TouchArcade.ru

I admit without shame that I was a huge Poké-nerd back in Pikachu’s heyday. The explosion of Pokémon’s popularity coincided with my sophomore year of high school, and being nerdy enough to know my cool-kid rep was in the negatives even before I started lugging around a Pokédex with my textbooks, I wore Pokémon t-shirts and evangelized the games and cartoon without a care. I also saw new Pokémon movies on opening night and, surrounded by squirmy kiddles and their irritated parents, broke out in wild applause and cheers when the Nintendo logo appeared on the screen, which prompted all the kids to whoop and holler along with me (and the parents to stare at me with such loathing that I wanted to crawl into the nearest Poke-ball).

There is, however, one immediately noticeable difference between MonTowers ~Legend of Summoners’~ [ Free ] critters and Nintendo’s kid-friendly goldmine. Amid the fantasy- and horror-themed creatures you will amass, you’ll also accumulate anime girls so scantily clad and busty they make Lara Croft look like a teenie bopper who has only just started to blossom. Fortunately, unlike the milky-white flesh of your personal monster-hunting assistant (and what soft, creamy, heaving flesh it is), there is much more to MonTowers than meets the eye.

Like Pokémon, MonTowers is a monster-hunting game where you pit monsters against each other and, ideally, add defeated opponents to your ensemble. Your goal is to clear a series of towers by defeating the monster on each floor and moving up to the next challenge. There’s a cursory story outlined at the start of the adventure, but really, it’s all about climbing monster towers and fighting deadlier and deadlier opponents.

At the beginning of each brawl, you get a chance to attack first by completing a touchscreen minigame. During your attack phase, your monsters automatically step up one by one to deal their damage. Should you botch your first-strike opportunity, the opposing monster gets its licks in before your group. The cycle rinses and repeats until your team or the enemy drops dead.

When you defeat an opponent, they either combust in a flash of light, or shrink into a coin. Earning a monster’s coin adds that monster to your collection. From the moment I received my first coin, I felt that old Poké-compulsion come flooding back–not only the burning desire to “catch em all,” but to form posses made up of different abilities that dominated the competition.

As our forum users can attest, there’s no real rhyme or reason to capturing a monster. Sometimes you’ll bag it, but more often than you’d like, you just won’t. Not to worry; there are other ways to expand your portfolio. As the game unfolds, you’ll learn recipes that reveal monsters you can breed to create new types. When you run out of monsters to hook up, you can spend the tokens you earn from leveling up on Gachamon, a gambling-type minigame where a payment of five tokens cooks up a random monster. Most monsters created through Gachamon are stronger than many of the ones you’ll encounter as you ascend monster towers floor by floor, making it an expensive addiction I was willing to indulge.

To build your team, you unlock monster slots that allow you to beam in monsters from your coin collection. Each monster comes with a summoning cost divided among five colored gems you harvest during the game, and you can use those same gems to buy upgrades. The catch is, you can’t take all your monsters into a fight. Instead you assemble a small squad from your pool of summoned fighters, picking and choosing ones with lots of health, attack power, and special abilities like health regeneration.

As you progress, you’ll eventually have to un-summon older, weaker monsters to fill your finite amount of monster slots with new blood you recruit along the way. Un-summoning a monster frees up its slot, but costs you all the time and gems you spent decking out your monster with enhanced powers.

I actually found myself growing attached to battle-scarred veterans, and it’s a shame that most battles end quickly if you bring in your heaviest hitters, rendering many older monsters obsolete. Ah, progress. You are a cruel mistress. (Although you can reminisce on old times by visiting the gallery, where you can view all your summoned monsters past and present, and in the various stages of undress brought about by any upgrades you purchased for them. Believe me, once you capture and fully upgrade the Nymph and Succubus, you’ll be spending a lot of time “reminiscing” with them.)

As with any collecting game, obsessing over filling every blank spot in your monster collection is the star of the show. A good thing, too, since MonTowers‘ battle system is pretty simplistic. Aside from exercising slight control over who attacks first and pouring healing potions down the throats of injured monsters (lose them in battle and all their upgrades go with them), you mostly just sit back and watch. To be fair, I found the battle system just as complex as it needs to be. The real strategy lies in upgrading your bestiary, building dream teams, watching them annihilate the biggest and baddest the game has to throw at you, taming them, and continuing your journey upward.

