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At GDC earlier this month, one of my favorite upcoming games that I had a chance to play was Get Set Games’ Mega Run. They’ve taken Redford, the adorable main character from their hugely successful previous title Mega Jump [Free], and have dropped him into an auto-running game.

But, this isn’t just any boring, old auto-runner. Instead it’s literally bursting with items, power-ups, and enemies, not to mention its colorful visuals and loads of personality. Plus, it has incredibly well-designed levels with multiple pathways and tons of secrets to discover. It really is something you need to see in motion to appreciate. Which is fortunate for you, as Get Set has released a new gameplay video of Mega Run in action.

Mega Run is still in the final stages of development, and with any luck we should be seeing the title hit the App Store within the next month or two. After getting my hands on the preview version at GDC, I really can’t wait to spend some quality time with the final game. Keep your eyes firmly planted on this space and we’ll let you know just as soon as Mega Run gets a firm release date.

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Back in January, developer Spry Fox released Triple Town [Free], an iOS version of their immensely popular Kindle, Facebook, and Google+ matching game. Triple Town was widely loved by gamers and gaming critics, including our own 4.5 star review, and it was great to see a developer that was able to innovate so heavily in what has become a stagnant match-3 genre.

Since its release, Triple Town has received several updates, but they have mostly amounted to maintenance type stuff. Over the weekend, another new update was released, this time adding some very welcome new gameplay maps.

First is the City on a Lake map, which you can see in the screen below. This gives you the standard 6×6 grid found in the original mode only this time there is an L-shaped body of water smack dab in the middle. Obviously this is going to affect your strategy by limiting the amount of space you have to make matches, since the water is unusable space. It puts a nice challenging spin on the regular Triple Town formula.

The second new map is called Peaceful Valley, pictured below, and is a much friendlier, casual experience. It gives you a 5×5 map grid to work with, but here there are no bears or ninjas to muck up your carefully planned town layout. This is another nice departure from the original mode like City on a Lake is, only instead of being more challenging it’s actually much less challenging, and really lets you concentrate on thinking ahead and making smart matches instead of dealing with those pesky bears.

Aside from the big addition of two new maps, there are some minor tweaks in this update as well. High scores are now saved locally in addition to online through OpenFeint, and can be viewed from the options screen. There is also now an in-game orientation lock for people like me who like to get their game on while laying in bed. Finally, there are even more optimizations and bug fixes.

There is one tiny catch, though. The two new maps are only available for those who have paid to unlock unlimited turns from within the game. If you aren’t one of those people then there’s some good news for you: to celebrate the new update the unlimited turns IAP is on sale for $2.99. I paid the original $6.99 for Triple Town when it first came out and felt it was completely worth it, so from where I stand 3 bucks is a fantastic deal for one of the finest match-3 games available, even more so after this latest update.

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Earlier this month, SNK Playmore released an update for their excellent iOS version of their popular fighting game franchise King of Fighters-i [$6.99]. Unfortunately, there was a huge SNAFU with the update, and for a lot of people downloading it would wipe out all of their data as well as take away 6 characters which had been added in a previous update.

The good news is that SNK Playmore has released a new update for King of Fighters-i that fixes the issue of deleting the additional characters. The bad news is that if your data was previously erased, then you aren’t getting it back. At least not in my case. If you held off on the last update or your data wasn’t erased as a result of it then you should be good to go with the new update. Emphasis on the word “should” because at this point I’m sure anything could happen, so maybe you should proceed with caution.

The strange thing about all of this update drama is that in the end, it looks like the original offending update was merely an iOS 5 compatibility fix, and didn’t offer any new content or features. Sadly, the new update that fixes the old update doesn’t have any goodies in it either, unless you count the fun I’ll be having re-unlocking everything in the game over again.

I know that sounded snarky, but actually King of Fighters-i kicks all sorts of ass, and I really don’t have a problem playing through it all again. Still, I’d love to see an actual content update released someday, and hopefully there’s one in the works. In the meantime, make sure to grab the newest update if you were among those who were affected by the bug.

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This is a promo image for Solipskier, which was used when Mikengreg revealed the game to people.

