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Craneballs Studios, the folks responsible for the popular Blimp [Free/HD] titles and the recent arcade shooter Overkill [Free], are readying a release into the super casual high scoring genre. Called Super Rope, it takes the endless vertical jumping formula and replaces jumping with climbing ropes using a simple swiping gesture that works really well.

The larger aim of Super Rope is to try and appeal to both the casual audience and the dedicated high score chasers. It accomplishes this by offering a few different difficulty levels. On easy, the game moves at a slow enough pace that even a young child can play along just fine, but on the harder settings things start to move quickly and it will require some quick reaction times in order to do well.

I had a chance to try out Super Rope at WWDC this week and quite liked the swiping controls and the rope climbing gameplay:

Super Rope should be launching at the end of June or the first week of July. The game will be free and come with one character and one environment, with 4 additional characters and environments each which can be unlocked by earning stars in the game or via IAP star bundles. The 5 characters in the game will have different special items and abilities, and the plan is to continuously offer new content to unlock down the road following release.

It will also include Game Center integration with at least 80 achievements and leaderboards to compete on. We’ll check out more of Super Rope when it hits the App Store in the coming weeks.

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This WWDC has been an odd event so far, with yesterday thoroughly focused on the keynote WWDC gaming-centric sessions occupying most developers' time. Regardless, we've tracked down a few developers that have given us a look at their upcoming games. The first of which was Imangi Studios, creators of Harbor Master [$1.99 / Free / HD]. There's still a few weeks of worth left to be done on their next title, Temple Run, but we're liking what we've seen so far.

Temple Run is an endless runner, but the catch is that the game is played in a third person chase view which adds some more gameplay elements than just jumping. You tilt to collect coins, and in addition to jumping to avoid things, you also need to swipe to turn as well as slide other obstacles. Check out the incredibly self explanatory video:

As a major fan of the endless running genre as a whole, I like what Imangi has done with Temple Run. They hope to get it released by the end of the month, and of course, it will come with a full array of Game Center leaderboards, achievements, and all that fun stuff.

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Some of my most beloved iOS games are the ones that perfectly fill those little gaps of time while I'm standing in line or waiting for a bus. Bitsize Games' Robo Surf [$0.99] is ideal for that role, with simple one-touch controls and gameplay that fills a few seconds or a few minutes depending on what you need.

At first glance, it looks pretty standard. You control a surfing robot (what else?) traversing a dangerous seascape. You build waves by tapping, pressing and releasing the screen to control your altitude. You keep going until you hit something or crash into the ocean, and then it's game over. There's a slight twist—you collect oil barrels scattered across the sky to build up turbo, which you can use to ignite your robot and fly straight through obstacles and the bosses that pop up every 500 meters—but the game is functionally pretty similar to endless runners and other obstacle dodgers. So why can't I put it down?

Probably because Robo Surf gives me reasons to keep going. I often struggle with high-score plateaus, but that's not a problem here. You unlock a new checkpoint after each boss encounter, and you can start your game from any of them. If the game were just a high-score fest, this would be pretty pointless—the leaderboards record your total travel distance, not your stopping point—but there's a lot more to Robo Surf than your top score.

The achievement system, for example, is my favorite thing about the game. Some developers include Game Center achievements like they're something to mark off a checklist. There often isn't much thought put into the sort of value they'll add. Robo Surf brings them to the forefront. Every so often, you'll be presented with a challenge: surf for 500 meters, maybe, or collect 20 oil barrels in a row. They're the same achievements you could earn at any point, but it feels a lot more satisfying to meet them this way.

Earn enough achievements, and you'll unlock new characters to ride the waves with. The friendly box-headed Robo, your starting bot, can be replaced with characters from three indie PC titles, Walkie Tonky, Iji and Blueberry Garden. The upgrades are purely cosmetic, but having them there as a carrot kept me playing to earn achievements, which in turn encouraged me toward more creative and challenging ways to play. By the time I unlocked all the playable characters, I was utterly hooked.

It helps that Robo Surf looks and sounds great, with engaging art and a cheery retro soundtrack underlying the action. There are lots of goodies to look at, between the cartoony birds, bats and bosses, and the backgrounds that change every few hundred meters. And if you need more to do, you can give the speedy 10 Wave mode a shot. This gives you ten touches to try to earn the best possible score, a short-form challenge that's inspiring some fierce leaderboard competition.

Robo Surf is lighthearted and fun, with enough hooks to turn it from a momentary distraction to one of my new favorites. Our forum users are loving it, too. It's hard for a game to stand out in such a crowded genre, but this one shines. Be sure to give it a look.

