TouchArcade.ru

Last fall we took a look at Ravenmark: Scourge of Estellion [$4.99 / Lite], and it absolutely knocked our socks off. If you’re into strategy RPGs and have been holding off for any reason, now is the perfect time to jump in. A huge content update just hit that nearly doubles the length of the game, and it brings a few user-friendly features along with it.

The defining feature of Ravenmark may well be its carefully crafted world and the compelling characters that inhabit it. It’s a game you can sink your teeth into, and the characters are worth caring about. The Suneater Campaign, new in this update, brings in a whole new cast and more lore to digest. It turns the story of Ravenmark on its head and brings the perspective around to the nation of Kaysan, formerly the villains of the piece. Rather than defending the lands of Estellion, the new campaign sees players striking out to take their land back from the Empire of the Raven.

The update adds eleven new chapters, bringing the expected length up to somewhere near the 20 hour mark, no small feat. It also mixes up the gameplay, as the swarming Kaysan must use different tactics than the organized armies of Estellion.

There are several other big changes in this update, including iCloud support and a lower difficulty mode. The latter increases the health of player-controlled units, making it a little easier to stomp all over the enemy. There are also new challenges to complete in each chapter for players looking for more difficulty instead of less.

Witching Hour Studios has mentioned two crash bugs that slipped into the Suneaters update. If you get either of them, simply load the chapter you’re trying to access from the Campaigns menu. The studio has already submitted a fix, so you’ll be able to get your epic strategy RPG on without a hitch in no time.

[source]

Fans of tower defense should feel lucky; it seems like we get at least one marquee release every month. Following this trend is iBomber Defense Pacific [$2.99], sequel to Cobra’s iBomber Defense [$2.99] and the latest Chillingo TD title. Building on everything we loved in the original, Pacific does a great job adding new gameplay twists while fine-tuning the traditional TD formula that has made the genre so popular.

From a gameplay perspective, iBomber Defense Pacific is a great mix of old and new tower defense elements that combine to create an experience that is far more ‘interactive’ than most traditional TD titles. Like its predecessor, Pacific still has the armor/tower repair mechanic (along with the rewind function), as well as the standard tower archetypes and upgrade levels. Pacific changes up some of the tower names, but they’re really nothing new and should be instantly be familiar for all TD veterans. New to the mix, however, is the ‘Dig In’ mechanic, which is a good addition and puts a greater emphasis on micromanagement and strategy.

By telling a tower to dig in, you can increase the range, damage, and armor of the tower but at the sacrifice of vision (instead of attacking from all angles, a frontal cone becomes your only attack range). However, you can rotate the tower’s cone of range at any time which basically provides an inexpensive (and significant) upgrade to your towers, assuming you can effectively manage your aiming.

I’m a huge fan of this mechanic because it feels like tower defense finally has a nice supplemental mechanic that rewards extra interaction. This is also shown in the ‘Bomb’ tower, which is a passive tower that slowly builds bombs that can be dropped on any part of the map. These sorts of interactive elements are certainly not unique to Pacific, but the quality in which they’re implemented is something not usually seen.

Other nice additions include a ‘perk system’ that allows players to assign three perks that range from starting with more money to faster tower targeting (and are unlockable via a variety of objectives). Pacific also greatly expands on the ‘Victory Point’ leveling system from the original – allowing for a bit more customizability and thus strategic play styles.

Besides gameplay, most other aspects of Pacific share the same devotion to detail that Cobra has provided in the past. Visuals are fast, fluid and colorful, although the backdrops at this point aren’t as special as the original. Maps start off simple and end up large and hectic, with some missions having you defend on multiple fronts including simultaneous land, water, and air attacks. Three difficulties, multiple objectives per map, and bonus missions provide a wealth of replayability. Even the sound effects are well done, especially when heard via headphones.

Complaints in iBomber Defense Pacific are few and usually limited to minor issues such as the occasional miscue when trying to rotate your dug in tower and a few random crashes. The biggest issue, however, deals with the lack of a mid-mission save state outside of keeping the game in memory. Considering the fact that iOS devices love to quit apps while multitasking, this is a glaring omission and could lead to a lot of lost progress if you quit the game before completing a mission. Players looking for a striking narrative will also need to look elsewhere, as Pacific offers the bare minimum in story to keep the action going.

