TouchArcade.ru

In a “good news/bad news” sort of situation, I always like starting with the good news first. Maybe it’s just me, but it makes the bad news easier to stomach. So, try this on for size: The Fighting Fantasy game books were originally first published in 1982, starting with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and blossoming into a full-blown series of gamebooks. What’s a gamebook? Well, imagine one of those choose your own adventure novels from when you were a kid (You do remember those, right?) except with more interactivity. Instead of simply turning to page 92 to to jump across a pit or turning to page 59 to go down the tunnel to the right, you need to roll actual dice to do a skill check to see if you can make it across the pit.

This adds a great element of randomness to things, and it feels more like you’re playing the book instead of just making arbitrary decision along various branching paths. I like ‘em a lot, and if you’re a fan of fantasy novels I’d go as far as saying this whole series is a “must-have,” especially considering at the current sale price of 99¢ you can buy the whole set for less than one dead tree version will run you.

Fighting Fantasy: The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, $0.99 – Deep in the caverns beneath Firetop Mountain lies an untold wealth of treasure, guarded by a powerful Warlock – or so the rumor goes. Several adventurers like yourself have set off for Firetop Mountain in search of the Warlocks hoard. None has ever returned. Do you dare follow them?

Fighting Fantasy: Deathtrap Dungeon, $0.99 – Deep in the caverns beneath Firetop Mountain lies an untold wealth of treasure, guarded by a powerful Warlock – or so the rumor goes. Several adventurers like yourself have set off for Firetop Mountain in search of the Warlocks hoard. None has ever returned. Do you dare follow them?

Fighting Fantasy: Citadel of Chaos, $0.99 – The Citadel holds a dark and dangerous peril for anyone foolhardy enough to venture through its gruesome gates. And yet venture you must for your mission lies at the heart of the Citadel, with the dread sorcerer, Balthus Dire!

City of Thieves, $0.99 – Terror stalks the night as Zanbar Bone and his bloodthirsty Moon Dogs hold the prosperous town of Silverton to ransom. YOU are an adventurer and the merchants of Silverton turn to you in their hour of need.

Fighting Fantasy: Creature of Havoc, $0.99 – You begin this adventure not knowing where you are or who you are. All you know is that you are some kind of creature of instinct, understanding little. During the course of the adventure, it may be possible for you to begin to control your bestial nature, to find out more about yourself, and even to learn your destiny. But even if you know all this, success is by no means certain, for the traps and terrors of Trolltooth Pass are many … Are you ready — to become the Creature of Havoc?

It doesn’t matter what order you play them in, so just download and start with whatever sounds the most interesting.

Now, the bad news. Big Blue Bubble, the developers responsible for bringing these gamebooks to the App Store, are on the verge of having their licensing agreements expire. It doesn’t sound like they’re being renewed either, so once these are gone, they’re gone. This also means there won’t be any updates for any of them, so don’t expect any Retina iPad enhancements, or tweaks/bug fixes if future iOS upgrades break the apps.

We’ve yet to hear when the licensing agreement actually expires, but needless to say, you should jump on these sooner rather than later if you want them.

[source]

In January Namco Bandai released an excellent iOS version of their classic 3D fighter SoulCalibur [ $11.99 ]. A a fan of SoulCalibur on Dreamcast more than a decade ago, the faithful iOS port was a great way to re-experience the game. The virtual controls worked well, the graphics were crisp and high-res, and the finely-tuned mechanics withstood the test of time.

However, as good as iOS SoulCalibur was, it was strangely devoid of any kind of multiplayer, a key component for a fighting game. Over the weekend, Namco Bandai looked to rectify that omission by releasing a new update that adds Bluetooth multiplayer to SoulCalibur. The new versus mode works just as well as you’d expect it to, and squaring off against an opponent face-to-face is just as fun as it was back in the day. It really is crazy just how well SoulCalibur has aged after all these years, especially as a competitive game.

