TouchArcade.ru

We’re fans of huge numbers, if you didn’t know. Last week, actually, we shared news of Jetpack Joyride’s latest downloads. Since going free, the title has wrangled in around 13 million consumers. That’s a lot, right? Check this, though: Imangi’s Temple Run [Free] just hit 36 million downloads. That’s more downloads than there are people in Canada, or uh, roughly 35.9 million more blocks than my Church of Brad has in our Minecraft server.

Temple Run ended up going free late in its cycle, too, and has enjoyed the spotlight of being the App Store’s number one game thanks to the constant support that it receives. It was also pseudo-cloned, but Apple fixed that issue fairly fast as we all expected it would.

Anyway, if you’re not one of these 36 million people, you should probably give Temple Run a look. To quote our review:

Corners are something you see a lot of in Temple Run. The game eschews the more traditional one-button jumping control of most runners for a swiping method that still allows for one-handed play . You can swipe up to jump, down to slide, and left or right to turn.

This control setup is risky — it’s much easier to mess up a swipe than a tap — but it works. Though the world is randomly generated, the addition of twists, turns and crossroads makes it feel more organic, like more of an adventure.

[Via @nattylux]

[source]

It’s possible that Team Meat is just trolling us at this point, but it seems like it is genuinely married to the idea of bringing an actual game to mobile. In its latest burst of tweets, the two man outfit announced that it’s working on some kind of Super Meat Boy “prototype” set for release across “touch devices.”

Before you get too excited about the whole Super Meat Boy connection, do take note that this isn’t a port. “It will be a re-envisioning of Super Meat Boy remade from scratch for touch,” the studio said, and it won’t use any art or “gameplay” from the title.

A couple of tweets later, Team Meat stated that it’s doing SMB for mobile because it welcomes the challenge of a touch game. Also, it isn’t planning to release something that it doesn’t take serious… unless the game ends up sucking.

If that’s the case? Team Meat will proudly walk into the sunset and “act like it never happened and move on to the next idea.”

Team Meat hasn’t ever really ever been all that fond of the App Store. Anyone around for the Zits n’ Giggles drama certainly knows that. But of late, the studio has loosened up. Earlier this January, Team Meat confirmed that its next title would “probably” hit iOS, and well, now we’ve got this news.

We’re huge fans of Team Meat and would love to see its talent actually go into a real, totally playable game on iOS. Here’s to hoping this prototype ends up becoming a game and that we all get to see it this title in the near future.

We know how these guys have felt in the past, though, so prepare for the worst.

[Via Shacknews]

[source]

Here’s a new one: instead of splintering into a billion different independent parts in order to explore the world of iOS, Salt Lake studio Eat Sleep Play is staying (mostly) together as it transitions into mobile and tablet development.

The Salt Lake City Tribune is reporting that after the studio finishes Twisted Metal, it’ll move on to iPad and iPhone development. Eight employees were handed pink slips last week in order to presumably shrink the studio size for the transition, and co-founder David Jaffe is expected to leave as well to pursue a new thing before the studio makes hop.

In a statement, the studio’s other co-founder Scott Campbell said all the right stuff about iPad and iPhone and iPad development, and noted that Eat Sleep Play’s “brand of mechanics-driven gaming” will be a big part of its future offerings.

Jaffe is reportedly set to move into the “casual” market as well, but that’s a point of contention. On Twitter, the God of War creator stated, “The rumors of me making casual games post-Twisted Metal — as many of you define them — are highly exaggerated.” Later this morning he clarified, “… never say never, but I have zero plans to make games like Farmville and Angry Birds.”

“I never said what I was doing post-Twisted Metal, and I’m still on Twisted Metal along with Eat Sleep Play for the next months as we launch it and balance it in real time and make sure it’s a perfect game and continue to support it.”

Pictured: Twisted Metal

“At the same, I will be opening a game studio here in San Diego because I really miss internal game development. Happy to share more details later.”

