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Zombie Wonderland 2: Outta Time! [99¢] has everything a good zombie game needs: guns, girls, guts, green goo and a generous amount of cleaning equipment. Oh, come on. Don’t raise that eyebrow at me. You know it’s true. Every good shoot-out tends to leave an inevitable mess and Zombie Wonderland 2, unlike so many of its peers, is not afraid to acknowledge it.

Here, in this goofy little defense/time-management/real-time strategy title, you’ll have the dubious pleasure of playing as the redneck stereotype Chuck. Being the responsible Zombie Cleaner (and someone totally oblivious to the idea of job security) that he is, Chuck will stop at nothing to rid the world of the cannibalistic undead.

As you might have guessed, this isn’t a particularly easy task. You’re going to have to do everything from bringing a vegetarian vampire his lactose-rich treat to protecting pet goldfish in Medieval Japan.

Silly, eh? If that description hasn’t scared you off just yet, this might spell the beginning of a wonderful friendship. Much like the story itself, Zombie Wonderland 2 is a fair bit of mindless fun, the kind that can easily rob you of a few hours of your time. If what you want is a simple, silly hybrid of the aforementioned genres, stop reading and go download it already.

However, if you’re an Apple App Store connoisseur, this may be where you sit down and ponder the direction of your dollar a bit more. Like a serving of fast food, Zombie Wonderland 2 is both satisfying and unfulfilling all at the same time.

Gameplay here is relatively straightforward. Each stage consists of you being told to defend a certain item from zombies for a number of nights. Of course, as a Zombie Cleaner, you’re also going to have to do your best to ensure that there is no unnecessary gunk on the floors at the end of the night, something easier said than done.

To accomplish this, you’re going to have to make use of your trusty shotgun ‘Betsy’, cleaning implements, turrets, wooden planks, unusual bullets and a peculiar assortment of limited-use weapons. Controls are exceedingly simple. To attack a zombie, you touch it with a finger. To board up a window, you tap it with a finger. To summon your infant Death Worm, you – you get the picture.

Sadly, though, it isn’t quite as exciting as it sounds. Your nightly escapades will mostly consist of you boarding up windows and playing ‘whack-a-mole’ with the festering onslaught. Regardless of how many you purchase, you’ll only get access to one turret at a time. One. Uno. Satu.

To make things even worse, your turrets are about as impervious to zombie attacks as cookies are to the Cookie Monster. More often than not, you’ll find yourself attempting to fix it while corralling flaming cadavers. It’s the same with the limited-use weapons and the various bullet types. Sure, you might have a dozen but you’ll ever get to use one variety at a time.

All said and done, however, Zombie Wonderland 2 is still an enjoyable piece of work. The over-the-top silliness and the bright, colorful graphics feel reminiscent of an old Saturday morning cartoon. The game’s just difficult enough to make it challenging and simple enough to engage in without requiring too much of a forethought.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Red Zebra Game’s Raid Leader reminds me a lot of Mika Mobile’s Battleheart [$2.99]. Like that game, it’s a real-time strategy RPG hybrid that seamlessly blends these two styles of play into a series of trying instance-based conflicts. Where the two depart the most dramatically is in the name: raid.

In Raid Leader, you’ll be taking a knight, a mage, and an archer, against a variety of damage-eating, MMO-like bosses that all appear to have special mechanical hooks. For example, there’s a yeti-like monster with a freeze spell that turns its target into a block of ice. In order to break out, you’ll have to tap on the screen. There’s also a worm that, much to the archer and mage’s chagrin, spawns mobs of life-sucking blood leaches all over the battlefield.

Speaking of the battlefield, battle is pretty simple — just click and drag. When you click on a character, you’ll be able to assign actions like healing or attacking to friend or foe. Some monsters have area of effect attacks, and for those, you’ll have to move the party around all over the screen, or figure out intricate formations to lessen the blows. It’s tactical-light, but effective as Battleheart proved.

One noteworthy thing I’ve learned in my time with Raid Leader is that you can’t go into auto-pilot during fights. You can wipe, and wipe pretty fast, if you (a) don’t honor things like blood leaches, (b) keep all of the party alive, and (c) master the game’s skill system, which lets you take two different skills per character into fights.

The latter point is particularly noteworthy: as you progress you’ll earn currency to buy new skills, and those skills will be essential to countering specific bosses actions and battle needs. Skills, then, are more of a mechanical extension of recognition and exploitation, as opposed to being strictly about preference. It’s a neat and entertaining change of pace.

