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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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It feels like a long shot, but there’s a chance we could see Octodad 2 on the iPad. The Young Horses, an incorporated branch of the original Depaul Game Experience crew, has revealed that it’s working on a follow-up to the original, and depending on how the funding fairs, we could see  additional projects like a motion-controlled console port, a booth for gaming conventions like PAX, and a possible iPad port.

Octodad is a curious third-person PC and Mac adventure game that has you, as the eponymous character, masquerading as a human and constructing a mannequin so you can avoid having dinner with your wife. The overall goal is to never be suspected as anything less than a loving, human husband, which is harder than it sounds. Movement in particular is abstract. You use a combination of thrusts and button presses with the mouse in order to plant on foot in front of the other recreating, somewhat, the gait of a human.

I’m… cautiously optimistic about how the movement mechanics in particular will translate to the iPad, but I’d love to see it despite the questions that I have. The Kickstarter page for Octodad 2 features the following video that teases some of what you’ll see in the sequel.

No firm release date for Octodad 2 has been noted. You can bide your time with the original, for free, at the game's official web site.

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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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Way back in early to mid 2009, we were at the height of top-down dual-stick Geometry Wars-style space shooter releases. It seemed like every week or two there was another new one to check out, and although they each had their own sets of strengths and weaknesses, the vast majority offered up pretty compelling arcade experiences that were perfectly suited to the platform.

Among the many great dual-stick shooters available was Occurro! [Free] from developer Acceleroto. Occurro! was released in July of ’09 and one of the things that set it apart from similar titles that were available at the time was its excellent controls, something that we noted when we reviewed the game.

Then about a year ago, the release of iOS 4 brought a sound problem that affected Occurro! and the developer pulled the game from the App Store with the intention of solving the problem. Well, additional projects and pesky “real life” got in the way and kept pushing the bug fix farther down the original timeline. At long last, the sound engine was reworked and last week Occurro! was officially re-released along with a bunch of other improvements.

First off, the old leaderboard system was ditched in favor of both OpenFeint and Game Center support for online high score and achievement tracking. The game also now supports multitasking and has received a decent graphical improvement in the explosion and particle effects department. The maximum number of enemies onscreen has also been increased for even more action, and many other minor tweaks and fixes have tightened up the overall experience.

Best of all is that Occurro! is now entirely free to download and play. There are no ads, no in-app purchases, and no plans to increase the price in the future. Acceleroto just wants to put the game out there for people to enjoy and hopefully spread the brand name around for a possible future release. As my mother once taught me, you never look a gift game in the mouth, and for the price of free you should definitely give Occurro! a try if you fancy a solid dual-stick arcade game.

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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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If you're anything like me, you've been wondering, "When in the world is Rocketcat Games going to release something that doesn't rely on a swinging mechanic?" Don't get me wrong, HookChamp, Super QuickHook, and Hook Worlds are all fantastic games, but I doubt I'm alone in looking forward to what Rocketcat would release outside of the hook and swing world. We're getting a first real glimpse at their next game today, Mage Gauntlet, which seems to be a beautifully pixelated homage to the classic action RPG games of yore.

Check out some screenshots:

The real awesomeness is contained inside of the trailer:

Details are a little vague right now, but Mage Gauntlet is built around a "more action, less grinding" quest philosophy centralized around the main character, Lexi. You're looking to become a wizard's apprentice, and your journey starts out with a quest to prove yourself. Equipped with a magical gauntlet, Lexi is able to absorb and launch magical energy. The spell system involves destroying "certain objects" to power-up your gauntlet with a completely randomized spell. You can hold four at a time, and these are accessible through a menu.

There's a full loot and leveling system complete with character customization through three different stats that you can build your character with. 50 levels will be included with release, along with an unlockable additional game mode. More levels and modes are planned after release. Oh, and there's boss fights, loads of different enemies, and lots of secrets and achievements. Scoreboards aren't initially included, but the future game modes I mentioned will introduce them.

Mage Gauntlet will be priced at $2.99, with an initial $1.99 sale. Like other RocketCat games, early buyers will get a pack of hats to customize your character with as well as a in-game pet that follows you around. We'll be following the release of this game closely, and hope to have a full preview in the next couple weeks.

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Com2Us's ultra-Korean Puzzle Family (Free / $1.99) is now available worldwide. It's full of crazy-fun minigames, but to get in on all the fun you're either going to need to pony up some cash, or invest some substantial time playing. Here's the deal: you start out with three of the game's eight minigames available to play. One is unlocked for free, one is unlocked by connecting Puzzle Family to your Facebook account, and one is unlocked by signing into Com2Us's gaming hub. If you want to unlock anything else, it's going to cost you stars. You can earn stars by playing the games (but slowly), or you can pay to get them in larger amounts. Unlocking all eight games is going to take a serious investment of your time, or more than a couple of your hard-earned dollars.

