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Just like Freeverse's recently released Warpgate [$4.99 / $6.99 (HD)], Flick Baseball [$2.99] has had a development cycle that borders on legendary for an iPhone game. We first heard of the game in a guest article by Freeverse developer Mark Andersson, and didn't actually see it in motion until a few months later when we played a very basic (and different looking) build of the game at WWDC. Later, we posted a preview trailer that had such an impact on Baseball fans around here that it seemed to slightly overshadow the release of Gameloft's Derek Jeter Real Baseball that popped up on the App Store in the following weeks.

After our preview from last week, I've spent a considerable amount of time with the game. Essentially, if you're looking for an in-depth 3D baseball simulation game, you're going to need to keep waiting– But if you're like me and prefer sports games that have an arcade feel to them, then you'll enjoy Flick Baseball.

Each of the different actions that make up the baseball game has a mini-game feel to it. Batting works just like Com2Us's Homerun Battle 3D [$4.99 / Free / $4.99 (HD)] where you tilt your device to move around a transparent crosshair of sorts to line up your bat. Tapping the screen swings, and you can advance bases by tapping on them in the corner of the screen.

Pitching is a guessing game of sorts that you play with the AI controlled batter. You select a pitch, then tilt the device to aim where you're going to throw and tap the screen to let it fly. If you choose the same pitch as the AI batter, they get a power bonus if they hit the ball. When your pitching luck runs out and the batter lands a hit, Flick Baseball automatically has your team field the ball. While most fielding is automatic, for fly balls, you contribute by playing a timing-based mini-game where four baseball gloves come flying out of each corner of the screen. In this instance, catching the ball requires you to tap the gloves as they intersect.

Once one of your fielders have the ball, using the same interface as running bases you can tap to throw the ball. While none of these areas of the game feel particularly technical, they are still fun. Also, if you don't like batting (or fielding), you can skip entire innings to only play the portions of the game you enjoy.

Skipped innings are calculated based on the statistics of your players, which serves as a fairly in-depth subsystem that controls the entire game. As you go through a game your pitcher's stamina decreases and it becomes harder to aim your pitches. Each batter's accuracy controls the size of their tilt-controlled hit zone. Many other player stats run the rest of the game.

If you're serious enough about baseball to want to play through entire seasons, you can do that as well, and skip as many games as you'd like just like skipping innings. And if you really get in to the game, you can build entire customized teams where you can tweak, modify, and fiddle around with nearly everything imaginable to create your own team filled with players that have silly names and ugly uniforms.

As I mentioned before, if you're the kind of person who wants a highly detailed in-depth baseball game, Flick Baseball isn't the game for you. Everything in Flick Baseball seems to be optimized for quick pick up and play sessions that focuses more on being fun than overly technical or difficult.

Eventually, Flick Baseball will be available in two flavors: The "Pro" version that is available today, and a free version sponsored by Chevy that is being put together by Small Planet which is still waiting to be approved by Apple. It will retain all the core gameplay elements, but you'll be missing out on things like season mode and team customization.

App Store Link: Flick Baseball Pro, $2.99

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When the original Sword & Poker [$1.99 / Free] was released early this year, it served as a perfect example of a game concept that sounded so insane we just had to try it. The idea of a poker-powered RPG was extremely unique, and the original Sword & Poker was a huge hit, both on our forums and amongst my circle of friends.

The basic gameplay remains identical to the first. From our review:

At the core is a card-based strategy/adventure game where battles take place by making poker hands on a 5×5 grid. When each game starts, nine cards are dealt in to the center of the grid and you take turns with the AI opponent placing pairs of the four cards you're dealt on the perimeter of the game board to form hands down, across, or diagonally. Jokers are wild, and as you play more hands a gauge in the bottom left slowly fills which allows you to swap a card for a joker as well.

There is a surprising amount of strategy in placing cards, as you need to look at what you've been dealt to try to determine the best order to play them as your opponent could also have plans for the same squares you hope to utilize on your next turn. Furthermore, as the game board fills up, you can potentially form multiple hands. A well-planned hand placed on the diagonal could also form many other hands going down or across.

The "Sword" portion of Sword & Poker comes from the roleplaying game layered on top of these poker battles, which could practically stand alone as its own game. Instead of just playing poker battles of increasing difficulty, the games are structured as floors in a dungeon and the challenge differs based on the type of monster you're fighting. …Read More

We absolutely loved the game the first time around, and eventually ended up rating it 5 stars along with the other January iPhone games. The good thing about Sword & Poker 2 [$1.99] is that it's extremely similar to the original, almost to the point of feeling like less of a sequel and more of an expansion. This is also the bad thing about Sword & Poker 2, as if you didn't really like the first one, or simply are looking for more than just even more dungeons to make your way through, Sword & Poker 2 has very little to offer.