Even your strongest team of monster slayers doesn’t stand a chance against the game’s most powerful adversary: Father Time. Similar to other freemium games like Tiny Tower [ Free ], many functions in MonTowers require real-time minutes or hours to complete. Lowly monsters only need a few seconds or minutes to pop up, but more advanced minions will keep you waiting for hours. The upgrade gems you harvest cost one energy apiece, and you replenish one energy every three minutes. Not so long, but to the impatient, waiting is waiting.

You can expedite certain time restrictions depending on the girth of your wallet. Tired of waiting for a summoned monster to warp in or apply researched upgrades? Slip it some tokens and it will appear instantly. Don’t want to wait for your wounded monsters to regenerate one health per second? Feed them potions, but be prepared to spend tokens on more once you run out, as you’ll rely on them in battle once you enter the third tower and beyond.

In many ways, the game’s time restrictions feel designed to make you either watch the clock and wait for assorted activities to wrap up in their own time, or break down and spend money–in-game or real–to get things moving. But, just like with Tiny Tower, the time restrictions never bothered me. There’s usually something to do while your timers tick down. Return to monsters you haven’t captured, take on new foes, consult your recipes to arrange blind dates for two lucky monsters, spend your savings on Gachamon, grind or purchase IAP tokens to instantly finish summons and upgrades–or, God forbid, put the game down and do something else for a while. Maybe gather some friends and LARP MonTowers in the woods or salivate over your sexier acquisitions.

And speaking of sexy (the game asks you to confirm that you’re at least 17 before installing it), the amount of skin it shows is good for a chuckle, but is no more than window dressing designed to attract horny 15-year-olds. Case in point: your female monsters actually remove clothing with every upgrade rather than adding on more for protection. Silly logic. But don’t let MonTowers‘ cheap bids for attention fool you. Look beyond all the thongs and pasties and you’ll find an engaging, if somewhat simplified, monster-hunting experience.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Say what you will about Gameloft, the developer occasionally does a good job of filling the App Store void with iOS versions of console staples. N.O.V.A. 3 [ $6.99 ], the third game in the company’s perennial FPS series is one such title.  Capitalizing on the success of the previous two titles, as well as offering full support for the latest and greatest in Apple hardware, N.O.V.A. 3 offers a great action-packed single player experience complete with some very impressive visuals.

Following the never-ending trials and tribulations of Kal Warden, N.O.V.A. 3 continues the story as Warden is yet again recalled into action, this time to the ruins of San Francisco to aid an old friend. From there, you’ll travel to several more planets, a derelict ship, and even the home planet of the Volterites. I’ll save the spoilers for those of you that care about the story, but suffice to Kal gets tasked with saving the human race (again) from certain doom and will go through humans, Volterites and Judgers alike to accomplish that feat.

You’ll be saving humanity via gameplay that should be largely familiar for genre veterans. Like its predecessor, N.O.V.A. 3 has you exploring a wide variety of locales while battling enemy archetypes and hitting objective-marker based goals that shouldn’t offer much in terms of surprise. Also, you can expect the occasional break from the on-foot battle heroics by piloting Mechs, manning the weaponry on top of AI driven trucks and serving as sniper support for other NPCs. By now, it should be apparent that Gameloft has uncovered the formula for a successful FPS, and while N.O.V.A. 3 doesn’t offer much in terms of revolutionary gameplay, it certainly succeeds in what it does implement.

One interesting inclusion is an in-game store that offers unique weapons and upgrades that takes currency you earn by completing single player levels. It’s nice to see a system that actually provides rewards proportionally to how well you complete a level run. Unfortunately, the inclusion of IAP to bypass said currency collection lessens experience somewhat.

A well-done FPS is in some ways far more reliant on its controls than other genres. Thankfully, N.O.V.A. 3 works within its limitations to provide a competent scheme for a touch screen. The standard dual-stick controls are available, as well as generous use of a swipe gestures for swapping weapons and powers. I was particularly a fan of the gyroscope inclusion, as proper use of that option goes a long way towards making the game’s aiming accurate and fun.

N.O.V.A. 3 plays well on the iPhone, but I found the screen to be a bit cramped compared to the roomy iPad controls. Either way, a host of options such as auto-aim, attempt to help even touch-screen novices blast away with ease. While I imagine there are some folks that will never get used to touchscreen controls for an FPS, the fact remains that N.O.V.A. 3’s control schemes do a decent job of letting you take out baddies and navigate the environments with ease.