One important thing to note though is that multiplayer isn’t compatible with the iPod touch. SoulCalibur is a pretty technically demanding game anyway, and even upon release required at least an iPhone 4, iPad 2 or 4th generation iPod touch to run. It is likely the lower amount of RAM in that iPod touch device that is the reason multiplayer is a no-go.

If you’re a SoulCalibur fan in the iPhone or iPad camp then get to updating your game and go search out a worthy opponent. Believe it or not, SoulCalibur is actually on sale right now to celebrate the update, down from its normal price of $14.99, so if a lack of multiplayer caused you to pass on the game before now is not a bad time to finally pick it up.

[source]

This afternoon, Aquaria [$2.99] joined the growing list of iPad apps that support the new iPad’s high resolution screen. And in celebration, publisher Semi-Secret Software is offering it for $2.99 instead of its usual $4.99 price point. Semi-Secret is thinking that this is the first time Aquaria has supported 2048 x 1536, so scribble another note in your “Perks To Owning Aquaria on iPad” column if you’re playing along at home.

Here’s what it looks like now, by the way:

This sale ends this coming Sunday, so you’ve got some time to act before it ends. We suggest you fill this extra time by playing Aquaria so… maybe you should just jump on this now. Or something.

[source]

It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than a year since Epic Games and Chair Entertainment released Infinity Blade [99¢], an Unreal Engine-powered sword battling RPG that redefined what we could expect from visuals on the iOS platform. They released the sequel, Infinity Blade II [$6.99], this past November, and basically improved upon everything in the first game. However, the original Infinity Blade is still really great, and I still find myself playing both titles regularly.

If you’re one of those people who haven’t dived into the whole Infinity Blade thing yet, now would be a good time to check out the series yourself without much risk, as the first game is on sale for its lowest price ever at just 99¢. Even if you don’t think the Infinity Blade style of game is for you, you at least owe it to yourself to drop a buck on it and find out for sure. I really didn’t think much of the game when it first came out, if truth be told, but I continued playing and somewhere along the line something just “clicked” and I found it almost impossible to put the game down ever since.

You can read our full review of the first Infinity Blade if you need some more insight, and if you like it and want some more, you can check out our review of Infinity Blade II as well. This sale is advertised as an April Fool’s sale, so be sure to grab it quick as there’s no telling how long it will last.

[source]

Back in January, developer Spry Fox released Triple Town [Free], an iOS version of their immensely popular Kindle, Facebook, and Google+ matching game. Triple Town was widely loved by gamers and gaming critics, including our own 4.5 star review, and it was great to see a developer that was able to innovate so heavily in what has become a stagnant match-3 genre.

Since its release, Triple Town has received several updates, but they have mostly amounted to maintenance type stuff. Over the weekend, another new update was released, this time adding some very welcome new gameplay maps.

First is the City on a Lake map, which you can see in the screen below. This gives you the standard 6×6 grid found in the original mode only this time there is an L-shaped body of water smack dab in the middle. Obviously this is going to affect your strategy by limiting the amount of space you have to make matches, since the water is unusable space. It puts a nice challenging spin on the regular Triple Town formula.

The second new map is called Peaceful Valley, pictured below, and is a much friendlier, casual experience. It gives you a 5×5 map grid to work with, but here there are no bears or ninjas to muck up your carefully planned town layout. This is another nice departure from the original mode like City on a Lake is, only instead of being more challenging it’s actually much less challenging, and really lets you concentrate on thinking ahead and making smart matches instead of dealing with those pesky bears.

Aside from the big addition of two new maps, there are some minor tweaks in this update as well. High scores are now saved locally in addition to online through OpenFeint, and can be viewed from the options screen. There is also now an in-game orientation lock for people like me who like to get their game on while laying in bed. Finally, there are even more optimizations and bug fixes.

There is one tiny catch, though. The two new maps are only available for those who have paid to unlock unlimited turns from within the game. If you aren’t one of those people then there’s some good news for you: to celebrate the new update the unlimited turns IAP is on sale for $2.99. I paid the original $6.99 for Triple Town when it first came out and felt it was completely worth it, so from where I stand 3 bucks is a fantastic deal for one of the finest match-3 games available, even more so after this latest update.

