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Rovio Mobile is setting its phasers to "tease" this week. After the release of a Halloween-themed video suggesting a new bird or something would be coming to Angry Birds Seasons [$.99 / Free / HD], it has released an equally suggestive image of what looks to be a new bird on its Facebook page. "The Angry Birds have a big surprise for you," the photo posting exclaims, somehow. "Can you guess what it is," it asks, just before it also tasks users with sharing the photo with their friends in order to unlock more hints.

Yes, this is the picture. It's really big.

It's not just us who think a new bird is on the way — the posting is brimming with fans who agree that a new character is coming. But before we jump off speculation cliff with our safe bet, we should note that it's totally possible a new enemy-type or pig could happen, too, in any iteration of the stupid-popular game. Sure, it's unlikely considering the Halloween tease, but hey, crazier things have happened. Like the self-flushing toilet. Who saw that coming? The answer is no-one, I think. Except the dude who invented it. Good dude, I bet. Probably a little messy.

Anyway, one of the Earth's most popular franchises might be receiving a new character. I'm guessing you're already grumbling in the comments column, but as an FYI here: a lot of people really care about this stuff and it's not like Angry Birds is a bad game. It's pretty fun.

[Via App Advice, Pocket Gamer]

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There’s just something about word games that make you feel like you’re accomplishing something in your free time. You’re not simply killing time; you’re expanding your very mind. Perhaps this is why games like Text Twist and What’s My Word have gone down in the annals (uh, it's a real word, which you would know if you played more word games, you pervert) of my favorite apps of all time. And just when I had given up hope of finding another worthy addition to that club, Spuzzle, Inc.’s Word vs Word [$.99] has earned its way onto the list. Felicitations all around!

I’m not going to sugarcoat it – this game is going to frustrate you. But if you’re like me/into punishment, you’re going to love it. It’s not only because the words are particularly challenging (finally, another chance to use that SAT dictionary!), but because this is really a logic game disguised as a word game. Words With Friends this ain’t.

Every time I try to describe this game to my friends, they end up with puzzled looks, but I will attempt to convey how it works anyway. (I’m just cool like that.) Basically, you have to figure out a secret word in the least amount of guesses. You can play easy (3- or 4-letter words), medium (5- or 6-letter), or hard (7- or 8-letter). The game gives you two keypads. The first is where you enter your guesses; the second keeps track of which letters are valid and which letters have been eliminated.

Let’s say the secret word is ‘cat,’ and you guess ‘tug.’ The game would tell you that you got one letter correct. As you can see, it won’t tell you if you have the order of the letters correct, adding to the challenge. From there, you need to determine which of the letters was correct, so you might guess ‘get.’ At that point, it would confirm again that one letter was correct, so you could eliminate the ‘u’ and ‘g’ of your first guess. It goes on from there until you solve the puzzle or give up.

You can play the game either solo or multiplayer. In multiplayer, you can create matches with your friends or let the game match you up with somebody online. In either case, you pick a secret word for them to guess, and they do the same for you. You take turns guessing until one of you figures out the other’s word and wins the game.

The issue with multiplayer (as in pretty much every other turn-based game) is that taking turns is, well, incredibly dull. Sometimes your partner will not respond for hours (or, uh, ever) so if you’re looking for fast-paced, action-packed wordplay you are probably going to want to have several games going at once, or play solo.

Oh, solo mode! Maybe it is a testament to my loser loner-ness but I prefer solo mode to all others. In solo mode, the game picks the secret word, and there’s no incentive to solve the word in the least amount of guesses (but I have my pride, OK?). That last part is important to note, because sometimes this game is going to throw the most ridiculous words at you, and it’s going to sandwich them in between rounds of elementary school vocabulary words.