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Today, Apple CEO Steve Jobs kicked off the week of the 2011 World Wide Developer Conference here in San Francisco with his keynote presentation that outlined three major technologies the company will soon be rolling out: Mac OS X Lion, iOS 5, and the iCloud service.

Mac OS X Lion

Jobs and company began running through several of the 250 new features that will arrive with the forthcoming major update to Mac OS X, Lion (version 10.7). Among the many advances it will bring are deeper support for multitouch gestures, facilities to allow easy creation and management of fullscreen applications, and the LaunchPad system that makes for easier browsing and launching of apps — all of which bring Mac OS X's look and feel closer that of iOS.

Mac OS X Lion will be available sometime in July, exclusively through the Mac App Store as a 4GB download at a price of $29.99.

iOS 5

Jobs then moved on to iOS 5, beginning with a look at where we are. Since the original iPhone's 2007 debut, over 200 million iOS devices have been sold, in all, 25 million of which are iPads. There are presently 425,000 apps in the App Store, 90,000 of which were designed specifically for the iPad. And, since its debut less than three years ago, 14 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store, generating a total developer payout of over $2.5 billion.

Apple intends to grow those already impressive numbers with the release of iOS 5, a major update to operating system driving the company's mobile devices. This new release will bring over 1,500 new APIs for developers to work with and over 200 new features.

Senior VP of iOS Software Scott Forstall took the stage to detail ten of the more notable features that iOS 5 will bring.

1. Notification Center is a new component of iOS that acts as a central notification hub that can be swiped into view, presenting a list of recent notifications and the ability to jump to the application associated with each. Additionally, notifications will no longer pop disruptively onto the screen, but will appear at the top of the screen, taking the user to the originating app with a tap or fading out entirely if ignored. The iOS lock screen will also display a list of the most recent notifications, with a swipe across each taking you to the originating application.

2. Newsstand gathers the many disparate digital magazines and newspapers available on the App Store into one place and allows easy browsing and purchasing. Chosen items will be downloaded into the News Rack, which features an iBooks-like interface that shows the current front page as the item's icon. Background downloads will allow subscribed items to updated themselves for easy pick-up reading.

3. Twitter support has been integrated into iOS, providing single sign-on (no need to re-enter password every time an app wants to access your Twitter account) and a pop-up Tweet Sheet for applications that support the new components. Those with immediate support include Camera, Photos, Safari, Maps, and Contact, the last of which can pull twitter user photos and import them into iOS contacts to put simplify the task of putting a name with a face.

4. Mobile Safari is the most popular mobile web browser in use today; nearly 2/3 of all mobile browsing is done with it. New to Mobile Safari is Reader, which provides a clean, unified rendering of multi-page stories, generated from RSS information. Reading List is an Instapaper-like system that allows webpages to be saved to a list for later reading. And, finally, tabbed browsing support will allow for easier management of multiple sites at the same time.

5. Reminders is a type of active to-do list system that can setup a "geofence" and trigger reminders based on your geographic location.

6. Camera is getting an update that will bring optional grid lines for better framing, on-device editing like cropping and rotating plus red-eye reduction. The volume up button can also be set to trigger the shutter. Additionally, a camera icon will appear on the lock screen allowing photos to be taken quickly without unlocking the device.

7. Mail under iOS will be enhanced to allow draggable addresses, indentation control, message flagging, full-message search, left / right swipe to / from inbox to message, an integrated dictionary, and support for the newly expanded iOS keyboard that can be slid upwards to split out into two thumboards.

8. "PC Free" changes have been made to iOS to allow it, for the first time, to be fully used without the need to sync to any PC or Mac. Upon first power-on, iOS devices will display a Welcome screen, as opposed to a sync notice. Software updates will now take place over the air via WiFi, and incremental "delta updates" will allow more efficient system updates.

9. Game Center has received several enhancements in this next version of iOS. Forstall indicates that there are over 100,000 game and entertainment titles in the App Store and, in an effort to further iOS as a game platform, Game Center has been expanded include user photos, achievement points, access to friends of friends, friend recommendations, game recommendations from Apple, and game downloads direct to Game Center. A framework for handling the behind-the-scenes back-and-forth needed by turn-based games has been provided as well, to eliminate the need for developers of such titles to handle everything on their own.

It was noted that in just nine months, there are 50 million Game Center users, while Xbox Live currently has about 30 million users after nine years of up-time, as a comparison.

10. iMessage lets iPad users get in on iPhone-style Message app texting. It's 3G and WiFi based, supports rich media, and works on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. The system includes optional delivery and read receipts with messages pushed to all of your devices.

