TouchArcade.ru

The cliché that nothing good in life is free can be especially true when it comes to to iOS games. Sure, every once in a while you stumble across a truly great free title, but there almost always is a catch. In the case of Ponos' Ballistik Wars [Free], the catch is simple: it's ad-supported. For 99¢ you can get rid of the ads, and you'll want to, because they take up an annoyingly large amount of screen real estate.

So for all intents and purposes, consider your initial download of Ballistik Wars a trial period. If you like it, you can get rid of the ads for an affordable price. It's as simple as that.

As far as the actual game is concerned, Ballistik Wars is a stylized, cartoony castle defense game. As you play through you'll unlock new unit types and you can upgrade your castle and units as you go along. It's not just defense though, it's also attack — so when you break through the enemy defense you still have their castle to think of.

The bulk of the game is going to be recognizable to anyone who has played a castle defense game, but the upgrade path means it's easy to get stuck unable to beat a level. Unlike most castle defense games, Ballistik Wars doesn't coordinate your energy consumption and unit type unlock together. This means that if you don't upgrade the proper components at the right times, you will be stuck unable to spawn a good counter-strategy. If you could grind, it wouldn't be a big deal, but losing means game over where you can only restart the level or start again from the beginning.

That said, once you get the hang of how everything works, Ballistik Wars is a surprisingly deep game with simple mechanics. Strategy is almost more important than most castle defense games because it's not just about surviving against an enemy onslaught, it's also about attacking their defenses. You need to strategize with multiple stages of attack and defense in mind.

The interface, unit selection and upgrade paths means you'll have a lot of information to store in your brain to get the most out of Ballistik Wars. Thankfully, the visuals are clean and the cartoon graphics keep things simple even in the chaos of battle. Most importantly, the unit types are diverse, so what you're selecting or what you're up against won't confuse you.

As you'd expect with a castle defense game, the units are each with their own strengths and weaknesses. There are also certain units that work better together than others, meaning you'll want to save up and launch two unit types at once to take advantage of the synergy. As you're attacking, you'll get bonus points for completing small meta-goals and the higher your score, the more points you'll get to distribute to upgrade your units.

Ballistik Wars is a good castle defense game with an interesting attack layer to it. If it wasn't so easy to get permanently stuck by upgrading the wrong units, it'd be an easy recommendation, but as long as you're willing to pay special attention to what you're doing, you'll get a lot out of the game. It might look like a casual title, but there is a lot more strategy to it than a glance can reveal.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Hope you like sales reports on this fine afternoon. Have another: Secret Exit, the dudes behind the original Zen Bound and its awesome follow-up Zen Bound 2, have cut the cost of Zen Bound and Zen Bound 2 EVERYWHERE in celebration of “summer.” Both are just 99 cents until July 11 on the App Store, while Zen Bound 2's digital releases on Steam and the Mac App Store are priced at a dollar or less.

In case you’ve been living under a rock but, for whatever reason, have access to a smart device or a computer and the Internet, and don’t know what Zen Bound is, here’s a quick run-down. Like their namesakes state, these are meditative titles that on a singular simple task: wrapping rope around 3D sculptures. Seems like silly offerings on the surface, but I think you’ll find their calming effects… well, effective.

• Zen Bound – $.99
• Zen Bound 2 – $2.99 → $.99

Also, their visuals are still some of the best on the market. If you don’t believe me, that’s fine. Just go check out our respective write-ups where, in addition to getting some hot screen action, you’ll also learn more about the games.

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Kairosoft’s Game Dev Story [$1.99 / Lite] is now cheaper than what it was. For a limited time, and in celebration of the release of Pocket Academy [$3.99 / Lite], the quirky simulation game that puts you in the shoes of producer, administrator, and game developer is $1.99. That’s a 50 percent savings from the regular price of $3.99.

If you listen to our podcast, you know that I’m a ridiculously huge fan of GDS. If I could, I’d erect a statue in its name in front of my apartment complex and praise it each morning before I start work or make some coffee. It’s good in all the right ways and has a level of depth and cunning that few simulation games, especially on this platform, tend to have.

Our review, of course, is glowing if you’re interested in a… critical dissection of the title instead of my lunatic ramblings in a news article.

In other news, but not-so-recent news, GDS has received a few updates since it’s initial release. For example, it now supports Game Center and its leaderboards functionality. You can also now switch the language back and forth between it's native language Japanese and the English translation, which might actually prove to be helpful considering that some of the translation work is shaky at best.

