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Firemint has been teasing their upcoming line-drawing-centric cheese-stealing stealth game Agent Squeak for quite some time now. The vague release date of "2011" has since transformed into the slightly less vague "summer 2011" and the game has a new name. SPY mouse is going to be Firemint's third "big game", and has been in development for two years

Give the teaser trailer a look:

I've seen the game a few different stages of its development at various conventions, and regardless what they're calling it, I think people will love it. The real question is, will it be the next Flight Control?

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I remember when I first heard about Elite Beat Agents, and how completely ridiculous the whole concept sounded of me tapping on the screen of my Nintendo DS in time with a song to make my three agents assist people in need via a masterfully choreographed dance. But, if you've played it, you know full well that the game is incredible, and still worth dusting off the ol' DS to play once in a while. I'm hopeful for similar things from Pixel Punch's Rice&Shine.

Rhythm games work well on iOS devices, but I've always found myself quickly getting bored of games that just have you tapping on colored dots without any over-arching goal beyond your high score or any potential unlockables. Rice&Shine adds an additional layer to this in that your rhythmic taps are actually translated to ninja-centric sword fighting. It remains to be seen how much of an effect all this ninja business has on gameplay, but I'm really hoping there's some depth to it beyond eye candy.

Anyway, check out the trailer:

Details are rather vague right now, limited to little more than this trailer and an ambiguous "coming soon." Needless to say, we're going to keep a close eye on this one.

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Secret Sauce's QuBIT [$0.99] is a great game I'm glad to have discovered. The development team is an offshoot of Ideaworks Game Studio, best known for quietly bringing other companies' intellectual property to the small screen with games like Call of Duty: Zombies [$4.99] . Given how well this, their first foray into original games, works, I'm already eager to see what they'll bring us next.

That's not to say QuBIT is flawless. I've seen high-score racers that have slicker graphics and fewer problems. But this one does three things very well: it expertly combines racing with color-matching elements, it offers up a high-score chase that's worth mastering, and it brings in a pounding electronic soundtrack that makes the whole package feel more compelling than it has any right to feel.  Let's just say my interest is piqued.

You control a mining robot sent to collect obscurium, brightly colored crystal deposits that form on an alien world. These can be collected by smashing headfirst into them while you go on your merry way, but you can't just collect everything you see. You're expected to collect the ones that match the colors of your QuBs, the colored blocks that orbit the robot. If your QuBs are red and yellow, you need to collect a red crystal and a yellow crystal, triggering a combo and allowing you to move on. Anything else will interrupt your combo and weaken your robot. As you smash through crystals, the wave meter fills up, and when it reaches the top, you'll get a new, harder set of QuBs to match. Fail to make a combo for too long, and your robot runs out of energy and is unceremoniously extracted.

Because the entire game is built around these QuB combos, you'll find a lot of room to improve from your early forays into obscurium collection. Early on, you might be satisfying just reaching a certain wave before losing your robot. From there, you can try to complete all the waves, and then to get perfect combos in every bonus section. You can go even deeper to master boost timing and the use of plasma rails. Your successes don't only show up on the Game Center leaderboard, they're also quite visceral – you move faster as you do better, and the music builds up to stronger beats. Make sure your headphones are plugged in for this one.

There are three control methods to choose from: tilt, directional buttons and a left or right slider. Tilt is the default, and surprisingly it's also the most comfortable control method. Usually I'm not a fan of tilt controls for racers, but it works here. And frankly, the other controls aren't great. The directional buttons feel oddly stilted, and the sliders are too touchy – even at lower sensitivities. There's also no Retina support, and the game is currently only playable on iOS 4.3 or higher. Thankfully, an update has been submitted to drop that requirement down to 4.2.6, and Secret Sauce is working to build in support for second-gen devices.

QuBIT doesn't come loaded with game modes, and it would be nice to see more added in the future. That said, there's something to be said for a game that does one thing and does it well. The competition for high scores is intense, both on the leaderboards and in our forums. There are also achievements to earn. But while I'll sometimes return to a game just to watch my score rise or to see those achievement pop-ups, QuBIT makes me want to improve my skills – and it leaves me feeling well rewarded when I do.

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Cavorite [$1.99]  by Cascadia Games is another entry in the puzzle-platformer section of the App Store, only this time, the game takes place on the moon. The story goes like this: Back in 1898, a funky substance named 'Cavorite' was discovered, which could shield against gravity. The professor who discovered it built a spaceship, sprayed it with cavorite and ventured into space, to become the first man on the moon.  Unfortunately, a bunch of green bug-eyed aliens, known as 'Selenites', emerged from underground. They abducted the professor and dragged his spaceship into caverns below the lunar surface.  Luckily, the professor has escaped, but he now must repair his spacecraft, to escape the moon. The game is inspired by the H.G.Wells novel The First Men in the Moon, written in 1901. How's that for retro?