[source]

This is a promo image for Solipskier, which was used when Mikengreg revealed the game to people.

When a game developer creates an awesome game, we expect its next release to be just as good. This works both ways. Greg Wohlwend and Michael Boxleiter of Mikengreg fame have told me what it feels like to have to work on something new with the expectation of past success in the background. It isn’t just noise — it’s having an effect on the development on its new title, Gasketball. From ideas to coding, the shadow of the success of an arcade skiing game called Solipskier [$.99] looms. It makes decisions harder. It ramps up the scope and quality. It’s making the stakes higher at a time when the studio is looking to do something totally different.

We discussed two kinds of pressure: external and internal. Mike and Greg said that they don’t feel any external heat as they build Gasketball. Solipskier got into a lot of hands, but that hasn’t given the studio the kind ravenous base that other great independent developers, like Team Meat of Super Meat Boy fame, enjoy. There aren’t throngs of people  expecting mastery in the follow-up from Mikengreg, in other words, so the bar feels low.

The pressure comes from inside, they expressed. Solipskier’s sales were the best Mikengreg has ever experienced, and the studio desperately wants Gasketball to outperform it in revenue, quality, and audience. Success is mutating their goals, as if the magic of Solipskier could ever be repeated.

“We really want our next game to seem like a step up, which is not actually very different from our early development days, every game we’ve made has been more interesting, more polished and more successful than the last,” Mike told us in an e-mail exchange. “The difference, now, is that we are trying to succeed in terms of a million players willing to pay us, which sets the quality bar dauntingly high for a two-man outfit.”

Gasketball's logo and the placeholder image for the game's web site.

Greg keeps asking himself if it’s even possible to have another Solipskier, and that seems like a fair question to ask. Its development, from idea to prototyping to final release, happened in brilliant flashes of creativity. Gasketball, on the other hand, hasn’t had that sort of conceptual magic. The conceit took longer to come along, and the studio had to throw out a lot of stuff in order to find this game.

“We had to resolve to getting down in the muck and doing the hard work of prototyping, testing, and scrapping everything for yet another prototype that felt like it had promise,” Greg told us. “For a game to really strike all the chords for us it has to be pretty specific.” Solipkier was initially designed as a Flash game. A lot of its systems and mechanics are designed around that platform. Gasketball is a departure, so it took longer to design as the studio learned new tricks.

The idea for Solipskier came from a brainstorming session that revolved around parallax scrolling. Speed and parallax seemed to gel well, so Mike and Greg started prototyping. In a blog post, the duo described the idea for the landscape painting component came as a watershed, “oh my god” moment. With wide-eyes, they went to work. In the end, the Mikengreg created an exhilarating skiing game unlike any other. Instead of focusing on tricks, jumps, and speed, Solipskier leverages style and the emotion that bursts from your chest when you feel like your acceleration is spiraling out of control.

Version ".01" of Solipskier

This wasn’t the duo’s first rodeo. Solipskier was created first and foremost as a flash game, just like Mike’s other titles as a part of Intuition Games. It was, however, the first game of either developer to grab major mainstream appeal. Mike tells me that he realized that this was a truly special project after publishers had entered into a bidding war for the game. An iOS version wasn’t in the picture at the time, but the reality of Flash development changed the tone of the porting conversation going forward.

“We were always looking for the next step out of the Flash world and into a more sustainable market that allowed for us to make larger, more fully formed games,” Greg told us. “The Flash market is great and gave us a way to become better developers while getting paid for it; however, it wasn’t a sustainable business.”

Mike and Greg were working “crazy hours,” and fretting over paychecks when they developed for Flash. Living by the seats of their pants did have its moments. “It was exciting in some ways for sure, but it couldn’t last,” Greg said. “We were lucky to have such success with Solipskier, as it’s allowing us to fully commit to iOS and downloadable titles in future.”

