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Back in February we learned that CAVE was readying a port of Deathsmiles for the App Store, and just a couple of days later they released a teaser trailer for the game. The trailer pegged a Deathsmiles release for Spring 2011, but with Spring all but gone and no sign of the game on the App Store it’s pretty obvious that things are taking a bit longer than expected.

CAVE announced on their Twitter that they will have more information regarding a release date soon, and have offered up a brand new trailer of Deathsmiles as a peace offering for the release running late. Like CAVE’s other iOS shmups, Espgaluda II [$8.99/Lite] and Dodonpachi Resurrection [$8.99/Lite], Deathsmiles will come with an iPhone mode in addition to the original arcade mode. The iPhone mode will come with a brand new exclusive playable character named Princess Tiara, and will have its own new storyline as well as original background music.

All of CAVE’s iOS offerings are amongst my very favorite games in the App Store, and I really can’t wait to check out Deathsmiles when it finally releases. We’ll be keeping a close eye out for any new information regarding a release date, and in the meantime you can check out our forums for some Deathsmiles discussion with your fellow gamers.

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Sometimes the simplest things are the ones that bring the most joy. There aren't many games that are simpler than Match Panic [$0.99], but that's a big part of its charm.

Here's how the game plays: adorable pixel sprites make a line down the screen. Identical sprites are shown on both sides of the screen, and its your job to tap the side of the screen that matches the sprite in the middle. Does it get any more straightforward than that?

But don't jump to conclusions—Match Panic is harder than it sounds. Without lives to contend with, you're free to make mistakes, but you have to beat the clock. It's easy at first, but time gets tight as you reach higher and higher levels. You've got to be fast, and you can't spare the seconds mistakes cost you. Now you're probably thinking that you're some kind of pro matcher who'd never make an error, but try saying that when there are three sprites on one side of the screen, two on the other and a clock ticking down the seconds. This is some seriously frantic matching action.

For all you meta-gamers, there's a lot more replayability than you might think. The first challenge is to unlock all the sprites by hitting level or match milestones. They get shuffled into play and make it that much harder to keep track of where your fingers should be tapping. You'll also want to push your scores on the Game Center leaderboards, which track high scores, bonus time, streaks and total matches. Then there are the achievements, which challenge you to play creatively, quickly and carefully.

I was pretty charmed by the trailers for Match Panic, so I'm thrilled that the game is so good. When I have a little time to kill, I put a song with a good beat on my iPod and get right to matching. I love Chaotic Box's Silverfish [$1.99], and Match Panic confirms that the one-man dev studio is chock full of good ideas. Our forum users agree: this is a game that's simple to pick up, but so hard to put down.

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What's My Word? [$0.99] is a board game port that language lovers simply must check out. If you've played the original with pen and paper, you know what to expect. If not, you're in for a treat.

The goal is to discover a hidden six- or seven-letter word. To find it, you need to come up with other, shorter guess words and enter them in shifted positions along the board. Each guess is scored by how many letters match the hidden word, and whether or not those letters are in the right place.

The scoring is the tricky part. It's the only thing that will tell you if you're on the right track. Correct letters in the wrong spot give you 250 points. Correct letters in the right spot give you 1000 points. You're given the total for the whole word, so you'll need to compare all of your guesses and find the overlapping letters and other giveaways. On your 11th guess, you'll either get the correct word, or not. It feels like a wordy version of the classic board game Mastermind, if that makes it any clearer.

What's My Word? is quite the strategic game. You can try to cover as much of the alphabet as possible with your guesses, but this might leave you with a lot of possible letters and no sure things. If you instead use similar words to track down correct positioning, you might finish the game with only two or three correct letters. Words that score 0 are extremely helpful since all their letters are eliminated, but then you lose that whole word from your total score. To make things even more complicated, you don't necessarily need to guess the correct word to get a high score. Balancing all these factors makes for an interesting challenge.

