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It was just a couple weeks ago that we were previewing the iPad version of the iPhone hit Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. At the time, developer Tiger Style had yet to submit this enhanced version of their critically acclaimed game. Well, good news Spider fans, as since that preview the game had been submitted and approved, and is now available for download from the App Store. As mentioned, this version includes some extra features that set it apart from it's iPhone counterpart. From our preview:

Like similar HD releases, Spider HD is little more than the iPhone game with the resolution of everything cranked up to fill the screen of the iPad. This allows you to see much more of your surroundings, making clues regarding the secrets of Bryce Manor much easier to spot than on the iPhone version, where your somewhat limited viewpoint could result in missing certain things if you weren't properly exploring some levels. Also, like most games built around fantastic art, the entire game experience is so much better in high resolution.

All four of the game modes from the iPhone game are included, as well as a brand new two player "sidekicks" game mode where two spiders are on screen, and each spider is controlled by the finger nearest to it. It's actually a surprising amount of fun, as like most games played in cooperative mode it's entirely up to you whether you want to help each other build webs, or simply race all over the screen trying to munch up bugs before the other player.

This developer video demonstrates the high resolution visuals, larger play area, and iPad exclusive same-device multiplayer:

If you're an iPad owner who's never played Spider, then now is the best time to become familiar with the franchise as Spider: Bryce Manor HD seems to be the definitive version of the game.  Besides the additions mentioned above, it also includes all the Director's Cut content that was added to the iPhone version towards the end of last year.  As always, further impressions are being collected in the game's forum thread.

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We just heard form Secret Exit, developers of Zen Bound [$2.99 / Free] and the currently iPad-only Zen Bound 2 [$2.99] that aside from dropping the price of Zen Bound 2 to $2.99, they also just submitted an update to make the iPad game universal. Not only that, but if you're lucky enough to have an iPhone 4, the Zen Bound 2 universal update is coming packed with both Retina Display support as well as utilizing the gyroscope for increased accuracy when moving the rope around.

Both Zen Bound games are not games as much as they are experiences, the music pairs wonderfully with the relaxing gameplay of just wrapping a piece of string around a 3D object, and everything down to the in-game menus are simply beautiful. The original Zen Bound actually started as a PC game, but paired with the multi touch interface of the iPhone (and iPad), Zen Bound truly came to life on the platform.

Even if you don't download the game, I really recommend giving the soundtrack a listen. All you have to do is plug your email address in to the Zen Bound web site.

Zen Bound 2 is one of my favorite iPad games, and with both a price drop and a universal update pending approval, it's even easier to recommend picking this game up.

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GodziLAB, of iBlast Moki fame, have taken an entirely new direction with their newest App Store venture, sizing up the portable online scene for a monster slam dunk. Star Dunk [App Store] is a frantically paced, competitive basketball shoot-out, where your task is to score more points than your adversaries in a free throw competition. Graphics are reminiscent of Geometry Wars; a stellar backdrop complete with a light show of shader effects for power-ups and ball handling– all running at a silky smooth 60 FPS on 3rd Gen iOS devices and up.

When playing Star Dunk, you first choose whether you wish to play online or offline. Either way you are immediately launched into a timed match where your objective is to carefully aim the ball's trajectory by swiping upwards with your finger. After each shot, the location of your next shot is reset to somewhere new. The key to obtaining bonus' and power-ups are through the backboard. When all four panels on the backboard are hit, they'll randomly select a bonus that applies for a limited time. Bonus' include score multipliers, larger rings and multi-balls.

To obtain the really big multipliers however, you'll need to hit a swish– nothing but net, and that's not easy. Consecutive 'extra clean shots' really ramp up your score, and are key to victory. Star Dunk also features a number of balls to unlock, all with different properties such as speed, bounciness and size. Some of the rarer unlocks have additional properties that add to the score multiplier in certain instances, and can be used to propel your score even higher. These help personalize the gameplay a bit, and add to the game's longevity as some of the more powerful balls take a considerable amount of effort (and sheer luck) to unlock their related achievement.

One other notable feature that we really liked about Star Dunk was how it handles its online match-making. If you choose to play online from the start screen you are thrown into a practice match, and a counter begins to the next online contest. The contest then begins seamlessly, synchronously matching each player against each other in a contest against the clock. Individual scores are then displayed in a ladder once the time is up. There are no lobbies to worry about and no visible connection screens. It was the smoothest integration of online gameplay we have seen, even over 3G. The downside to this seamlessness is that we were unable to directly play against friends, though the game's description alludes to the possibility.