So if you're someone who wants to pay for a game upfront and have it all available to you, give this one a pass. But let me just say one thing first: Puzzle Family is really, really fun. Most of the minigames are takes on matching games, but they're interesting takes. If you can resist the siren song of IAP, you can easily get by with the three unlocked games in the free version and have a lot of fun while slowly working towards unlocking the rest of the content.

Flick and Fly, the included game, is a match-3 style game where you flick grumpy-faced blocks into each other to make and clear matches. They'll slide until they hit something, so setting up combos takes some (quick) thought. Hide and Seek also has you matching faces, but these ones are two-sided. Tap them to flip them around and swap their colors to make matches. In Shanghai Pop you'll match pairs of blocks, but they have to either be touching or be free on one side.

If you choose to spend your stars on more games, you can unlock the following:

• Order the Order, which gives you a three-symbol pattern to find in the field.
• Who's Next, which has you locate three different colors of critters in ever-increasing numerical order.
• Boing Boing, which is pretty much Puzzle Bobble.
• Copy Copycat, a flipping puzzle that needs you tap squares to flip those around them and match a specific pattern.
• Tap on Time, a timing game about tapping the right square at the right moment.

They're all wrapped in Puzzle Family's colorful, haywire style, with lots of cute and completely ridiculous imagery. And they're also very fun. You're on a tight timer in all the games, with either time or HP running down whenever you stop making matches or miss your timing, so they always feel frantic. In a pinch you can use a skill, which gives you a little more HP or time, but be warned – in the free version of the game, you can only earn them back by viewing ads, and in the paid version you can earn them back at a rate of 10 per day.

That's the main difference between the paid and free versions of Puzzle Family, by the way: ads. There aren't any in the paid version. You also get 3000 stars to start with, so you can unlock a couple more games. If you like the game, I'd recommend going for the paid version sooner than later, since your progress doesn't seem to carry over – it's a better deal than buying the stars in the shop.

The metagame aspects of Puzzle Family are a little lacking. There is no Game Center integration, just Facebook leaderboards. The urge to earn stars helps offset the lack, though – a high score is nice, but earning a ton of stars is much more satisfying. Even once you've unlocked all the minigames, you can use your stars to buy dress-up items for your stick-figure avatar, and those items give you more HP, higher scores and such. Your scores also feed into an experience system, of sorts – each "level" moves your little Puzzle Family to a new home. They start off living in the gutters, so there's nowhere to go but up.

I can see why Puzzle Family is so popular: there's lots to see and do, I'm always stimulated, and the stars do a great job of hitting the "reward" switch in my brain. So far our forum users are loving it too. I do wish the game were less mercenary in its approach, but if you pay, you're paying for a collection of very fun games. Few of them would stand on their own, but all eight together make an argument that's hard to resist.

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I've always thought the early Fallout games would work great on the iPad, (and to some extent they do, if you were able to download iDOS before it got pulled) but like many ancient PC games, the Fallout IP is securely locked up in a twisted web of developers and publishers that have been bought and sold over the years. In the case of Fallout it was originally an Interplay project, which got rolled into Bethesda, which now is part of ZeniMax. There's even been some brutal legal drama as who owns the rights to a Fallout MMO has been duked out in courts. What I'm getting at, is I'm not holding my breath for an iOS Fallout anytime soon.

So, having totally written that off long ago, imagine my surprise when I stumbled across PipClock [99¢ / Lite] randomly browsing the App Store today. In a nutshell, it takes the "dashboard" style clock and weather apps, but applies a glorious level of Fallout-esque style to it. Seriously, just check out the screenshots:

The functionality is basically what you'd expect out of one of these sorts of clock and weather apps, although everything has a wonderful Fallout spin. For instance, here in the "Ruins of Los Angeles" in "California's Wastelands" it's 85 degrees out with "poisonous fog not detected". Oh, there's a faux geiger counter built in too. Each element also has subtle animations, with static, scan lines, and even sparks.

Since upgrading to an iPad 2, I've been looking for a good use for my original iPad outside of checking to make sure games we're reviewing still run on it. With PipClock, I'm thinking I might have to relegate it to night stand duty as PipClock just looks too awesome to not be running all the time. It's universal too, so you could do the same with an old iPod touch if you've got one laying around.

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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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