Within the first two months, the iOS version of Solipskier made a little over $70,000, while the sponsored Flash version generated $15,000. On Metacritic, it’s sitting at a 79 average across five positive reviews. Greg tells us that this success “changed the scope” of what it could do with its next game. The duo continued to pay themselves the same amount of money, but Solipskier gave them consistency and the ability to screw up.

Version "0.5." Can you spot the differences!?

“Since Solipskier, we’ve made six or so fairly polished prototypes and scrapped all of them,” Greg tells us. “We could have taken any one of those further but we’d rather call it a failure early and often than find ourselves with a less than stellar finished game that never found that magic we always look for.”

Solipskier’s success and design are weighing heavily on Mike’s mind as he executes concepts on Gasketball. He second guesses a lot and he’s finding it hard to accept praise from friends. “We’ve always seen the flaws in our work first and foremost, but even worse on this project I see things that aren’t there.” Mike elaborated: “My brain is constantly convinced that there are more features I need to discover before the game will be good, but they’re always just out of reach or vision. Every time I implement an idea and it doesn’t make the game instantly better I feel a crush of defeat. I feel a bit like I’m going crazy.”

They’re not alone in this, though.

The Other Guys

Other studios go through the similar issues. Some deliver greatness quickly. After Chair Entertainment released a brilliant Meteroid-style game called Shadow Complex on XBLA, it was able to stoke a similar sort of fanfare and praise with the launch of Infinity Blade. After Simogo released Bumpy Road, it followed it up with an equally charming rhythm and stealth game called Beat Sneak Bandit.

Some studios deliver late. Mobigame released its puzzle game Edge a couple of years ago to insane levels of acclaim and drama. The app was pulled because of a bogus trademark violation just as it was hitting critical mass, and the studio had to fight for the game to get back onto the App Store. Its follow-up, Cross Fingers, released 11 months after Edge. Mobigame’s David Papazian tells us that Cross Fingers is picking up steam. Edge has since been re-released.

Edge on MacOS

“We were very happy with this second game because it is really innovative and completely unique on the App Store. While I am writing, I can see that Cross Fingers is 5th in the Top Free in the US App Store with more than 8 million downloads. However, the game works a lot better now than it did at the start, because we evolved with the market. We added more levels and in-app purchases. Also, the fans are not the same as Edge fans, a lot of women and men from any ages love Cross Fingers, when Edge is more for gamers.”

Papazian says Edge, and its awards, gave his studio legs. The popularity led him to meeting a lot of people, and gave him a good “in” when introducing his work to press. His studio’s pressure was internal, too.

“But you have some pressure, you must do it again and you polish the new game as much as you can, maybe too much. Luckily we did it again, but we did not receive any awards and Apple never featured Cross Fingers on the US store. We had to fight for this success, by updating the game until it finally worked.”

Tiger Styles grabbed a lot of attention with its puzzle game Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. While working on the follow-up, a Metroid-style game called Waking Mars, Tiger Styles’ David Kalina said he felt a subconscious kind of pressure to one-up Spider. It’s a similar feeling that Mike and Greg feel as they create Gasketball. “When you make a game that gets game of the year nods,” Kalina told us, “there is definitely this feeling that EVERY game needs to live up to that standard, which is sort of an impossible bar to try and meet every time out.”

Waking Mars is more about exploration than anything else.

The development of Spider had a sense of urgency to it. He needed the game to succeed so his studio could exist. With Waking Mars, Kalina said that urgency was replaced with the desire to blow everything up in its second game, which again, is something Mikengreg is similarly struggling with. “When you start approaching game development that way, the cost of everything goes up, and the more you spend, the more risky it is to fail,” he admitted.

Waking Mars, in the end, will keep his studio alive. However, Kalina said he wouldn’t pour so much time and so many resources into Tiger Style’s next game. Kalina wants to be able to fail and experiment and do bold things.

