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What’s this? Rovio Mobile has something else new up its sleeves? In a recent interview with AllThingsD, Rovio CEO Mikael Hed shared a lot of “stay calm, don’t panic” thoughts on Rovio and how heavily tied its success is to Angry Birds, noting that Rovio’s fingers are in more than just video game jars. He also revealed that his company is in production on a yet-to-be-revealed game set to hit in the next couple of months. AllThingsD says this title is a “non-Angry Birds-themed game,” which leaves a lot of room for interpretation as to how Angry Birds-less this new title could be.

If this is a new IP… boy, does Rovio have some shoes to fill. Angry Birds is on stores shelves and clothing racks, as well as pretty much on anything with a chip in it. You can’t help but to think that, unless this game somehow exceeds the popularity of Angry Birds, it’ll be considered anything other than a failure. We can think of worse problems, though. Like hammer toe. Bet that’s the pits.

[via RoyalePost]

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This past November we learned that Dejobaan Games and Snuggle Truck [Free/HD] developer Owlchemy Labs were in the midst of bringing a mobile version of their 2009 PC hit AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity to the App Store.

The absurdly long title refers to the sound one makes when base jumping off extremely tall buildings, which is exactly what AaAaAA!!! is all about. On the way down you perform risky and stylish stunts to earn maximum points and admiration.

The mobile version of the game is known as AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! (Force = Mass x Acceleration), and the developers have announced that it is scheduled for release one week from today, on March 1st. Check out the amusing and informative new video for AaAaAA!!! (F=MxA) below.

When AaAaAA!!! (F=MxA) launches next week it will come equipped with Universal iPad support and cost $2.99, and we’ll have more on the game once it’s finally available.

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Some former developers from True Axis and Firemint have banded together to form a new studio called Ninth Ninja and are readying a release of the classic dual-stick shooter Mutant Storm for iPad. Mutant Storm was originally released by PomPom Games for the PC, Mac, and Xbox, and was amongst the first to spark off a rebirth of retro-style arcade games in the past 10 years or so. It was also remastered and re-released as Mutant Storm Reloaded on Xbox Live Arcade in 2005.

You may remember that another PomPom Games release called Space Tripper [$3.99] made its way to iOS last year thanks to the porting efforts of True Axis. It also shouldn’t be forgotten that the Space Tripper iOS project was filled with trials and tribulations before it finally ended up on the App Store after more than 3 years of development. The wait seemed to be worth it though, as Space Tripper’s gameplay held up strong on iOS and the performance was rock solid.

Andy Coates, the former one half of developer True Axis, was responsible for a majority of the Space Tripper iOS port. He’s putting all that previous hard work to good use by using the same engine for the Mutant Storm port, and again the game is running at a solid 60fps on the iPad 2 and is running respectably smooth on the original iPad as well. Check out the developer’s hands on video of Mutant Storm running on the iPad.

Development on Mutant Storm is said to be going a whole lot smoother than it did with Space Tripper, so chances are we won’t be waiting 3 years to get our hands on the game (hopefully I didn’t just jinx it). In fact, Andy says that the game is basically finished, and that all that remains is some work to do on the menus and online integration. Ninth Ninja is hoping to have Mutant Storm out in April or May of this year.

Ninth Ninja has also announced that they are currently working on a brand new iOS project in addition to Mutant Storm. Adrian Moore, who had previously worked on Firemint’s Spy Mouse, will be handling the design. Artwork will be Paul Mitchell’s job, and he most recently has worked on the Real Racing series, also from Firemint. And of course, Andy Coates will be handling the programming of this mystery title.

We expect to have lots more on Mutant Storm and the mystery game from Ninth Ninja, especially with GDC just a couple of weeks away, so keep your eyes on this space.

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Inco is alone. His parents are dead, and so is his universe. He’s the last living human, and a survivor of a horrible, no-good, very bad event that turned his universe’s suns to char. He doesn’t brood, which is a good thing since no-one likes a crybaby, but I really feel for the guy: he lives among broken toys and dwells in total darkness. When Incoboto opens, you’ll see him peering into an especially black space with his telescope, perhaps searching for answers.

