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In this week’s edition of “How Many People Have Downloaded Angry Birds,” we’re proud to share this interesting little fact: Angry Birds has now been downloaded over one billion times. Developer Rovio Mobile announced the stunning download number this morning, but didn’t note specifics as usual. However, because the numbers on previous benchmarks line up, it’s safe to assume this is a combined number of downloads across every iteration of the game and the insane number of platforms they’re available on. Seriously, you can get these games wherever: browser, PSP Minis, your mom’s TV; whatever.

It’s no secret that Rovio is working on some sort of new IP, and the studio gave a “sneak peek” in its celebratory one billion Angry Birds download video, which debuted today, too. Check it out:

As eagle-eyed Jeff Scott over at 148apps points out, the kid at the end of the trailer is none other than Casey from Casey’s Contraptions [ $2.99 (HD)]. Everyone involved so far seems to be being fairly coy with the details, so it remains to be seen whether Rovio is simply publishing a Casey’s sequel, if they’re taking the IP over, or something in between. I suppose we’ll have to just wait and see.

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Despite the majority of the gaming world wishing otherwise, Nintendo seems pretty dead-set in not bringing any of their beloved properties to other platforms. Which means, if you’re standing in line at the bank and get a sudden hankering for some Mario Kart, you’re mostly out of luck if you aren’t sporting Nintendo hardware.

However, video games are an iterative pastime, and Mario Kart is far from the only kart racer around. On the iOS platform, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing [ $1.99 ] is widely considered to be the finest answer to Mario Kart currently available, and we’d tend to agree. It pits a cast of Sega characters against each other in the power-sliding, weapon-laden, arcade-style racing we’ve come to expect from a kart racer, and it does it extremely well.

Throw in fantastic course designs, a full single-player campaign and challenge mode, and both local and online multiplayer options and you have a seriously good kart racer, even with the lack of everyone’s favorite plumber.

Over the weekend, Sonic All-Stars Racing got just that much better with its first significant content update since being released in June of last year. The big ticket items in this update are two brand new characters: Shadow the Hedgehog and Knuckles the Echidna. These are two extremely popular characters from the Sonic universe and are a great inclusion here. In addition to the two new characters there is also a brand new track to race on.

The other big feature in this latest update to Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is native video-out support either wirelessly using AirPlay or through an HDMI hookup. I checked out this feature back at GDC and can say that his game in particular scales up to the TV screen extremely well. Finally, iCloud progress saving has been implemented as well as some UI changes including character faces on the mini-map during single player and Game Center avatars for when playing online.

If you’ve got kart fever on-the-go and don’t have a spare copy of Mario Kart handy, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing should do the trick and is an even better game now thanks to the latest update.

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Any gamer who has been at it for as many years as myself certainly has a shortlist of particular standout favorites that set themselves apart for one reason or another, having indelibly left their mark upon his or her twitchy gamer brain. One such game that can be found on my list / burned into my brain is the Apple II title Wings of Fury, written by Steve Waldo and published by Broderbund in 1987. It’s a side-scrolling, carrier based aerial shooter set in the Pacific during World War II. The mission of the game is to use your Hellcat’s canons, bombs, rockets, and torpedoes to wipe out island installations, enemy ships, and defend your carrier against aerial attacks. It’s a lot of fun and is particularly challenging due to the somewhat realistic flight mechanics and the need to delicately land on the carrier to refuel / rearm.

Others out there who, reading this, fondly recall Wings of Fury (it also made it to the Amiga [video], C64, DOS, etc.) will be pleased to know that a rather well-done iOS remake has been put together by Korean studio Idea Spoon Games and released into the App Store.

Wings of Valor [App Store] is an iPhone title that pretty much captures the experience of the original — it looks like it’s all there, with simple, clean graphics. Of course, for a game like this, the onscreen analog stick is no match for the real-world, analog Apple II joystick with which I piloted my Hellcat in decades past, but the Wings of Valor controls work well enough.

In a chat this afternoon, author JY Kim of Idea Spoon explained that he is a huge fan of the original game and, lamenting the lack of App Store titles of the particular sort, decided seven months ago to bring the game, himself. Kim is a one-man operation and, as such, has rolled everything on his own, including the 2000 images that were drawn to bring the game together, the physics and particle system, and the camera / zoom system. He takes particular pride in the last, which he felt needed to be close to perfect in order to make the game work. He plans to soon bring improved visuals, better dogfight AI, and iPad support to the title.

Folks in our forums are having a pretty good time with Wings of Valor, so far.

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Simogo, the studio behind Beat Sneak Bandit and Bumpy Road, leave a lot of game ideas and mechanics on the cutting room floor because its games are the end product of an improvisational style of design that sheds structure in favor of a flow. Simogo calls this “jazz” development. We’ve covered this topic exhaustively in the past, but we just couldn’t pass up on another opportunity to show off even more cut content. In a video it released this morning, Simogo lets us in on a few more abandoned ideas.