As a platform game, Cavorite has plenty of stationary and moving platforms and conveyer belts to jump between, lava and spike-pits to avoid, lazer beams to block or deactivate, doors to unlock and assorted alien enemies to jump or defeat. There's three varieties of alien to watch out for: 'Guard Selenites' are aggressive and carry spears, 'thieving Selenites' are kleptomaniacs who steal your ships parts if they reach them first, while 'pusher Selenites' move any crates in their path, which may either help or hinder. My favorites are the deadly moon-beetles, which crawl around platforms and inflict instant death if touched.  The enemies can be killed by crushing with crates which turns them into green goop, forcing them into spikes or pushing them into molten lava.

While the title is solid as a platform game, It's the puzzle-solving and level-design where this game really shines. There are crates which must be pushed, dropped or even flown into position, to complete each level.  The professor is armed with a cavorite gun which causes objects or enemies to float.  You can spray cavorite on an object to make it rise, perhaps to activate a button above or to drop on an alien's head once the effects of cavorite wear off. You can also make a crate float, then grab hold of it, to be pulled into the air. Once air-bound, you can maneuver the floating crate (and yourself) left or right. This is a useful way to reach higher platforms, to transport crates to other parts of the screen, to activate buttons or to block lazer beams. The puzzles make you stop and think, as you often need to plan your strategy for completing the level. Things are moving around on the screen, so sometimes you need to act quickly before your exit is blocked or a thieving alien steals a part required to repair your ship.

Cavorite delivers plenty of gameplay in three chapters (63 levels). Each chapter features a different pixel-art landscape and it's own boss battle. Gold or silver stars are awarded for each level, based on time taken. If you get stuck, a level can be skipped after a few unsuccessful attempts. There's even Game Center achievements and an online leader-board for fastest game-completion times–  Screenshot grabbing and tweeting are built in. The developer knows all the puzzles and can beat his own game in 24 minutes and 9 seconds, which is an insane time for hard core gamers to beat. For most of us, the game will provide hours of gameplay, which is probably why the music got stuck in my head, in a good way.

The App Store is a smorgasbord of awesome games, so it's easy to jump from title to title, having a wee taste of each. But a nibble of Cavorite isn't enough, for the puzzles are enticing, without being too difficult, so you'll want to keep playing until you escape the moon. The well-designed puzzles and ability to float objects, all within a physics-based platforming game, with retro pixel-art and a nod to H.G Wells, is a winning combination.

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Prose With Bros [$1.99 / Free], the interactive sentence-building game that challenges you and friends to construct the dirtiest things that comes to mind, now has 100 new words. Evil Laugh Games reckons that the title now has around 2,000 as of this free update. Let us all hope that the words “snowball,” “camel,” and “gorilla” have made the final cut.

Words, while as crucial as they are to the experience, aren’t the only things added to the latest build. Evil Laugh on its Facebook page mentions that “various” tweaks and fixes have been included or addressed. The richest tweak we’ve spotted so far is the 24-down-to-12 hour voting time reduction, which should make games a lot snappier. Evil Laugh says it's open to dropping that time even lower moving forward and now you also have the option to cancel out of games hung up on other players' moves.

In a prior update, Retina display visuals were added, as well as capitalization and punctuation, and Twitter support.

Prose With Bros might not be a household name yet, but it’s getting the kind of attention that it needs to be a serious contender. We checked out the title back in April, so give that write-up a look if the asking price of $0-with-ads seems too rich.

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One of our favorite releases from earlier this year was The Blocks Cometh [99¢] from developer Halfbot. This Flash game to iOS port had you controlling one of several characters who must dodge and stay on top of the endless stream of blocks inexplicably falling from the sky. The goal was to get as high into the air as possible while avoiding getting crushed by a falling block, and each of the 5 available characters had their own unique attributes such as special jumps or weaponry to destroy blocks with.

With its great pixel art, rocking chiptunes, and frantic gameplay, we had no problems recommending The Blocks Cometh in our review from February. As great as the game was though, there were still a few issues. Our major complaint was the difficulty, and it seemed that no matter how large our own Brad Nicholson’s muscles grew, he just couldn’t do very well in the game. There was also a substantial group of people in our forums and elsewhere who were calling for a landscape mode, since playing The Blocks Cometh in portrait was a pretty cramped experience.