He finds one in a curiously sentient, but obviously mad sun named Helios. Helios is babyish and overexcitable. He giggles like an infant and devours like one, too. But he is also odd and knowing in the way that he floats about pointing to the things he can fix if, and just if, Inco can find more fuel for him.

They’re as perfect of a fit as Inco is going to find considering everyone is dead and all, so the two strike up a friendship set off across the universe. Helios wants stars, while Inco just wants to find someone. Conveniently, when Helios gobbles a star, he gains enough power to turn on the world’s contraptions.

This is the premise of Dene Carter’s imaginative 2D side-scroller Incoboto, a game that we’ve had our hands all over for the last week or so. Carter is an ex-Lionhead Studios veteran, and you can see that studio’s creative spirit all over it. It’s the end result of hundreds of different ideas that have been mashed together into an imaginative romp that has things to say about death, living, corporate control, adventure game design, exploration, and many other things.

Breaking it down mechanically into a snappy phrase isn’t easy. In our audio interview this week, Dene said he gave up trying to pitch the game. Incoboto is too odd, too much its own game.

“I kind of gave up doing all of that,” Dene told us. “While you’re developing a game, of course, what you’re trying to do the whole time is try to emphasize the fundamental thing that makes your game, your game, and not a game. It’s so easy to describe your game as other games, with bits of this and bits of that or whatever else, as soon as you start doing that it’s very easy to get distracted.”

“After literally a year doing that and just kind of going ‘god, this is ridiculous, this is turning to Nethack, this is turning to god-knows-what-else. How the hell did we get here?’ And my wife literally beating on my ass for about three weeks, I just said you know what, this is a strange, strange game and I will just make sure everything that I do with this game from now on reflects that.”

The core components of the game’s overall structure and design seemingly owes a lot to the small creative team at Nintendo behind the original Super Mario Galaxy. Incoboto is the end result of what would happen if that team squashed that experience into 2D, and in the process of torturing, manipulating, and cleansing it, injected new features and the bent, almost dreamlike signature whimsy of a Lionhead production.

I don’t want to sell this short; Incoboto clearly is its own title. But its core action revolves around loosely adapted concepts and mechanics popularized by Galaxy. It plays around with physics a lot, and you’ll find yourself pulling a ton of levers and scaling a lot of oddities in a quest to collect stars across a series of interconnected globes that you can travel to and from freely.

If you’re still lost, take a gander at this trailer. This should put you in the right head space. Note the almost total lack of UI:

The game’s camera acts as a rod, slowly spinning the world as you move around it. One of the coolest elements of Incoboto is its one-touch controls. To run, press a finger in a direction. To jump, press that finger down again. It’s really simple, and it works. One of its other cool elements? The Corporation. In the game, you’ll discover that everything in Inco’s world has been created by an overly-observent mega-company that seemed to exist simply to create the most inane things ever invented, and then post PR-friendly signs about them everywhere.

At its heart, Incoboto is a puzzle game. Collecting stars allows Helios to open brand new passageways to other worlds. However, most of these stars are tucked out of reach, or require some fanciful solutions to get to.

You’ll run across puzzles that will have you lining up rods to complete an electrical circuit. In one specific case, we rotated a physics-based puzzle box with a ball on the opposite end of where it needed to be. Sometimes, you’ll be smacking switches with rocks or explosives. Other times, you’ll be scaling a world in a precise way to reach a star.

The puzzle design is lightly schizophrenic; there’s a lot of ideas floating around in the game, and you’ll see a lot of different puzzles as a result. The kickback is that you’ll hit a lot video game logic walls. New puzzles just don’t jive with the old. I got stuck within the first hour, and then again in the second, and then big-time during the third.

Seriously, Dene says this is basically the point: he wants you to get stuck or feel funny, and then to have to probe your friends for answers. He views this as a mechanic in an age where everyone wants to hold your hand. How indie.