Seriously, the game gave me ‘hay’ and ‘eon’ then busted out ‘mEq’ on me. Game, that is not even a word, it’s an abbreviation! What would Scrabble have to say about this?! I thought maybe it was just a fluke, but then after ‘rails’ it gave me ‘haem.’ HAEM. “A complex red organic pigment containing iron and other atoms to which oxygen binds.” I am beginning to suspect that this is all part of an elaborate ploy by my high school chemistry teacher. This is punishment for turning in all those assignments late, isn’t it?

The almost-comically varied nature of the secret words it picks for you really helps keep the game challenging. There are some elements that need work (what, so ‘fart’ isn’t in the game’s dictionary but ‘barf’ will win the round?) but honestly, those elements are minimal. If you’re a fan of word games or logic problems, this is well worth the download, and the fact that it has a well-developed multiplayer system really puts it over-the-top. Serendipitous endeavors, friends!

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Ah piracy. Forget the days of violence, scurvy and the constant threat of hanging. We're talking about the freedom of the high seas, questionable fashion choices and incredibly anachronistic language, savvy? Plunder and the open ocean, that's the pirate's life for me.

Powder Monkeys [$0.99] goes blessedly light on the pirate-speak, but otherwise it's the perfect pirating experience. You can travel the seas, hunt down rivals, capture towns, plunder to your heart's content and dress up your ever-more ludicrous ship. And you can do it all as a, erm, monkey.

To be fair, Powder Monkeys has a surprisingly thorough back story that delves into the reasons your captain and crew are monkeys and not people. I would have accepted "because monkeys are cute" as sufficient cause, but you won't have to settle for such shoddy explanations here.

Monkey business aside, Powder Monkeys does an excellent job of dishing up the feeling of freedom that goes so well with playing pirates. The bugs have wronged monkey-kind and you're on a mission to hunt them down, but you can get to that at your own pace. The rest of the time you can sail your ship around, tapping from a bird's-eye view, wandering, fighting and plundering at will.

Or, should I say, mostly at will. It's a dangerous world in this game, and everyone you encounter is up for a fight. Ship-to-ship battles play a bit like handling four games of rock-paper-scissors at once. You have four cannons, as does your enemy. To load them, you select your ammo and tap on your cannon of choice (this works best if you play with both hands). The ammo loads, fires, and either hits the enemy ship if the path is open or smashes against opposing ammo if not. That's where the RPS feel comes in: your ammo can miss the enemy's shots entirely, they can collide and both be spent, or they can collide and one can be defeated. It all depends on their relative strength.

That's also where the RPS analogy starts to fall apart. There are around 40 types of ammo available to be unlocked. Figuring out what's best against what gets really complicated, and unless you want to grind you'll often struggle to have enough silver to keep your supplies of even the most basic ammo up. Of course, there's always the siren song of IAP to help smooth those struggles… but you can certainly do without.

Powder Monkeys also boasts a robust leveling system. You get experience for fights, plunder and missions, and as you level you unlock new ammo and new parts for your ship. Most are largely cosmetic, but better and stronger cannons are available periodically.

In between spells of fooling around on the openish ocean, you can take on the missions that make up the game's story and a slew of random side quests. Many of these involve revealing a map, plundering everything in sight and then defeating an enemy, but there's some variety to be had. Simple stealth and escort missions, timed mazes and other gimmicks pad out the experience.

There are a few oddities that interfere with the entertainment, but they're largely little things. You can surrender any fight without penalty, sapping a bit of the stress of being surrounded by foes. It's far too easy to switch to the powerup selection pane when tapping the bottom cannon, something that could easily be fixed. As you level, fights start to seriously burn more (or more powerful) ammo. And the game can get extremely grindy if you want to experiment with lots of different ammo types and don't feel like putting down more cash.

Otherwise, I've been downright delighted with Powder Monkeys. It's huge, varied, and lots of fun. If you have ever had a hankering for the high seas, this is a good place to start. Anchors aweigh!

