TouchArcade.ru

Ticket to Ride [$6.99] is a tremendous board game-to-digital game translation. It looks and feels authentic and boasts a wide range of features. It’s a sharp title through and through, but it was missing a couple of things at launch, namely a pass-and-play option. That has since been added. Developer Days of Wonder hit us up about the game’s most recent patch, which adds the aforementioned mode for up to four friends or a mix of friends and AI. It even hides your cards when you pass the device, which is a super-smart design decision.

More was added in this update, though all take a backseat to pass-and-play. You can now mute voices if you don’t want to hear them, as well as skip some animations. The buttons in the game’s silly “Central Station” now have names so you know what you’re clicking on, and hey, if you’re colorbind, “better support” has been added in. Finally, there’s been an update to the netcode for people with crappier connections. Most notably, if you drop out of a match, there’s now an option to do a quick recovery and jump back into action.

That’s a lot stuff addressed and there’s still more. If you’re interested in learning all, hit up the game’s full patch notes at this iTunes link.

Ticket To Ride is easily one of the better board games turned digital, and this update only strengthens its position. If you’d like a more critical dissection of the title look no futher than our review. Spoiler: it’s glowing.

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If you hang around TouchArcade pretty often, chances are you’ve heard us sing the praises of Bug Heroes [Free]. This dual-stick shooter features elements of tower defense along with a huge cast of characters, fantastic graphics, and tons of play modes. It’s easily among our favorites in the dual-stick genre.

Bug Heroes developer Foursaken Media is looking to branch out with this successful brand, and announced back in May that they were working on Bug Heroes Quest, a full fledged action/adventure/RPG featuring the characters and world of the original Bug Heroes. It sounds like a pretty great idea to me, and today they’ve released the first trailer which shows Bug Heroes Quest in action:

The story-driven campaign will feature the original 3 characters from Bug Heroes and will contain more than 50 missions. The developer has said that the environments in Bug Heroes Quest are as much as 4 times the size of the biggest maps in Bug Heroes, some of which are pretty large. You’ll be able to level up your characters and adorn them with tons of weapons, items, and equipment, and then take them into a survival arena to battle it out for a spot on the Game Center leaderboards.

With this video, Bug Heroes Quest is basically complete and is just going through the final play testing period. Foursaken is planning on submitting the game any day now, and hopefully it will release shortly thereafter. You can find additional screens and tons more info in the thread in our forums, and we’ll be waiting with bated breath to get our hands on the final version of Bug Heroes Quest soon. You can check out the original Bug Heroes for free with the link below, which I'd highly recommend doing if you are a fan of excellent games.

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For quite some time now we have been tracking Manomio's upcoming iAmiga emulation system for iOS, designed as a sort of wrapper or delivery vehicle to bring licensed Amiga games to the App Store. At the end of last year, we posted an exclusive preview of the in-development system, including a demo video showing a number of classic test titles running quite well on an iPhone 4. One of the titles we played with back then was Cinemaware's classic 1986 strategy game, Defender of the Crown. I'm happy to report that this well-loved, fully-licensed title will be the first iAmiga-powered game to land in the App Store, and that Manomio CEO Stuart Carnie was kind enough to grant us exclusive access to a near-release build of the game.

First, let me say a little bit about the game, for those that may be unfamiliar. Defender of the Crown is a strategy game set in medieval England. The player takes on the role of any of four Saxon knights in a bid to defeat the Norman invaders and fill the vacant throne of England. The original game manual, which is packed with historical information, tells the story well.

IT IS A TIME OF LEGENDS. A time for heroes. A time of bitter strife, when great men rise above their peers to perform great deeds. A chapter of history is in the making.

Your liege the king is dead, the throne vacant. Britain enters a season of destruction, a winter of killing that can end only when the last brave Saxon knight lies dead or the castles of the Normans lie in heaps of rubble, emptied of the foul oppressors who have enslaved your people.

It is a time when foreign invaders shall learn truths administered by the shining blades of Saxon swords. It is a time when heroes are made, and legends are born.