By the way, those environments you’ll be traversing across look absolutely gorgeous. N.O.V.A. 3 takes full advantage of the hardware offerings of the iPhone 4S and new iPad, which leads to one of the most visually impressive FPS titles I’ve played on iOS. The textures, weather and visual effects – even the shadows are all well done and simply stunning.

As nice as the game looks on the small scree, N.O.V.A. 3 begs to be played on a new iPad. The larger retina-display of the tablet lets you truly appreciate just how far the visuals have come in the series. The fact that the game manages to look this good while successfully running (for the most part) at a decent framerate is probably the most impressive accomplishment. Granted, there were a few mishaps with the graphics engine, such as a few instances of falling through environments, the occasional slowdown when there’s a lot of action on the screen and the unusually lengthy loading screens (that occasionally make you think the game crashed), but these do little to detract from what is an otherwise impressive visual system.

It would be easy to simply classify N.O.V.A. 3 as impressive eye candy and leave it at that, but Gameloft deserves credit for continuing the trend of creating a well-rounded FPS experience complete with a full story-driven campaign, a plethora of control and gameplay options and a balanced gameplay experience. We sometimes talk about games that possess that certain something that make them ideal for showcasing the might of iOS. I’d argue that, while N.O.V.A. 3 may not necessarily be at the top of that shortlist, it has enough going for it to warrant being close to such a classification.

This is part one of our two-part N.O.V.A. 3 review. In previous N.O.V.A. games, multiplayer played a very large component of how much our community enjoyed the game. With our early review copy, there obviously wasn’t anyone to be found to play with online. As soon as the game is released, and we can spend some quality time with the multiplayer we’ll post a follow-up focusing on the multiplayer aspects of N.O.V.A. 3.

TouchArcade Rating:

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One of the all-time best platformers on iOS would have to be Acne Play’s Pizza Boy [ $1.99 ]. Released back in September of 2010, Pizza Boy absolutely nailed the virtual controls thing on the touchscreen, and almost more importantly they totally got the “feel” right – that is, the weight and movement of your character as he ran and jumped through the world felt perfectly tuned, like a classic 2D Mario game.

We thought Pizza Boy was great when it hit, though it was a bit on the short side, something that was rectified a few months later. Now, after all this time since Pizza Boy’s release, Acne Play, in conjunction with NCSoft, has announced their newest game for iOS and Android called My Little Hero with the following teaser trailer.

The problem with this teaser trailer is, well, that it’s just one big tease. There’s no gameplay shown and we’re really left wondering what kind of game My Little Hero is. I guess that is the point of a teaser, right? At the very least our interest is piqued.

The only other information we’ve been able to glean from our forums is that My Little Hero is an action adventure title and we should be hearing more on the game in the way of screens and videos soon. Given how awesome Pizza Boy is, consider us excited for whatever My Little Hero turns out to be.

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Hello Games’ Joe Danger will be making his debut on mobile in the near future, and it won’t be a port of the Xbox Live Arcade or PSN version of the title. In an interview with Gamasutra, Hello co-founder Sean Murray noted that the upcoming iOS and Android takes on the title will be very platform specific, written from the ground-up for iPhone.

Here’s what Murray had to say about his studio’s approach to controls, iOS in general, and what this new Joe Danger will bring to the table:

I think games that people love on the iPhone have something in common, their controls are made for the device. Swiping in Temple Run, slashing fruit in Fruit Ninja or pulling back a catapult in Angry Birds are controls that are best on a touchscreen. I hate the virtual d-Pad, it never feels right to me. It feels like something that only exists to make porting games easier.

Joe Danger is a game with a lot of depth to the controls. We want to make very much an arcade game on your mobile. You swipe the screen to make Joe wheelie, you nudge him in the air to affect his gravity, you can flick a barrier out of the way, or wrestle with the shark in the shark tank. You have such control that levels that would be impossible on console are much easier on the touchscreen.

Murray expressed that Hello isn’t one percent locked-on to what it’s doing right now. In fact, it’s using the playable build that it’s bringing to PAX East to gather feedback and assess if this is something it still wants to pursue.

We’ll definitely be keeping our all-seeing eye on this, so buckle up.

[via Gamasutra, Thanks Chris!]