Pocket Academy, by the way, is another excellent Kairosoft simulation, combining the same quirk from GDS, except applied to a school.

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Push-Cars [$0.99 / HD] is a puzzle game with a conscience. Like a pint-sized version of Pixar's Cars, you've got a bunch of anthropomorphic cars to handle. There's the eco-friendly ones like Sparky, the slow but green electric, and there's the gas guzzlers like Sixteen. Your job is to smash those gas guzzlers to bits while helping the others slip out of town.

It's not a complicated job. You're presented with a overhead city block, stylized and designed from real maps of American cities. The cars are positioned on the road, and all you can do is tap to rotate them. They can only go straight, and will drive until they hit something. Once you find a solution that will let the good cars escape and smash the bad cars into each other, a building or a dead end, hit the gas and it all plays out.

It sounds pretty straightforward (and maybe a touch heavy-handed), but in practice it's a lot of fun. The early puzzles are simple, but as more cars are introduced there are more elements to handle. The cars travel at different speeds, so lining them up to intersect each others paths can be tricky. Some can take off-road routes, others can leap over a single car or crush opposition beneath them. By the time you've met all the cars, you'll be faced with some major challenges. Even physics come in to play on some levels.

And that's just the first half of the game. Push-Cars includes 90 levels (all of which can be unlocked by playing through them, or you can pay to unlock them all). The first 45 take you across the country, visiting landmarks in New York, Vegas, San Fransisco and more. Once you make it through those levels, you head back to the start. There you'll find new levels that mix all the game's cars in on repeated maps. The difficulty curve isn't always consistent, but you'll find the later levels increasingly more challenging.

If the difficulty is too much, there's an in-game hint system that will show you the correct positioning of two of your incorrectly positioned cars. This is a big help, but there's a catch – the game only gives you and handful of hints to start, and rewards a few more throughout the game. Need more help? You can buy a pack of 10 hints for a buck. I might be dating myself here, but this gave me flashbacks to those old 1-900 video game tip lines. On the other hand, every puzzle is solvable without hints, and there's no downside to taking a trial-and-error approach, so I can't say this bothers me much.

Push-Cars' stylized maps add a lot of charm. You get a sense of looking down at the actual cities, but they fit in nicely with the game's cartoonish art. There are a few less-charming features. I wasn't big on the game's music, and toggled it off pretty quickly. It has a rather unique theme that's got to be an acquired taste. The menus are also unnecessarily complicated. Finally, on small devices it can be a challenge to tap buttons or cars that are too close to one another.

That's just the small stuff, though. On the whole, I'm quite happy with Push-Cars. I've still got a few Game Center achievements to pick up, but I'm rocking the leaderboards and I've devoured the puzzles. They're just the right mix of sadistic and fair. The developer's taking feedback on our forums if you have an opinion to share, and a lot of our users seem happy with the game so far. So why not give it a ride?

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Before I begin, I'm just going to pat myself on the back for this marvelously sensational sounding yet entirely appropriate headline. Alright, with that out of the way– OnLive CEO Steve Perlman is back to his old tricks of blowing minds and unveiling technology that is all too easy to dismiss as vaporware, impossible, and all the other things that got thrown around when OnLive was first revealed. To make this a little easier to digest, let's back things up a bit and discuss exactly what Shannon's Law is all about. If you've ever been at a concert, sporting event, convention, or any other densely populated area and haven't been able to use your phone, you've already experienced it first hand. Shannon's Law (or the Shannon–Hartley theorem) has to do with the maximum amount of error-free data that can be transmitted wirelessly, which is why you can't Rick Roll your buddy at a football game, place a call in New York City, and other common problems that have just become normal in the world of cell phones– Particularly as smartphones become more prevalent.

Dealing with the huge amount of data that smartphones use has turned into a massive problem for cellular carriers worldwide, but the latest breakthrough from Rearden Companies might change all that. They've made brand new radios that don't work anything like existing radios, and starting from the ground up have come up with a way to utilize the wireless spectrum in a way that isn't limited by Shannon's Law at all. With their earliest iterations of this technology they've been able to reach ten times what Shannon's Law says is possible. They also don't yet know the limit of just what they can do, but they know they can do "at least 100 times" what current cellular technology is doing in the same spectrum with 1ms latency at a few miles and 2ms latency at 30 miles.