The game is centered around a Risk-style map of England on which the player builds and deploys troops in an effort to defend home territories and take land occupied by the Normans. The struggle involves field combat, castle raids (with catapults, even), jousting, rescuing damsels in distress, and the like. While some of the action is quite involved — jousting is a first-person affair, for instance — other portions of it are more high-level strategy, i.e. click attack, watch the stats columns update. The whole thing is laid out like a very interactive board game, as opposed to something more intricate and vast, such as the more recent Warcraft III or Starcraft II. It is 25 years old, after all.

Even though Defender of the Crown is now 25, the pixel artwork of the talented and renowned Jim Sachs is still lovely to behold — and I don't think I'm talking through my retro blinders, there. Given that, I wanted to share an excerpt from Brian Bagnall's excellent book On the Edge: the Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore, to help convey just how actually jarring an experience it was to see the game for the first time back in 1986.

[Amiga co-creator R.J.] Mical saw artist Jim Sachs push the Amiga to its full potential. "Jim Sachs, what a God he is," marvels Mical. "Jim Sachs is amazing. These days everyone sees graphics like that because there are a lot of really good computer graphics artists now, but back then, 20 years ago, it was astonishing to have someone that good."

The final game was a landmark in video game production values. As game designer Bob Lindstrom recalls, "The shock of seeing Defender for the first time was one of those experiences that changed the gaming stakes for all of us."

Compared to other video games of the time, Defender of the Crown established a new level of quality. IBM had Kings Quest by Sierra On-Line, a decent but primitive adventure game. The Macintosh had games like Checkers or Backgammon, or board games like Risk. Defender of the Crown had richer graphics than any computer, console, or even arcade game could boast in 1986. It was a revelation.

That's not to say that the game shined so brightly on every one of the numerous platforms to which it was ported. While the Amiga original is unquestionably the most visually impressive of the lot, there's room for debate as to which version looks the worst. And, happily for iOS users, it's the Amiga version that will soon be landing in the App Store.

Being a faithfully emulated version of the original, Defender of the Crown for iOS brings with it the Amiga's mouse-based controls, and Manomio has done a good job of making that work with the iPad's touchscreen. In order to interact with items on the screen or aim the jousting lance, the screen becomes basically a large trackpad, with a pointer that can be dragged or clicked (tapped) to get things done. As a full-time user of Apple's large Magic Trackpad, I very quickly got accustomed to the interaction, there. In a number of situations, a direct tap on this or that item on the screen would be preferable to dragging the pointer about, true, but I think it's important to remember that this is an emulated title that is being made available to iOS gamers thanks to the iAmiga system. A ground-up rewrite of a classic from years past — and the likelihood of that occurring — is an entirely different proposition, from many angles. I think there's much to be enjoyed about Defender of the Crown on iOS, just as it is.

Have a look at a bit of gameplay on the iPad 2 from the latest build of the game.

Stuart indicates that right now the game is feature complete and all that's left is to finalize the in-game documentation. Defender of the Crown for iOS is a Universal application supporting the iPhone 3GS, 3rd gen iPod touch, iPad, or better. It should arrive in the App Store in about two weeks and we'll be sure to let readers know when they can start to have fun storming the castles.

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Back in March, I felt luckier than a field of four leaf clovers when I was among the first to see Fruit Ninja [$.99 / HD] creator Halfbrick’s latest side-scrolling title, Machinegun Jetpack. It’s a mix of infinite runner and shooter like Monster Dash [$.99 / HD]. Heck, it even stars that game’s hero, Barry Streakfries. Where it departs is where it draws its namesake: during the entirety of the experience, you’ll be strapped to a jetpack that spews bullets.

Back at the event in San Francisco that March, I was told that the game should have been out about… well, right now. I have an update on that: Halfbrick says that the target is now late August, and it’ll definitely hit within the next two months. The team inside Halfbrick on the game is doing a final critical pass, adding in features and tweaking the existing ones for the best possible experience.

I’ve also been told — and you’ll hear this later in the podcast this afternoon, if you’re into our audio — that Machinegun Jetpack will support IAP. As you play, you’ll receive coins that you can exchange in “The Stash,” which is a place that operates as an item and upgrade shop. With IAP, you’ll be able to buy more coins with real cash or, if you want a little bit more of a challenge, buy a machine that doubles the coins you collect organically.

Before you jump out of your seat, Halfbrick realizes that IAP can shred game balance, so it's designing the game for people who aren’t going to purchase coins from The Stash. The IAP is just a way people can earn and use faster. Think of it like a cheat code of sorts — a cheat code that costs money.