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Don’t count out the possibility of a handset version of Botanicula. In a chat with Pocket Gamer, Czech dev Amanita Design said it was at least considering the idea of bringing the mind-meltingly gorgeous point-and-click “exploration game” to phones. Fleshing that comment out, it cautioned that Botanicula for phones is “still just an idea and we need to carry out a few experiments before we can talk about it seriously.”

Botanicula was revealed earlier this month and is currently slated for a release at some point in early 2012 across the PC and Macintosh. Its premise goes a little something like this: five bug-like friends go on a journey to “save the last seed from their home tree which is infested by evil parasites” and, apparently, spiders.

"Mind-meltingly gorgeous" is probably an understatement on my part, by the way. Botanicula is… just, wow. We sincerely hope a touch version will prove viable for the studio.

[Via Pocket Gamer]

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Super Cyclone [99¢] is a challenging 2D dual-stick shooter released by Miniclip.com and UK-based developers PlayerThree.  It involves shooting aliens, dodging and blasting asteroids, collecting pick-ups and trying to stay alive long enough to protect the star-gates from waves of alien attack.

Whereas most dual-stick shooters occur within a rectangular playing area, the space battles in Super Cyclone are set within a circular zone. In the center of the playing area is a star-gate. The invading aliens want to breach the star-gate, to gain access to our planetary system. You're on patrol to ensure that doesn't happen, by shooting them all down. If any enemy-spawning alien nests enter the star-gate, it's game-over.

The main controls are a standard dual-stick shooter configuration, with the left stick used for navigation and the right stick for 360 degree firing. There's a button for launching missiles and another for weapon selection. A couple of users in our discussion forum found the navigation controls "twitchy", but personally I had no problems making the ship move and fire where I wanted.

When you destroy an alien craft, a yellow "heart" appears for collection (although it doesn't actually resemble a heart). These increase your score multiplier and are converted to coins once the level is completed, so grab them quickly before they disappear. If you don't collect the hearts, you'll have absolutely no chance of reaching the difficult scores required to achieve a three-star level score.

You can double tap (and hold) the right stick to make your ship spin around rapidly, like a …super cyclone. In this mode your ship can destroy enemies and attract any floating pick-ups or yellow "hearts" in the vicinity. The cyclone feature also causes overheating, as shown on a "cyclone meter", so if you spin too long your ship explodes, depleting one of your three lives.

Your craft is protected by a shield system, which weakens with each attack or collision. To restore the shields power you need to find a quiet area and stop shooting briefly. This forces a quick change of pace, which is a nice interlude from the often frantic and crowded battles.

Your ship is also equipped with a radar system, which displays small icons around your craft, which are color coded to represent different enemy types, pick-ups, or appearing enemy nests. The direction to your star-gate is also shown, to keep you orientated. Asteroids don't show up on the radar, so you need to stay alert to dodge or shoot incoming hunks of space-rock. If you shoot asteroids, they break into smaller pieces, as in the classic Asteroids game.

The enemies evolve as you progress, learning new behaviors and acquiring new technology (such as stealth technology, so they don't appear on the radar), making them harder to beat in later levels. Some enemies become more aggressive as you progress, while others turn cautious, but more deadly.  One example of enemy evolution is that the alien nests gain the ability to fire weapons in 360-degrees, in addition to spawning multiple aliens to chase you around. There's reportedly 24 different enemy evolutions of behavior in total (not to be confused with 24 different enemy ships, which there's not).

The star-gate starts to spin when it's about to release a special pick-up item. This might be a new type of weapon and ammunition, such as a barrage of heat seeking missiles or rapid fire. You need to grab any pick-up's quickly before they float off into space.

You can purchase weapons and ammo-packs in an in-game store, using money earned by collecting yellow hearts or via in-app purchases (which are not necessary).  Your default weapon is a plasma cannon, but you can also buy or pick-up heat seeking missiles which cause splash damage, pulsar shots with fast and wide spread, or ION bolts with extra range. The store includes some "coming soon" slots, which the developers plan to fill with additional weapons, new ships, and possibly a wing-man.