With that said, we’re not so sure if Jaffe is moving on to iOS, too, but we’re trying to make contact and see exactly what’s up. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Jaffe is continuing to clarify. In a series of tweets, he revealed that he’s talking to people “about some big, huge next-gen game ideas” he’d love for his new studio to make, as well as some stuff in the browser space.

“I have no idea what game we’ll make yet. Could be iPhone, could be next-gen console,” Jaffe said. “Have barely done anything with the new company yet.”

[via The Salt Lake City Tribune]

[source]

A few weeks back, Cave announced that their next iOS release would be Dodonpachi Blissful Death, a port of their 2002 Japanese arcade game Dodonpachi Dai Ou Jou. Just in case your brain needs a refresher, take a look at the rather awesome trailer for the game:

Today Cave announced over Twitter that Dodonpachi Blissful Death is set for release this week on February 9th. Of course, due to the magic of time zones, that means late Wednesday for the App Store here in the US. It’ll set you back $4.99, but you’ll need at least 4th generation hardware or an iPad 2 in order to play. Also, look for Dodonpachi Resurrection to be going on sale for somewhere around $5 the weekend following release.

[source]

Did you know that Blackfish Games’s New Orbit [$.99] is cheaper than usual? It is. Since late this past January, the horror sci-fi title has been available at $.99 instead of its usual $2.99. It’s a good price, too: New Orbit is a solid, story-driven game that has some really sharp gravitational / orbital mechanics wrapped up in its Asteroids-inspired, but less frenzied shell.

At $.99, we think you should give it a try. Our users raved about the game after its initial debut, and still seemed high on it even after finishing. Check out what they had to say before making a purchase, or hey, watch this teaser trailer:

[Via @SteveStreza]

[source]

We’ve had our eye on Tweet Land [$1.99] from Why Ideas ever since we spotted it as a curious Kickstarter project back in April of last year. The project was more than sufficiently funded, and last month we were treated to a new trailer and news that Tweet Land would be hitting at the end of January. As expected, earlier this week the game finally went live in the App Store.

Tweet Land was intriguing due to its unique real-time usage of tweets drawn from Twitter that would trigger elements into the game. It reaches out into the vast ocean of Twitter and utilizes special keywords from real tweets to create things in the game. It’s a fantastic idea in theory, and Why Ideas did pull it off on a functional level just as they had promised. However, despite being really innovative, Tweet Land doesn’t hold up as well in the gameplay department, and there were a couple of unintended side effects of using live tweets that left a sour taste in my mouth.

First, let’s talk about the kind of gameplay that’s in Tweet Land. You control a car heading down the highway (Route 140 no less) and you must make it to the finish line while dodging tweet-driven hazards and other traffic on the road. You can veer into the other cars from the side to knock them off the road and score some points, and ramming multiple cars off the road at once will multiply the points you earn. If you hit cars from behind or run into road hazards, you lose a bit of life, which is represented by the visual damage on your car.

I really like Tweet Land’s retro style, and there is a lot of humor and personality in its pixel art visuals (though it’s kind of blurry on my iPhone 4S). But things start to fall apart when you actually start playing. The controls are very slippery, and it’s hard to be precise when trying to properly ram other cars or avoid hitting hazards. With practice you can get used to it, but it’s still really annoying when you’re trying to quickly react to something and the controls don’t afford you the kind of finesse that you need to get it done.

I think when you have games that are built on top of a very simple core gameplay concept, you have to get all the little details right. That’s why games like Jetpack Joyride or Angry Birds are often imitated but rarely duplicated. as they get the feel of the controls and the movement in the game so right. If you’re going to be doing the same action over and over again, you want that action to be fun. While Tweet Land has its share of fun moments, something about it just feels off, like it’s missing something but I can’t pinpoint what.