In my preview session, I didn’t push too far into the main campaign — which of course, revolves around a princess and her need for three heroes to defeat a great evil — but I get the sense that balance might be Raid Leader’s biggest hurdle. Hard and fun is great, but hard for the sake of it isn’t. MMOs seem to screw this up all the time, so Red Zebra needs to be extra careful here.

Raid Leader is being published by Crescent Moon Games as a Universal app, and it’s expected to be released “soon.” It’s currently in beta.

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I’ve played a lot of iOS games in my time, and have gone through varying levels of addiction with certain titles. Even so, that usually doesn’t last for too long. I’ve never found my own personal Angry Birds or Tiny Tower. That is, until I picked up Hero Academy [Free] for the first time. Shortly after, I noticed that I was playing a match while cooking, waiting for people to come over, or pretty much any other time I had three free minutes or more at a time. At that point, I identified that I might have found that game that I feel the need to play endlessly. Good news is, all my other friends seem to have the same problem, so that works out for me.

Hero Academy is Robot Entertainment’s first iOS offering, and I think it’s the sign of good things to come. The premise is very basic: You are playing a tactical battle against another team, and the goal is to destroy their crystals before they destroy yours. Each round allows you five moves (”action points”), which you can use to either place team members and items on the board, or move and attack with your preexisting team members.

If you play the free version of the game, the only team available to you is the Council, which is made up of humans and is a well-balanced option. Should you wish, you can unlock the Dark Elves for $0.99, which can summon the spirits of their fallen enemies to aid them in battle.

At the bottom of your screen, you’ll see a selection of five items and characters, which the game randomly deals you each turn. If you don’t like what you got, you can use your finger to drag anything you don’t want over to the tiny door in the bottom left corner. Once your turn is finished, you’ll get new stuff and hopefully get dealt exactly what you were looking for. This selection of items includes spells and weapons to strengthen your characters’ attack and defense abilities so you can survive in the field for longer.

The board itself also includes some options to give you the advantage. In the middle of each board is a tile with a crystal on it, and reaching it will weaken the enemy’s crystal a bit. There are also tiles that have a sword or a shield on them, which will give you a buff to attack or defense. At the end of a turn, you can also choose to submit your turn normally or submit it with a taunt, which is pretty much just to piss your opponent off.

Getting to know your characters and how their skills can be used is vital. For example, the magician can cast a spell that can hit a row of opponents and only spend a single action point on it. Using these types of skills to your advantage will give you the edge needed to keep those fools off your crystals.

Frankly, I’m no fan of waiting around for someone to take a turn. When I first saw that Hero Academy had no single player mode where you could at least play against the computer, I was a bit let down. At first, I only had a few games going with other friends. The key to the fun of Hero Academy really came clear when I got a lot of games going, and that was when I started to feel my skills were improving and I was getting better at it. Considering my moves more carefully and how I could best defend against the way my opponent played was rewarding, and I started to win more matches.

There is one downfall to the game, and that is that the free version is relentless when it comes to in-game ads. Between each match, you’ll see an ad that you have to stare at for five seconds before it disappears and you can play again. If you’re good at ignoring things, you may not mind one bit, but if you’re like me and it bugs the hell out of you, you can buy any heroic team to get rid of the ads, which costs a buck. Only the Dark Elves are available for now, but Robot promises new teams are coming in the near future. You can also spend a bit more to get new avatars if you so desire.

Hero Academy is a simple game, and it does what it’s built to do very, very well. If the content continues to expand and offer more for the fanbase, I could see it being something I would want to come back to over and over again in the future. It also offers access to invite Facebook and Twitter friends to join you right in the menu, so never fear if you don’t have enough games going at a time. Invite everyone you know, and soon enough your phone will be jingling with the notification sound you’ve learned that you’re unable to resist.

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Woody Woodpecker has his own star on the Hollywood walk of fame, his own famous theme song and a distinctive laugh (ha-ha-HA-ha!   Ha-ha-HA-ha!), but old Woody hasn’t had much press coverage in recent years. So he’s trying to make a comeback, with his new iOS game published by Chillingo.

Woody Woodpecker [99¢] is basically Tiny Wings [99¢] turned into a side-scrolling race between five cartoon characters across a curvaceous landscape. And like most Chillingo releases, it’s nicely presented. You choose which of the five characters to race as, with each having their own “vehicle” and special weapon.