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Working with someone else’s baby is hard work, but Mass Effect: Infiltrator isn’t Iron Monkey’s first rodeo with another company’s high-profile IP. Earlier in 2011, it busted out an amazingly true Dead Space experience on iOS. Horror, action, dismemberment: this thing had it all. “Soon,” Iron Monkey will release Infiltrator into the wild, as console fans prepare for the next the huge game in the Mass Effect franchise, Mass Effect 3. We don’t know yet if Infiltrator will feel as pure and focused as Dead Space, but we did get a chance to chat with the game’s design director Jarrad Trudgen to get a better idea.

Consider us stoked.

Oh, Geth. You're always messing things up.

TouchArcade: Could you give us the elevator pitch for Infiltrator? What are you trying to bring to the table here?

Jarrad Trudgen: Mass Effect: Infiltrator is the definitive third-person, cover-based shooter on iOS. We set out to faithfully recreate the look and feel of the Mass Effect universe, with a particular focus on combat, and raise the bar we set with Dead Space iOS for art quality, technical fidelity and touchscreen controls. We put a lot of effort into creating rich, immersive experiences employing the high production values typically associated with console games so sound design is another area where we try to innovate on the platform.

Infiltrator tells an original story with an all new protagonist (voiced by VO legend Jay Anthony Franke who played JC Denton in the original Deus Ex games, no less) that runs parallel to the events of ME3 and offers players a chance to see events from a different perspective. Ultimately, we want to make a game that appeals not just to hardcore Mass Effect fans, but also to anyone who enjoys quality mobile gaming.

Anyone else hate lasers? We hate lasers.

TA: What’s it like working with Mass Effect? We’re sure there’s pressure. Then again, you guys also handled a Dead Space title, which was no small task, surely.

JT: We’ve been incredibly fortunate to work on some high profile franchises in collaboration with very talented studios. It’s always daunting working on an IP that you’re a big personal fan of; there is a huge sense of internal pressure to not screw up as no-one wants to be a blemish on something they love. Luckily, both Visceral and Bioware are great creative partners — they had plenty of time for us and were always supportive and keen to collaborate.

TA: What’s the creative process like when you’re working with someone else’s baby? Do you have bounce builds and ideas back and forth constantly? I’m trying to get a sense of your work flow.

JT: We worked closely with executive producer, Casey Hudson, and Lead Writer, Mac Walters, to establish the high level goals for Infiltrator at the beginning of the project: what features to focus on, the setting, main characters and broad stroke narrative. Those guys are very passionate and hands on about the franchise. Once these defining goals were agreed upon they handed us the reigns and largely left us to fill in the gaps. We’d provide our latest draft of the script and fairly regular builds for feedback and there was always great support channels there for our questions and requests. Teams need to feel empowered to get the best out of them and we’ve been fortunate to build great relationships with IP holders so there is a level of trust to give us freedom within the universes they have created.

Sadly, this series keeps its characters from going full Robocop.

TA: How does your studio’s personal experiences with Mass Effect inform what you’re doing with this project?

JT: Already being a fan of something obviously makes it easier to work on it; you already understand the lore of the IP and hopefully have a good understanding of what makes it tick. However, there are risks too, especially when creating an entry for a radically different platform. You don’t want to just slavishly imitate as what works on console may not work on a touch device. For example, our combat is designed to satisfy in shorter bursts than on console – we employ a slow-mo chaining feature and a ranking system which results in a more arcade style experience that is really replay friendly. Again this ties into our goal to make a game that is deep and satisfying for Mass Effect fans but still accessible to players less familiar with the franchise or genre.

TA: What’s next?

JT: Next up, we’re planning to bring Mass Effect: Infiltrator to Android devices.  We don’t have any specific dates to share quite yet, but Android users can stay tuned for more news from us on that front.

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A shoulder surfer would describe Super Crate Box [$.99] as a mess, a pixelated mash of vivid colors and explosions wrapped in a whirlwind of erratic movement, 8-bit sound, and some decidedly bizarre character design. They’d be right. Super Crate Box is a mess, but it owns its fast-moving arcade chaos, and deftly brings you along for the ride.

You don’t even realize that you embraced it until it’s an hour later and you hate that godforsaken disc launcher with the passion of many angry men. What renders you helpless has a lot to do with its infinite, looping structure and purity of play. This is a minimalist, throwback-style game that wants you to do one thing: capture crates for a high score. The hooks are in its constituent parts, which seamlessly blend into a cacophony of arcade action surrounding this pure purpose of play. It becomes hypnotizing, fast.