If this is the first you've heard of Sword & Poker, I highly recommend at least giving Sword & Poker Lite [Free] a try. If you like it, you should give some serious consideration to picking up Sword & Poker if not Sword & Poker 2 as well.

And chances are, if you played the first one, all you need is the iTunes link to the sequel:

App Store Link: Sword & Poker 2, $1.99

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One of our favorite iPhone games has dropped to only $0.99 starting today. Space Miner: Space Ore Bust was reviewed in February and ultimately received a 5 star rating from us. From our review:

Space Miner: Space Ore Bust really is an App Store gem, given the unusually broad appeal I feel surrounds the title. Shooter fans definitely have a lot to be excited about, as do RPG fans — but even those that usually find themselves impatient in an RPG setting should enjoy Space Miner. The RPG layer is not only light, but easily manageable and delivered with a healthy dose of humor. Without a question, this is one of the best games I've played since the App Store went live over a year and a half ago.

If you haven't picked it up yet, don't let this one pass you by.

App Store Link: Space Miner: Space Ore Bust, $0.99, Space Miner: Space Ore Bust Lite, Free

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Puzzle Quest 2, Infinite Interactive's follow-up to the RPG puzzle series, is slated to hit Xbox LIVE Arcade and the Nintendo DS this summer. But will it be released for the iPad and iPhone?

It's possible. In a conversation with us, game executive producer Tim Ramage said that both platforms are "viable platforms" for the game.

“At the moment we are only announced for XBLA and DS but we are looking at all other platforms for possible opportunities," Ramage said via e-mail. "Both the iPad and iPhone would be viable platforms for Puzzle Quest 2 to be a part of.”

The original Puzzle Quest (Chapters 1 and 2) [App Store] launched on the App Store in December 2008 following the full game's Xbox LIVE Arcade release in October.

The iPhone port was met with middling reviews until perfomance updates brought it up to speed with its platform counterparts, but it's always maintained that magical mixture of Bejeweled-style match-three play with RPG trimmings. Definitely check it out if you're a puzzle game fan.

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Ravensword: The Falling King [$4.99 / Free] and Mikado Defenders [$2.99 / Free] are two games we really enjoyed. They both now have Lite versions recently released that you should try if you are any kind of RPG or Tower Defense genre fan.

Ravensword: Reviewed in November and given 4 stars – Review

Overall, Ravensword is a great addition to the somewhat scarce landscape of RPG's on the iPhone. It has some flaws, but it's a lot of fun and at the end of the day that's really all that matters. With an estimated 6-8 hours of gameplay, and side quests to keep you busy long after that, I can't help but recommend Ravensword.

And soon we'll also have some exclusive details on the sequel, Ravensword 2, so stay tuned for that.

Mikado Defenders: A Tower Defense that really stood out – Review

The tower defense section of the App Store is arguably just as crowded as the match three and line drawing sections, but Taito has managed to create a really cool looking game with a decent amount of depth to it that should make any fan of the genre happy. It comes with multiple difficulty modes, as well as both a story and endless mode. Impressions in the thread in our forums have been positive so far, and much like Taito's other iPhone games, Mikado Defenders is a lot of fun.

App Store Links:

• Ravensword Lite, Free
• Ravensword: The Fallen King, $4.99

• Mikado Defenders, Free
• Mikado Defenders, $2.99

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Prior to today's release, Kyle Poole's adaptation of Battle of Wesnoth [iPhone: 99¢ / iPad: 99¢] existed only on the iPhone, and while the game was good, it really seemed like it was never intended to be played on a screen that small. Battle for Wesnoth is a turn-based RPG with tons of user created content originally developed for the Mac and PC available for free. Since the game was designed to be played on a computer with a keyboard and mouse, we thought that quite a bit got lost in translation to tiny touchscreen controls in our review.

I'm happy to report that the interface issues found in the iPhone version have been completely eradicated thanks to the massive screen of the iPad. At 1024×768, the game is rendered just as it is on the Mac/PC client, and all of the various buttons and menus work great even with my fat, pepperoni greased fingers. The increased screen resolution also allows you to see much more of the battlefield at once, resulting in much less scrolling too.

Unfortunately, right now the iPad port is a little rough around the edges still. There's an annoying bug where the screen goes black momentarily when the iPad is rotated, but launching the game with the rotation lock enabled fixes this. Also, while you don't need to do much scrolling around anymore, panning about battles feels much slower and laggier than it should.