You might choose Woody on a skate board launching missiles, Winnie Woodpecker on skis spraying perfume or perhaps Buzz Buzzard on his motorcycle splashing around black oil to slow down the opposition. Each character has slightly different attributes for speed, acceleration and handling, but this doesn’t make much difference, as it’s pretty easy to win races. This game would definitely benefit from more challenging difficulty levels.

The main controls are based on one finger, much like Tiny Wings. You hold your finger down to accelerate while descending and lift your finger when moving up-hill. Buttons are available to activate your character’s special weapon or for speed-boosts, both of which re-charge before re-use.  There are options for left/right hand controls, although strangely, you must display “left hand” for right handed taps.

Two game modes are provided: Single-player race, or online multiplayer via Game Center. The multiplayer mode randomly matches you with one opponent. My first race was Woody versus someone else playing as Woody. Since then it’s been difficult to find a random online opponent (there’s no option to play a specific friend).

The thirty single-player levels are spread across three locations. You start on the golf course, but can unlock the snow-covered slopes of the Arctic and Circus levels by winning races and earning “thumbs-up” awards, which is essentially the 3-star achievement system used in many games. On the golf course, there are sand-traps to slow you down and lightning clouds to shock you. While in the Arctic levels, the characters are given skis. You can switch characters between races as it doesn’t matter which character you use to beat each level.

Scores are based on the number of slides, tricks, mayhem (swooping on non-race characters), time and points gained during the race, all of which contribute to your “thumbs-up” rating. But if you don’t place in the top three, you don’t receive a score. High score leaderboards are provided in both Game Center and Crystal, with a separate leaderboard listed for each of the three race locations. But don’t rely on the on-screen progress indicators to see how you’re doing, as they frequently misreport your position.

Woody Woodpecker is an easy game to enjoy (like Tiny Wings) and has a special nostalgic appeal. However, whereas Tiny Wings had islands to reach and evolving objectives to satisfy, this game has neither. Sure, there’s levels and worlds to unlock and a few Game Center objectives, but the character attributes aren’t upgradable and the wins come too easily. It would be more satisfying if the various characters, means of transport, and weapons were unlocked along the way, rather than all provided from the start. Overall, a good game, but just for a couple of days or for the kids.

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It’s not that Snoticles [$0.99] is a bad game. Not at all – it’s a competent puzzler across the board. It’s just that I’ve grown to expect a lot from games published by Adult Swim. Right or wrong, they blew us all out of the water with Monsters Ate My Condo [$0.99] and Bring Me Sandwiches!! [$0.99] Both have a frenetic sort of madness underlying them, one that seemed like it might just be a trend. The come down since then has been harsh.

Taken on its own merits Snoticles is certainly a solid title, minus a few recent weeks of crash-happy downtime between updates. There are five worlds of physics puzzles to be solved with the excretions of Zit, Dread, Spark and Snot, the titular snoticles. Each has its own abilities that are put to the test in solving puzzles defined by (generally) static blobs that must be destroyed.

Each snoticle has a set number of shots to destroy the on-screen blots. You must carefully aim and fire, sometimes destroying obstacles before you destroy the blots themselves. It’s not completely unfamiliar. But there are no carefully constructed towers to topple, no slingshot to pull. Just the usual things – shooting, a selection of special abilities, a three-star rating system and the goal of complete destruction.

Zit’s shots are the default from which every other shot is drawn. His follow an arc afflicted by gravity and bounce off surfaces. If they hit an Alpha Blot, all other blots around it die. Spark launches fireballs that are unaffected by gravity and fly straight through almost anything in their path. Dread’s shots blow up everything around the first surface they hit. Snot’s particularly grotesque shots cling and can be dropped with an extra tap.

The formula works, but it never gets all that interesting. Every level has more or less a single solution, and most of them are obvious. The only trick is to pull them off with the fewest shots possible. In practice this mostly winds up meaning you’ll retake the same shots in the same order and try not to miss. As the game progresses, more and more blots are shielded and can only be destroyed by one particular snoticle, which only serves to make the correct solution even more obvious.

There are elements that complicate matters – breakable surfaces, moving parts, tunnels and gravity wells and such. Only the last of those adds significant complexity, and that’s only really by making shots much harder to predict. It’s more frustrating than challenging.

There is satisfaction to be found stalking through the levels to hunt down every last blot, don’t get me wrong. It just doesn’t rise above a fairly straightforward premise. There’s an even-keeled wackiness there, but it just doesn’t have much on the outright insanity of some of Adult Swim’s other recent releases.