Though the game design is sound, the port's mechanics leave a little to be desired. The Game Center achievements pop up inconsistently and at weird times. Also, I found myself heading to pen and paper to solve some of the puzzles. The game includes a scratch pad to note down the letters that you're sure of and those you've eliminated, but I just don't find it interactive enough to work through all the logic. Not a huge deal, but it's hard to play on the go when I'm constantly looking for a pen.

For the price of admission, you get 50 potpourri puzzles, and daily six- and seven-letter challenges. The daily challenges have Game Center leaderboards to rank your score. If you'd like more content, there are already 19 extra word packs available for in-app purchase, at a dollar each or 10 bucks for an all-access pass. Categories for the extra packs include things like sports, video games, and movies. I've enjoyed playing the extra content, but if you put a puzzle down partway through it would sure be nice to see which category it's in when you come back.

Unfortunately, the multiplayer aspect of the original game has pretty much been abandoned. You can challenge friends by sending them words with categories, but there's no overarching competitive play. If you want to play with a friend locally, the best you can do is enlist their help over your shoulder while you struggle through the solo challenges.

All in all, though, What's My Word? is a great little package. It's even Universal. If you like your word games to come with a big dose of strategy and logic, you should definitely check it out.

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Like asynchronous-multiplayer word games? Then Hanging With Friends [Free / $1.99] is the game for you.

Brought to us by Zynga and the folks behind Words With Friends [Free / $2.99 / HD], Hanging With Friends is a strange-but-fun combination of Hangman and Scrabble. Like other asynchronous titles (and exactly like the other With Friends games), you start a game by finding someone to play with. You can find opponents randomly, or amongst Facebook friends or your contact list. You can also find a friend by their username or play locally with pass and play.

Once you've found a friend to play with, you create a word using a random selection of letter tiles. You have a chance to earn bonus points by positioning your letters on double or triple letter/word score spaces. When your word is made, its your opponent's turn to guess.

Guessing is done in classic hangman style. You have a set number of strikes based on the length of the word (shorter words are harder, so you get more chances with them), and you can pick from all the letters in the alphabet. Guess your opponent's word before running out of strikes, and you live to play another day. Fail, and your cute little avatar loses a balloon and gets closer to falling into the pit of lava below.

Avatar? Lava? Yeah, you're not getting hanged in Hanging With Friends. This is a kinder, gentler, Zynga-er take on the game. When you first begin, you're asked to create a boy or girl avatar, with a few customization options (I can almost smell the cash shop coming, though it's not in yet). When you play, your avatar floats with balloons above almost certain death. Animations let you watch your opponent (or yourself) squirm as failure draws near. But this is a family game, so you'll never see the fatal fall.

You and your opponent each take turns creating words and guessing at them until one of you runs out of balloons. To keep things interesting, you're both given a set of lifelines that you can use to save yourself. The extinguisher removes options from the board, revive gives you back a strike, and suspects gives you a one-in-four chance of getting the right letter. They're free the first time you use them against a given opponent, and after that they cost 20 coins. It looks like you'll be able to buy coins with an in-app purchase in the future, but for now you earn them with with bonus points or high-scoring words. It's a nice little addition to the formula.

My only reservations are the usual complaints about the With Friends games. The game feels slower than it should. Each time you open the app you have to wait for your games to update, and then you have wait to load your game. The new mechanics slow things down even further, letting you sit through an animated retelling of your opponent's turn and making you go through a few pointless extra clicks. I'd love to see the game streamlined, but it's never slow enough to be a serious problem.

I'm glad there aren't any serious issues, because it's not like many fans of async word games are going to pass this one up. If you're not completely sold, grab the ad-supported free version. You'll probably get hooked-Hanging With Friends is fun, cute and clever, so you're going to find lots to like. And if you need a few more friends to play with, our forum thread is a great place to start.

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We neglected to cover the NGP during our visit to Los Angeles for E3. The big news was that, yes, it’s called the PlayStation Vita. Also, the Wi-Fi model will hit at $250. That latter is actually a big deal: Sony is positioning it purposefully to compete toe-to-toe with the Nintendo 3DS on a price level, even though it’s a technically beefier handheld with more functionality.