In the just released 1.5 update to the game, Halfbot looks to remedy both of these major complaints, while at the same time adding in a whole bunch of other cool things to boot. Addressing the difficulty is the new Casual mode, which features slower moving blocks and the ability to get squished by blocks 3 times before it causes a game over. In addition to Casual mode, there is now an Arcade mode as well which gives you the benefit of the extra lives but the blocks move at regular speed.

The next big feature in this update is the ability to play in landscape mode at any time simply by turning your device. Landscape mode causes the screen to shrink considerably so as not to cut off any of the same area you would have in portrait mode, but it still remains large enough to play easily and there are nice borders on the sides for the virtual buttons to sit. Landscape definitely offers up a way more comfortable way to play the game. If I had to nitpick something it would be that none of the screens outside the actual gameplay are landscape friendly, but this is an extremely minor annoyance.

Another of the big changes is the addition of an in-game store with two 99¢ in-app purchase options. The first will unlock all 8 additional playable characters in the game, which includes the 4 new ones added in this latest update. Every character can be unlocked normally just by achieving certain goals in the game, but if you’re not patient enough for that sort of thing then the option is there to spend a buck and get them all at once.

The second IAP is much more interesting. It’s actually a whole new mode called GameBot which gives you a retro Game Boy inspired version of the game. GameBot can only be played in landscape mode, and the outside edges of the screen are mocked up to look like a classic portable system. Gameplay is essentially the same, though it does have a slightly different feel to it and you aren’t able to choose a character. But something about it is just a lot of fun, especially if you ever owned an old handheld like the Game Boy.

The remainder of the update contains 30 Game Center achievements as well as general bug fixes and optimizations. Also, all 4 of the modes that are in the game now each have their own Game Center leaderboard to climb. If you picked up The Blocks Cometh before but couldn’t hang with playing in portrait mode or thought it was too difficult, you should definitely give the updated version another spin. If you’ve been enjoying The Blocks Cometh since the beginning, then there are plenty of goodies in this latest update to keep you further entertained as well.

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Ticket to Ride [$6.99] is a tremendous board game-to-digital game translation. It looks and feels authentic and boasts a wide range of features. It’s a sharp title through and through, but it was missing a couple of things at launch, namely a pass-and-play option. That has since been added. Developer Days of Wonder hit us up about the game’s most recent patch, which adds the aforementioned mode for up to four friends or a mix of friends and AI. It even hides your cards when you pass the device, which is a super-smart design decision.

More was added in this update, though all take a backseat to pass-and-play. You can now mute voices if you don’t want to hear them, as well as skip some animations. The buttons in the game’s silly “Central Station” now have names so you know what you’re clicking on, and hey, if you’re colorbind, “better support” has been added in. Finally, there’s been an update to the netcode for people with crappier connections. Most notably, if you drop out of a match, there’s now an option to do a quick recovery and jump back into action.

That’s a lot stuff addressed and there’s still more. If you’re interested in learning all, hit up the game’s full patch notes at this iTunes link.

Ticket To Ride is easily one of the better board games turned digital, and this update only strengthens its position. If you’d like a more critical dissection of the title look no futher than our review. Spoiler: it’s glowing.

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Earlier this month, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that Cowboy Rodeo, who lovingly ported the classic Amiga titles Pinball Dreams [$4.99/Lite] and Pinball Fantasies [$5.99] to iOS, were getting set to release a brand new version of Pinball Dreams that was fully remade with 3D graphics. Just a few days ago that game, known as Pinball Dreams HD [$4.99], arrived in the App Store.

I was sort of confused as to why they would decide to remake the game seemingly out of the blue, but according to the developer they had been getting requests for iPad versions of their games ever since the iPad’s release last year. But redrawing the old graphics to suit the new screen size and resolution would have been too large of an undertaking, so they started toying around with the idea of building the tables in 3D to solve those problems. After being happy with the results, they took the project full steam ahead.

Now, two and a half years after the first iOS release and nearly twenty years after the original Amiga release, Pinball Dreams HD breathes modern life into a retro classic. Purists tend to get up in arms when people go fiddling around with their classic games, but before you go blasting hatred over your IRC channel or start calling for Cowboy Rodeo's head over the Usenet boards, you should know that Pinball Dreams HD uses the exact same gameplay code as the original iOS version. And, in practice, it plays nearly identical to how you remember it. It also features all the original music and sound effects.