Still, you’re not going to be playing a game like iBomber Defense Pacific for the story. You’re going to play it because you’re looking for the next big TD game to get your fix. In this regard, Pacific offers nearly everything you need for an enjoyable and deep tower defense game.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

Way back in 1984, English teacher-turned-game developer Mike Singleton released a vast and innovative adventure gamed for the ZX Spectrum home computer called The Lords of Midnight. The game was extremely well received and garnered high praise for its gameplay, the expansive world in which it is set, and its use of a clever graphical technique known as “landscaping” to render the scene with pre-scaled sprites. The Lords of Midnight turned out to be Singleton’s most well respected title and is considered by many to be one of the best video games ever created.

Versions of The Lords of Midnight were soon released on a few other (mainly European) platforms of the day, and in 1991 DOS PC versions of the game and its sequel, Doomdark’s Revenge, were released, originally developed as reverse engineered fan conversions by Christopher Wild. (Singleton gave his stamp of approval to Wild’s conversions — see Wild’s 2004 Retro Gamer two-piece article / interview with Singleton.) Not long after, Wild began thinking about doing Windows versions of the games and thus began his work on The Midnight Engine, a system that would allow the Midnight games to run under modern operating systems and, thanks to data abstraction, would also allow new games to be created under the same framework.

At this point, the astute reader has probably figured out that I am not just waxing nostalgic for the simple fun of it. No, I am happy to say that there is reason for my taking a few moments to bring the uninitiated up to speed, here, and that reason is a project that has been underway for over year now to bring The Lords of Midnight to iOS.

In January of 2011, original author Mike Singleton reached out to Christopher Wild, suggesting a collaboration to get his 27 year old classic in the hands of a new audience. Since that time, at a varying pace, the project has been underway.

Wild has been posting progress updates to his blog throughout the year, and indicates that it is definitely the intention of both he and Singleton to do this conversion just right.

Let me firstly assure you that we are not developing a freeform, realtime, 3d game. We are not developing [the less well-received sequel to Doomdark's Revenge] the Citadel. We are not going to f*** it up!

Lords of Midnight is about the landscaping. It’s about those 2d panoramic views. It’s about moving some characters and pressing night and the end of the turn and waiting for the dawn to break to find out what happened.

So, the landscaping stays. Yes it will get an update. Graphically we will try a few things to help us justify bringing a 27 year old game back to the future. If you’ve followed the history of [The Midnight Engine] with the Lords of Midnight and more importantly Doomdark’s Revenge, you’ll have an idea of some of the things that means.

We’re going to make a few changes to the AI. Nothing drastic. This is not about turning Lords of Midnight into the style of RPG/Adventure games that are currently available. The AI in lords of midnight works – it’s a little simplistic, but it’s perfect for the style of game. However, there are a few little things that no longer sit comfortably, and to be fair, probably didn’t when Mike originally coded them. So there will be a couple of tweaks and additions.

The affect of these additions is that the game will not play like it used to. In spirit it will be the same, but don’t expect to be able to fire up the emulators and watch the old spectrum game play exactly like the new one. There will likely be some surprises, but I think everyone will enjoy.

Wild also indicates that certain AI changes will be made to facilitate multi-user gameplay and that it will remain turn-based like the original — not real-time. The picture that he paints of the conversion goals should appeal to those iOS gamers who loved the title in decades past.

The iOS conversion of The Lords of Midnight is being developed under the Marmalade SDK (née Airplay SDK), will run natively on both the iPhone and the iPad, and should make its way to various other platforms, as well. Doomdark’s Revenge will also be brought over, some time after The Lords of Midnight arrives.

The team has just posted a demonstration video, albeit preliminary and somewhat rough, of the game running on iPad hardware.

That a whole new generation of gamers will have easy access to such a rich classic is wonderful news, and rest assured we will keep readers apprised as progress on The Lords of Midnight for iOS marches on.

( Embedded screenshots are from the ZX Spectrum original and graphics in the demo video are placeholder — not final versions. )

[ via Gaming on the Go, thanks @gnomeslair ]

[source]

It’s hard to appreciate a novel game when clunky stuff enters the picture. Sminis [$.99] is one of the few Unreal Engine 3 games on the App Store that doesn’t look like an Unreal Engine 3 game, and it’s one of the few puzzlers out there that tries to be something different. I also have a man-crush on its attempt to feel at home on touch devices, as it doesn’t try to do too much despite being rendered in 3D. On the other hand, it suffers from a hairy problem: its core design flashes ruthlessness too often, leaving you squirming helplessly in the hands of overindulgent design decisions.