It’s important to keep the ‘beefier’ part in my mind. If the device launches in 2011 as it’s expected to, it’ll enjoy a window where it’s the top dog. It’ll have games that look better than any other handheld on the market, including the iPod Touch. That’s a compelling enough reason for consumers to buy instantly, short-sighted as they may be.

But, as you know, the mobile phone will only get faster and stronger as the Vita sits on store shelves and stagnates. This is a point that id Software’s John Carmack made while speaking to GameSpot at E3.

The man — no, the visionary — believes the Vita is two times more powerful than a phone at the moment, and he seems confident that it won’t compare to phones in just about two years.

"I think that they've picked as eminently a suitable hardware spec as they could for that,” Carmack told the pub. “They're going to have you program for it like a console, so it's going to seem twice as powerful as a smartphone with the exact same chips in there."

"But of course, by the time they actually ship, there may be smartphones or these tablets with twice as much power as what they're shipping with on there. And a year or two after that, it's going to look pretty pokey."

I don’t think you need to lick a toad in order to foretell this. The phone market moves at a ridiculous pace, especially compared to the traditional console / handheld market.

Carmack thinks quicker and cheaper games on the Vita would mean more success in the long-term — even if it looks ‘old’ compared to upcoming phones. I'm not sure I agree. Big games with high production values like the God of War portable titles, I think, are the best hope that Sony has with this device. Even though iOS is capable of having a big budget games, few studios that I know of throw that kind of production money into a 99-cent-to-seven dollar application.

[Via Pocket Gamer]

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I’d like to write “hot on the heels of the re-release of Dragon’s Lair [.99 / HD], comes Dragon’s Lair 2: Time Warp [$2.99] for the iPhone and iPod Touch.” If I did just throw that out to the ether, I’d be incorrect. The original Dragon’s Lair re-release was shoved out the door in December 2009. Dragon’s Lair: Time Warp joins its predecessor in the App Store in June 2011.

I doubt I’ll ever receive an answer that sits with me well about the hold-up, but I suppose it’s stupid subject to broach at this point. The game is out so… who cares, right?

Let’s talk about it then. Dragon’s Lair 2 has the same feature set as the original re-release, including the move guide, the choice between three, five, or infinite lives. However, there is a fun extra that I’m sure the core enthusiasts out there will love: Dragon’s Lair 2 for the iOS features a “Director’s Cut” version of the game with an alternate ending.

In total there’s eight levels to explore as you play as Dirk who is charged with saving a certain princess named Daphne. This time around, you’ll need a rickety time machine and fast fingers to successfully retrieve her from the evil wizard Mordroc.

Dragon’s Lair 2 is $2.99 on the App Store while it’s predecessor is now sitting at a good 99-cent price point. Check out our review of the first in series to see if it’ll click with you. Lord knows how much these QTE-focused games hurt me on the inside.

Oh! And there's been no word yet if there will be an "HD" version of this sequel for the iPad. We're working on getting confirmation.

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Back in February, my jet-setting TouchArcade cohort Eli Hodapp found himself wanting to play some video games on his laptop while on the road. Not one to carry around a bulky Bluetooth controller just for that specific purpose, he came across a novel little app called Joypad [Free] which was a suitable alternative. Basically, the Joypad app runs on your iPhone or iPod touch and turns the device into a wireless controller for your computer with a highly configurable set of virtual buttons.

The Joypad app syncs up with a desktop client which allows it to be used to play any game by remapping the keyboard controls to the virtual buttons on the device. It works really well, is fairly easy to setup and get running, and is a great companion for the traveling gamer, as we noted in our review of the Joypad.

So since that time, the two man operation Zell Interactive who are responsible for the Joypad have been quite busy. First of all, the formerly limited free version of the Joypad has been updated to include all the same functionality of the paid version. Basically, this means you can download the Joypad and the desktop client and have your very own virtual controller on your iOS device at no cost at all. As the developers do enjoy putting food on their tables, the way they will monetize the Joypad from here on out is by offering additional skins as in-app purchases.