As you progress, you’ll find tools and other objects that expand what you can do while digging for stars. Early, you find a glove that allows you to throw rocks at springy targets. The first item gives you the power to find hidden buttons and switches with a gentle pinch and zoom motion.

My time with Incoboto has been short, and I got stuck a lot. It’s a discouraging kind of feeling, so I’m not quite sure what that says about me or how I’m clicking with some of the fundamental design. It’s nice to have an actual challenge, I guess, but I don’t want the difficulty to keep me from seeing everything Dene has created. This is a beautiful, beautiful world with music that blends into the atmosphere as smoothly as a smooth thing.

I’m eager to see more in the final version, which by the way, should appear at some point this March on iPad. If you’d like to hear Dene talk about his game, consider checking out our most recent podcast. If you’d like to see more of the game, there is a really, really thriving discussion in our message board right now.

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There’s always room for another point-and-click on iPad and iPhone as far as we’re concerned, so we’re pretty pumped about today’s big news: Lume, Story Book Games award-baiting and artistically gifted PC adventure game, is coming to iOS later this week. There’s been no official word on if this port will be packing any original tablet- or phone-specific content, but according to Story Book, it’ll at least feature new sounds and a higher resolution.

That’s important, too. Lume has a gorgeous paper and cardboard art style that just … pops off the screen as you play. An even higher resolution could only make it better, right? We’ve embedded a video of the PC version below for your viewing pleasure and vow to bring you a better look down the road.

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I’m going to let you in on a little secret: we’re pretty big fans of SpellTower [$1.99], the clever iOS word game from Zach Gage. Actually, that’s not really a secret at all now that I think about it. We gave SpellTower a full 5 stars in our review when the game launched in November, and an update the following month added Universal support and Game Center achievements, making an already great thing even greater. In fact, we thought so much of SpellTower that we included it in our Game of the Year picks for 2011.

So yeah, it’s no secret that SpellTower is pretty good and stuff. About the only thing the game is missing is some sort of multiplayer mode, but over the weekend Zach Gage posted a quick teaser video showing just that: a local competitive multiplayer mode. Matching words will send letter blocks over to your competitor’s screen, and the grey shading in the backgrounds shows where the other person’s current tile stack is at.

This particular multiplayer mode works over Bluetooth and can be played on any combination of iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad devices. Meaning, iPad players can get down with iPhone or iPod touch players. Zach also teases that this is just one aspect of the planned forthcoming update, and that there are other non-multiplayer new modes in the works too. When talking about new game modes, Zach cheerily states “Expect a few choices when the update hits.” There’s no solid release date for the SpellTower update just yet, but we’ll be sure to let you know when it hits.

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When I unlocked a moustache and created Ron Swanson Pizza Bagel (Ron to his friends), I fell a little bit in love with Pizza Vs. Skeletons [$2.99 / Lite]. I mean, how many games let you play – and customize – a 10 foot tall pizza that’s out to crush every skeleton it finds? And it’s not all skeleton crushing, oh no. We’ve also got Pizza Rescues Trapped Puppies, Pizza Balances on Rolling Skulls and a hefty handful of other games in here, taking full advantage of everything a giant pizza can do.

The common thread is the pizza (or tire, or moon, or…), and its three capabilities: rolling, jumping, and pounding the ground. You roll by tilting your device, jump by tapping the screen once and hit the deck by tapping again. Any of those moves can crush skeletons, which simply can’t stand up to the weight of a giant pizza. If you’re worried about the tilt controls, give the free version a try. I can tell you they’re better than most, easily calibrated, and fit perfectly with the gameplay, but try for yourself to be sure.