Sminis are tiny, and supposedly sentient, robot beings crafted by an evil scientist in order to help him do, uh, evil stuff. After a “freak accident,” the Sminis are free to bust out from the scientist’s contraption-filled lair. You play as a maestro-god tasked with guiding entire groups of Sminis simultaneously through the scientist’s Frankenstein machines. Lose too many Sminis to a saw, hydraulic press, or a moving platform, and it’s game over.

Think of Sminis like a new-age Lemmings. Sminis act on their own accord unless you tell them to start or stop with a simple tap on the screen. Presented in a couple of different perspectives, each level has you actively guiding these little guys through various timing-based traps. Sminis are a manufactured good, however, so they’ll keep spilling out of spawns as you guide one or two along a level’s rote path. The catch is that Sminis also possess timers. Stopping one may start others, and so on. If two Sminis touch, you lose both. Each level has a cap of Sminis you can lose. Greater difficulties stress increasingly clean runs.

In the smaller and more focused levels, the individual Sminis timer is an enjoyable, if not wholly pleasant, aspect. It’s a second layer of complexity that compliments the other perfectly. But later, the individuality of the game’s parts can feel overwhelming. Quickly enough, gone is the air of coherent, puzzle-driven play, as the entire experience devolves into a mess of sloppy reactions and stupidity thanks to the sheer amount of moving stuff on-screen. In these moments, it’s like Sminis is afraid to let you breathe.

In one level, for example, you’ll be forced to navigate Sminis moving from three spawns onto three moving platforms set at a very, very specific pace. The timing here seems to revolve more around luck. Take a second to think, and you’ll lose a Smini. Watch the platforms, and you’ll lose a Smini. I should note that, all too often, it’s possible to glean an absolute solution by peering into the level designer’s mind and synching each Smini at specific, undrawn checkpoints. Levels all have a specific rhythm, and you’ll squirm while trying to figure them out.

There’s some solace to take in the schizophrenic pacing; some levels indisputable walks in the park compared to their predecessors. Another helpful thing when you come down with the Sminis blues? The fact that it’s clearly different. It isn’t a match-three. It isn’t a block rotating game. And it isn’t a word game. It’s a novel experience, so that keeps you moving.

It’s disturbing that the consistently awesome look of Sminis hasn’t influenced what goes on in the game. It looks good, if not unique. Only a handful of UE3 titles on the App Store attempt to be something more than “Shiny Dude Kills Everything Part 3.” This has some touch and character, as well as a fun, cutesy vibe.

But while Sminis always looks good, it tends to take big, scary dives in puzzle quality. At the same time, it’s hard not to recommend it alongside a few caveats. Sure, it can be a tad ruthless, and yeah, the mechanics can feel clumsy, but in bursts, Sminis feels good.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

Are you into Japanese RPGs with turn-based combat and slightly stilted translations? Do you crave a game that’s best played with a spreadsheet and a community of other players close at hand? Do you keep buying crafting or management sims in search of something truly deep? If so, get excited. Adventure Bar Story [$0.99] fills that niche beautifully. As a big fan of games like Harvest Moon and the fabulous Recettear I consider myself among that elite crew, and I love this game, flaws and all.

While it isn’t the best in its class if you look across platforms, there really aren’t any quality games similar to Adventure Bar Story on iOS. There are RPGs, yes, and there are management sims (so often presented in freemium grind-fests), but a deep combination of the two has been noticeably absent before now. Rideon Japan brings us a game settles right into that gap, offering many hours of entertainment for a remarkably low price.

When our story starts, our heroine Siela and her sister Kamerina are apparently competing to see whose apathy can run the family bar into the ground first. When a buyout offer arrives, Siela is inspired to actually try to get things up and running again. Her friend Fred offers to help. Fred owns the only shop in town, so he’s a good guy to have on her side. He lets Siela in on a little secret: there’s a field nearby where you can literally gather cooking ingredients from the ground.

After a trip to the meadow, Siela returns to the bar to cook up a few dishes. Once she’s got a few things worth selling she gives them to her sister, who opens the bar and sells the goods off-screen (no interacting with the customers for you). This is all a little silly, admittedly: icons indicating produce, meat, dairy and other supplies litter the ground of the meadow, and at first it seems there’s little to do but gather them up and head back to the bar to paw through menus and create inspired dishes like “Salted Daikon” and, um, “Salted Cucumber.”