When a game developer creates an awesome game, we expect its next release to be just as good. This works both ways. Greg Wohlwend and Michael Boxleiter of Mikengreg fame have told me what it feels like to have to work on something new with the expectation of past success in the background. It isn’t just noise — it’s having an effect on the development on its new title, Gasketball. From ideas to coding, the shadow of the success of an arcade skiing game called Solipskier [$.99] looms. It makes decisions harder. It ramps up the scope and quality. It’s making the stakes higher at a time when the studio is looking to do something totally different.

We discussed two kinds of pressure: external and internal. Mike and Greg said that they don’t feel any external heat as they build Gasketball. Solipskier got into a lot of hands, but that hasn’t given the studio the kind ravenous base that other great independent developers, like Team Meat of Super Meat Boy fame, enjoy. There aren’t throngs of people  expecting mastery in the follow-up from Mikengreg, in other words, so the bar feels low.

The pressure comes from inside, they expressed. Solipskier’s sales were the best Mikengreg has ever experienced, and the studio desperately wants Gasketball to outperform it in revenue, quality, and audience. Success is mutating their goals, as if the magic of Solipskier could ever be repeated.

“We really want our next game to seem like a step up, which is not actually very different from our early development days, every game we’ve made has been more interesting, more polished and more successful than the last,” Mike told us in an e-mail exchange. “The difference, now, is that we are trying to succeed in terms of a million players willing to pay us, which sets the quality bar dauntingly high for a two-man outfit.”

Gasketball's logo and the placeholder image for the game's web site.

Greg keeps asking himself if it’s even possible to have another Solipskier, and that seems like a fair question to ask. Its development, from idea to prototyping to final release, happened in brilliant flashes of creativity. Gasketball, on the other hand, hasn’t had that sort of conceptual magic. The conceit took longer to come along, and the studio had to throw out a lot of stuff in order to find this game.

“We had to resolve to getting down in the muck and doing the hard work of prototyping, testing, and scrapping everything for yet another prototype that felt like it had promise,” Greg told us. “For a game to really strike all the chords for us it has to be pretty specific.” Solipkier was initially designed as a Flash game. A lot of its systems and mechanics are designed around that platform. Gasketball is a departure, so it took longer to design as the studio learned new tricks.

The idea for Solipskier came from a brainstorming session that revolved around parallax scrolling. Speed and parallax seemed to gel well, so Mike and Greg started prototyping. In a blog post, the duo described the idea for the landscape painting component came as a watershed, “oh my god” moment. With wide-eyes, they went to work. In the end, the Mikengreg created an exhilarating skiing game unlike any other. Instead of focusing on tricks, jumps, and speed, Solipskier leverages style and the emotion that bursts from your chest when you feel like your acceleration is spiraling out of control.

Version ".01" of Solipskier

This wasn’t the duo’s first rodeo. Solipskier was created first and foremost as a flash game, just like Mike’s other titles as a part of Intuition Games. It was, however, the first game of either developer to grab major mainstream appeal. Mike tells me that he realized that this was a truly special project after publishers had entered into a bidding war for the game. An iOS version wasn’t in the picture at the time, but the reality of Flash development changed the tone of the porting conversation going forward.

“We were always looking for the next step out of the Flash world and into a more sustainable market that allowed for us to make larger, more fully formed games,” Greg told us. “The Flash market is great and gave us a way to become better developers while getting paid for it; however, it wasn’t a sustainable business.”

Mike and Greg were working “crazy hours,” and fretting over paychecks when they developed for Flash. Living by the seats of their pants did have its moments. “It was exciting in some ways for sure, but it couldn’t last,” Greg said. “We were lucky to have such success with Solipskier, as it’s allowing us to fully commit to iOS and downloadable titles in future.”

Within the first two months, the iOS version of Solipskier made a little over $70,000, while the sponsored Flash version generated $15,000. On Metacritic, it’s sitting at a 79 average across five positive reviews. Greg tells us that this success “changed the scope” of what it could do with its next game. The duo continued to pay themselves the same amount of money, but Solipskier gave them consistency and the ability to screw up.

Version "0.5." Can you spot the differences!?

“Since Solipskier, we’ve made six or so fairly polished prototypes and scrapped all of them,” Greg tells us. “We could have taken any one of those further but we’d rather call it a failure early and often than find ourselves with a less than stellar finished game that never found that magic we always look for.”