Your typical game goes a little something like this: on a flat plane, enemies tumble out of an invisible pipe in the opening of a level, and you, while they fall, capture crates and defeat those enemies with the weapons you pick up from said crates. If an enemy hits the lava pit because you didn’t kill it, it pops back out of the top at double speed and joins the ever-growing conga line of even more brainless enemies.

Avoidance is key, but so is aggression. Each crate contains a new weapon that forces you to strategize distance versus time at the drop of a hat. As you play, you’ll unlock even more weapons, all of which do something completely different and are often devastating. Laser guns, mines, rocket launchers, grenade launchers, the shotgun are just a taste of what’s on the roster. Each has its own special kind of spread and weaknesses. Some even have big negatives, like the disc launcher, which is a single fire gun that has bullets that bounce back at you.

Whatever pacing you’re imagining, multiply that by 11 and you’ll get a sense of the raw madness that is Super Crate Box. One second you’re charging up a laser gun to rid a platform of its occupants, the next you’re dropping down to another level and using a mine in order to put a stop-gap on that side so you have enough free-time to grab a crate on another platform. The frenzy absorbs you, and the raw precision becomes a second nature thing. People say it’s a mess, and it is, but I’m OK with it. I welcome all of it.

As you play, you’ll steadily unlock more guns and more characters to use in the game. It’s your usual incentive program, but where it departs is in the fact that it also rewards failure. If you die 500 times, for example, you’ll unlock Super Meat Boy as a character. Simply gathering crates, no matter how many times you die along the way, is also a valid way to unlock stuff.

I’m surprised by how much I dig the virtual controls; Halfbot and Vlambeer did a heck of a job translating the action to the touchscreen and then making it feel as natural, and as split-second responsive as the game’s PC and Mac counterparts. On iPhone, the two-button UI is a tad too bulky. On iPad, the game feels at home. Regardless, these guys nailed it. This game feels good.

Another place you can play is on the iCade. Currently, the controls have been flip-flopped inadvertently in an update, but when they’re working ideally, they feel great. I think this is the way to play since you get that tactile feedback.

People in general are really responding to Super Crate Box, and our community digs it. I love it. Its high-octane play married with its no-frills, arcade game design that keeps me collecting crates and blasting enemies into delightful little pieces of monster. I’m thinking it’ll grab you, too.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Last week when we learned the classic laser disc arcade game Mad Dog McCree [$4.99] was coming to the App Store, I was stoked. I had fond memories of gunslinging at that giant arcade cabinet as a kid, and figured reliving the experience on my small touch screen device would give me that great shot of nostalgia that I’ve been fortunate enough to encounter often on the App Store. Then I actually fired up the iOS version, and learned once again that nostalgia is a fickle beast.

Mad Dog McCree has not aged well, and I’m not so sure it was ever a very good game to begin with. With a certain part of the video game spectrum always striving for the most realistic visuals possible, and the introduction of disc-based storage in gaming which started becoming prevalent in the late 80s and early 90s, mankind embarked on one of its most hideous inventions of all time – full-motion video games. What could be more real than actual real-life video footage?! It was THE FUTURE.

Unfortunately, the biggest drawback to full-motion video is that it’s extremely linear. Rather than an artificial world which you built from the ground up and could manipulate in an infinite amount of ways, you had to plan ahead for what could happen and then produce those results on film, limiting the level of variety in the game. As such, games like Mad Dog McCree allowed very little player interaction or variation.

My 9 year old me didn’t care about these things, though. All I knew is that I could point a big plastic revolver at cowboy outlaws on a massive screen and they would react to me shooting them. Crazy stuff. That also brings up one major point of contention with the iOS version of Mad Dog McCree – there’s no light gun. This sort of takes away a huge part of the appeal of a game like this, however, I actually found the tap-to-shoot mechanic on the touch screen to work just fine and I didn’t end up feeling like I was missing out by not having a gun peripheral.

As for how well the rest of the game translates, the port itself is very good. The video sequences look good enough, though obviously lightyears away from the high definition visuals we’re all accustomed to nowadays. Aside from the natural old-school look of a 20+ year old title, the menus and interface in the iOS version are really quite ugly. They look especially jagged and blurry on Retina Display devices, and could use a high resolution upgrade. It’s a pretty minor thing, but it sticks out.