There are other small touches that show the efforts Godzilab have gone to, to make Star Dunk stand out as an online game. Though you can't see your player's actions during a match-up, the Earth in the background will occasionally rotate to find just where your opponent is, neatly displaying their current score and position along side it. An arrow indicator on the top right of the screen also shows how you're faring in the contest; whether you are raising in rank, declining or stagnant compared to your competition.

These touches help make Star Dunk something more than just the simple basket shooter. The competitive nature of the game gives extra incentive to unlock the gamut of Plus+ achievements and their rewards, and the global ranking system constantly updates you on your progress compared to the rest of the world. What we would have liked to see is a way to compete against friends directly (and if it is possible, a more apparent way to do so) and a more detailed explanation of scoring that the current tutorial doesn't offer. In any case, Star Dunk is an entertaining take on a popular sport that should have the competitive types champing at the bit for a long time to come.

Note: The developers have reported that there is a bug resulting in crashes on OS 3.0 and 3.1. An update is already in submission to Apple to address these issues.

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The large screen followup iPad version to the popular game Fruit Ninja has finally arrived. Fruit Ninja is a simple game at its core but one that we really enjoyed

It's a bit of a shooting-gallery type experience but one you are swiping to slice rather than tapping to shoot. You're only allowed to miss 3 pieces of fruit before it's game over — but beware, slicing a single bomb (thrown up randomly) will result in an instant game over.

In fact, it's so simple, that it's hard to explain the appeal. The overall game is put together quite well, and the swipe mechanism is strangely satisfying.

The iPad version supports up to 8 finger swipes across the screen and adds a two player split-screen mode that is featured in the video:

As with the original, global high scores are tracked via OpenFeint. The iPhone version also remains available for $0.99 and has sold over a million copies.

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If you're anything like us and have been around through multiple device generations, tidal waves of freebies, 99¢ sales out the wazoo, and all the other contributing factors that have lead to the apps section of your iTunes library to be the same completely unmanageable pile of so many games you can barely scroll through them, you know how much of a challenge it is to keep up with the constant stream of updates to the various pieces of your app collection. While slamming a pepperoni-greased finger down on the "update all" button a few weeks ago, I missed a Sketch Nation Shooter [99¢] update which addressed my two major beefs with the game: I dislike anything that requires Facebook to work, as my Facebook is a holy place reserved for friends, family, and incessant Frontierville spam. Secondly, while the custom game sharing was amazing, finding anything quickly became impossible as more and more people submitted their creations.

If this is the first time you've read about Sketch Nation Shooter, you're in for a treat as it's a fantastic idea for an iPhone game. Basically, Sketch Nation provides the building blocks to create simple shooters and avoidance games. You literally draw your ship and the various enemies that will appear in game, photograph them, then as if through some kind of magic the game is able to analyze these photos and import your individual drawings in to the game world. Even if you're terrible at drawing, this entire process is a ton of fun.

If you're not interested in creating your own game (or have an iPod touch and are obviously incapable of photographing your drawings) there is an absolutely massive database of games that other people have created, freely available. Because the designers of these Sketch Nation creations are limited by the tools offered by the sandbox of the game itself, a lot of them feel very similar, but the creativity that has gone in to many of them (particularly the higher rated ones) is often astounding.

For more information on Sketch Nation Shooter, check out our review. You can get a ridiculous amount of play time out of this game if you get sucked in to the creations of others as well as your own and this recent update added a few DLC art modules so you don't even need to be able to draw at all if you'd rather just use the pre-packaged art for your games. With Facebook dependence a thing of the past, and an enhanced interface for browsing user-created games, Sketch Nation Shooter is now even easier to recommend.

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Here's a look at a couple of games that I've been having a surprising amount of fun with lately. They both use the same general concept of keeping a ball bouncing for as long as possible, but each accomplishes this goal with their own unique style. Neither will likely be considered the second coming of video games as we know it, but instead are just a quick bit of fun at an affordable price to eat up a spare few minutes when you're bored.

Tilt Ping, 99¢ – Everyone at one point or another has probably tried to see how long you could keep a ball bouncing in the air with a paddle or racket, and Tilt Ping brings that experience to your iPhone in very nice fashion. You hold your device out flat in the air, just like you would with a paddle, and use subtle tilting to keep the onscreen paddle under the bouncing ping pong ball. Adding variety to this idea is the special powerups that will appear every so often. They are designed in a way to try and distract you from keeping the ball going and force you tap icons that appear on the screen. Trying to maintain your bounce while focusing on tapping the bonus icons (some of which alternate between good and bad bonuses, requiring you to be even more careful) can become a really hectic and fun experience.