Things get even crazier, though. Naturally you'd expect this new wireless technology to be both massive in size and complexity, but according to Perlman the radios are actually much simpler with a single antenna and use much less processing that's even taking place in current cell phones. That 30 miles mentioned before? That's not only beyond the curvature of the earth, it's also farther than a television station will transmit. Speaking theoretically, they expect to be able to reach 250 miles and the only reason they're even citing the 30 mile number is because of the time limitation of driving back and forth from test stations.

Perlman notes that the implications of this technology are "profound," and it's hard to disagree. Shannon's Law and the very real world limitations that we've all experienced using our cell phones is a serious issue for wireless engineers desperate to expand capacity to support the growing number of data-sucking smartphones in the wild. Beyond that though, with the latencies they're able to attain as well as the transmit distance, this could completely change the face of broadband in the world which has historically always been plagued by the last mile.

Aside from that, speaking specifically from a mobile gaming perspective, the massive decrease in latency would make twitch-based games completely playable without gobs of predictive netcode to compensate for massive ping times via current cellular networks. It's not hard to go wild speculating all the benefits this new technology could provide.

I know it's easy to dismiss all of this as impossible, wizardry, witchcraft, black magic, technobabble, or whatever other way you'd like to describe it. Consider this though: When OnLive was unveiled it wasn't entirely uncommon to see editorials like this one citing all the reasons why OnLive couldn't possibly work. But it does work. OnLive has been online and fully operational for over a year now. I've played games to completion using the service without issue, and the recent addition of the Micro Console to my household has made gaming with OnLive even better.

Specific details on how all this works are yet to be released, and it's hard to say how long it will take this initial unveiling to turn into an actual real-world product… But, the future looks bright and I'm overjoyed to have people like Steve Perlman in this world.

[via Engadget]

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Kairosoft’s Pocket Academy [$3.99 / Lite] takes the best and worst elements of its prior releases, Game Dev Story [$1.99 / Lite] and Hot Springs Story [$3.99 / Lite], blends them together, and then applies them to a school environment. It’s not remarkable on the surface. It has the same cutesy art direction used in these prior games. It also re-hashes a lot of mechanics, continues to shroud a lot of its crucial foundational and tycoon elements in mystery, and it controls like crap. But it does still deliver in the form of the studio’s should-be patented carrot-on-the-stick design approach and fleshes out a crucial, but oft-forgotten, driver in all simulation games: the people.

Provided the gun to my head wasn’t real, I’d argue until the moment the trigger is pulled that Pocket Academy isn’t as much of a school simulation as it is a over-the-top student simulation game because, at the end of the day, this game isn’t about how pretty your school is or about how many trees you’ve planted. It’s about what your kids are learning and how well they can prove that your system, either totalitarian or social-focused, works.

On the top end, this game puts you in the shoes of an administrator planning out the next greatest thing in education. You’re in charge of building classrooms, researching new facilities like restrooms, libraries, and nurses’ offices, and creating statistical bonus zones with bonus-laden objects like shrubbery, trees, or even rocks. Chaos is frowned upon, as the careful planner who puts like buildings together can string together dramatic bonuses to student-side factors like learning and school spirit.

This is where the one real rub rears its head: Pocket Academy isn’t good at telling you what is “good” versus “bad.” It hides a lot of bonuses and mechanics from viewing. The only solid way to find out what works well with something else is via experimentation, which is a costly and horribly slow, pace-chewing endeavor. Even buildings and research subjects have terrible descriptions that can lead to hair-pulling strategic misfires.

Like Game Dev Story understood, to some extent, the development process and let you lead it, Pocket Academy allows you to do the same with a school. The end product is a well-learned student body, and you get several years to turn kids’ mush into iron. Ample classrooms and activities are a necessity to do this, as well as teachers. Students come in once a year or through transfer if your school is attractive enough. Teachers, on the other hand, need to be hired and then leveled up. Satisfactorily, you are put in charge of what statistics receive boosts upon leveling up, which lets you mold a curriculum that feels… well, you. It's pretty redeeming building something in your own image.

Science, math, English, Spanish, and history are the subjects each student can learn. As they sit in classrooms, they’ll automatically receive points in these areas. As they roam and participate in other facilities, they’ll earn additional points that you can then, in turn, spend in classrooms to boost their core attributes or apply to research. This is the push and pull: do you spend these points in order to get more areas for interaction, or do you spend them to educate the students more?