Here’s what it comes down to: Snoticles is a good game. It’s a fun physics puzzler that provides a mid-tier challenge. But there are so many similar games out there, and this one doesn’t do much at all to set itself apart. If the App Store hasn’t slaked your thirst for aimey-shooty physics games yet, you absolutely won’t go wrong with Snoticles. I just have to wonder if there’s anyone out there that still meets that description.

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Back in October we told you that Namco’s classic 3D arcade fighter SoulCalibur was coming to iOS, and now it looks like we have a release date for the game. According to Andriasang (and noted by Joystiq), Namco Bandai will be releasing the iOS SoulCalibur as a Universal app this coming week on the 19th.

SoulCalibur on iOS will feature 19 different fighters and lots of game modes, including arcade, time attack, survival, extra survival, practice and museum modes. Sadly, there is no sign of team battle mode or any kind of multiplayer mode, which is pretty odd for a fighting game. The lack of online multiplayer isn’t really surprising, but I sure hope we see some sort of local multiplayer option in an update in the future.

But even with the lack of multiplayer, SoulCalibur is an absolute classic that I spent countless hours with on my Dreamcast and I’m really looking forward to playing again on my iPhone and iPad. There will be Game Center support for 3 of the above modes, so there will be somewhat of a competitive aspect. Unfortunately, it looks like at release only owners of 4th generation devices or either version of the iPad will be able to run the game. Hopefully the hardware requirements will be able to be lowered down the line at some point.

We’ll be sure to give SoulCalibur a spin and see how it’s stood the test of time when it hits the App Store this week, and you can check out our forums for further discussion of the game.

[Via Andriasang and Joystiq]

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Absolutely nothing about the first five minutes of Darkness Rush: Saving Princess [$0.99] gave me any reason to think it would be a good game. There’s that mouthful of a title, for one thing. An absolutely incomprehensible story and translation didn’t help, and the Castlevania stylings and scantly clad ladies plastered everywhere just made me nervous. Even the tutorial was off-putting – I mean, seriously, how does it take that long to show us how to use a jump button?

It was a huge surprise when I realized two things: this game is an endless runner, and it’s really, really fun.

There are two caveats to lay out before we go any further. This game is poorly optimized even compared with standard Unreal Engine memory consumption. My freshly restarted 4S experiences unforgivably bad frame rate drops sometimes. Only the newest generations can run the game, and crashes are a big problem if you’re low on memory. Also, the game pushes its in-app purchases pretty hard for a paid title, but there’s only one thing that can’t be earned by playing. Prepare to put down an extra dollar if you want to unlock the under-dressed (but fantastic) Helena as a playable character.

Now to the fun. Darkness Rush follows a pretty typical formula for an endless runner. You run and jump as long as you can while collecting coins. Eventually gravity gets the better of you, and you die. Your score is uploaded to the Game Center leaderboards and then you do it all over again.

Yawn, right? But remember the awesome mission set up from Jetpack Joyride [Free]? You’ve got that to contend with here as well. Each time you play you work toward four different missions that change up whenever you earn one. Completing missions gives you experience, and leveling up earns you a new title to show off in multiplayer.

You can spend the coins you earn on equipment and power ups. Each time you start a new game you’re prompted to buy single-use powerups that give you extra lives or double your income, that sort of thing. They’re totally reasonably priced and can make the game much easier. Equipment is less reasonably priced, and could take hours to grind (or moments to buy with real cash). Here’s the thing, though: equipment isn’t just cosmetic – it can also increase your agility, mana, jump height and speed. Makes it a bit more worth the grind than Barry’s flowery lei, no?

Mana is where the real fun is, taking Darkness Rush from your standard running and jumping affair to something a lot more interesting. As with Stylish Sprint [$0.99], you can attack some of the obstacles in your way, and you can fly. Both those things cost mana, which regenerates very, very slowly. Run dry and you’re pretty much toast. But you also collect gems as you run, and once you have three you can transform into a wolf, bat or angel depending on your character. While you’re transformed you don’t use up mana. You can also take an extra hit, which knocks you back to your human form. Managing transformations adds a whole new level to the game, and it’s the key to getting a good score.

