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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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Behold! The kingdom of Kameloot! A great land plagued by literature-loving rats, ruffians, maddened herbivores and stupefyingly high taxes. It is here that Battleloot Adventure [99¢/HD] takes place. In this turn-based strategy/RPG hybrid, you’ll be taking command of a motley crew of mercenaries.

Unlike most titles within the genre, Battleloot Adventure will not have you galloping off to the castle in order to decapitate the state dignitaries. I mean, the local oppression is sort of what keeps you rolling in the dough. While, in theory, your purpose in life is to assist the city you’ve sworn fealty to in its attempt to win the ‘Grand Gossip Notoriety Prize’ , you’re really just in it for the gold.

As you might have guessed already, Battleloot Adventures is not a game that takes itself too seriously. It’s a game plagued with sheep, after all. Black sheep. Red-eyed, rabid-looking sheep. Be-tentacled, flatulent purple sheep. Battleloot Adventure has a sheep for all occasions. Can you honestly imagine something like this being grim and dark?

The bright, cartoony art style certainly enforces the light-hearted atmosphere. Characters are well-drawn and vividly colored albeit often encumbered with slightly overlarge heads, something that may not appeal to those who do not enjoy Japanese anime. In contrast, the watercolor backgrounds look as though they deserve a spot in a children storybook somewhere.

Now, let’s talk about the gameplay. Combat in Battleloot Adventure is wonderfully simple. To attack, you tap on your target. To defend, you tap on yourself. To utilize an item or a skill, you tap on the appropriate icon before tapping on the desired target. Simple, right?

Sort of. Once you dive into it, things start to get complicated. One of the things that you’re going to have to monitor is energy. Almost everything you do (item consumption being the notable exception here) requires expenditure of that precious resource. If you permit a character’s energy to drop below a certain percentage, they’ll be useless up till the point their bar replenishes. And no, you can’t block under these circumstances either, something that will be the cause of despair at least once.

There’s an element of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ to the fights. You see, each entity in the game is associated with one of four classes. Each class, in turn, is represented by a color. Bandits are red, soldiers are blue, healers are green and wizards are flamboyantly purple. As you might have guessed already, certain classes will do well against others. The rogues of the game, for example, do well against soldiers but fare poorly against a wizard’s assault. Needless to say, the ecosystem of colors is something you’ll want to keep in mind if you want to perform effectively in combat.

Skills have been done in a rather interesting fashion here. While most games demand payment in mana or energy, Battleloot Adventure wants payment in stars. Stars are what you acquire when you’ve inflicted sufficient amounts of damage on an enemy. Stars are also essential to some quests and provide bonus gold at the successful completion of a stage. Stars are great. Unfortunately, in order to use a skill, you’re going to have to spend a star. Will it be worth it? That’s entirely up to you.

On top of all that, you’ll also have to take passive abilities, talents, equipment, environmental effects, the fact you can rope your characters together to assist one another in attacks, and quest objectives into consideration. It’s a lot to juggle, but what makes Battleloot Adventure so neat is the fact that it’s not mandatory for you to know exactly what you’re doing. It is exactly as easy or as difficult as you want it to be. You can elect to finish everything in two rounds via a strategic usage of skills and physical prowess or you can work through each enemy slowly. It’s up to you.

One of the things that make me incredibly happy about Battleloot Adventure is the way they’ve handled IAPs in the game. They’ve done an excellent job with it. I think this is the first time I’ve said that about any game’s usage of the freemium model, but it’s true. Instead of ransoming your headgear or demanding money to unlock new quests, Battleloot Adventure will offer you in-game gold for real-life cash, and if you don’t want to, you don’t actually need to buy the gold. Things in Battleloot Adventure do not cost an arm and a leg. At most, they might cost a toe or an unimportant finger. It’s definitely a refreshing change.

That said, with Battleloot Adventure, patience is important. In spite of all the praise I’ve lavished onto it, Battleloot Adventure is one of those games that takes a little warming up. The dialogue isn’t atrocious but it’s certainly not the most impressive in the world. As for the first Act, well, the less said about it the better. I understand wanting to ease the new player into the world but the pacing’s slightly off for Act 1.

Nonetheless, for those willing to persevere, the game opens up when you reach Act II. Suddenly, there are things to do everywhere. There is equipment to unlock. There are feats to complete. With every quest you fulfill, more areas become unlocked. Speaking of equipment, I love the fact that all of the gear that you acquire will be visible on your party members in a wonderful display of attention to detail.

Battleloot Adventure isn’t perfect (I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth but that Witch is broken, guys. Broken. Also, there’s no Universal version. Why, Digital Tales, why?). Nonetheless, it’s still an impressive addition to the App Store and a game that belongs in your library. It’s immersive, it’s expansive (I’ve been playing it for a week), it’s simple, it’s something you can teach to your grandparents and your three-year old niece. As long as you’re OK with some minor quirks, Battleloot Adventure is one that you don’t want to miss.