I usually go with the latter since it’s the real meat of the game. In order to attract more kids, you need to compete in challenges based on those core subjects. The higher the IQ, the likelier they are to pass the challenge. Also, schools as a whole are rated and a lot of funding, as well as those ratings, depends on end-of-semester test scores. The goal is to be the best school in the world, so the students actually matter. But the other decision is a fundamental one, too. Without interaction, you don't get points for research or tests.

Weighing these two options, as dull as they sound, is entertaining. I think it helps that there's always something you could be doing in the process or, at least, building towards.

To its credit, Pocket Academy really fleshes out who these kids are. They’re all named and you deal with them over the course of several years. You’ll also see them make friends, attempt to date other students, get frustrated, succeed, and fail. Students all have certain disposition traits, too, which factor into how they learn and where they learn the best. As if that wasn’t enough, there are also activities they favor which you can cater to by building clubs or more facilities.

After spending years with these kids and using them in the right way, you do tend to bond with the character, as silly as that sounds. But it’s that connection, as flimsy as it is, that makes this simulation game much more satisfying than most. You have a stake in the systems, at least.

I could go on and on about the systems at play, what you can do, and the billions of little things that you’ll end up doing to improve the experience. There are tons of mechanics and little touches at play in Pocket Academy, all of which are satisfying to some extent to use, deal with, or think about. The game starts brutal, so be prepared.

I have a feeling that, like Game Dev Story, you’ll run out of meaningful things to do in Pocket Academy after an epic several-year run but I don’t think that hurts. As it is, there are plenty of things — perhaps too much in places — to do for several, several hours. For those of you who didn’t download sight unseen, no worries: this is a sharp little simulation game packed with depth and, oddly enough, a little emotion. It might be hard to penetrate at first, but stick with it and you’ll be rewarded with an awesome game.

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EA is spending big cheese in order to become a major entity in the smartphone, tablet, and social sectors of the market. With this in mind, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to hear an EA executive say, “Hey, we’re into this smart devices and the Web.” But the way that EA is attempting to dive in differs from its competition.

The other week, Take-Two’s CEO said that phone games, for it, weren’t meaningful in terms of returns. It would like to, actually, see the prices of tablet games raised. EA, on the other hand, is building its AAA-tier console and PC titles with an eye towards the App Store and other places from the get-go.

“We've been changing the way we develop games so that we can have them on smartphone, tablets, in addition to console and PC,” EA Games label manager Frank Gibaue told GI.biz in a brand new interview.

“It's all part of the digital transition that we're going through and Origin is the platform on which we'll be able to publish and service customers on mobile as well as PC platforms. And then link to the consoles in unique ways as they develop.”

You’ve heard of Origin before. It’s EA’s new digital distribution service. The PC version of the software is available now. An App Store equivalent is in the works.

Origin for PC, thus far, is rocking the PC digital download boat in all the wrong ways. As opposed to being a valid alternative for a compelling reason, it’s simply the de facto place to download new EA-published games. Crysis 2, for example, was pulled from Steam as the service launched, as well as Alice: The Madness Returns. Battlefield 3 is looking like it won’t appear on other platforms as well. The Star Wars MMO won’t for sure.

Free-to-play, which has become a favorite topic of ours in our most recent podcasts since Eli fell in love with League of Legends, is also going to be a part of this new initiative to reach everyone, though we’re not sure on the specifics — we just know, for now, that Gibeau was name-dropping it in a recent interview alongside smartphone games.

"Launch some new services like Star Wars that are unique, and in addition to that do a bunch of free-to-play businesses, that frankly when they get to scale, have huge audiences, are very profitable, they're not cannibalising the main games and they actually reach markets that we're not currently serving,” he said in the same interview.

“With Need for Speed World, Russia and Brazil are number one and two – the Ukraine is in there. I can't sell packaged goods in those territories. But I'm reaching an audience with Need for Speed content. It's an engine that's not as advanced as Frostbite 2 but it's certainly got great production values and great game designs, and it's free-to-play with micro transactions. It's a very exciting time from our perspective because it's not all about consoles. It's about smartphones, tablets, free-to-play, browser, social.”

So what’s new in the world of EA? Video games on our phones — and possibly more F2P ones, since they have a longer tail and reach a broader audience. Also, Origin. Makes you wonder if we’ll start getting App Store titles with all three of these things combined into one package.