The first set of skins will be a retro pack that will offer skins from the NES, Game Boy, Genesis, and many other classic consoles. The skins are purely visual and don’t alter the functionality of the app, but if you use the Joypad for playing classic console emulators then the appropriate skin can add a bit of fun to the experience. The skins will be available individually for 99¢ each or together as a complete pack at a discounted price. The original paid version of Joypad has been renamed Joypad Elite [$11.99], and will always receive all the new content as free updates rather than IAP. If you don’t already have Joypad then the free version is the way to go, but this way they can still say thank you to their previous customers who supported them by buying the app initially.

While the skins are a neat feature, the really big news about the Joypad is that the developers have recently released a free SDK that will allow other developers to easily integrate native Joypad support into their desktop or iOS games. On your computer, this means that if a developer integrates the SDK into their game you’ll be able to play that game using the Joypad without the need of syncing with the Joypad Connect desktop client.

It all works incredibly simply. Just fire up a game with Joypad support on your computer or iOS device and then fire up Joypad on an iPhone or iPod touch. The game will automatically detect the Joypad running and send the appropriate controller configuration to the device. There can be a mixture of various types of buttons, d-pads, or analog sticks on the Joypad that suit each individual game. Shortly down the road, the ability to add custom controller skins for a particular game will be added into the SDK for an even more cohesive experience.

The Joypad developers have added in Joypad support to an open source version of Wolfenstein 3D [$1.99/Lite] just to demonstrate how easily it works:

Another recent addition to the Joypad app is mouse movement and clicking support when playing games on a computer. This means you can control the cursor in a game that normally needs a mouse just using the accelerometer of your iOS device. They demonstrated this feature to me by playing Minecraft using just an iPhone and the Joypad app, and I was pretty blown away with how well it works:

The Joypad app comes with pre-configured settings for both Minecraft and Portal 2, but the controls can be configured pretty much however you want to make them work with a ton of desktop games. They’ve also added support for connecting via Bluetooth in addition to a local WiFi connection, which takes care of some of the connection issues that were present when trying to use the Joypad on a crowded WiFi network.

There have been a few games that utilize playing on the iPad using an iPhone or iPod touch, and EA Mobile is dabbling in this area as well, but the release of the Joypad SDK means that there is the potential for any game to use this functionality, and it can be an attractive extra feature to add to any iOS or desktop game. Couple Joypad support with the display mirroring capabilities of the iPad 2, and suddenly your mobile devices have taken on the traits of a home console. While the Joypad isn’t a total substitute for a physical controller, it still works really well and is a lot of fun to use. Hopefully developers will check out the free Joypad SDK and we will see support for it in many more games in the future.

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At WWDC this year, I sat down with Dave Castelnuovo from Bolt Creative to talk about what’s upcoming in the various entries in the Pocket God series. We’ve always been fans of Pocket God [99¢] around TouchArcade, but admittedly hadn’t quite stayed up to date with the series as of late. After Dave showed me some of the recent new features added into the games, I was really surprised by just how much they’ve evolved since I’ve been on Pocket God hiatus.

The biggest bit of news is that the previously iPad-only Pocket God: Journey To Uranus [99¢] is now a universal app and is currently on sale for 99¢, down from $4.99. This version of Pocket God lets you take your pygmies into space to various planets, each with their own unique features. You can also discover mini-games which are based on classic arcade games, like Bump ‘n’ Jump, Joust, and Tempest 2000.

These mini-games are so incredibly well done that they could practically be standalone games on the App Store, and Bolt Creative has plans for many more in the future. Journey To Uranus plays just fine on the smaller screen of the iPhone and iPod touch, and it has really come a long way since first launching for the iPad back in December. The developers plan to adopt a rapid update schedule similar to the original Pocket God game, so expect a lot more from Journey To Uranus in the future.

Speaking of the original Pocket God, the most recent update added a neat Challenge of the Gods feature to the game. There is a new Challenge Menu which offers a few tasks to discover and complete for each of the 39 episodic updates the game has received during its lifetime. This gives a great reason to go back and fiddle around in all of the previous episodes, and once all tasks for an episode have been completed you’ll unlock a God idol for that episode.