Developer Kyle Poole has been very active on our forums and has consistently been adding content, fixing bugs, and tweaking performance in the iPhone version since its release. Sure, the iPad Battle of Wesnoth has a few issues, but it's completely playable, and with the current 99¢ sale, you really should grab this game if you're a turn-based strategy lover with an iPad.

App Store Links: Battle for Wesnoth, 99¢ (iPhone) – Battle for Wesnoth HD, 99¢ (iPad)

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We first saw the beginnings of Freeverse's Flick Baseball at WWDC last year, and I can only imagine how long it had been in development before then. Much like the recently released Warpgate [iPhone: $4.99 / iPad: $7.99], it's immediately evident that a lot of time and effort went in to this game.

Flick Baseball is a full 3D baseball game that looks and plays a lot like a fleshed out version of Com2Us's Homerun Battle 3D [$4.99 / Free] with 3D players, tilt to aim batting, and some extra features such as being able to control your runners and where your outfielders throw the ball. Since Homerun Battle 3D is still one of my favorite iPhone games, I'm really happy with how Freeverse seems to have captured a very similar batting mechanic that works extremely well.

I've barely begun to scratch the surface of Flick Baseball, as we'll be saving that for our in-depth look in our full review, but this is a very complete baseball game. You can play both 3 and 9 inning baseball games in two different difficulty modes, and the entire game is driven by this crazy subsystem of player statistics. Some players bat better than others and as such have a much larger hit zone when they swing, and others require your aim to be practically perfect when batting to hit. There are tons of other stats that control every attribute of each player of your team.

34 teams are included, and you can build your own team with a custom name, lineup, uniform color, roster, stats, and everything else. You could likely spend hours doing nothing other than building custom teams in this game if you wanted to. There are full 11, 33, 66, and 165 game season modes with all kinds of stat tracking, a playoff mode, and the games even change from night to day depending on the actual time of day it is in the city you're playing at.

Here is a video of me playing a couple innings, which features a lot of strike outs and a beginner's luck home run:

Flick Baseball should be available May 3rd, so keep an eye out for a full review and another video of me (hopefully) hitting nothing but home runs with my tricked out custom baseball team. So far I'm really enjoying the game a lot, and look forward to getting deeper in to it.

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The sequel to the well received Alive 4-ever dual stick shooter has finally arrived. Alive 4-ever Returns expands on the same zombie-invested formula but seems to add many new features to the mix.

The sequel offers a new graphics engine with weather effects, RPG elements as well as 18 types of zombies and 37 types of weapons. Feature list from the developer includes:

• 4 Player Co-Op (local Wi-Fi)
• Fabulous Visual Effects
• RPG Elements Such As Power-Ups & Picking-Up New Skills
• 13 Amazing Skills
• 18 Disgusting Types Of Zombies
• 37 Different Kinds Of Destructive Weapons
• 36 Bonus Equipment
• 40 Stages Of Challenges
• Supersize BOSSES!
• 3 Unique Game Modes
• More Than 40 Achievements Through OpenFeint

Here's a recent gameplay video which shows off the new features.

We haven't had a chance to put the game through its paces yet, but early feedback is being collected in the forums.

App Store Link: Alive 4-ever RETURNS, $1.99

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When we first reviewed Mecho Wars back in mid-2009, we were extremely impressed by the stylish, artwork and rich palette that creator Luc Bernard brought to the game. It's no wonder that his upcoming title, SteamPirates has received so much attention from our forum readers, as screenshots released to date have hinted at a gorgeous steam-punk based RPG with a certain feline influence.

SteamPirates is essentially a linear, turn based strategy game, with light platforming helping to tie the combat sequences together. You start off playing as Kat, a cat-raised, furless human working for the canines; and soon add to your team when you meet Ziggy, a sex-crazed star of an obnoxious rock band. The storyline of cat vs dog is outlined at the beginning and via character dialogue throughout. It's certainly different and sometimes entertaining, but tries a little too hard to be crude at times.

The combat is menu driven, where you use standard attacks, items or skills awarded to your characters upon reaching certain levels. There doesn't seem to be any character customization (in terms of gear or skills) in the build we have– a feature still to come– as a badge system was described in some detail in our forums.

The game features a number of mini-games in the latter part of the game. We came across helm-to-helm ship combat in our play through, which involves tapping on screen to direct your cannon fire. It's a simple implementation, but helps to break up the turn-based combat. There are purportedly castle-defence and match-3 mini-games spattered throughout the game too, which we'll have more details on in our review.

The artwork in SteamPirates is definitely its draw-card, and we hope the gameplay will follow suit. We'll be back for a full review when it launches, but in the mean time check out our video above of the opening minutes of the game and post your feedback and comments to our forum thread.

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