The game is broken into two environments with 12 levels each, with a spot for a third environment that’s said to be coming soon. With each new level, new tweet-driven elements are introduced and added to the current ones, so as you keep going the variety of things that can happen increases quite a bit. An example of a hazard would be if someone tweets the word “meteor” then a meteor will fly in from off screen and you’ll have to use the position of its shadow in order to avoid being crushed. There are helpful things that can be triggered in the game too, like health packs or a temporary spread shot for your vehicle.

One problem with the progression in Tweet Land is that it gets rather hard rather quickly, and if you get stuck on a level there’s no moving forward until you beat it. This got pretty frustrating since many of the times that I died it felt like it wasn’t actually my fault. When elements are brought in from Twitter, they are accompanied by a label with the Twitter handle of whoever tweeted that keyword. This is neat, but leads to an incredibly cluttered and distracting screen, especially when there are multiple things happening at once. Coupled with the floaty controls and the speed at which things are zooming by, and the odds are stacked against you.

Arrows indicate where things will be coming in from off screen, but they’re hard to notice amongst the busyness on the screen and often aren’t very helpful. Add in the fact that there’s usually a ton of traffic on the road with you, and making it to the finish line intact can require a healthy dose of luck just as much as skill. The levels tend to be a bit longish, and nothing is worse than seeing your cheap demise when you’re within a stone’s throw of the finish. The more I failed a level over and over, the less I felt compelled to go back and conquer it.

However, my biggest issue with Tweet Land is something that I didn’t really expect: the tweets that the game draws from can be much too somber for what is supposed to be a fun and lighthearted game. For example, if someone tweets about a “car crash” then cars will zoom in from offscreen and wreck into some of the other traffic on the road. When your run ends, you have the option of looking at a list of all the tweets that were used to bring things into the game.

To my horror, I found that in this particular instance “car crash” was pulled from a huge retweet campaign trying to raise money for a girl who had lost her parents in a car crash in Florida. I know Tweet Land has no way of telling the difference, but I couldn’t help but feel crass for playing a game that was fueled by somebody else’s tragedy. With some of the other keywords used in the game – like tsunami, terrorist, and death – I have no doubt that encountering a downer situation like that will occur often.

While I do still think the idea behind Tweet Land is incredibly clever, I just find the game too fundamentally flawed to be enjoyable. Don’t get me wrong, I want to like it and I did find myself having fun with the game at times, but those fun times are quickly diminished when you realize your game is possibly being powered by the tragic tweets of strangers. Beyond that, the gameplay is too average to warrant dealing with cheap deaths and an unpredictable difficulty.

With some tweaks to the controls and interface, and perhaps some sort of filter for what kind of keywords are utilized, then Tweet Land could end up being something pretty special. It feels like it’s just a couple notches off of being something great, and I hope it gets there someday. As it is now, though, it’s hard to recommend the game except to those who might be curious to check out its novel use of Twitter or are prepared to deal with its shortcomings.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

Kotaku is reporting that Crytek, the company behind the CryEngine technology and the Crysis series of visually high-end first-person shooters, is in advanced stages of a new social gaming network that they’re calling GFACE. Yes, GFACE. I’m as baffled as you about the name, “game+Facebook” maybe?

Anyway, what the service known as GFACE actually claims to do sounds pretty cool. It runs completely in the browser and lets you do all the sorts of social things you would expect from your Facebook, Google+ or Twitter – add friends, post about your interests, discover new people, and plenty more. You can also meet up with people online and enjoy media-type things together, sort of like how you can watch a movie with friends in an Xbox Live party.

And of course, you can partner up and play games together. But this is the surprising part – all the game’s are streamed from the cloud on GFACE’s end, similar to how the OnLive system works. There’s a drag and drop party creation system that Kotaku likens to Battlefield 3‘s Battlelog, and then everybody plugs into the game on GFACE’s servers from their individual locations.