Anyway, Machinegun Jetpack will still debut as a Universal app with Game Center at 99 cents. I'm still trying to figure out what I'm going to do with myself until it hits.

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Last year, Capcom raised the bar for traditional fighting games on the touch screen with Street Fighter IV [$4.99], and a couple of weeks ago they upped their game again by releasing Street Fighter IV Volt [$6.99] with online multiplayer. To a lesser degree, we’ve also seen Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 [99¢/HD] on the App Store, and although quirky and rough around the edges it still offered up a decent portable experience for fans of that series. With SNK Playmore’s recently released The King of Fighters-i [$7.99], we now have all the major players of the mid-90s 2D arcade fighter rivalry once again battling it out with each other, this time on the App Store.

While SNK’s various fighting franchises all had a pretty dedicated following, it was always the Street Fighters and Mortal Kombats of the world that stole the mainstream spotlight. Now here, more than a decade later on iOS, SNK Playmore has brought their A-game for a shot at the iOS fighting crown. And true to its namesake, The King of Fighters-i takes that crown by elevating touch screen fighters to the next level. It’s missing the marquee feature of online multiplayer that Street Fighter IV Volt can boast about, but when it comes to control responsiveness, speed, performance, visuals, animations, and approachability, The King of Fighters-i tops the competition.

The King of Fighters-i is based off of the newest entry in the franchise, The King of Fighters XIII which hit arcades last Summer and is slated for a home console release this October. The game comes with 14 playable characters, and anybody who knows the King of Fighters series knows that that is just a fraction of the monstrous roster of total available fighters. But it’s a decent start, and all of the included characters are interesting and fun to use. Plus, SNK Playmore states in the game’s description that 6 additional characters will be coming by October in free updates, most likely in time to coincide with the console release of the game.

The meat of The King of Fighters-i lies in the 4 single player modes. First, there is the traditional arcade mode lets you engage in the 3-on-3 team battles that are a staple of the series or regular 1-on-1 matches. Then there is an endless mode which is your typical game of survival as you face off against as many consecutive opponents as you can using just one gauge of life, which gets refilled slightly in between rounds. Finally, there is an excellent training mode which not only lets you spar against a computer opponent with many adjustable parameters but also features a fantastic combo training section that will teach you how to pull off some of the extensive combos in the game, some of which are incredibly elaborate.

As for controls, The King of Fighters-i is set up very much like Street Fighter on iOS, right down to the virtual controls which can be placed anywhere on the screen that’s to your liking. Despite the similarities though, The King of Fighters-i controls come out on top, and feel a notch above Street Fighter in terms of overall responsiveness. There's a punch and kick button, a button for evading, one dedicated to simplified special moves, and a fifth button used for entering a hyper state when one of your special meters is filled. These special meters also allow you to do super and EX moves. All of this is explained well in the tutorial that gets you off an running with the basics without much hassle.

The one big feature I love about the controls here is the inclusion of simplified special moves. This allows specials to be pulled off just by hitting a direction along with the dedicated special moves button. For someone like me who isn’t as intimately familiar with each character’s move sets, this allows me to use any character on a whim and not have to worry about constantly checking a move list in the pause screen and trying to memorize their special moves. It really encourages using and exploring different characters rather than the ones I’m normally comfortable with, and also makes the game a bit more playable with virtual controls.

At this point, the bones of The King of Fighters-i seem fairly comparable to other entries in the genre, but it’s in the overall execution where the game really outshines its opponents. The first thing you will notice is that The King of Fighters-i is much faster than other fighting games on the App Store. The action can get really fast-paced, but thanks to the excellent controls it’s not a problem to keep up. Also, I’ve never ran into so much as a stutter in frame rate while playing, and load times are lightening quick.

Graphically, the game is pretty incredible. It contains static backgrounds similar to Street Fighter IV, which is kind of a bummer, but the backgrounds in The King of Fighters-i are much crisper and more vibrant than the drab, fuzzy ones found in Capcom’s offering. Where the game really stands out visually is in the amazing hand-drawn sprites which are animated so fluidly it almost feels like you're watching a cartoon. The character sprites are a bit jagged around the edges, but you’ll hardly notice once you see them in motion. The animations, to me, are what make The King of Fighters-i feel the most like an actual console fighter as opposed to just a mobile version of one.