Solipskier’s success and design are weighing heavily on Mike’s mind as he executes concepts on Gasketball. He second guesses a lot and he’s finding it hard to accept praise from friends. “We’ve always seen the flaws in our work first and foremost, but even worse on this project I see things that aren’t there.” Mike elaborated: “My brain is constantly convinced that there are more features I need to discover before the game will be good, but they’re always just out of reach or vision. Every time I implement an idea and it doesn’t make the game instantly better I feel a crush of defeat. I feel a bit like I’m going crazy.”

They’re not alone in this, though.

The Other Guys

Other studios go through the similar issues. Some deliver greatness quickly. After Chair Entertainment released a brilliant Meteroid-style game called Shadow Complex on XBLA, it was able to stoke a similar sort of fanfare and praise with the launch of Infinity Blade. After Simogo released Bumpy Road, it followed it up with an equally charming rhythm and stealth game called Beat Sneak Bandit.

Some studios deliver late. Mobigame released its puzzle game Edge a couple of years ago to insane levels of acclaim and drama. The app was pulled because of a bogus trademark violation just as it was hitting critical mass, and the studio had to fight for the game to get back onto the App Store. Its follow-up, Cross Fingers, released 11 months after Edge. Mobigame’s David Papazian tells us that Cross Fingers is picking up steam. Edge has since been re-released.

Edge on MacOS

“We were very happy with this second game because it is really innovative and completely unique on the App Store. While I am writing, I can see that Cross Fingers is 5th in the Top Free in the US App Store with more than 8 million downloads. However, the game works a lot better now than it did at the start, because we evolved with the market. We added more levels and in-app purchases. Also, the fans are not the same as Edge fans, a lot of women and men from any ages love Cross Fingers, when Edge is more for gamers.”

Papazian says Edge, and its awards, gave his studio legs. The popularity led him to meeting a lot of people, and gave him a good “in” when introducing his work to press. His studio’s pressure was internal, too.

“But you have some pressure, you must do it again and you polish the new game as much as you can, maybe too much. Luckily we did it again, but we did not receive any awards and Apple never featured Cross Fingers on the US store. We had to fight for this success, by updating the game until it finally worked.”

Tiger Styles grabbed a lot of attention with its puzzle game Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. While working on the follow-up, a Metroid-style game called Waking Mars, Tiger Styles’ David Kalina said he felt a subconscious kind of pressure to one-up Spider. It’s a similar feeling that Mike and Greg feel as they create Gasketball. “When you make a game that gets game of the year nods,” Kalina told us, “there is definitely this feeling that EVERY game needs to live up to that standard, which is sort of an impossible bar to try and meet every time out.”

Waking Mars is more about exploration than anything else.

The development of Spider had a sense of urgency to it. He needed the game to succeed so his studio could exist. With Waking Mars, Kalina said that urgency was replaced with the desire to blow everything up in its second game, which again, is something Mikengreg is similarly struggling with. “When you start approaching game development that way, the cost of everything goes up, and the more you spend, the more risky it is to fail,” he admitted.

Waking Mars, in the end, will keep his studio alive. However, Kalina said he wouldn’t pour so much time and so many resources into Tiger Style’s next game. Kalina wants to be able to fail and experiment and do bold things.

“I’d like to release two or three games in the next year and have them all be surprising in some way, and if they don’t happen to set the world on fire, we can be cool with that because we’re at least trying to push in new directions,” Kalina told us. “The worst thing we could do now is to say ‘we have to do something just like Spider or Waking Mars BUT BIGGER…’ If we go down that path, you may never hear from us again!”

On Gasketball

Gasketball has a chance to be stellar. It’s a basketball game that has its users matching their opponents’ last shots. It’s like a digital version of HORSE, except rendered on a fantastical 2D plane that lets you freely move the hoop and shot placement around. It also has special balls and barriers that you can set up to make your shot more Byzantine and advanced. There’s a plan in place to continually update the game as it lives on the App Store.

Surprisingly, nothing mechanically in Solipskier informed Gasketball’s creative direction, Mike and Greg said. In fact, Greg argued that there wasn’t one to begin with. He said Mike came up with the idea for a playful and fun basketball game that was “a bit more skill-based than just a slingshot or pre-mapped trajectory control scheme” game. Moving in a new direction entirely, Gasketball eschews the stark contrasts of Solipskier in favor of a more playful and fun art direction.