[Via GamesIndustry.biz]

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We've been sort of Kairosoft crazy ever since they released their phenomenal game company simulation Game Dev Story [$1.99/Lite] last year. Then, Kairosoft followed up that release here in the States with Hot Springs Story [$3.99/Lite], an even more refined simulation that let you manage and expand your own Japanese spa. Since then, Kairosoft has been releasing tons of differently themed simulations using their trademark character and style, but so far none of them have made it out of the Japanese App Store and into the US.

Back in April we took a look at one of those titles, which through our powers of mediocre translation we were calling Pocket School Story 2. It turns out that the game is actually called Pocket Academy [$3.99/Lite], and it has just gone live in the US App Store. Pocket Academy looks extremely similar to Hot Springs Story, except that you are creating a successful school from the ground up and managing all of the different aspects of it rather than a Japanese bath house.

We'll be putting Pocket Academy through its paces and come back with a full review soon, but since there are no doubt many of you who will buy a new Kairosoft game sight unseen (myself included) I figured that the decent thing to do would be to let you know of its availability and provide you with a link to the game. You can also check out the early impressions from gamers in our forums who have picked up the game, and we'll be back with more on Pocket Academy soon.

Update: A lite version is now available too.

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We've been sort of Kairosoft crazy ever since they released their phenomenal game company simulation Game Dev Story [$1.99/Lite] last year. Then, Kairosoft followed up that release here in the States with Hot Springs Story [$3.99/Lite], an even more refined simulation that let you manage and expand your own Japanese spa. Since then, Kairosoft has been releasing tons of differently themed simulations using their trademark character and style, but so far none of them have made it out of the Japanese App Store and into the US.

Back in April we took a look at one of those titles, which through our powers of mediocre translation we were calling Pocket School Story 2. It turns out that the game is actually called Pocket Academy [$3.99], and it has just gone live in the US App Store. Pocket Academy looks extremely similar to Hot Springs Story, except that you are creating a successful school from the ground up and managing all of the different aspects of it rather than a Japanese bath house.

We'll be putting Pocket Academy through its paces and come back with a full review soon, but since there are no doubt many of you who will buy a new Kairosoft game sight unseen (myself included) I figured that the decent thing to do would be to let you know of its availability and provide you with a link to the game. You can also check out the early impressions from gamers in our forums who have picked up the game, and we'll be back with more on Pocket Academy soon.

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It's no secret that Rovio has been looking to turn Angry Birds into an … even bigger worldwide phenomenon than it already is. They've already got an impressive online store loaded with swag, as well as a pre-order page where you can get in line to order everything from lunch boxes to Angry birds sandals of all things. Normally I'd say, "Who the hell buys this stuff?" But, I've seen a ridiculous amount of people wearing Angry Birds shirts, and my neighbors' dogs' favorite toys are their full array of plush Angry Birds toys. Oh, and it probably doesn't hurt that these days Angry Birds is available on every platform under the sun, and it wouldn't surprise me if sometime next year I'll be able to play Angry Birds on my microwave.

A recent post on the Rovio blog provides some clues for the next step of Angry Birds world domination. David Maisel has joined the Rovio team with the mysterious title of "Special Advisor." I'm imagining this as a Game of Thrones-esque hand of the king kind of situation. Anyway, one of David's many claims to fame is transforming Marvel Entertainment from a comic book company desperate to remain relevant in the digital age to self-producing and self-financing massive summer blockbusters, turning existing comic franchises into multi-million dollar movie series and getting an entirely new generation interested in reading comics again.

Will Maisel be able to duplicate that success? It's hard to say. Rovio has recently raised $42m in investments to expand, and part of those expansion plans included acquiring Kombo, which is a leading Finnish animation studio. It seems that they've got all or most of the pieces of the puzzle to start pumping out Angry Birds TV shows, movies, or whatever else.

Now, I know how easy it is to just scoff and dismiss this news (all while simultaneously posting a comment to this story about how much you hate or "don't get" Angry Birds) but consider this– Angry Birds has single handedly turned a ridiculous amount of people onto gaming that otherwise never would have cared. Hell, I've seen this in my own family. My own father spent most of my life trying to get me to play less video games, and now courtesy of the iPad 2 I bought my parents plays "Pigs" (as he calls it) daily and has since branched out to similar casual games. I hear similar stories from friends all the time.

Love Angry Birds or hate it, it's fantastic to have something like this bringing this many more people into the world of gaming. If an Angry Birds movie is wildly successful, it will also serve to raise even more awareness to mobile gaming–

And that's never a bad thing.

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