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Simon Oliver of Rolando fame is coming back to mobile with a new Okabu game, The Guardian is reporting. Oliver released the original Okabu on PS3 back in 2011. It took a slugging from critics for its overly dry and simplistic design, but Oliver and his studio Handcircus Games has since been working on a free-to-play take in preparation for a release this year across iOS and Android. He didn’t comment on what this one will do differently.

He did, however, describe the original Okabu as a first step. He and his studio built a universe, and they’ll continue to work within it. “We wanted to retain ownership of the IP so we could build something that we knew would work across different platforms,” Oliver said. “That’s been our focus since October, working on a prototype for a new free-to-play game set in the Okabu universe, for iOS and Android,” he continued, hopefully with a flourish.

A screen of the PS3 version of the game.

The entire interview, by the way, is a fascinating read. Oliver has been around since the beginning of the App Store and, with help from Rolando, he became one of the first App Store success stories. The Guardian quizzed him about all sorts of currents topics, including the Triple Town controversy, IP ownership, and the new and more vibrant App Store landscape. His answers carry a different weight.

[via The Guardian]

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I must be biologically programmed to react instantly to anything that reminds me of The Legend of Zelda for NES. Take Carota! [$1.99], for instance, which is a puzzle game starring a rabbit named Thaddeus who’s been knocked down a hole and must proceed through 50 levels of puzzling to make it back to the Earth’s surface. Must have been a deep hole, yeah?

Anyway, if you’ve ever played Zelda (and who hasn’t), you’ll recognize that some of Carota’s levels take place in a room that looks awfully like the rooms of the Zelda dungeons. And so, the nostalgia begins…

It’s really no more than a hat tip though, which I appreciate, since I’ve played plenty of Zelda clones. Carota! is anything but, going in favor of an interesting little puzzle dynamic where you turn blocks with the touch of a finger in order to guide your rabbit to the door.

This sounds very simple, and in the beginning, that is just what it is. You can drag blocks around the screen in order to craft this path, but in order to clear a level, you must use a certain number of blocks or the door will not open. This is no problem at all when your goal is to use four. It gets somewhat more complicated once you have fifteen. Did I mention the blocks also disappear after you waste enough time? Yep, there is that.

You do have a few options at your advantage, however — you can introduce new blocks in at anytime (and you’ll get a preview of what each block is, in the upper left hand corner), and you also have access to a speed button which makes your bunny friend go just a tad faster. Both of these resources are invaluable as the levels become more difficult. Since Thaddeus only walks in one direction most of the time, you’ll have to be crafty about making sure you turn blocks at just the right moments to keep him moving, too. Oh, but he always turns left at forks. And he cannot walk back on a tile he has already crossed. Have you got all this written down?

Keep that pen out. In later levels, there will be more new blocks for you to learn to work with, such as blue ones that are slippery. To say that Carota! gets difficult later down the line would be a bit of an understatement. You’ll have quite a bit going on to manage if you can progress, and that’s when one of the game’s fatal flaws comes in — it’s not always 100% responsive to touch when you are trying to move blocks around. It’s mostly responsive, but I did have a few issues where I had to drag my finger across the screen several times when trying to move a block, which meant losing the precious few seconds I needed and Thaddeus fell to his doom.

Carota! will time you as you progress through each level, so if you want to try to improve your score, the option is there. To tell you the truth, though, some of these levels drove me so crazy, I don’t think I would ever want to play them again. If you’re a high score rockstar, however, OpenFeint and Game Center are waiting for you to get in there and show off your high scores.

I liked the concept of Carota! but I thought it could have been executed better. If the controls were as responsive as I expected, I think it could have helped with the challenge of later levels, but fighting against that issue and the difficulty at the same time made me feel as if I was struggling to have a good time. When the formula works, it works well, but if you don’t have a high tolerance for punishment, you might want to spend that $1.99 elsewhere.

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At the beginning of February, the team behind the action platformer Terra Noctis [99¢] announced their new iOS project called Spellsword (no relation to Rocketcat’s upcoming game). After dishing out scant details for Spellsword in our forums, the team has been quiet for the last month or so while toiling away at the project. Today they’ve sent along the first video for Spellsword that finally shows the game in action.

The core gameplay in Spellsword is arcade-style action platforming similar to Super Crate Box [$1.99], but with lots of cool upgradeable items like hats, rings, amulets, and special powers. It will also be more structured and goal-oriented than SCB with 90 missions slated for the release version as well as unlockable endless arenas. It’s looking pretty sweet so far, and it sounds like Spellsword is very near its completion, so expect to hear a release date sometime in the near future.

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When Hunters: Episode One hit the scene almost a year ago, we were impressed with its solid gameplay and daily mission structure. With Hunters 2 [$4.99], Rodeo Games looks to expand on the success of the original with additional content while attempting to address some of the shortfalls of the original. While Hunters 2 has its share of nagging problems, there are more than enough improvements to the core gameplay to make this sequel worthwhile.