Mike walking people through their first look at Gasketball.

Our expectations got the best of us when we first saw Gasketball. It’s just not the game you envision this studio doing at first glance. Solipkier was speedy and sharp, and it had a very specific and awesome rhythm, tone, and style. You’d figure the next game from this studio would incorporate some of these elements. This game is exceedingly friendlier in look and behavior. It’s also more thoughtful and maybe even a shade or two less impressive from a conceptual standpoint.

The stakes are just higher now. But there’s also another reason this project is especially different for the studio. Like with Mobigames and Cross Fingers, Mikengreg see Gasketball as an opportunity to grab an entirely new audience.

“We’re both getting older and want to do more with our lives than spend a hundred hours a week in a dark office,” Mike tells us. “When you start working independently you tend to hold your breath and accept sacrifices to your happiness in the short term for long term gains and we’ve yet to really succeed in a way that really gives us the security to let go and look to the future.  It can get very nerve wracking to think that you only have one shot at releasing each game, and every time you fail to reach your goals you get one step closer to having to quit trying.”

It’s a strange world right now for Mikengreg, as the studio struggles with the success of Solipskier and thinks about a studio-wide transition. But it’s confident about Gasketball and its eventual quality. We are are, too. We’ve seen the game in action, watched the videos, and have even fiddled with a build. The title threw us off at first, sure, but now that we’re comfortable with the fact that Mikengreg are switching focus, we’ve been able to move past our expectations. It’s figuring out a way to do that, too.

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Here’s a fun Friday story for you- Disc Drivin’ [$1.99 / Free / $2.99 (HD)], if you’ve never heard of it, is an a turn-based racing game that both Jared and Arnold can’t get enough of, still. The basic idea is if you took a game like Mario Kart, but gave it online turn-based multiplayer, and used a flick-based shuffleboard-like mechanic to race your discs around a track. We’ve got a pretty extensive review in the books, but since then, the game has been updated a whole bunch of times with all sorts of new stuff.

Anyway, in a recent short interview with AdWeek, Rich Sommer, the actor who plays Harry Crane on AMC’s Mad Men dropped some interesting details on the gameplay habits of the cast and crew:

Disc Drivin’ is a racing game that I’ve been playing a lot lately with Jon Hamm; Jay Ferguson, who’s also on the show; our head hairstylist; and our makeup artist.

Celebrity endorsement for apps and games isn’t a new thing, but it always seems like whenever a celeb’ is tweeting about the game they’re playing, it’s usually the same ultra-popular junk everyone else is playing. Disc Drivin’, however, is seriously obscure compared to something like, I don’t know, Temple Run.

So, yeah, if the folks behind Mad Men are playing Disc Drivin’, you totally should be too. Right?

[via AdWeek]

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Back in mid-2010 iOS 4 had just hit the streets and brought with it a ton of new features and a host of new APIs that would allow developers to integrate with core iOS elements more easily. One of these new APIs let developers pull music that was stored on the device for use within an app, and as gamers we immediately thought of the possibility of seeing something like Audiosurf coming to the App Store.

Sadly that never did happen, although there have been a number of rhythm games since then that have attempted to create gameplay directly from your music library. But none of them have come close to being able to integrate the two as well as Audiosurf did on PC back in 2008. Well today, Audiosurf creator Dylan Fitterer sent word that a new game in the series is on its way called Audiosurf Air, and that he’s already got it up and running on iOS.

This new Audiosurf is built using Unity, so as Dylan puts it “it runs pretty much everywhere”, including iOS. The trick now is to decide exactly what platforms he’ll actually be releasing the game on and when, but I think iOS is a pretty safe bet. He notes that even these first screens of Audiosurf Air don’t represent final graphics and there is still a ton of work left to do in the game, but still, new Audiosurf! The plan is to have the game come out sometime in 2012, and we’ll keep you posted on any new details concerning the upcoming Audiosurf Air.

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Let’s wind the clocks back to 2009, as really, to appreciate what Angry Birds has become, I think we need to go back and appreciate what Angry Birds was. The App Store was a crazy place. The “gold rush” was still in full effect. Publishers like Chillingo were trying to stake as large of a claim as possible in this brave new world brought about by the impulse-powered instant gratification of downloading a 99¢ game and the exploding popularity of the iPhone.