The interesting bit is that the type of gameplay seems to scale depending on what device you’re using. Like the graphic above, someone can be playing a first-person shooter on their PC while other players are connected to the game via their mobile devices, but with secondary roles. The person on the iPad has a commander role from a top-down perspective and the person on the iPhone-lookalike is directing a support weapon.

It’s a pretty exciting prospect thinking about being able to play games with people online in this fashion, utilizing different devices and gameplay perspectives all in the same game. I need another social network like I need a hole in my head, but the other features of GFACE sound pretty interesting as well. That name, though. Yeesh.

You can see a video of GFACE in action at the original Kotaku article or the GFACE website. The UI is bananas, everything is so smooth and high-tech feeling. I’m actually eager to check it out. Right now GFACE is in closed beta, but whenever it finally launches it will be interesting to see if it’s able to make an impact in the fledgling streaming game market or the nearly-impossible-to-compete-in social network market.

[Via Kotaku]

[source]

The bonus is back, dudes! On this week’s special edition of the TouchArcade Show, Eli and I sit back in our e-chairs with Team Eufloria’s Rudolf Kremers in order to discuss Eufloria and the imminent iPad port. We also explore Kremers’ work history, his creative motivation, and the future of Eufloria, Team Eufloria, and Omni Labs. We learned a lot, and we’re guessing you will, too.

If you’d like to give this episode a listen, doing so is easy: just hit up one of the handy links below or, hey, subscribe to our podcast feed on iTunes or Zune. The latter is the easiest way to get our episodes the second they’re released.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-Bonus-030.mp3, 19MB

Our extensive hands-on preview of Eufloria is coming this Wednesday, by the way, and all that noise I made in our discussion seems to be pretty warranted. Also, after Kremers gave me a big pat on the back for pronouncing his name right, I ended up messing it up a total of three times throughout the show. My bad, my man!

Look out for another TouchArcade Show this coming Friday and another awesome bonus show next week. You won’t want to miss either of these.

[source]

Check this: footage of Oceanhorn, the Cornfox & Brothers adventure game joint that seems to resemble the best Zelda ever in both style and tone, is now available. We’ve embedded the video just below for your viewing pleasure and aren’t worried in the slightest that it will be pulled despite being labeled as a “secret” video. This is a PR stunt for a title that made waves when first announced, and hasn’t seen substantial coverage since.

We’re not complaining, by the way. We want to see more and realize that Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas could be a big deal when it hits later this 2012. Not only is it fascinatingly gorgeous, but it’s also mechanically and functionally inspired by Zelda. The world desperately needs more of these kinds of games, and if these cats can pull it off, a lot of people are going to be very happy.

Also, in entirely unrelated but sort of related news: If you’re into Wind Waker, check out this fan-made imaginary Wii U sequel trailer that just hit YouTube and is blowing up all over Twitter. Bananas!

[source]

A couple of weeks back we told you that Cave was readying a release of Dodonpachi Blissful Death for iOS, a port of the Japanese shooter Dodonpachi Dai Ou Jou and the fourth game in the Donpachi series of bullet hell shmups. Over the weekend, Cave released the first promo trailer for Blissful Death on iOS.

It sounds like Dodonpachi Blissful Death will follow the formula of their Bug Princess [$4.99/Lite] iOS port in that it will forgo a retooled Smartphone mode and will only have the arcade version of the game. It’s too bad, as I really enjoy the Smartphone modes in their previous iOS games, but it’s also not surprising given their recent poor sales results. It could be that they just can’t dump as many resources into iOS ports anymore.

The upside to that was that Bug Princess came in at a lower price than their other iOS shooters, but Cave has yet to release any pricing info for Blissful Death, or a firm release date beyond just February. Also, you’ll need at least 4th generation hardware or an iPad 2 for the game, and Cave is being a bit cheeky on Twitter regarding whether the game will be Universal or not. We’ll let you know if any more information surfaces, and you can bet we’ll be all over Dodonpachi Blissful Death when it launches next month.

[source]