There's four sectors to play, each with seven levels, making 28 levels in total. Each time you clear a level by surviving the waves of attack, the next level is unlocked. By the time you reach sector B, things are frantic and several enemies will be swarming around you. Fortunately, this game is level-based, so you're not starting from the very beginning each time.

Although Facebook integration is provided, they haven't included Game Center leaderboards, which is unusual for a points-based shoot'em-up which already has Game Center achievements. Also, they seem to have forgotten a Game Center achievement for completing sector D. However, the developer advises leaderboards will be added in a coming update and in the meantime the best scores are being recorded.

The current version has a few teething problems. It erratically freezes when the pause menu is accessed and achievements are sometimes awarded more than once, but the developer is releasing fixes for both of these issues. Also, the tutorial pages flick by automatically and there's no option to replay it, unless you erase the game data and re-start from scratch. The pick-up items have labels which are too small and disappear quickly, leaving you wondering what you picked up. And lastly, a vague  "Achievement achieved" message appears when you satisfy a Game Center achievement, but it doesn't say which achievement. These notifications overlap the left stick and appear inconveniently under your fingers, so the message is partially obscured.

Super Cyclone has some fun ideas, such as the star-gates and alien nests, which ensure the gameplay is more interesting than simply shooting enemies endlessly. This game is available on the Miniclip website so you can try it in your computer browser for free; although rest assured it handles much better on our touch screens.

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On the heels of the pyrotechnic announcement for Infinity Blade 2, Chair Entertainment has dropped another content update for the original Infinity Blade [$5.99]. Content Pack #4, as it’s been oh-so-cleverly dubbed, gives you new rings, swords, helmets, and shields to level up and use against its brand new enemy the “RookBane.” Chair describes the ‘Bane as “fierce and deadly,” which kinda calls into question the character of the game’s other monsters. I mean, what are these guys, chopped liver?

If you’re one of the two or three people who are really into Infinity Blade’s lore, know that this update also packs in a “sneak peek” at the game’s book, "Infinity Blade: Awakening." The whole thing is available right now, actually, on the App Store for $2.99.

That's not a RookBane, btw.

A small little side-note here, but it appears as if Infinity Blade 2 will launch with its share of new equipment and items in addition to the pre-existing stuff in Infinity Blade. I’m not sure if this applies to new items added in updates, but if it does, this update rolls in a lot of content that you’ll see again this December.

[Via TUAW]

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In this week’s bonus edition of The TouchArcade Show, we Eli and I chat with Luke Schneider of Radiangames about his upcoming arcade-inspired title Super Crossfire. We also discuss a lot of other fun stuff, including his next project, what inspired him to leave Volition and do his own thing as an indie developer, and how his experience informs his current work. This week’s opening is, probably, the craziest we’ve ever done, but I assure you that the chat is all business —- for the most part.

So, hey, you’d like to listen to this and don’t know what to do. I got your back, bro. Just click a link below and start streaming or downloading. And, hey, if you want to grab all of our episodes the second they’re available on the Internet, feel free to subscribe to us on iTunes and Zune. All the cool kids do it.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
Zune Marketplace: TouchArcade.com Podcasts
RSS Feed: The TouchArcade Show
Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-Bonus-019.mp3, 18MB

We’ll be back with you later this week for another regularly scheduled episode of the show. I strongly urge all of you to toss us e-mails in the meanwhile: podcast@toucharcade.com

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Chair Entertainment’s Infinity Blade 2 will be a lot more than a facelift. From our side of the aisle, it appears as though the team is attempting to widen the scope and breadth of the original experience, all the while giving players something they didn’t have a lot of in the first game: choice. In a must-read interview with IGN UK, Chair co-founder and technical dude Geremy Mustard revealed that the game will launch with over 100 new weapons and items, boast a significantly larger world with more intricately constructed environments, feature way more enemies and optional side-paths, and it’ll roll out with fun battle additions like, say, dual- and two-handed fighting styles and weapons.