Chillingo was incredibly successful in pooling together a library of games we called “AAA titles” at the time. iDracula [ $2.99 ] may look incredibly archaic by today’s standards, but back then, it was among the cream of the crop. In late May, Chillingo spun off a new brand called Clickgamer.com, which per the original press release was intended to “carry casual games and software applications in the Apple App Store. This new brand will fully complement Chillingo’s existing catalogue of AAA innovative titles.”

Clickgamer.com’s aisle in the App Store was (and still is) an odd assortment of ultra-casual games and apps ranging from the SAT Vocabulary Builder [ $1.99 ] to sliding block puzzle games like Pic n’ Mix [ $0.99 ]. Reading between the lines of Chillingo’s own distinction between the AAA Chillingo and Clickgamer.com brands, it wasn’t difficult to see why Angry Birds [ $0.99 ] was relegated to the non-AAA Clickgamer.com brand when it launched, as the late-2009 1.0 version of the game really wasn’t anything that special. Or, as we mention in our original review which almost seems laughable now:

When you see a game with a name as nondescript as Angry Birds, it’s pretty hard to get excited. Even after playing through the first few levels, I was enjoying this game, but failing to see the real appeal.

The original release had a barebones array of birds, 63 levels, no leaderboards, no achievements, and no, really… anything else. Angry Birds wouldn’t even strike it big until months later in early 2010, when Chillingo announced that the game had been downloaded over half a million times. Whether that sales surge was a result of Chillingo’s marketing prowess or creative consulting as a publisher or the product of Rovio’s hard work seems to be a matter of perspective, and the answer to that question depends more on who you ask. Regardless, Angry Birds has yet to let go of a position on the top ten iTunes sales charts.

The Angry Birds kingdom expanded into the Angry Birds empire with the self-published release of both Angry Birds Seasons [ $0.99 ] and Angry Birds Rio [ $0.99 ] over the next couple of years. Since then, Rovio has grown further yet, and now days it’s difficult to find a platform that doesn’t have Angry Birds on it as the brand has made its way to the browser, smart TV’s, and even feature phones being sold in emerging markets. Think about that. People in African countries rocking series 40 Nokia phones have Angry Birds.

Despite Rovio’s unprecedented levels of success, recently it has been hard to dispute the argument that the Angry Birds formula might be getting a little stale. I’ve always been excited to play through the levels added in new updates, but for a while now I’ve felt like I’m just going through the motions of figuring out the weak points in the pig defenses, launching a bird, collecting my three stars, and moving on. This lead to the inevitable question of what could Rovio do in a sequel to not only revitalize the brand to players who have grown bored, but also provide a big enough twist on gameplay to make it worth having a fourth installment in the series?

It turns out the answer was to head to space.

Angry Birds Space [$0.99 / $2.99 (HD)] is close enough to the rest of the Angry Birds family that anyone even vaguely familiar with the games will be able to hop right in. It features the same premise of flinging birds in a big slingshot into dastardly egg-stealing pigs, but this time, your shots are assisted by a dotted line coming off the front of the slingshot to make the aiming process a little more transparent. The boss battles from Rio even make an appearance.

It comes packed with the familiar family of birds, with some minor modifications. All of the birds got a cosmetic upgrade, with snazzy looking space outfits. More importantly, some of their functionality has changed. For instance, the new version of the yellow bird doesn’t just dash forward. Instead, tapping on the screen sends it homing in on that specific location, even allowing for complete trajectory changes in flight. The force exerted by the bomb bird seems to focus more on pushing things rather than destroying them, and a new freezing bird turns anything inside of its blast radius into ice, allowing for easy cleanup with blue birds.

The magic of Angry Birds Space comes from the physics tricks Rovio is able to pull off by leaning on the gravitational fields of the various planetoids that make up many of the levels. Birds shot into space fly straight as an arrow, as obviously, there isn’t any gravity to make them do anything differently. Gravity fields are indicated by faint blue halos, and completing each level (particularly with three stars) involves the intelligent mastery of both zero gravity as well as the (potentially) multiple gravitational pulls of the different planetoids that the pigs have set their forts up on.

This varying gravity system allows for some incredibly elaborate level design, including puzzle elements that would never have been possible with the “traditional” gravity model of previous Angry Birds titles. One early level that exhibits this in a particularly clever way involves the introduction of the bomb bird. Players are faced with a bunch of pigs hanging out and being smug on a gravity-rich planetoid.