Then there’s multiplayer. It’s not currently a huge selling point, to be frank. Once you make it through the wait for a match (which varies wildly with the game’s relatively small user base) you’re dropped into a foot race against another player. If you die you get set back, so it’s mostly a challenge to see who can die less. Considering the lag and frame rate drops, this gets pretty hilariously bad.

But multiplayer is just icing on an otherwise excellent cake. The terrible translation is due to be fixed, and it sounds like there may be some optimizations coming down the line, too. I sure hope so. As endless runners go, this one is gorgeous, varied and tons of fun, so it deserves to be playable. And if you’re sitting there steaming that all the lovely gothic art has gone to waste as an endless runner, swing by our discussion thread. Rumor has it that LuckySheep will be moving on to something more Castlevania-like next. I can’t wait, but dear lord – let them hire an editor first.

TouchArcade Rating:

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How long do you need to play to have a good time? Windosill [$2.99] is a straight up terrible value proposition if you like serious length from your games. It doesn’t take much longer than 15 minutes to run through and there’s no real replayability. But damned if it isn’t a great 15 minutes while it lasts.

If you take it down to fundamentals, Windosill is a puzzle game about traveling. A toy car drives from room to room. Each is locked, each has to be solved with creative thinking and exploration to open the next. There are only eleven rooms, and they’re over in a snap. Yet whimsy and charm makes it ever so memorable.

This is a port of a Flash game from 2009, but the iPad version feels like it was always meant to be. There was always something tactile about its puzzles; now players can interact with them directly. Multitouch makes a huge difference – not in how the puzzles are solved, but in how they can be played with.

That’s what Windosill is: playful. It’s a game, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s also a toy. Poking around is almost as fun as solving a room. Each room is filled with interactive widgets – boxes to open, lights to turn on, leaves to pull off – and the trick is to find which ones can be used to open the next door. But playing with everything else will reward you with equally delightful results. And every bit of it is eye-candy, designed with a look to surrealists of the past.

Windosill doesn’t get into how to play, so neither will I. Poke around, experiment. That’s all you need to do. There are no awkward controls to deal with – just tap and drag things around, see what they do. And don’t be afraid to experiment.

There is a little value in the iPad version over the Flash game. Once you complete the game, you can turn on two settings: Complex Gravity and See-Thru. The former lets you play with tilt controls, the latter lets you look at the inner-workings of each level. It doesn’t add much, but it’s an extra bit of play. You can also paw through a sketchbook of concept art.

So there you go. Only you can know if you can be satisfied by such a brief encounter. If you can, Windosill is fantastic. It’s gorgeous, playful and feels like it was born to be played on a touch screen. But I wouldn’t blame you if the brevity is just too much. Bigger isn’t better, but Windosill leaves me wanting more, and there isn’t more to come. Delighted or disappointed? Stop by our discussion thread to share.

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To steal a line from Jon Irwin, “The platforming genre, once dominant, has now been relegated to counterprogramming.” Which is to say that the two-dimensional platformer has overtaken, like kudzu, much of the niche and indie landscape that isn’t dominated by games that involve shooting things in the face. For mobile gaming, that idea is more or less maintained  if you swap face-shooting for physics-puzzling or colored-block-sliding. But that kind of reductive generalization doesn’t leave room for nuance, and nuance is exactly what you need to talk about Terra Noctis.

At first blush, Terra Noctis [$.99] seems pretty derivative: the pits are inexplicably endless, the physics are rudimentary, and the enemies — pumped in straight from the Mushroom Kingdom — die if something lands on their heads. Even the narrative introduction seems particularly on the nose: Allen is a nightmare who isn’t scary enough to pass his monster exams. Desperate, he sneaks out of school to find a way to get scarier. The idea is never revisited.

It’s not long before Fire Fruit Forge starts to introduce new mechanics: shooting, power-ups, puzzles, three different types of currency, and a bat named Columbus who guides Allen to secret areas and sometimes, bafflingly, lets him ride around on his back. Unfortunately, these do little to dispel the first impression: some of the mechanics don’t really affect the core platforming, and the ones that do are one-note concepts that don’t add much.

There are three different collectible items that can be spent: blue fairies buy power-ups, red fairies unlock the next hub-world, and golden coins unlock bonus levels. It’s kind of weird that a game about crushing goomba skulls involves so many ways to buy stuff.

I like the idea in theory — collectibles have long been a staple of the genre, and Fire Fruit Forge are right to give Allen’s monetized pixie dust mechanical value. Because these items are hidden throughout each non-linear level, players are ostensibly motivated to explore. This, in turn, introduces a risk-reward element to Terra Noctis‘ points system and OpenFeint leaderboards: player score is based both on speed and collection, and climbing the leaderboards depends on managing both.