But Adventure Bar Story slowly reveals itself to be atypical, even in the world of management RPGs. Everything in the game revolves around food. To level up, you eat. To earn money, you create dishes to sell. To advance the plot, you run your restaurant as well as you can. In fact, the game can be played nearly entirely as a restaurant management sim, finding the best prices for the best goods to make a self sustaining menu. Siela and her party only need to venture out into dungeons only when they’re high enough level to complete them and advance the plot. Or you can play traditionally, grinding monsters and looking for hidden secrets.

After a couple days of gathering and cooking the basics, the game opens up. A new dungeon unlocks and the story moves forward. New dungeons are filled with new ingredients, and this is when the cooking sim starts to shine. Trying to discover recipes from scratch feels similar to playing something like Doodle God [$0.99]: there is a collection of ingredients and tools to work with, and you’re left to discover the internal logic that drives the combinations. Once you get one recipe down, you can usually iterate on it to create other, similar things. A basic understanding of cooking helps, but if you hit a wall there are recipes to be bought. Hint recipes with a few blanks filled in open up as you discover new ingredients, too.

Each new ingredient dramatically increases the number of recipes that can be completed, so the bar really starts to hustle after a few days. Once its profile is high enough, Siela is invited to participate in local cooking contests. If she can cook something popular enough to take first place (something that can be worked out by paying attention to what sells in the bar), there will be big rewards and more interest in her bar.

I’m impressed by the depth of strategy Adventure Bar Story offers. Each day’s menu takes consideration: is it better to list high-cost foods, or use them for experience? Recipes that go particularly well together unlock combos that make them hot ticket items. And since the party can only head out once per day, deciding where to go to farm which ingredients is a challenge.

While combat follows a typical turn-based, random encounter RPG formula, that doesn’t mean it’s dull for long. Many of the skills effect the food that drops from battle. Dispatch an enemy with “Butcher” and it will drop extra items; skills like that abound. You don’t unlock them by levelling up with food, you unlock them automatically with points earned in battle.

Adventure Bar Story does contain IAP, but it’s ridiculously optional. Jewels, the premium currency, were added in on top of the existing content, and they add a couple shortcuts and a few handy weapons and items. You might want to use them to solve a particularly tough recipe or to get ahead on equipment, but they’re never, ever necessary.

The game doesn’t particularly distinguish itself on aesthetic levels. The music is enjoyable enough without being distracting, the environments and sprites are RPG-standard. The dialog often feels forced, but generally the translation is serviceable. There are a few language and cultural gaps to watch out for when working through recipes, though, and a handful are completely lost in translation. A word of warning, while we’re discussing flaws: save often. The game supports multitasking but no auto-save, so it’s easy to set yourself back by switching apps and taking too long to return.

Once you get the basics down, Adventure Bar Story can get pretty rote. You unlock new characters from time to time, find secrets and improve your bar, but it all happens slowly. So goes the story, too, so most of the playtime is spent navigating long lists of items and putting together recipes. It’s fun for a while if you’re in it for the RPG, but it’s great for a lot longer if you’re the sort of person who can’t resist a checklist or a spreadsheet. On the whole, this game is a steal—but only for the right sort of person. Many of them are hanging out in our forums, working on divining the game’s depths. Trust me, you’ll want their help.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

Last week we had a chance to sit down with Kathy Fung, founder of SiuYiu, the studio behind tower-builder Vegas Towers HD [Free]. She showed us two games that should be coming out in the next few months, and we have to say, they’re pretty charming.

First up is Pocket Minions. This is a tower builder of a different sort, and it’s pretty adorable. It’s also strategically complex in a way that some similar tower games don’t quite pull off.

The goal is to create a perfect working ecosystem where your tower will produce and protect your minions and your minions will give you the means to keep building your tower. Each new floor you build gives you the ability to make a new minion, be it a Hunter, Maid, Wizard, Knight or whatever. You can command each of those little guys to produce new resources, like food or gold, that can be used to create even more minions and floors.

The minions are full of character, and you can drag them around to do your bidding. Neglect them enough and they’ll riot, leaving you to hang them up in the dungeon to straighten them out. Keep them happy with unclogged toilets and well-stoked furnaces and they’ll work their little hearts out for you. They’ll even take on thieves, ghosts and dragons, the threats that come to make your life miserable.

While this all sounds like the perfect recipe for an IAP currency system, we’ve been told Pocket Minions will be a premium title without purchasable currency, so you’re going to have to manage your tower through hard work and careful planning.

The studio does have a freemium title coming soon as well, called Tiny Sheep. It has two things we’ve seen before—animal breeding and city building—but it looks like it’s going to combine them delightfully. Everything comes back to the sheep. To earn money, you shear them and sell their wool. You use that money to add to your flock or bring in buildings that support your sheep breeding, like shearing shacks and markets for wool trade.