There isn’t a clear shot to be had between the slingshot and the pigs themselves, as there are all sorts of asteroids littering the top half of the screen. Completing the level actually requires delicate use of the bomb birds to gently push the asteroids down into the gravity field, at which point they come smashing down on the pigs. Other levels involve shooting your birds to catch the rim of a gravity field, placing them in an orbit of sorts to slingshot around to hit an otherwise unreachable target.

The truly interesting thing that I’ve found is that this gravity mechanic has allowed for some incredibly creative ways to complete levels. The comparison may be a bit of a stretch, but in Scribblenauts Remix [ $0.99 ] the way to truly have fun in that game was to come up with the most absurd and imaginative solution to each puzzle. Sure, nearly every level can be solved by equipping yourself with some wings and a gun, but there’s just a certain sense of satisfaction to be had when you figured out how to somehow work Cthulhu into your solution. Similarly, while most levels in Angry Birds Space often have a fairly clear-cut solution, I’ve been having way more fun coming up with the most convoluted flight paths for my birds, with personal bonus points awarded for as many orbits as possible before expertly slamming whatever bird I fired into a pig.

Some other changes have been made to Angry Birds Space, namely, the addition of a new in-app purchase system. In previous games, the Mighty Eagle is a one time 99¢ purchase which allows you to skip one level every hour. The Mighty Eagle also adds an entirely new (although not necessarily immediately apparent) game mode where you can go back to previously completed levels and fire off the Mighty Eagle shooting for destroying everything on screen.

Unfortunately, now not only is the Mighty Eagle a consumable item, but it also doesn’t automatically skip a level. When you fire out the sardine can, the Mighty Eagle can totally miss, leaving whatever smug pigs are left on screen laughing at your failure. Additional Mighty Eagles are awarded in small quantities by just playing the game. Alternatively, 20 Mighty Eagle shots can be purchased for 99¢, with additional packs of Mighty Eagles ranging all the way up to 980 for $19.99.

Out the gate, Angry Birds Space comes loaded with two level packs: “Pig Bang” which serves as more of a tutorial for the new space-centric physics and “Cold Cuts” which introduces the new freezing bird. A third (very difficult) level pack entitled “Danger Zone” is available via a 99¢ unlock, and if you even find yourself vaguely enjoying the two included packs, the third one is basically required.

This raises the question of what is going to come of the future of Angry Birds updates, as the tea leaves of this IAP-unlocked level pack can be read in numerous ways. Angry Birds has been known by its seemingly never-ending stream of free content via updates, and I find it to be a little hard to believe that Rovio would put a stop to that with Angry Birds Space. My gut is telling me that future updates might follow a path of offering up a free pack and an optional ultra-difficult paid pack like “Danger Zone” for hardcore players… But, we’ll have to wait for the first update to land to know for sure.

If you’re playing on a new iPad, you’ll be happy to know that the HD variety of Angry Birds Space comes with crisp Retina Display-friendly graphics. Neither the HD or standard versions are universal, so, having the optimal Angry Birds Space experience requires some App Store double dipping if you want to play on both your iPhone and iPad. Sadly, there still doesn’t seem to be any way to sync progress between versions of the game, so, in that regard, there isn’t much point in buying it twice anyway.

Angry Birds is the unlikely candidate with meager beginnings that somehow managed to redefine both mobile gaming and the levels of financial success that are possible in the mobile space. The brand is known worldwide, and the series is enjoyed by everyone from hardcore gamers, to celebrities and athletes, to my own father who couldn’t possibly be more of a non-gamer. Angry Birds is the Super Mario Brothers of mobile devices, and Angry Birds Space is so successful in redefining the Angry Birds formula that everyone should give it a try.

TouchArcade Rating:

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If you’re lining up to see The Hunger Games tonight, why not bring its official teaser game with you to pass the time? The Hunger Games: Girl On Fire [Free] launched this afternoon for the generous price of $0 and we recommend it without pause. It’s a conceptually solid runner that boasts a tremendous look, and it even introduces some new ideas to its clotted genre.

If you’d like a way more in-depth look, feel free to hit up our preview. We’ll be bringing you more on it in the near future, too, so stay tuned.