With all the things there are to love about The King of Fighters-i, there’s still one big thing missing which is the lack of online multiplayer. This might normally have been forgiven on a platform like the iPhone, but since Street Fighter IV Volt just proved that it’s possible to pull off and will likely only get better in the future, it’s something I’d like to have in a fighter. There is a local Bluetooth multiplayer mode, but in my limited testing the  performance seemed fairly sluggish. Still, I appreciate its inclusion and hope that SNK Playmore will explore more options for multiplayer in the future.

As a single player experience though, The King of Fighters-i has a lot to offer. The several arcade modes and combo training alone will keep you busy for some time, not to mention the Game Center leaderboards and achievements, but there’s also a really great collectible component to the game. Coins can be earned while playing the various modes and then spent in an in-game shop on things like concept and promotional art as well as collectible character cards. There are also different pre-fight dialogues for every character matchup in the game, which is a cool little detail if you have any vested interest in the various story elements of the characters. Luckily, it can also be disabled in the options if you choose so as not to slow down the matches starting.

I really can't find much fault in The King of Fighters-i apart from a lack of online multiplayer. If that ever comes into the picture it will just be icing on what is already a very delicious single player cake. Players in our forums have been raving about The King of Fighters-i since release, and as far as iOS fighters are concerned it’s raised the bar significantly against the competition, including the mighty Street Fighter.

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This week in another splendid episode of TAS, we discuss a lot of different stuff. Puppies and big quads leads off the discussion, as Jared paints us a word picture of his visit to EA HQ in Redmond, CA. Later, we dive into the games he saw at the event and the news that broke during it, and we also find the time to talk about beards, F2P, rat infested trees, and the hottest games on our minds.

Captain America even rears his red, white, and blue head in a podcast that tends to go off the rails at the oddest of times.

You can listen just below, of course, via direct download or stream. You could also give us a listen via the iTunes podcast aisle or the Zune Marketplace, as doing so awards more experience points than streaming it especially if you rate us. (And very well might be part of the iTunes podcast featuring voodoo!)

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-007.mp3, 50MB

Need some show notes? We got your back. Below you’ll find all the relevant links to our discussion topics, including reviews to some of the games we talked about. Convenient!

GAMES

• Swords & Soldiers [$2.99 / HD]
• iCade, The Dungeon Saga [$1.99 / HD]
• DeathSmiles [$4.99 / Lite]

FRONT PAGE

• Origin for iOS Revealed
• Realm of the Mad God On Mobile? It Could Happen
• Pokemon Coming To The App Store
• F2P Revenue Overtakes Premium In App Store

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We did our best to stay rational amidst the rampant speculation that Nintendo was getting into the App Store with the release of Pokémon Say Tap in Japan this summer. For one, it isn’t a move that makes sense. Nintendo puts its own titles on consoles and handhelds that it owns and sells exclusively. Also, Nintendo is keen on ragging on the App Store and saying Apple has it all wrong, so why would it bother with an app?

The word that we trusted was that this was a The Pokémon Company release, not a Nintendo one. The Pokémon Company is an affiliate of Nintendo and are the marketing managers of a brand that expands well beyond the confines of video games and into the realm of TV, toys, and other forms of media like a trading card game.

Turns out that this information was accurate. Nintendo of America, in a recent chat with Giant Bomb, flatly denied any Nintendo involvement with the project and said Nintendo content will continue to stay on Nintendo platforms. Pokémon Say Tap is a The Pokémon Company marketing tool. That’s it. Period.

"On July 1, the Pokémon Company announced that it was launching a free Android and iOS application in Japan called [Pokémon Say Tap]. The Pokémon Company routinely launches applications for cell phones and PCs as a way to promote its non-video game products, such as a music CD and Pokémon TCG cards in this instance,” Nintendo of America said in a statement given to Giant Bomb.

“Since they are intended purely as promotional tools, not as unique video games, Nintendo is not involved in any way,” it said. “… Nintendo has no intention or plans of publishing its IP on non-Nintendo platforms. This is an example of a promotion by a key Nintendo partner and has no bearing on Nintendo's overall strategy.”