The game is hard, but keeps you coming back for just one more go. The whole experience of Tilt Ping is done with nicely detailed and colorful graphics, as well as OpenFeint integration for tracking achievements and many different statistics, making for a fairly robust package for such a simple game.

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Juggle!, 99¢ – What we have here is basically the antithesis of what Tilt Ping brings to the table. Imagine you invited a friend over to play Pong in the 70's, but they cancelled at the last minute, so instead you decided to concoct a way to play by yourself. In essence, this is Juggle! Forgoing the pretty graphics of Tilt Ping and instead paying homage to the aforementioned Pong, Juggle! is a deceptively compelling game. You start with a ball dropping from the top of the screen that you must keep in play by continuously bouncing it with the paddle at the bottom. With each bounce on the paddle, the ball (which is technically a square due to the retro theme) gets smaller and smaller, until it's just a tiny pixel. As play advances, more balls are added into play, requiring you to “juggle” them all to increase your score. You must keep at least one ball in play at a time, or else it's game over.

Again, it's an incredibly simple concept but one that's executed really well and is hard to put down. Like Tilt Ping, OpenFeint is included in Juggle! along with stat tracking and a nice set of options.

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Back at WWDC we got a first look at Illusion Labs' iPad game, Foosball HD [$2.99]. At our party during the event, Anders Mårtensson of Illusion Labs whipped out his iPad and the game had a constant crowd around it with people taking turns playing, with others huddled around cheering. It wasn't hard at all to recommend picking up Foosball HD in our review, as iPad gaming really seems to be at its best when playing a two player game with both players using the same device.

The iPhone version, simply titled Foosball [99¢] hit the App Store today which aside from the smaller screen plays identical to the iPad game. Foosball is controlled by swiping on either side of the screen near the foosmen you want to move or rotate. There is a basic single player mode where you can play against an AI opponent, but the game truly shines when played with two players, each controlling their own team utilizing the touch area of half of the iPhone screen.

If you have an iPhone 4, Foosball runs at Retina Display resolution which looks almost photorealistic at such a high pixel density. There's not much you can say about the gameplay of Foosball, as the game literally consists of nothing more than a virtual foosball table that automatically keeps score along with a AI opponent with three difficulty levels if you don't have a real-life opponent to play. The single device multiplayer works well, but is difficult to transition to after being used to the iPad version since the fingers of two players obscure so much of the iPhone screen.

Still, if you don't have an iPad, Foosball will be a fantastic addition to the games on your phone especially if you've found yourself having a great time with single device multiplayer games in the past. For its current price of 99¢ (which is unheard of for Illusion Labs games) it's totally worth downloading just in case you ever find yourself in a situation that calls for a spontaneous game of iPhone foosball. I'd still recommend picking up the iPad version over the iPhone version if at all possible, or even both if you consider yourself a true foosball fanatic.

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Proud to be indie developer NimbleBit leaked some vague details to us this afternoon regarding their next iPhone game, Pocket Frogs. The story of Pocket Frogs starts back with their previous game, Dizzypad [iPhone: $1.99 / iPad: Free + DLC], a simple jumping game that we loved in our review which recently received an update adding in iOS 4 fast app switching and Retina Display support for the iPhone 4.

Figuring they'd make the various Plus+ awards a little more fun than just increasing your overall Plus+ gamer score, NimbleBit linked these awards with unlocking differently colored playable frogs. The unexpected side effect of this for NimbleBit was it turned out that for many players, the goal of playing Dizzypad for them was to unlock every frog rather than shooting for high scores as originally intended. NimbleBit released several updates to the game which added even more frogs, so when searching for inspiration for their next game, it seemed only natural to make a game with the sole purpose of collecting as many frogs as possible.

Pocket Frogs is a game of raising, breeding, and trading frogs. Each of your frogs will have three specific genetic traits that they inherit from their parent frogs, which according to NimbleBit will result in "many thousand possible emergent species." There are going to be multiple customizable habitats to raise your frogs in, and players will be responsible for keeping the frogs healthy, happy, and well fed by taking them out to explore the Pocket Frog pond.

Aside from breeding frogs, players will be able to get new frogs by ordering them in-game as well as trading frogs with friends via Plus+. There are also plans to have various challenges to breed certain frogs which rotate on a weekly and monthly basis and the frog store will rotate on a daily with new frogs to buy with in-game currency. NimbleBit is still hashing out plans on exactly how they're going to monetize Pocket Frogs, but have assured me that players will be able to access absolutely everything in game for free and whatever in-app purchases they finally decide on will be intended for serious frog breeders and otherwise entirely optional.