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In August of last year, Beeworks Games ported their quirky Nintendo DS adventure title Touch Detective [Free] to the iOS platform. The art style, presentation, and writing in Touch Detective were superb, but the difficult and illogical puzzles really marred the experience. As such, we thought it was just ok in our review.

One nice thing, however, was the business model of Touch Detective which gave you the entire 1st chapter of the game for free and let you buy the additional 3 chapters through IAP. The 1st chapter was worth a solid hour or two of gameplay too, more than enough time to determine for yourself if the game’s charm would outweigh its frustrating puzzles.

Today, Beeworks has released the 2007 sequel to the original game called Touch Detective 2 1/2 [Free] into the iOS App Store. It comes with 5 full chapters as opposed to the original’s 4, and there is an exclusive bonus episode for this version with 4 additional chapters centered around the character Funghi.

Touch Detective 2 1/2 uses a similar pay structure to the first game, too. You get a chapter and a half for free with the rest of the game broken up into 3 IAP chapter packs that run $3.99 each, or you can purchase them all at once for $8.99 and save a few bucks.

As a word of caution, the game isn’t compatible with the new iPad just yet. It’s not an iPad native game anyway, but if you were thinking of running it pixel doubled on the new iPad you’ll have to wait for a fix first, which is already in the works. Other than that, though, if you liked the series on the NDS or the first iOS release, there’s really no reason not to download the free chapters and give Touch Detective 2 1/2 a spin.

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The new iPad and its gorgeous high-definition display has been in our lives for over a week. Game developers have had one for the same stretch of time. Undoubtedly, you’re into new iPad, but what about the guys who make the media you consume on it?

Over the last few days, we’ve been asking a smattering of the highest profile iOS developers out there what they think of the new device now that they’ve had the time to use the thing. We’ve also been inquiring about commitment: will these major players support the Retina screen in updates and future releases?

Below is a list of who we’ve been talking to so far and their responses. As you’d suspect, everyone is still excited about the possibilities of the new iPad’s beefier hardware. Also, many updates are on the way.

Halfbrick chief marketing officer, Phil Larsen:

“We’ve had the new iPad and it goes without saying that it rocks. This screen is astonishing and we already have our guys hard at work making sure our current titles are up to speed. Imminent Jetpack Joyride and Fruit Ninja updates will definitely address this. We’ll also be optimizing all of our new games from launch, and with the higher download limits we’ll be getting a bit more funky and adding some extra visual splendor. Barry Steakfries will be looking his best!”

We can't wait to see Om Nom in high resolution.

ZeptoLabs co-Founder and creative director, Semyon Voinov

“New iPad is a great device and we will of course make sure that our current and upcoming games will support it — because their look will benefit from the new high-res screen. There are some challenges from the development side like the increase of the app size and a wider fragmentation of the platform, but those are all manageable.”

Semi-Secret co-Founder Eric Johnson

“The screen on the new iPad is amazing. I use the iPad regularly for reading, and have already taken for granted the clarity of text rendered on the new display. I can’t wait to update our games with updated artwork to take full advantage of the retina display.”

Robot Entertainment lead designer Marcin Szymanski

“Everyone in the office just got the new iPad, and we’re very excited about it. It feels like it will be a transformative experience for many kinds of games, where players will forget that they’re looking at a computer display, but instead feel like they’re looking at a real scene. Robot won’t be immediately developing Hero Academy to the new specs since most of our iPad work was completed before the announcement, but it’s certainly something we’d consider for future development.”

Imangi designer Keith Shepherd

“We love it!  The screen is beautiful, and it’s wicked fast. We’re already working on an iPad Retina optimized version of Temple Run and it looks incredible. The graphics horsepower is fantastic as well. We have Temple Run optimized and running on the new iPad at retina resolution using MSAA and high resolution textures all at 60fps without any hiccups.  Everything is so crisp and sharp that you don’t even notice the screen, it’s like a window into another world –perfect for games and immersive experiences such as Temple Run.”

So, retina updates for Cut the Rope, Temple Run, Fruit Ninja, Jetpack Joyride, and possibly Hero Academy iPad are all coming? Our hearts are about to burst with joy. We’ll keep asking devs what they think, by the way, but it sure feels like everyone just adores the new iPad and can’t wait to do something new with it.

[source]