Keep dreaming those Nintendo dreams for Nintendo-published and created releases on the App Store. Mario and the rest of the bunch aren’t coming in the foreseeable future, as was made clear in this statement. You'll have to keep buying the latest Nintendo handhelds if you want in on some Nintendo action.

[Via GiantBomb]

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How much of a multitasker are you? If you're anything like me, you've probably got a dozen tabs open in your browser, three other programs on your desktop and a game or two waiting on your phone. But that might just make you a singletasker with a short attention span. If you want to prove that you're pro at juggling tasks, pick up VineKing [$1.99 / Free]. It will put even the best multitasker to the test.

In VineKing, the green lands of the world have been destroyed, leaving nothing but cold stone, lava, and monsters. As the last Vine King, its your job to bring back the luscious greenery that once existed, but the forces of darkness won't give up easily. Each of the game's 30 levels is a piece of rock that you need to win back, and you only have one tool: the vine that grows from your head.

The vine can be used in two ways. To reclaim ground, draw a path over it. When the vine whips out, the rocks will shatter beneath that path and grass will grow through. To defeat the monsters that come to steal back the ground and destroy the Vine King, tap on them. Those two tasks will keep you occupied, but there's a problem: you only have so much vine to work with. Once your green meter goes dry, you're toast. To keep fueled, you need to collect the seeds that pop out of the cleared ground and from defeated monsters, but while you're sucking up seeds you're completely vulnerable.

While you're balancing those three tasks, the monsters are hard at work taking back the ground you've cleared. As the game becomes more difficult, it's easy to play yourself to a stalemate – as you clear more land, more monsters show up and take it back while you fend them off. To keep from getting overwhelmed, you can upgrade the Vine King. Each time you complete a level, you're ranked for how many seeds you picked up, how many monsters you destroyed, and so on. That rank translates to coins that you can use to purchase upgrades, like faster vines and better seed storage.

You'll need a well-upgraded Vine King and quick fingers to master later levels. As you progress, the monsters get faster and more aggressive. The levels also get more unfriendly, with lava pits that burn your vine and crystals that block your way. I found that grinding earlier levels for coins made later ones more manageable, but skilled multitaskers might be able to get by with less. You'll want to go back to earlier levels either way, to collect Game Center achievements and earn gold rankings.

VineKing is very loveable, with charming art and a soundtrack that keeps things stressful. It's also a strikingly original game. Our forum users seem to love it, and there's a lite available if you remain unconvinced. You'll be giving your drawing, tapping and gathering skills a workout in no time.

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Ant Raid [$2.99] isn't a knockoff of Nintendo's Pikmin. I want to get that out of the way up front. It has a few things in common with Pikmin, sure, and it does a pretty good job of scratching that itch while Nintendo takes its sweet time bringing out the next sequel, but the game stands well on its own.

So now that we've covered what Ant Raid isn't, I probably ought to tell you what it is: a real-time strategy game that forgoes micromanagement for simple tap-and-target style gameplay. Your units are the titular ants, who circle around your base. Tap and hold to select a group of them, and then tap a target to send them off after it. Sometimes that target is a resource like pine needles or berries, other times it's an enemy — a mutated snail or bee that's coming to destroy your base. Once they dispatch their foes or gather their resources the ants return to base, ready for new orders.

The controls keep the targeting system simple, but Ant Raid also requires some strategy. Enemy units come in three colors, and each gives you energy toward special abilities. When you gather enough blue energy, you can make your ants immortal for a time. Red makes them super fast, and if you can trigger red and blue at the same time, you get gold ants that are both speedy and immortal. Green energy is a special case – it unleashes divine power, letting you interfere directly by tapping on enemy units to smite them and dragging resources to the base to gather them. A large part of the game's challenge lies in deciding when to unleash these powers, and in maintaining enough energy to keep them going.

Without any serious resource management or unit building, Ant Raid runs the risk of being a smidge too casual, but despite the lack of any hardcore RTS features it manages to stay challenging. Keeping your ants alive is goal number one. Each enemy has its own pattern of ant-murder: snails knock out all attacking ants when they die, while beetles flip on top of ants and need a second wave of attackers to polish them off. You'll need to keep enough ants alive to revive their fellows and take out the enemy. With large swarms constantly rushing your base, you need to think on your fingertips to ensure all the enemies are engaged but none have a chance of obliterating your army. If you can't move quickly, your base will get slammed.