As expected, gameplay in Hunters 2 is comparable to its predecessor. Players still deploy and guide hunters through a variety of environments (complete with fog of war), taking out opposing forces in furtherance of hitting mission objectives (which typically involve defending an objective, reaching a marker or just taking out all forces). Both the leveling and equipment systems return, offering a variety of different ways to upgrade your hunters. Also making a return is the daily mission hub, offering new contracts with different maps and objectives every day. At this point, Hunters 2 offers more of a ‘tried-and-true’ approach to turn-based strategy, leaving little to error or imagination.

While the gameplay is mostly similar, Hunters 2 does add a few new elements to the mix. In addition to fighting against other hunters, the game introduces a new alien race that has its own attack style. The aliens play a role in the new campaign mode, which finally offers a story experience to the Hunters world.  Hunters 2 also combines the previous Health/Armor system into simply Armor, streamlining weapon damage. A new crafting system also allows players to customize a wide variety of weapons (at a premium price). Permadeath also makes its debut, offering genre fans the opportunity for a more hardcore experience. Finally, the sequel overhauls the talent system, providing a great deal more customization for individual hunters.

This new upgrade system is at the heart of the Hunter 2 changes. Hunters are assigned two of six possible talent trees, which provide perks ranging from additional benefits while guarding to increased weapon damage and armor protection. Players can hire new hunters with different talent trees, although only a limited amount of hunters are available to hire at any one time (hunters for hire cycle every few hours with the rest of the in-game shop).

Level design has also improved in Hunters 2, with a bit more variety in environment and size. However, I still noticed that some of the tile sets appear to be recycled from the first Hunters. Visuals are also well done, with fast, fluid animations (although I think retina support for the new iPad would have been a nice addition). However, I did encounter a strange lighting bug that would completely wash out the environment colors and make the game very bright.

One feature that is sorely missing in Hunters 2 is the inclusion of iCloud support. Considering the amount of investment you can have with building up your team in terms of loot and stats, I really would have liked the ability to move saves between different iOS devices. This is especially true since Hunters 2 plays great on both iPad and iPhone.

Despite its inclusion of a story-driven campaign, plot is still somewhat lacking in Hunters 2. The number of set missions is incredibly small and the tale being told lacks any kind of narrative punch to serve as motivation for continuing the campaign. Granted, some gamers will undoubtedly not care about a story, but I just found it a little disappointing.

Still, despite my above complaints, Hunters 2 continues to do a great job preserving the core gameplay mechanics of Episode One. The leveling system and large variety of weapons keep me coming back  to play missions simply to earn more gold and experience to refine my hunters. Also, the loot system and daily mission structure do a great job promoting replayability. As mentioned above, there’s nothing new or particularly innovative, but it’s still implemented well.

It goes without saying that fans of Hunters: Episode One will have a great time with Hunters 2. The tweaks to the leveling and upgrade systems do a great job streamlining gameplay while the inclusion of an actual campaign and additional difficulty options are welcome additions. While the incremental upgrades probably won’t win over gamers that weren’t fans of the original, Hunters 2 still offers a compelling turn-based strategy experience.

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Sega’s Phantasy Star Online 2 won’t cost you a dollar — unless you’d like an item or two. Sega has announced that the upcoming sequel to the everyone’s favorite “light” MMO, Phantasy Star Online, will roll with the standard MMO free-to-play model, and charge users for select item transactions from its in-game store. Also, an iOS and Android version has been confirmed. Both are slated to hit at some point in “winter 2012,” according to Andriasang.

Keep your expectations in check, though: Sega has said that the phone versions of the game are simpler and will feature “social game elements,” on top of a basic character creation mechanism, and controls. These versions will be able to loosely communicate with the PC and Vita versions of the game, but the experiences won’t had across these platforms won’t be measuring up to each other.

Images via Andriasang.

The available intel on PSO2 still isn’t fantastic, as it seems like Sega is keeping its marketing efforts for the game contained to other regions. However, we do know that PSO2 will continue to offer the franchises’ specific blend of shooter-meets-brawler combat and offer instanced-based content. Oh, and Mags are totally coming back!

Footage of the Vita version.

[via Andriasang]

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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.

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For all the attempts, there still isn’t a great monster training RPG on iPhone or iPad. Callis Projects might be the first studio to accomplish such a thing, if the slick appearance of Zenforms is any indication of content quality. Zenoforms: Protectors is a traditional Pokemon-alike, seemingly sporting a similar story, presentation method, combat system, and structure. Its evolution model seems to be its biggest departure: each pocket monster, or Zenform, has five stages it can hit if enough “skill points” are used.

Here’s some screens:

Our forums have been all over this since the beginning of the year, and that specific thread has a ton of assets to share. The game also has a tremendous web site with even more nitty-gritty. We’re currently contacting Callis to see what’s up, and hey, learn when the game is due to hit iPhone. Stay tuned and check out the game’s media while you wait. Lookin’ good, man.

Are you having GDC 2012 flashbacks, by the way? At the event, we saw another Pokemon-alike going by the name of My! My! Monsters. It has a strikingly similar look to Zenforms, and while the build that we saw was rough, it looks like a real contender in the space, too. It’s interesting see two in-development titles like this jockeying for the same position. We’ll definitely be keeping our eyes on both to see who the real master will be.

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