“I’d like to release two or three games in the next year and have them all be surprising in some way, and if they don’t happen to set the world on fire, we can be cool with that because we’re at least trying to push in new directions,” Kalina told us. “The worst thing we could do now is to say ‘we have to do something just like Spider or Waking Mars BUT BIGGER…’ If we go down that path, you may never hear from us again!”

On Gasketball

Gasketball has a chance to be stellar. It’s a basketball game that has its users matching their opponents’ last shots. It’s like a digital version of HORSE, except rendered on a fantastical 2D plane that lets you freely move the hoop and shot placement around. It also has special balls and barriers that you can set up to make your shot more Byzantine and advanced. There’s a plan in place to continually update the game as it lives on the App Store.

Surprisingly, nothing mechanically in Solipskier informed Gasketball’s creative direction, Mike and Greg said. In fact, Greg argued that there wasn’t one to begin with. He said Mike came up with the idea for a playful and fun basketball game that was “a bit more skill-based than just a slingshot or pre-mapped trajectory control scheme” game. Moving in a new direction entirely, Gasketball eschews the stark contrasts of Solipskier in favor of a more playful and fun art direction.

Mike walking people through their first look at Gasketball.

Our expectations got the best of us when we first saw Gasketball. It’s just not the game you envision this studio doing at first glance. Solipkier was speedy and sharp, and it had a very specific and awesome rhythm, tone, and style. You’d figure the next game from this studio would incorporate some of these elements. This game is exceedingly friendlier in look and behavior. It’s also more thoughtful and maybe even a shade or two less impressive from a conceptual standpoint.

The stakes are just higher now. But there’s also another reason this project is especially different for the studio. Like with Mobigames and Cross Fingers, Mikengreg see Gasketball as an opportunity to grab an entirely new audience.

“We’re both getting older and want to do more with our lives than spend a hundred hours a week in a dark office,” Mike tells us. “When you start working independently you tend to hold your breath and accept sacrifices to your happiness in the short term for long term gains and we’ve yet to really succeed in a way that really gives us the security to let go and look to the future.  It can get very nerve wracking to think that you only have one shot at releasing each game, and every time you fail to reach your goals you get one step closer to having to quit trying.”

It’s a strange world right now for Mikengreg, as the studio struggles with the success of Solipskier and thinks about a studio-wide transition. But it’s confident about Gasketball and its eventual quality. We are are, too. We’ve seen the game in action, watched the videos, and have even fiddled with a build. The title threw us off at first, sure, but now that we’re comfortable with the fact that Mikengreg are switching focus, we’ve been able to move past our expectations. It’s figuring out a way to do that, too.

[source]

Let’s wind the clocks back to 2009, as really, to appreciate what Angry Birds has become, I think we need to go back and appreciate what Angry Birds was. The App Store was a crazy place. The “gold rush” was still in full effect. Publishers like Chillingo were trying to stake as large of a claim as possible in this brave new world brought about by the impulse-powered instant gratification of downloading a 99¢ game and the exploding popularity of the iPhone.

Chillingo was incredibly successful in pooling together a library of games we called “AAA titles” at the time. iDracula [ $2.99 ] may look incredibly archaic by today’s standards, but back then, it was among the cream of the crop. In late May, Chillingo spun off a new brand called Clickgamer.com, which per the original press release was intended to “carry casual games and software applications in the Apple App Store. This new brand will fully complement Chillingo’s existing catalogue of AAA innovative titles.”

Clickgamer.com’s aisle in the App Store was (and still is) an odd assortment of ultra-casual games and apps ranging from the SAT Vocabulary Builder [ $1.99 ] to sliding block puzzle games like Pic n’ Mix [ $0.99 ]. Reading between the lines of Chillingo’s own distinction between the AAA Chillingo and Clickgamer.com brands, it wasn’t difficult to see why Angry Birds [ $0.99 ] was relegated to the non-AAA Clickgamer.com brand when it launched, as the late-2009 1.0 version of the game really wasn’t anything that special. Or, as we mention in our original review which almost seems laughable now:

When you see a game with a name as nondescript as Angry Birds, it’s pretty hard to get excited. Even after playing through the first few levels, I was enjoying this game, but failing to see the real appeal.