We’ve embedded the video below. It’s a mesmerizing bit of content, as it’s cut together in a way that reminds us of Simogo’s brand of game development. Check it out and see if you agree with us:

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Sword & Sworcery [$4.99 / Micro] is an amazing adventure with some of hippest art and sound we’ve ever seen in a video game. It’s inspirational, too, as fans of the title have demonstrated by conjuring a plethora of art revolving around the themes, music, action, and scenes in the indie darling. In an effort to generate even more awesome stuff, the crew behind the game are putting together a virtual jam to provide artists around the globe “a little bit of structure and motivation, as well as an opportunity to exhibit” their work alongside the people who made the game. This is taking place on May 11-13th, and it appears as if everything submitted will appear at the #Sworcery tumblr.

If you’d like to get in on the action, submissions can be submitted here. The page explaining what’s exactly going down is available at this address. Here’s a tiny small selection of the stuff appearing on the game’s tumblr:

“Slyve & Sworcery” – a painting by Slyve aka @c_sylvain at Capy.

“Depths of Mingi Taw” – painting by Qiqo aka @supertamago at Capy.

There’s some great stuff already, obviously. It’ll be interesting to watch this page fill. And if you haven’t played Sword & Sworcery yet, what’s wrong with you?

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Long-time TouchArcade readers might remember an upcoming title that we were really excited for called Galactic Keep: Dice Battles. The premise of the game was to take dice-based tabletop RPG mechanics and translate them into video game form on the iPhone, while keeping a heavy emphasis on the storytelling aspects of classic Dungeons & Dragons games.

We first learned of the game way back in July of 2009, and got to see a playable version in person at Pax East the following March. Since then however, as more than 2 years have gone by, things have been extremely quiet on the Galactic Keep front.

After successfully launching another of their long-awaited title called Skull Smashers [ $0.99 ] last month, developer Gilded Skull Games has once again jumped into Galactic Keep development. In fact, as they note in our forums, they made a decision to hit the reset button on the project since it was so badly outdated, and just start over from scratch.

It sounds like a crazy idea for a game that’s already been in development for years, but this way they can take everything they have learned thus far and build the game with newer hardware and features in mind, like Retina Display and Universal support. The screenshot above is the first glimpse of this revamped take on Galactic Keep.

No word on just how long Gilded Skull is expecting the rebooted project to take, but just knowing that Galactic Keep is still alive and kicking is sure to warm some hearts.

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We just learned this week that one of the pioneering forces of both the freemium pay model as well as real-time online multiplayer, Eliminate, will be closing up shop later this month. Well according to RockBandAide.com right on the heels of that news it looks as if EA Mobile will be giving the same treatment to the original Rock Band [ $4.99 ] iOS game, which we thought was pretty good when it launched towards the end of 2009.

The original Rock Band was usurped by the superior sequel Rock Band Reloaded [$4.99 / $9.99 (HD)] in December of 2010, so it’s not totally surprising that EA would want to focus on the newer version. However, for a game that many people have likely spent a good chunk of cash on by buying new songs through IAP, not to mention that it launched at $9.99 to begin with, it seems sort of crazy that EA would flat out make the game inoperable.

At the very least you would think that EA would be able to just leave the original Rock Band alone, so those who bought it and paid for IAP songs can continue to at least use it even if future updates aren’t in the cards. Perhaps there’s a reason for this, like a licensing issue with the music, but at any rate if you’re still a fan of the first Rock Band on iOS you’ll have until May 31st to continue enjoying it.

Servers being shut down and dropping support for games isn’t a new phenomenon, but in the increasingly more digital age of video games you’ll just have to keep in mind that the experience might be finite unlike physical copies of games which will last for eternity as long as you have the hardware to play it.

Note: I’m leaving the links for both Rock Band games in case you already own the original and want to re-download it for safe keeping, but obviously it won’t work after the end of the month. If you want a Rock Band game for iOS go with Rock Band Reloaded (for the time being, anyway).

[Via RockBandAide.com]

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Trilobyte’s The 7th Guest [ Free ] was among the first full motion video-centric PC games released following the dawn of the CD-ROM drive era. I had a horrifically underpowered Mac at the time that just barely stuttered through the game, but doing so is a gaming memory I’ll never forget. Gameplay focuses around exploring the dark and mysterious puzzle-packed mansion of Henry Stauf. I don’t want to spoil too much of it, since the whole experience is so much better if you manage to go into it fresh.

If you’re already familiar with the game, you can check out our review where I get into some additional nitty gritty details. But, really, you should just skip all that noise and download the game anyway- Especially while it’s free. As an additional bonus, The 7th Guest [ Free ] is also free on the Mac App Store. If you get stuck in either version of the game, give the Book of Secrets [ Free ] a look.