It was also mentioned that iOS 5 will support wireless mirroring of an iPad 2 screen to an Apple TV display, WiFi-based syncing with iTunes, and will bring all of the resources of Mac OS X's Core Image subsystem to iOS developers.

iCloud

The third piece of today's keynote puzzle is iCloud, Apple's long-rumored online data storage / retrieval system that's designed to make life much simpler for users of all Apple devices.

"Some people think a cloud is just a hard disk in the sky," Steve told the crowd. "We think it's way more than that." iCloud stores content (think contacts, calendar, photos, music), with wireless push to all devices. But the kicker is, it's completely integrated with apps. Everything happens automatically, invisibly. "It just works."

iCloud replaces MobileMe and its core apps — Contact, Mail, Calendar — with completely rewritten version made to store data remotely and sync it with all Apple devices, Mac OS X or iOS-based. But those are just three of the nine total apps that make up the iCloud system. The App Store app has been updated to show your full purchase history from any device, with a download from cloud button that allows such apps to be redownloaded on different devices without any additional charge. Moving forward, any app purchased on any device gets pushed out to all other iOS devices. The iBooks app now works in the same fashion, as well.

A Backup application wirelessly backs up all data on an iOS device to the cloud via WiFi — user data, camera roll photos, videos, books, apps, and music. If you purchase a new iPhone to replace an old, all data from the old device will sync down to the new unit.

Documents in the Cloud is Apple's solution to the complex and unnecessary nature of the filesystem on modern systems. As Jobs indicated, it "completes the iOS document storage story." This component of the iCould system allows applications to manage their own documents, syncing them to the cloud and down to all other devices. Support for Documents in the Cloud is already present in the latest versions of Pages, Numbers and Keynote. iCloud developer APIs are forthcoming that will allow storage of full documents as well as simple key value data. Documents in the Cloud supports all iOS devices, Macs, and PCs, too.

Photo Stream brings photos to the cloud. Take a photo on any iOS device or import a photo into iTunes on a Mac and it is automatically moved to the cloud and synced with all other Apple devices, and the Pictures folder on Windows PCs. This allows viewing of your Photo Stream on any iOS device — including the Apple TV — or Mac or PC. Photo Stream photos are all stored permanently on Macs and PCs, with the most recent 1,000 stored on iOS devices. Photos will be stored in the cloud for 30 days, long enough for them to make their way to all of your connected devices.

iTunes in the Cloud brings easy syncing of your music across all devices. Any previously purchased music can be downloaded without additional cost on any Mac, PC, or iOS device. Any future music purchase automatically gets pushed out to all connected devices. For music not purchased through iTunes, but ripped from CD or gathered elsewhere, the iTunes Match service will scan your library and allow you to download tracks that are found, at 256 Kbit AAC quality. Any tracks that were not matched can be uploaded to the cloud for access from any device. The cost for maintaining iTunes Match titles in your iCloud library is $24.99 per year.

MobileMe, which was a $99 per year, subscription service is now dead. iCloud replaces it as a free service that provides all of the aforementioned along with a me.com email address and 5GB of document storage, not counting photos, videos, music, apps, or books.

Developers can download a beta of iOS 5 with iCloud support today, and the system will roll out publicly in the fall.

Apple has placed a video of this morning's complete keynote event online.

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Last week we learned from a tweet by Gameloft that their first title to use the Unreal Engine would be a game called March of Heroes. Unfortunately, the only information on the game was what was contained in those 140 characters or less. Based on the name alone, we felt it safe to assume that March of Heroes would be some sort of military first-person shooter, which isn’t much of a stretch considering that particular genre has flooded the market in recent years.

Today Gameloft has released a proper trailer for March of Heroes and – surprise! – it’s a military themed first-person shooter. Based on some of the visuals in the trailer, it looks like March of Heroes may take place during the Cold War era, similar to last year’s Call of Duty: Black Ops.

The use of the Unreal Engine is definitely a huge upgrade from your typical Gameloft game, as their regular in-house engine has really started to become dated. I’m looking forward to seeing some more from March of Heroes, and seeing how this week is E3, I’m sure we’ll be getting tons of new information about this and other Gameloft titles. No release date or price has been set for March of Heroes, but we’ll bring you any news as we get it, and you can check out our forums for discussion of the game.

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Will Wright, the visionary behind The Sims franchise and the creator of Spore, is getting back into games design with his new studio, Super Fun Club. At E3, Wright revealed that this new title, which is ‘likely’ to hit tablets, smartphones, and Facebook according to UK news site Eurogamer, is based on science fiction author Bruce Sterling’s “Maneki Neko.”