The original release had a barebones array of birds, 63 levels, no leaderboards, no achievements, and no, really… anything else. Angry Birds wouldn’t even strike it big until months later in early 2010, when Chillingo announced that the game had been downloaded over half a million times. Whether that sales surge was a result of Chillingo’s marketing prowess or creative consulting as a publisher or the product of Rovio’s hard work seems to be a matter of perspective, and the answer to that question depends more on who you ask. Regardless, Angry Birds has yet to let go of a position on the top ten iTunes sales charts.

The Angry Birds kingdom expanded into the Angry Birds empire with the self-published release of both Angry Birds Seasons [ $0.99 ] and Angry Birds Rio [ $0.99 ] over the next couple of years. Since then, Rovio has grown further yet, and now days it’s difficult to find a platform that doesn’t have Angry Birds on it as the brand has made its way to the browser, smart TV’s, and even feature phones being sold in emerging markets. Think about that. People in African countries rocking series 40 Nokia phones have Angry Birds.

Despite Rovio’s unprecedented levels of success, recently it has been hard to dispute the argument that the Angry Birds formula might be getting a little stale. I’ve always been excited to play through the levels added in new updates, but for a while now I’ve felt like I’m just going through the motions of figuring out the weak points in the pig defenses, launching a bird, collecting my three stars, and moving on. This lead to the inevitable question of what could Rovio do in a sequel to not only revitalize the brand to players who have grown bored, but also provide a big enough twist on gameplay to make it worth having a fourth installment in the series?

It turns out the answer was to head to space.

Angry Birds Space [$0.99 / $2.99 (HD)] is close enough to the rest of the Angry Birds family that anyone even vaguely familiar with the games will be able to hop right in. It features the same premise of flinging birds in a big slingshot into dastardly egg-stealing pigs, but this time, your shots are assisted by a dotted line coming off the front of the slingshot to make the aiming process a little more transparent. The boss battles from Rio even make an appearance.

It comes packed with the familiar family of birds, with some minor modifications. All of the birds got a cosmetic upgrade, with snazzy looking space outfits. More importantly, some of their functionality has changed. For instance, the new version of the yellow bird doesn’t just dash forward. Instead, tapping on the screen sends it homing in on that specific location, even allowing for complete trajectory changes in flight. The force exerted by the bomb bird seems to focus more on pushing things rather than destroying them, and a new freezing bird turns anything inside of its blast radius into ice, allowing for easy cleanup with blue birds.

The magic of Angry Birds Space comes from the physics tricks Rovio is able to pull off by leaning on the gravitational fields of the various planetoids that make up many of the levels. Birds shot into space fly straight as an arrow, as obviously, there isn’t any gravity to make them do anything differently. Gravity fields are indicated by faint blue halos, and completing each level (particularly with three stars) involves the intelligent mastery of both zero gravity as well as the (potentially) multiple gravitational pulls of the different planetoids that the pigs have set their forts up on.

This varying gravity system allows for some incredibly elaborate level design, including puzzle elements that would never have been possible with the “traditional” gravity model of previous Angry Birds titles. One early level that exhibits this in a particularly clever way involves the introduction of the bomb bird. Players are faced with a bunch of pigs hanging out and being smug on a gravity-rich planetoid.

There isn’t a clear shot to be had between the slingshot and the pigs themselves, as there are all sorts of asteroids littering the top half of the screen. Completing the level actually requires delicate use of the bomb birds to gently push the asteroids down into the gravity field, at which point they come smashing down on the pigs. Other levels involve shooting your birds to catch the rim of a gravity field, placing them in an orbit of sorts to slingshot around to hit an otherwise unreachable target.