In our original review of T7G, we were a little bummed that the notoriously difficult microscope puzzle was nowhere to be found. The good news is Trilobyte later released this puzzle as a standalone game called The 7th Guest: Infection [ Free (HD)] which is also free as part of this promotion. We posted some more details about Infection here.

Go go go! Grab these games now!

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A couple of weeks back we told you about Galcon [$1.99 / Free ] creator Phil Hassey’s latest project titled Dynamite Jack. You play as a captured Space Marine who is forced to work in a dangerous place known as Anathema Mines. Of course, being a bad ass you decide that working for “the man” against your will just isn’t for you, so you set out to escape from the depths of the mine.

In a recent blog post, Phil noted that a fellow developer suggested that the deaths in Dynamite Jack lacked a certain impact. So drawing inspiration from the awesome death sequences for Roget Wilco from the classic Space Quest series, Dynamite Jack now features plenty of awesome ways to die, as you can see in this new video.

Since death comes often during the course of playing Dynamite Jack, there will be an option to turn off the death animations if they grow tiresome, but they’ll be on by default. Part of the leaderboard tracking will include how many times you bite the dust as well. Dynamite Jack is scheduled for release on Mac and PC May 10th, and will be coming to the iPad within a couple of months after, hopefully around July 1st if all goes according to plan.

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Rogue was a little before my time, and it took a while to see the appeal. Games with permadeath sound like an exercise in extreme frustration, even balanced out by tantalizingly random loot and procedurally generated worlds. In the past few years I’ve come around on the subject of roguelikes, though. It’s nice to have RPGs and skill-based games meet up, and they’re the best way to enjoy a complete game in a short time.

The latter is what I enjoy most about them, so it grates on me that so many of the best roguelikes take hours to complete. Wouldn’t it be nice if more of them embraced their strengths and provided seriously compact experiences? Not that there’s not room for the long-form, but how I’d love to have more games out there like Zaga 33 [$0.99]. It’s quick, compact and challenging in equal parts—nothing wasted, nothing left out.

It’s odd to see a game so well-suited to iOS arriving as a port from desktop, but that’s where we find ourselves. Developer Michael Brough has embraced all the best things about the roguelike in Zaga 33, and has done so with bite-sized chunks that fit perfectly into the world of mobile gaming. Got 15 minutes to kill? That’s enough to work your way through the whole game if you have the skills to pull it off. Of course, you don’t stop there. It’ll take more than a few of those short sessions to work your way up to that level, and more than a few afterwards to max out your high score.

Stranded on the, err, rogue planet Zaga 33, your hero, the humble “@,” must travel into its depths to destroy the alien cortex. You’re virtually unarmed, extremely vulnerable, and facing down 25 levels of hostile aliens. Zaga 33 strips out all but the absolute necessities of the genre. You won’t level up your little @, and you get nothing for your kills. Each time you hit an alien you take down one of its two hit points. Each time an alien hits you, you take one damage out of a maximum of nine.

That means hunting is counterproductive, so each time you enter a new screen you’ll need to weigh your possibilities. Do you head for one of the potentially useful artifacts? Doing so might draw an alien’s attention. You can fight one off easily enough, and you’ll recover one hit point when you reach the next room. But if there are two in your way, or three, you might find yourself in dire straits.

Add to that dilemma another layer of concern: you’re never sure what the artifacts will be until you use them. The artifacts’ symbols are shuffled with every new game you start, so a starburst symbol might be a healing item one playthrough and a nuke the next. Is it worth it to fight through a sea of hostile aliens for what might just be a teleportation spell? It’s a tough call. Knowing that the number of items you have at the end effects your final score—well that just makes it tougher.

You’re not left with only unknowns, at least. Zaga 33 tells you exactly how each alien will behave. Goblins move toward you, snarks move between you and the exit, and so on. This is information you’ll need in order to survive, and it turns each level into something of a puzzle. You can’t always reach the exit without getting hit, but it’s always worth trying.

Zaga 33 isn’t for everyone. The controls aren’t perfect, which can sometimes lead to mistakes. The game’s distinctly retro aesthetic will be a turn-off for some. And I can sympathize with the feeling that roguelikes can be a bit pointless. I enjoy the repetition, the fight to improve my score in a pretty randomly generated experience, but there’s no shame in preferring persistance.

If a retro-style roguelike sounds right up your alley, on the other hand, Zaga 33 is a must-buy. It’s tiny, but that just means you can try often and learn from your mistakes. I don’t usually expect to get much from a game in 15 minutes, but Zaga 33 makes every second count. Try the free desktop version if you’re on the fence—if it captures you like it’s captured me, you’ll be happy to put down a bit of change to take it on the go.

TouchArcade Rating:

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