"The player will explore many different environments in this game," Mustard told IGN. "You'll see some stuff that looks familiar, but the castle in this game is very different. We'll also be exploring environments in a more Asian-themed landscape."

“With each environment, we wanted to create these water cooler moments — these areas where players can look back and converse about that battle that took place in front of that huge tower or by that really cool clock,” he continued. "There's always something in the environment that will keep your focus and lead you through the level."

We got our first look at Infinity Blade 2’s December-bound feature set at Apple’s press event the other afternoon and came away ridiculously impressed with the technical majesty. Can this game come any faster, please? Pretty please with sugar on top?

[Via IGN]

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Developer ustwo™ doesn’t really consider themselves game developers, though they have dabbled with their series of “DOT” games, most recently DOT5URBO [Free]. No, most of their success and notoriety is from their utility and entertainment apps, and their extremely well-received interactive children’s app Nursery Rhymes with StoryTime [$3.99].

However, they’re preparing to jump head first into the world of games with their upcoming Whale Trail. A take on the endless cave flyer genre, Whale Trail gets the base mechanics of this type of game just right. You play as Willow the Whale, trying to escape an evil underwater monster who has invaded your ocean home. You realize that a magical whale trail gives you the power to float into the sky and escape his grasp.

This whale trail is fueled by the colorful bubbles that are spread across the randomly generated play field. Your trail is constantly decreasing, so in order to keep afloat in the air you’ll need to collect these bubbles to keep the whale trail chugging along. Mixing things up are the ability to do a loop-de-loop, small turbo whirlwinds that can shoot you along and allow access to higher elevations, and spikey items which will give you temporary invincibility when enough have been collected. Invincibility from what, you ask? From the evil dark clouds that also litter the landscape, and will cause your whale trail to diminish at an increased rate if you don’t avoid them.

I’ve been playing a preview version of Whale Trail for the past couple of weeks, and so far have really come to adore the game. It doesn’t do anything especially new or crazy in the game mechanics department, though it does have a great “feel” and tugs at you to give it just one more go to increase your high score.

Where Whale Trail sets itself apart from the packs of similar titles is in its stunning visuals. The entire world is a brightly colored, almost psychedelic collection of crazy graphics and sounds. It’s as if The Beatles’ movie Yellow Submarine decided to morph into a video game starring a cute whale. There’s even a catchy folk-rock theme song about Willow the Whale humming along in the background, completing the hippie vibe. No ‘shrooms necessary. Check out the newly released trailer for Whale Trail to see what I mean:

Whale Trail is currently slated for an October 20th release date, and before then there may even be a few new features that sneak in as ustwo™ continues to tweak the game. I’m impressed with it already, and feel like it has the solid gameplay chops to keep you coming back as well as the aural and visual splendor to sink its hooks into you on an emotional level, Tiny Wings [99¢] style. We’ll definitely be giving the final version of Whale Trail a flight through the sky (with diamonds) when it launches later this month, and until then you can drop by our forums for discussion of the game.

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This past week we posted a preview of the first three games set to hit the App Store, marking the launch of the Elite Collection of 8-bit home computer games from noted and long-running studio Elite Systems. The games have just gone live and are available in both iPhone and iPad "HD" versions.

The initial Elite Collection titles that have arrived are Datasoft's 1987 magical platformer Black Magic, Image Works' lovely 1992 release First Samurai, and the frantic 1992 space shooter Enforcer from Manfred Trenz. Every one of these titles is very well implemented in iOS and is among the top tier of games to be found on the 8-bit platforms of decades past.

The the Elite Collection is Elite Systems' initiative to expand on their ongoing retro rebirth efforts and bring a host of classics of old to iOS — those that originated on platforms beyond the ZX Spectrum, which was their initial source platform. For more details on these titles (including videos), see our preview.

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