Gameplay comes in an original Arcade mode and a new, easier Casual mode. Truthfully, both of them are stupid hard. Mad Dog McCree requires lightning quick reaction times and good memorization of how the levels play out in order to be successful. Enemies can be hard to see in the environment, so tremendous amounts of trial-and-error are necessary to learn the ins and outs of each level. In the iOS version, it’s easy to skip cutscenes and retry sections quickly, and the ability to quit and continue where you left off makes actually completing the game a more realistic endeavor (not to mention, at $1 a pop in the arcades if memory serves me correctly, a whole lot cheaper).

Mad Dog McCree is the product of a FMV era that was light on gameplay and heavy on the “omg look the graphics are actual people!”, but it’s definitely earned its spot in gaming history. The iOS port is really pretty good, and whether or not you should pick it up will ultimately come down to if you actually enjoyed the original game or if you just remember it through the rose-colored glasses of a 9 year old, like me. Strangely, as shallow and frustrating as the game is, I find myself going back to it over and over again. For some reason I really want to see it through, most likely because I never would have been able to as a kid in the arcade.

I don’t think it’s as fun as other iOS laserdisc ports like Road Blaster [$4.99/HD] and Cobra Command [$6.99], but Mad Dog McCree does a solid job at translating the gunslinging action of the arcade original to the touchscreen of iOS. If you’re a fan of the source material, then you should be pretty satisfied with this port.

TouchArcade Rating:

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When it was initially released for DSiWare last year, Shantae: Risky’s Revenge [Free / $2.99 IAP], was an underappreciated gem on a service that most people didn’t bother using. Now, thankfully, the game might find a little more grounding with the wider release on iOS, but as we’ve seen time and time again, platformers are a difficult sale on touchscreens, and Shantae, despite its pedigree, will have to keep up.

The game is a sequel to the Shantae, which was released for the Gameboy Color well into the rein of the Gameboy Advance. It follows the story of the belly-dancing, hair-whipping Shantae, as she seeks out her arch nemesis, Risky Boots, in order to get a magical lamp.

As a game, Shantae takes most of its cues from Castlevania and Metroid, meaning it’s essentially a large, open-world 2D platformer, where gaining certain transformational powers will unlock new areas. You’ll be able to turn into a monkey to scale walls, an elephant to pound rocks or a mermaid to swim underwater. As you discover new powers, you’ll be backtracking and searching out new nooks and crannies to explore. On top of those powers, you’ll also get magic spells, which are purchasable in the main hub town, and performance enhancers, which enable you to attack faster, stronger and more.

Most interesting is its introduction of a somewhat three dimensional plane, where each smaller 2D area has several levels to it — like a stack of papers with levels drawn on them — you’ll bounce forward and backward through each section. It’s too bad they’re not used more throughout as it’s truly the most interesting addition to the genre.

It’s all rather clever and the level design keeps up, which is a good thing, because in general, most Metroidvania games we’ve seen so far have been lacking in their ambition. Unfortunately, you won’t find guides of where to go and the maps in the game are terrible and unhelpful — Shantae is all about exploring and figuring things out for yourself. This is frustrating at points, especially when you’re at a loss for where to go next, but the reward for finding your own way often makes up for it, even if it does make it so you never feel like your properly progressing. Despite its clear influences, it’s not derivative of either of the above games, and mostly forges its own path while maintaining the feeling of a good homage.

Most frustrating is the lack of a quicksave option, and the fact the game has a tenuous relationship with multitasking, working seemingly at random, doesn’t help. I’ve complained about this before with iOS games and you can call me weak for doing so, but when playing on a mobile device, I’d like a quicksave option for when I need to put it down for a moment — even if it’s just one slot, a bookmark to come back to but not exploit. There’s also an option for iCloud saving, but it doesn’t appear to be working at the moment, but thankfully, the IAP of the full game has no problems transferring from device to device.

Visually, the game is hit or miss. It’s weird to say, but the game actually looks better on the lower-resolution DSi screen, because the pixel matching feels more natural. On retina display, the it looks a bit muddy and it isn’t helped by the hideous bright-blue border around everything. It looks even worse on an iPad, like a blown-out tiny image. Despite itself, it still manages to be passable on the quality of the animation alone. WayForward has a way with 2D platformers that few developers can imitate and even through the pixels don’t look quite right, the game itself never feels gaudy or horrible and you’ll quickly get used to it. I don’t think they needed to invest in making everything a higher resolution, but I feel like the emulation of the pixels could have been a little more clear, especially considering the border around the game screen and characters are all converted up.