These skills will be put to the test across Ant Raid's 104 levels. Story mode takes up the first 60 of those levels, and faces you with the task of curing the vicious insects of their pesticide-induced mania. Once you complete story mode, you unlock 40 challenge levels across 4 levels of difficulty. You can replay all of the levels to try to get 3-star rankings. There are also 4 endless survival levels that unlock as you progress through story mode. These have a clever twist: the number of ants you have available in each of them corresponds to the number of stars you earn in story mode.

Aside from a less-than-inspiring story and mediocre cutscene design, I like nearly everything Ant Raid offers up. The game benefits from being built specifically for iPad, and takes advantage of the screen real estate. The levels look great, the controls are solid and very rarely frustrating, and there is a ton of content (including 47 Game Center achievements and 5 leaderboards). Some of the goals in later story mode levels get repetitive – build flags in every level, then collect berries, then build flags, then collect berries – but the ramped-up difficulty kept me interested despite the repetition.

Ant Raid might be a little light for the serious RTS crowd — its focus is on frantic action far more than management or organization. For anyone who wants some strategy in their action games, though, it's a perfect fit.

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One of my favorite things about the App Store is because of how fast it moves, you never have to wait too long to see trends forming. Thinking back on it, the entire existence of the iPhone is little more than a flash in the world of technology, even though its release back in 2007 (and the launch of the App Store in 2008) feels like ancient history now. A number of things have changed over the short life of iOS devices, but I think the change that had the largest effect on App Store was Apple shifting gears to allow the free to play market to take hold.

When Steve Jobs initially announced the in-app purchase system, he made sure to emphasize that only paid apps would be allowed to use it. Or, as he put it, "free apps remain free." Apple doesn't often change their tune, but they did in a big way on October 15th of 2009 when they opened the free to play flood gates. Moments later, ngmoco announced that Eliminate would be free, officially kicking off the free to play revolution on the App Store and energizing an incredibly vocal minority who were sure that this would be the death knell of iOS gaming in one fell swoop.

Since Apple rarely reveals statistics on both the sales of iOS devices and the number of apps downloaded (200 million device sales and 15 billion downloads, per last count.) if you want to delve any deeper than that you need to get third party analytics firms involved. Flurry is one (of many) of these companies, and they've currently got their analytics package installed in over 90,000 different apps spread across over 40,000 different companies. This gives them a massive bucket of data to run all kinds of different reports which they throw up on their blog from time to time.

The latest out of Flurry is that free to play games are responsible for 65% of the revenue in the top 100 grossing list, compared to only 39% earlier this year. If you're the kind of person who would rather see this data in chart form, well, you're in luck:

Now, I'm sure there are skeptics out there that right now are thinking to themselves, "Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. The top grossing lists go to 200. These numbers are skewed in favor of free to play by chopping off the bottom half of the list!" I followed that path of logic too, since it can often be easy to manipulate statistics to promote an agenda of sorts. However, after speaking to several developers with games all over the top 200, it seems that in calculations like this positions 100 to 200 (and beyond) aren't worth that much consideration because of the extreme bell curve of the top grossing lists making #200 essentially insignificant compared to #1.

What does this mean for iOS gamers? Well, the writing has been on the wall for quite a while now that free to play is taking over the App Store. It's not a hard decision for developers to make either when laying out plans for future games either. With a 99¢ paid game, your profits are completely tied to your chart positioning and your options are incredibly limited for promotion, often relying entirely on making your game free and crossing your fingers for a surge of sales when the sale is over. Comparatively, there's all sorts of neat tricks to make money from a free game, even with horrid chart position.

Thankfully, even though Zynga put the original bad free to play taste in everyone's mouth with Farmville on Facebook and many developers followed suit with similar iOS games that centralized around time sinks and pay walls, there is light at the end of the tunnel. On the Mac/PC side of things, games like League of Legends and recently Team Fortress 2 have been providing some fantastic "core-gamer" experiences while being totally free. I'm sure eventually games like these will filter down to mobile devices, as it's basically impossible to argue against the financial incentive being there through a massive customer base eager to download (and optionally pay for) free to play games.

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