The truly interesting thing that I’ve found is that this gravity mechanic has allowed for some incredibly creative ways to complete levels. The comparison may be a bit of a stretch, but in Scribblenauts Remix [ $0.99 ] the way to truly have fun in that game was to come up with the most absurd and imaginative solution to each puzzle. Sure, nearly every level can be solved by equipping yourself with some wings and a gun, but there’s just a certain sense of satisfaction to be had when you figured out how to somehow work Cthulhu into your solution. Similarly, while most levels in Angry Birds Space often have a fairly clear-cut solution, I’ve been having way more fun coming up with the most convoluted flight paths for my birds, with personal bonus points awarded for as many orbits as possible before expertly slamming whatever bird I fired into a pig.

Some other changes have been made to Angry Birds Space, namely, the addition of a new in-app purchase system. In previous games, the Mighty Eagle is a one time 99¢ purchase which allows you to skip one level every hour. The Mighty Eagle also adds an entirely new (although not necessarily immediately apparent) game mode where you can go back to previously completed levels and fire off the Mighty Eagle shooting for destroying everything on screen.

Unfortunately, now not only is the Mighty Eagle a consumable item, but it also doesn’t automatically skip a level. When you fire out the sardine can, the Mighty Eagle can totally miss, leaving whatever smug pigs are left on screen laughing at your failure. Additional Mighty Eagles are awarded in small quantities by just playing the game. Alternatively, 20 Mighty Eagle shots can be purchased for 99¢, with additional packs of Mighty Eagles ranging all the way up to 980 for $19.99.

Out the gate, Angry Birds Space comes loaded with two level packs: “Pig Bang” which serves as more of a tutorial for the new space-centric physics and “Cold Cuts” which introduces the new freezing bird. A third (very difficult) level pack entitled “Danger Zone” is available via a 99¢ unlock, and if you even find yourself vaguely enjoying the two included packs, the third one is basically required.

This raises the question of what is going to come of the future of Angry Birds updates, as the tea leaves of this IAP-unlocked level pack can be read in numerous ways. Angry Birds has been known by its seemingly never-ending stream of free content via updates, and I find it to be a little hard to believe that Rovio would put a stop to that with Angry Birds Space. My gut is telling me that future updates might follow a path of offering up a free pack and an optional ultra-difficult paid pack like “Danger Zone” for hardcore players… But, we’ll have to wait for the first update to land to know for sure.

If you’re playing on a new iPad, you’ll be happy to know that the HD variety of Angry Birds Space comes with crisp Retina Display-friendly graphics. Neither the HD or standard versions are universal, so, having the optimal Angry Birds Space experience requires some App Store double dipping if you want to play on both your iPhone and iPad. Sadly, there still doesn’t seem to be any way to sync progress between versions of the game, so, in that regard, there isn’t much point in buying it twice anyway.

Angry Birds is the unlikely candidate with meager beginnings that somehow managed to redefine both mobile gaming and the levels of financial success that are possible in the mobile space. The brand is known worldwide, and the series is enjoyed by everyone from hardcore gamers, to celebrities and athletes, to my own father who couldn’t possibly be more of a non-gamer. Angry Birds is the Super Mario Brothers of mobile devices, and Angry Birds Space is so successful in redefining the Angry Birds formula that everyone should give it a try.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

Since getting the new iPad last Friday, I’ve been having a blast playing through the games that have been updated to take advantage of the beautiful new screen. Of course, gameplay reigns king when it comes to any game, but the visuals are important too, and it’s pretty crazy just how much a big bump up in the graphics department can add to a gaming experience.

So far, my favorite example of this has been Zen Bound 2 Universal [99¢], which was just updated with Retina iPad visuals. In early 2009, the original Zen Bound was a technical showpiece for the iPhone in terms of its striking visuals as well as its incredible use of multi-touch. Right off the bat, the sequel followed in these same steps by being a launch title for the original iPad back in April 2010, and a few months later for harnessing the power of the iPhone 4’s gorgeous new Retina Display and Gyroscope capabilities.