The sound too, is worth mentioning. Jack Kaufman’s soundtrack is like something pulled straight out Aladdin, with a chip-tuned, Middle-Eastern vibe pushing you along the whole way. The game was created to look and sound in the vein of SNES and Genesis classics and it succeeds in nearly every way.

Unfortunately, it’s still a platformer on iOS and the virtual controls will never have the tuned accuracy of a physical stick. It does feel like the game was loosened up a bit from its DSi counterpart to correct this, although since Nintendo doesn’t allow for downloading older games onto a different device, I can’t redownload the DSiWare version to confirm this. It’s certainly a bit easier than most of the games that inspired it, which is nice considering the controls aren’t as precise as they need to be. For what it’s worth, the virtual stick works as well as it can, but can’t be customized or moved, so if your hands don’t conform to where they’re at, you’re out of luck.

If you don’t have a DSi or 3DS, or you just don’t want to plop down $12 to play on those systems, Shantae: Risky’s Revenge is a solid port, but marred with the same problems we’ve come to expect on iOS. It’s certainly one of the better virtual control schemes and you’ll only occasionally find problems with it, especially when required to jump and attack, but overall, it retains the engaging gameplay from the original.

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It's been about a year since decades-old studio Elite Systems brought their ZX Spectrum: Elite Collection [iPhone, iPad] and the first wave of its retro titles to the App Store. Since then 150 titles have become available through their Spectrum emulator, giving retro fans much old school gaming goodness to play with.

Since then, Elite has been hard at work engineering a completely new system through which to bring an even broader range of retro classic to iOS gamers. I recently had a conversation with Elite co-founder Steve Wilcox who filled me in on some of the titles that are on the way in the coming Elite Collection of 8-bit home computer games, as well as details surrounding their newly completed proprietary technology that went into it. The new system is a facilitator, of sorts, that was designed in such a way as to not incorporate, reference, or in any way rely upon third-party property and that is able to deliver to iOS games that originated on platforms other than just the ZX Spectrum in near-100% original form.

Elite has been busy licensing classics from a wide range of developers and it sounds like iOS gamers are in for a trove of titles to be delivered through the studio's new system. The first stage in the deployment consists of nine games developed across North America, the UK, and Germany.

The launch games of North American origin are:

• Black Magic (the action-adventure, published by Datasoft in 1987)
• M.U.L.E (the seminal multiplayer game from Ozark Softscape, published in 1983)
• Alternate Reality: The City (the first in the cult RPG series, published by Datasoft in 1987)

The launch games from the UK are:

• First Samurai (the platform game, published by Image Works in 1992)
• Uridium (the sci-fi side-scrolling shoot 'em up from Hewson, published in 1986)
• Paradroid (Andrew Breybrook’s puzzle-shooter, published by Hewson in 1985)

The launch games from Germany are:

• Enforcer (the shooter from revered German programmer Manfred Trenz, published by CP Verlag in 1992)
• Bundesliga Manager (the football (soccer) management simulation, developed by Werner Krahe and Jens Onnen, published by Software 2000 in 1989)
• Denaris (the modified Katakis, an R-Type clone, again from Manfred Trenz, published by Rainbow Arts in 1989)

These games will be released as individual iOS applications, three at a time. The first three titles from the list of nine set to arrive in the App Store are Black Magic, First Samurai and Enforcer, which should land by month's end. A great many more titles will follow, and Wilcox tells me that, down the road, game bundles configured as collections will be offered, as well.

On a touchscreen device, controls are, of course, a particular challenge when bringing over games that were written with joysticks and keyboards in mind. And, while in such cases a touchscreen is never a match for physical controls, Elite has done an impressive job with the highly customizable "iDaptive" controls used in their iOS Spectrum offerings (demonstrated in this video). Steve informs me that in the upcoming Elite Collection, the iDaptive controls are brought to the fore and will allow players to heavily customize the control experience.

As a huge fan of the solid, basic gameplay of the classics of old, I've been impressed with Elite's efforts so far with its ZX Spectrum: Elite Collection. This latest news from the quarter-century old studio shows a true commitment to bringing these classics to a new generation of gamers and is an effort I whole-heartedly applaud.

We should have the first wave of games in our hands in just a few days and will share our reactions shortly. Stay tuned.

[source]