors. To progress through the doors, you need to complete the mini-games that each room has to offer you.

So far, I’ve been given the choice of four games, each with the same basic principle of navigating your guy to the end of the level while avoiding what appear to be blood covered blades. Each “game” has a different control method. There’s an auto-runner style game where you tap the screen to jump, a platformer style game with virtual controls, a vertical falling game controlled via tilting, and a similar tilt controlled top-down maze-style game.

None are particularly interesting, and I really can’t quite decide if the game itself is difficult, or if the controls are just terrible. Either way, you beat two of the games inside the room you’re currently in, the next room unlocks, and you repeat the process. Admittedly, I’m stuck on the third room right now, but there hasn’t been much variation to speak of yet. Per the iTunes description, there are 9 rooms in all.

I’m reluctant to call this a “review,” since, as mentioned, I’ve basically reached a stopping point in the game right now. With that being said, I haven’t really found what I have been able to get through to be that enjoyable, and like way too many things that Square farts out on to the App Store, 774 Deaths just has me wondering why an iOS port of Final Fantasy VI doesn’t exist. I’d buy that at a high price. (And I’d even say that in the same tone of voice as the merchant dude in Resident Evil 4.)

For what it’s worth, people in our forums seem to be enjoying 774 Deaths. So, if you’re a glutton for punishment, give it a shot…?

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