And here we are again, not even a week into the launch of the long-awaited Retina Display iPad and Zen Bound 2 Universal is again a stunning showpiece of the new technology. The high resolution textures and fancy lighting effects combine to create remarkably realistic in-game models. If there was such thing as an uncanny valley for tiny carved sculptures, this would be it. Everything runs at a silky smooth framerate too, further making the visuals feel like they just pop right off of the screen.

The enhanced visuals have got me hooked on Zen Bound 2 all over again, just as I was when it first released, and if you haven’t checked out the game previously now would be an excellent time if you’re an owner of the new iPad. It’s a perfect game to show off the screen of the new device to people, and the unique multi-touch gameplay is just as impressive as ever, too.

With its slow-paced, meticulous gameplay Zen Bound 2 isn’t for everybody. But if you’re intrigued by the look of it and want something to show off your new iPad then it’s totally worth its current sale price of 99¢. The bonus is that if Zen Bound 2 is your cup of tea, it comes equipped with more than 100 puzzles to work through that can very easily eat up your free time if you aren’t careful, made all the better with the gorgeous new Retina Display iPad visuals.

[source]

I can hardly believe it’s been almost one year since the release of Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP. Since that time, Sword & Sworcery has earned more accolades than I can shake a stick at, including our own Game of the Year award for 2011, and it redefined what we can expect from a melding of video games, music, art, and storytelling on the iOS platform.

Basically, if you somehow haven’t checked out Sword & Sworcery yet, you can currently get either version of the game at a discount in order to celebrate the one year anniversary of its release (and the vernal equinox, of course). And by either version I mean the iPhone/iPod touch-only version which is on sale for 99¢, or the Universal version which will set you back $1.99 during this one day price cut.

If you don’t currently own an iPad, but are having thoughts about picking up one of those fancy new iPads, then I’d just go ahead and jump on the Universal version. The folks behind Sword & Sworcery note on their website that they’re fully aware of Apple’s latest touchtronic device, and will be announcing something on that topic soon. I drool at the thought of a Retina iPad version of Sword & Sworcery, so let’s keep our fingers crossed.

Also, you can’t really mention Sword & Sworcery without mentioning Jim Guthrie who did the amazing soundtrack for the game. He’s all over this sale business too, and you can currently purchase the Sword & Sworcery soundtrack in digital form for whatever price you feel like paying. If you’re a collector type, you can also get the album on limited edition vinyl with original artwork from Pendleton Ward (seen above), or as a limited edition cassette tape. That’s right, a cassette tape! All of this is available at Jim’s Bandcamp page.

[source]

Way back in October of 2010, Goodhustle Studios released Beast Boxing 3D [99¢/Lite], a first-person arcade style boxing game that we thoroughly enjoyed in our review. It utilized pretty simple boxing mechanics, but had intuitive controls and a fantastic art style. The campaign was a bit short, but this was rectified pretty well through an update the following December that added two additional characters and a survival style Endless Mode.

There hasn’t been much activity with Beast Boxing 3D since then, but a brand new update has just been released that addresses two of the biggest requests from users since the game came out: high resolution visuals and Universal iPad support. A lot of the artwork in Beast Boxing is hand drawn, so there isn’t a lot of impact on the Retina Display or the iPad screen, though it does look much cleaner. However, it makes a big difference in the text as well as the actual 3D character models, both of which are razor sharp now.

Check out the comparison screens of the non-HD visuals on the left and the updated screens on the right (click for full size):

There are some other minor fixes in this latest update too, like improved UI elements and issues related to Game Center achievements unlocking. Also, the characters themselves have been given additional sound effects and animations, giving them all a bit more distinction to their personalities.

Beast Boxing 3D has remained one of my favorite games since it came out, and I’m really happy to see such nice improvements so far beyond release. If you hadn’t checked it out before, the lite version has received the same Universal and HD treatment so you can see what you’re getting into without risk. If you like the lite, the full version is currently on sale for 99¢.

[source]