One of the core features of Pocket Frogs that NimbleBit feels has been missing from some many of these free social games is a full featured offline mode. If you're an iPod touch user, you will be happy to know that you can play Pocket Frogs without ever connecting to the Internet, you just won't be able to buy any of the in-app purchases or participate in frog trading while offline. Otherwise, you can breed your own little frogs to your heart's content, buy new frogs, and even participate in all the breeding challenges.

Pocket Frogs is currently being developed for all iOS platforms and will include Retina Display support. NimbleBit isn't getting specific with release dates yet, and instead have just told us to "expect to have a handful of little frogs this summer." We've yet to hear whether or not players will be able to release their army of frogs on unsuspecting virgin ecosystems, but for what it's worth, I've got my fingers crossed.

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An ambiguous image has been making the rounds over the weekend as casual game development king PopCap has sent out save the date emails for August 2nd in San Francisco, CA. This is quite literally all we know right now, but judging by the wild success of both the original Plants vs. Zombies for the Mac and PC, as well as the chart-topping Plants vs. Zombies [$2.99] and Plants vs. Zombies HD [$9.99] for the iPad, it's no surprise that PopCap would be making a sequel.

If this is the first you've heard of Plants vs. Zombies, here's the gist of the game from our review:

In Plants vs. Zombies, Popcap takes the standard tower defense formula and greatly simplifies it. Instead of a path to build towers along, you drop seeds in your yard which then grow in to plants that have various offensive or defensive capabilities. The yard is organized in a grid, and zombies move straight across the row they spawn on, munching (or in some cases jumping or flying over) anything that they come in contact with.

A gauge on the top of the screen shows how close you are to the end of the level, with flags indicating when big waves of zombies are going to come. When you clear a stage, you're often awarded with the seeds of one more of the nearly 50 included plants. This seemingly constant progression does a great job of keeping you interested, as it always seems like you have a new toy to play with. To shake things up even more, mini game levels are mixed in, including a bowling game of sorts, a whack-a-mole game with zombies, and others.

We awarded Plants vs. Zombies for the iPhone 5 stars, and the iPad game is worth a look too as it includes a survival mode, more mini games, and the graphics look simply fantastic on the iPad screen. PopCap seems to have a knack for creating fun games that appeal to everyone from the most hardcore FPS player to your grandma, and I expect Plants vs Zombies 2 to be no different. It seems a sequel is inevitable, I just hope they release it simultaneously on the App Store instead of making iOS gamers wait nearly a year for a port like the first Plants vs Zombies.

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If you've found yourself stricken with a severe case of the Mondays, why not give your life some perspective and appreciate the fact that unlike the citizens of The Raging Dead [Free], you're not currently running for your life in a city filled with zombies with some omnipotent finger deciding whether or not your life is sacrifice for the greater good. (Or, if you are in a situation like this, I'd wonder why it is you're reading TouchArcade instead of, well, not getting your brain eaten.)

We reviewed The Raging Dead when it was released earlier this year, and as someone who was always oddly captivated by the various Java-powered zombie infection simulators that made the rounds years ago, I thought the game was really cool. Much like said simulators, The Raging Dead uses similar AI to populate a game world which initially only has a few zombies (red dots) who instantly begin pursuing the humans (blue dots).

From our review:

As you might imagine, entire cities can be completely overrun with zombies unless the undead are stopped quickly, and that's where the player comes in. Tapping on the screen will drop a bomb (or fire the machine gun, if that's your preference), killing all zombies in the impact area. That impact area is painfully small at first, and that combined with the extremely zoomed out view in each level makes precision a bit difficult. Luckily, weapons can be upgraded with money earned at the end of each level to allow for a more forgiving blast radius, so players will be able to eliminate the zombie threat quickly and efficiently.

The interesting part of the game becomes apparent when you realize that your weapon has limitations like reload speed time, and you must sacrifice some civilians in order to prevent the infection from hitting everywhere in the city at once. The strategy is to quickly eliminate all the scattered zombies at the start of the level, and by the time you've done that it's likely that the one or two that you missed have created a small army around their locations. That's just the sacrifice that you'll have to make if you want to be successful, because the only way to win is the eventually get all the zombies in a corner where they have no more civilian targets to infect and wipe them out all at once.

22 levels are included, as well as two weapons which you can upgrade in between levels. At the end of each level you're graded, earn money for said upgrades, and potentially unlock in-game medals based on how many humans survive as well as how little damage you did to the surrounding city. I fully realize there are entirely too many zombie games on the App Store, but if you've got room on your device for just one more, The Raging Dead is worth a try especially while it's free.

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