There are problems with the system, though. The power-ups add very little to Terra Noctis, and using them never become a regular part of my strategy. This devalues the importance of the blue fairies, which in turn makes collecting them less gratifying. It disrupts the balance of the entire system. Similarly, the red fairies and coins are too easy to find, and the levels they unlock are too cheap: not once was my progress impeded by a lack of funds. In other words, not once was I motivated to explore Terra Noctis in a meaningful way.

The other supplemental mechanics, like shooting and flying, simply aren’t creative enough to keep Terra Noctis moving forward. The first time I shot a bat to complete a puzzle was neat, but the shooting function hasn’t changed since. These things are largely tangential to the running, jumping, and head-stomping, but adding extra mechanics isn’t the same as using them effectively. It doesn’t help that the environments and level design change very rarely, despite there being four different hub-worlds to explore. Visually and mechanically, Terra Noctis is a static place, and the entire experience can tend to feel same-y.

Despite the lack of variety, Terra Noctis is buoyed up by its visual design. You’ll explore the same vague forest and cave designs over and over, but the backgrounds are a nice example of parallax scrolling, and the foreground has a lush, storybook feel to it. The animations are fluid and expressive — I especially like that Columbus, the helper-bat, manages to seem anxious and excitable, even though he’s basically just a set of eyes with wings. There’s an undeniable charm and innocence that runs through every piece of this game.

You’ll also hear the same four or five synthpop tracks during the course of the game, but the Herbie Hancock-esque score — no, seriously — is used judiciously to set the tone for each level.

It doesn’t hurt that Terra Noctis is so fun to play. Even disengaged from the high-level design choices, jumping up and down and stomping purple goombas is a treat, thanks in no small part to the game’s  controls: they’re simply the most sensitive and responsive virtual buttons I’ve encountered to date. They aren’t perfect, though, since the buttons are placed too closely to one another — I often find myself going left when I mean to go right.

(The other systemic bugbear in Terra Noctis is hit detection: Allen’s hitbox seems too big and he often finds himself stuck in a ledge or block. This might lead to a few unwarranted deaths, but the checkpoints are spaced evenly enough that it never becomes a huge issue.)

Still, the level design is generous enough to accommodate those lapses, and the most significant exploration is vertical, not horizontal.  Players sometimes get cut off from areas they mean to explore, but Terra Noctis is usually pretty good about expanding and bottlenecking appropriately. In all but a few exceptions, you can feel free to wander around, comfortable with the knowledge that you will eventually circle around toward the critical path.

Maybe it’s a good thing that Terra Noctis‘ more ambitious designs fall through — there’s a lot of fluff that distracts from the core. As it stands, the game’s fairy-tale premise evokes something akin to coming home for a long weekend. The game’s strengths are found in the understated joy of jumping through space, of seeing some unreachable ledge or platform and guiding Allen to it. Terra Noctis, through its intuitive controls and design, provides simple pleasure. This is comfort gaming — familiar, identifiable, and care-free. I’m ready to spend Martin Luther King Day in my pajamas, guiding Allen through the rest of his quest.  I’m pretty sure I know where he’s heading.

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So, in the madhouse that is CES, I managed to track down the IonAudio booth to get some hands on time with the new iCade Mobile.

The details remain the same as when we previously reported on it. The iCade Mobile will be priced at $79.99 when it launches. It’s got eight buttons, and a d-pad. Like the original iCade, it connects over Bluetooth.

What’s nice about the design is it supports both landscape and portrait modes. The iPhone or iPod Touch sits in a specially designed cradle that can rotate freely.

Of course, one side effect to this design is that it makes the whole device pretty big. You’ll be able to see in the hands on video that it adds a considerable amount of bulkage to your iOS device:

Unsurprisingly, control-wise it felt the same as the iCade. Some people seem to complain of a very slight lag in controls, but as you can see in the video, it’s pretty minimal. To my hands the controls felt nicely spaced out, though I didn’t really get a chance to test out the shoulder buttons in action. As with any of these accessories, it’s hard to imagine lugging one around with you everywhere you go, but the added convenience (over the original iCade) of being able to lean back in your couch is nice.

And here’s an official video from Ion Audio showing people having a hilarious time with it:

You too could look this happy. The device is coming this spring at $79.99.

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