"He describes a karmic computer that's keeping a balance of payments between different people, and causing them to interact with each other in interesting ways to improve their lives even though they're strangers," Wright told Eurogamer in an interview. "They earn karmic points that are redeemed by having somebody else help them."

The game doesn’t have a name yet, but it should be out within a year. Wright said as much on the record, kinda, as he explained his thoughts on how the conventional development model is morphing into one that demands quick production as opposed to slow, two-year cycles.

The Maneki Neko is a Japanese sculpture of a cat with its paw raised to the air. In the short story of the same name, this gesture is some sort of sign of a secretive AI-based gift economy. Talk about a wild premise for a game, right?

Wright is an inventive guy with a lot of off-the-wall game ideas and thoughts — this one included. It’ll be neat to see him on phones and tablets since these are part of a handful of platforms that allow for this next level type of craziness without significant financial repercussions. I’m excited to see what he can do, too.

[Via Eurogamer]

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In this week’s episode of The TouchArcade Show, we discuss my favorite topic: me. We also take the time to jaw about a bunch of delightful new games and other topics ranging from the use of Discover card in courthouses to serious stuff like the pointlessness of geo-centric MMO games in the US and Gameloft’s Unreal Engine announcement.

Give us a listen just below with your favorite streaming-capable device, or hey, click the subscribe button on our podcast on iTunes. Provided plans move forward, we’ll be on the Zune Marketplace soon, too, so get ready people.

Now, for the show notes and a special message to our first-rate podcast responders:

GAMES

• Cargo Bridge [99¢ / Lite]
• MecaPix
• Monster Hunter: Dynamic Hunting
• Shadow Cities
• Tiny Tower
• Velocispider
• X-Men

DISCUSSION

• 'March of Heroes' To Be Gameloft's First Unreal Game
• We Spend Some Time With 'Shadow Cities' And Think It Has Some Promise
• E3 And WWDC '11 Predictions [Psst, we'll be at both!]

SPECIAL NOTE: Big thanks to all of you who sent us an e-mail or a tweet this week. If you'd like to get in touch with us and, possibly, get name-dropped on the air hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, or at our podcast e-mail, podcast@toucharcade.com.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show

Music credit: 'Castlevania 2010,' a remix by Benjamin Briggs.

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Alright, this is nuts.

Little Big Planet 2 was released for the PS3 in early 2011, and much like the original Little Big Planet, came loaded with an extensive custom level creation suite. These custom levels are available for download online, and while some of them are fairly creative, I haven't seen anything like this:

If you've got a PS3, Little Big Planet 2, and PSN happens to be up, you can download this LBP2 custom level by searching for either "Tilt to Live", or just searching by the name of its creator, "MRcheese911". Alternatively, you could just download Tilt to Live on the App Store. It's an absolutely fantastic game that we loved in our review that has only gotten better with updates.

Anyway, I've got to go pick my jaw up off the floor. I didn't even know it was possible to make custom levels like this.

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OnLive for iPad has been a long time coming. Worse, news of it has slowed to a trickle since the release of the dodgy “viewer” app [Free]. Yet on the eve of the biggest game show around, things are changing. Earlier this afternoon, Engadget busted out a preview for a new universal micro controller for the service — a controller that is said to work with all OnLive enabled devices, which of course, also means the iPad.

This is the coolest innovation we’ve seen on the OnLive front since getting our hands on an E3 2009 demo of the actual service on an iPad. That experience, however, was kind of a wash — Eli was using a jacked version of touch software and noted that it didn't really jive with him, so a controller is definitely a welcome sight. Plus, OnLive's games weren’t designed with touch in mind, so a controller is a necessary… well, it’s not exactly evil, but a controller certainly go against the grain.

Engadget notes that it was using OnLive and the controller via an HTC Flyer, and for what it’s worth, the pairing worked well with little lag. That’s neat, right? At E3 we hope to get our hands on a build of the iPad iteration of the software with a controller and we’ll be sure to let you know how that goes.

[Via Engadget]

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We've had our pepperoni-greased thumbs all over Tiny Tower since the start of a beta last month. Nissa did a fabulous hands-on preview not long ago, but this recent trailer actually shows the game in motion which should really whet the appetite of any NimbleBit fan:

In the same vein of Pocket Frogs, Tiny Tower is a free to play game that is balanced in a way that you don't really ever hit those annoying pay walls where you have two choices: Close the game, or fork over some cash. I've been having a great time with the beta, and if all goes as planned, Tiny Tower should be available on the App Store in late June or early July.

For more details on the game, check out the thread in our upcoming games forum.

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