Although I’m not an original fan of the game from back in the Amiga days, I did fall in love with Pinball Dreams back in ’09 on the iPhone, and it pleases me as well to see the game’s integrity retained. It actually feels pretty surreal to be playing Pinball Dreams HD with fancy 3D graphics in your face but sweet retro sounds hitting your ears. It feels like I’ve entered some sort of bizarro time warp, but I’m loving every minute of it.

One thing to note is that because the game is in 3D, there is a dynamic camera that follows the ball around the table. It’s not quite as dramatic as the camera in Gameprom's pinball games like War Pinball [99¢/HD], so if you’re prone to nausea from those then you’re probably still safe with Pinball Dreams HD. But the lack of any kind of camera options is annoying, especially the absence of a single overhead shot of the table.

Thankfully this should be rectified with the first update to the game which Cowboy Rodeo has said in our forums will include additional camera options as well as a few other minor fixes. They’ve also pretty much confirmed that Pinball Fantasies will be getting this same HD treatment down the line too, and that Pinball Dreams HD will be hitting the Mac App Store soon. I am definitely looking forward to both of those.

One of our forum members has recorded this extremely lengthy video of Pinball Dreams HD so you can see what it's like in action:

If you’re a fan of the original Pinball Dreams, whether on the Amiga or on iOS, then don’t be scared of checking out Pinball Dreams HD. The game still plays and feels like it always has, but now it looks fantastic in high resolution on the iPad and Retina Display devices. If you’re new to the Pinball Dreams world, then know that you’re getting 4 extremely well designed tables and one of the best digital representations of pinball ever released. It’s not a very realistic pinball simulation, but in 1992 it was the pinnacle of video game pinball and that has held up incredibly well over the years.

Pinball Dreams HD is an excellent example of how to modernize a classic while still remaining true to its roots, and it’s one that pinball fans shouldn’t hesitate to pick up.

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Trendy Entertainment, creators of Dungeon Defenders [$2.99] on iOS, are currently working on a project tentatively titled Afterlife: Ground Zero. The game will be a survival-horror third-person shooter, and should contain some sort of cooperative gameplay. I use the word “should” because at this moment the Afterlife project is still in the very early stages, and nothing about the game has really been finalized.

Over this past weekend, an internal gameplay video of Afterlife was accidentally uploaded publicly to the vastness of the YouTube interwebs, and it didn’t take long for members in our forums to take notice of the video and post it for all to see. The problem is, the video wasn’t meant for public consumption, and was really only meant as a tech demo to show off internally.

Well, you can’t fight the power of the internet, and instead of running around and trying to eradicate every version of the video that gets uploaded Trendy decided to just recapture the same footage in a higher quality and release it publicly. Keep in mind, this video is mostly just a tech demo running on an iPad 2 using the Unreal Engine, and many things can and will change before a final release:

One thing worth pointing out is that the virtual controls are definitely placeholder, and were whipped up quickly just for the purposes of this demo. Other than that, though, Afterlife looks pretty astounding. As was stated, the game is VERY early and will likely evolve quite a bit as it continues development, but this demo video shows a ton of promise. You can follow along with the discussion in our forums and we’ll definitely have more news on Afterlife: Ground Zero just as soon as it’s available.

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If you hang around TouchArcade pretty often, chances are you’ve heard us sing the praises of Bug Heroes [Free]. This dual-stick shooter features elements of tower defense along with a huge cast of characters, fantastic graphics, and tons of play modes. It’s easily among our favorites in the dual-stick genre.

Bug Heroes developer Foursaken Media is looking to branch out with this successful brand, and announced back in May that they were working on Bug Heroes Quest, a full fledged action/adventure/RPG featuring the characters and world of the original Bug Heroes. It sounds like a pretty great idea to me, and today they’ve released the first trailer which shows Bug Heroes Quest in action:

The story-driven campaign will feature the original 3 characters from Bug Heroes and will contain more than 50 missions. The developer has said that the environments in Bug Heroes Quest are as much as 4 times the size of the biggest maps in Bug Heroes, some of which are pretty large. You’ll be able to level up your characters and adorn them with tons of weapons, items, and equipment, and then take them into a survival arena to battle it out for a spot on the Game Center leaderboards.

With this video, Bug Heroes Quest is basically complete and is just going through the final play testing period. Foursaken is planning on submitting the game any day now, and hopefully it will release shortly thereafter. You can find additional screens and tons more info in the thread in our forums, and we’ll be waiting with bated breath to get our hands on the final version of Bug Heroes Quest soon. You can check out the original Bug Heroes for free with the link below, which I'd highly recommend doing if you are a fan of excellent games.

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