This leads right into what will be in the forthcoming episode 40 which is titled Battle of the Gods. You’ll be able to take any of the 39 God idols that have been unlocked in Challenge Mode and then pit them against each other in a battle arena to see who comes out on top. It sounds like a pretty interesting idea, and I’m looking forward to checking out how it works when it launches in early July.

In other Pocket God news, the Pocket God Comics [99¢] app has just received issue #7 of the digital comic based on the game characters. They are also planning on streamlining the comic creation process so as to pump out new issues at a faster rate than they are currently running at. There are more than 20 new issues already in the pipeline, and support for Pocket God Comics is planned for at least the next few years. Also, the Pocket God Facebook game is up to episode 8 and will continue to evolve with new features and gameplay unique from the iOS games.

If you’re like me and haven’t checked in on what's up with Pocket God lately, you should definitely give both the original and Journey To Uranus another look as I'm fairly blown away with just how far the series has come in recent months.

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At WWDC, I had a chance to sit down with David Whatley, who brought us GeoDefense and GeoDefense Swarm, to discuss what he's got in store for us iOS gamers.

Whatley's path-based tower defense title GeoDefense is unquestionably the iOS tower defense game I've spent the most time with. There's definite appeal in its minimal, neon glowing graphics and relentless action. During our meeting, the author showed me an in-progress build of sequel GeoDefense 2, which is a tower defense game — with a twist.

In the simplest terms, GeoDefense 2 is a tower defense puzzle game. The game features a pre-laid track along which the encroaching enemies file through, but each level starts off with a number of towers already in place. Your task is to arrange the towers about the playfield in the most strategically sound fashion, but there's a catch: you can only move towers across straight track segments and empty space; towers can't be moved over each other or over track corner segments. This arrangement lends something of a sliding puzzle feel to the strategerie of the game. To make matters either better or worse (we'll see…), new turrets appear with each wave.

Tower defense is a now crowded genre in the App Store, and a notable variation on the formula is welcome. I was very much intrigued by what Whatley showed me of GeoDefense 2, and am anxious to give it a go in its final, release form.

In addition to his GeoDefense sequel, which will be published through his studio Critical Thought, Whatley gave us an exclusive look at his upcoming title, Tiny Heroes, to be published by the other studio with which he is involved, Simutronics. In short, it's Plants vs. Zombies meets Dungeon Keeper.

In Tiny Heroes, you play the dungeon. The objective of the game is to defend your treasures by placing the defenses you've chosen about your dungeon corridors. Waves of classic heroes of various sorts and abilities — thieves, knights, clerics, wizards, rangers, etc. — begin to invade your dungeons in an effort to make off with the booty.

The defenses available are a bit more varied than those of the typical tower defense game. There are crossbows, crush chambers, pop-up pikes, allied monsters, bombs, and the like. The incoming heroes vary in their ability to deal with the different defenses; the thieves can sometimes disarm bombs, for instance.

For the creative defense gamer, a forge area in the game allows players to craft their own custom towers. Tiny Heroes will take advantage of the Retina display where available and the graphics look sharp. The iPhone version is set for an August 1st submission to Apple, with an iPad version to follow, in time.

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It seems like every convention we see a game (or, sometimes, games) that make us take a step back and say, "Whoa, now that's really cool." As a former hardcore Dungeons & Dragons player, Pocket Heroes hit all the right notes for me. Here's the game in a nutshell: Take a party-centric tabletop-style turn based game, give it sprite-based UI, and then add in Words With Friends-style push-powered asynchronous online multiplayer.

The developers explain it better than I can:

It remains to be seen just how awesome the game will be once it's finally released, but I'm super excited for this. Some of the best times I've had in a gaming environment has been in Dungeons & Dragons games, so if F5 Games can even capture a sliver of that fun I'll be totally happy.

For more details, check out the thread in our forums.

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