It looks like there’s quite a bit more to come from the city-building side of things, with fairs and churches and all manner of things around to support your sheep breeding.

Caring for your sheep fills out the other side of the game. You’ll need to protect them from wolves, shear them regularly, and keep them happy and healthy. If one member of the flock wanders off, the others will be sad until it’s found. If you protect them and keep them together, they’ll be happy. And when they breed, there’s always a chance they’ll produce a new, rare sheep, and you’ll have something highly prized to shear, sell or share.

The art style is particularly charming, and you absolutely must check out the teaser:

We’ll have more for you about both of these games a bit closer to release.

[source]

Forget about feeding your cat. Soon, you’ll be able to enrich its mind while simultaneously competing against the little guy in an app called “You vs. Cat” on iPad. Cat connoisseurs Friskies is behind the air-hockey-meets-interspecies-action title, and it’s tuning the experience specifically to pit you versus your cat. In a small demonstration at SXSW, Buzz Feed played against an adorable little kitty named Buddy, and was beat an amazing three times in a row. In fact, cats are up on humans by around one thousand games at the time of this posting.

There’s a lot of cat-specific apps out there. The vast majority aren’t games, though, which is what makes this remarkable. No doubt, our own Bearded One Jared Nelson will put this game to the test whenever he can. He’ll report his findings immediately, and with lots of gushy language because, cats.

[via Buzz Feed]

[source]

At GDC 2012 we got a preview of two upcoming titles from Scottish game studio Digital Goldfish, the guys behind Bloons.

Chip Trippington and the Kwiff Frizz Quiz

One of the most unique and perhaps even bizarre titles I saw at GDC this year was the upcoming point-and-click adventure Chip Trippington and the Kwiff Frizz Quiz for iPad and iPhone.

The game is the story of poor Chip, the office Liquid Rejuvenation Manager, who has a big heart but is more often than not the butt of his officemates’ gaffs. Chip just wants to be one of the guys, and so joy it was when he got an invite to the company party. Sadly, when he went to get ready for the big night out, Chip discovered he was out of Kwiff Frizz, the structural component that holds his mighty hair aloft. Out to the shop then, goes Chip. But, little does he know that the quick run to the corner store is about send him through a series of unimaginable events that just might put the fate of the world in his big, clammy hands.

Chip Trippington starts out with the simple challenge of getting Chip to make a cup of coffee for his co-workers, but then the quest for a hair product begins, and it’s one adventure after another. Gameplay involves point-and-click puzzle solving and multiple-choice text interactions. In the few minutes I spent with the title, I came to love its sometimes warped sense of humor.

World’s Strongest Man

Another coming game that the Digital Goldfish folks showed us was an iOS take on the TV license World’s Strongest Man. The game will be an iPhone-specific release that challenges you to be come the world mightiest athlete. Getting that done involves balancing Energy and Morale levels during visceral competitions such as Keg Toss, Overhead Lift, and Truck Pull.

In preparing for The Big Day, there’s much training to be done in the game’s training area, building strength and improving skill. These involve seven different mini-games (with an eight coming in an update after launch), all designed to push muscles to the max.

Getting to the glory seat requires a bit of strategy on top of the raw muscle element. Career choices factor in, such as determining which promo events to take on, and just how to structure training to maximize your build.

The game features a Career mode that is a 10-year run to become the World’s Strongest Man, as well as a Free Play mode that is conducive to quick-play sessions.

[source]

As you can hear on our special GDC edition of The TouchArcade Show this week, Ravensword 2 from Crescent Moon Games was the one game out of the dozens that I saw this week that blew me away the most. The original Ravensword redefined what one could expect from a 3D action RPG on the iOS platform back in 2009, and the sequel feels incredibly similar to the first but is bigger and better in every way. The most immediately noticeable improvement in Ravensword 2 is its absolutely fantastic visuals, which you can see in the screens below.

One thing you can see is that there are now dinosaur-like beasts roaming the lands of Ravensword 2, and in my brief demo these bad boys offered up some visceral combat experiences. Other more typical enemies, like a troll, have been redesigned and look totally fearsome. The world itself is also highly detailed and teeming with life, and as I can’t seem to quit saying, everything looks gorgeous. There’s still a lot of work to be done in Ravensword 2, but if everything goes according to plan we should be seeing it hit the App Store in mid-2012 or so.

[source]