Now obviously this game gets a little crazy, right? At first it seems that all you do is roll back and forth, crushing waves of skeletons and avoiding their spears by jumping sometimes. Of course that’s not all; that wouldn’t be nearly strange enough. There are traditional platforming sections where you roll your pizza to ski or rescue puppies (you crush their cages, see, and then they stick to your cheesy surface while you take them to safety). Among other oddities, we also get into castle crushing levels, levels where you bounce of brains for maximum board-breaking impact, and my personal favorite, a Feeding Frenzyesque survival-of-the-fittest sim that takes place under the sea. It could come off as too wacky, but I played most of the game with a stupid grin on my face.

There is one thing I really don’t dig about Pizza Vs. Skeletons. There are 100 levels, which is rad, but that means you’ll be playing each game type quite a few times. They don’t all hold up to this repetition. With pizza-skiing, for instance, you have to deal with tiny platforms and explosions and things as you get to higher levels, but all of them pretty much look and feel the same. They just get longer, and longer, and eventually stop being all that novel.

But you’ve gotta remember that you’re doing these things as a giant pizza, and that your fellow skiiers are skeletons wearing Santa hats. That absurdity goes a long way. That time when I was on the moon, knocking skeleton cherubs out of the sky? Still fun, even though I did something similar a few times already.

If you like messing around with customization, Pizza Vs. Skeletons is a dream. You pick up coins while you play, and you can use that money to unlock new bases, faces, hats and toppings. Not that into pizza? You can play a rolling jellyfish with a Stetson, gems for eyes and a beak. Why shouldn’t you, aside from the boundaries of good taste? Oh, and before you ask, no, you can’t buy extra currency with real cash. In this game, you’ve gotta earn your rewards, or at least win ‘em on the Wheel of Pizza that pops up after every level.

You’re free to earn your cash and play the game pretty much any way you want, skipping any levels that aren’t to your taste. You only need to earn 165 stars out of a possible 300 to open up all the levels across 10 chapters. It’s your usual three star, three goals system, but you can’t earn them individually. So if a level’s goals call for you to beat a timer, collect a certain number of coins and not get hit, you’ve gotta do that all in one go. But if you don’t want to grind, settle for two—it’ll still get you comfortably to the end.

In other words, don’t let boredom get to you. It’s possible to grind the fun right out of this game, but if you stick to playing modes you enjoy and challenge yourself with three stars when you want to, there’s no reason this skeleton-crushing simulator should lose its charm. For a little extra spice, try finding (and wearing) the ten secret ingredients. They’re hidden in ten unnamed levels, but you might be able to join forces in our forums to hunt them down.

If you’re on iOS 5, and you can live with music that can’t be disabled (it’s good music, at least), give this one your time. Riverman Media has infused Pizza Vs. Skeletons with a ton of humor, and it goes well with a side of creepy-cool art. Whether you’re sumo-fighting for supremacy or squashing skeletal spikies, it’s going to look good and feel great. It sounds like the developer has lots of plans for the future, so we’ll be looking forward to plenty more things to crush and new ways to crush them.

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I created my Yelp profile in early 2010. I’d used the site for years before then, but for whatever reason, I didn’t feel compelled to start writing reviews until a few years ago. Yelp, in the off chance you’ve never heard of it, is a massive community-driven site which primarily focuses on offering honest customer reviews for all sorts of businesses. It’s equally useful to find a place to get lunch, somewhere to get your hair cut, a cool shoe store, or a million other things. Taking a step back, there’s tons of similarities between Yelp and the App Store, but Yelp does two things that make a massive difference.

Just like how you can find listings for anything from a roller-skate repair shop to a studio to learn fencing, you can equally come up with just about anything on the App Store. Both feature an insurmountable amount of content that’s hard to even imagine, and both Yelp and the App Store orbit around an equally important customer review system. Sure, sites like ours provide a more “official” venue for long-form reviews, just like a proper newspaper columnist would offer restaurant reviews, but I’d argue that a platform for legitimate customer reviews is just as useful.

“Legitimate” being the key word here. Developers on our forums have encouraged players to leave reviews for their games since, well, the birth of the review system. This sort of vague motivation generally results in reviews which I’d describe as both thoughtful and extremely useful for fellow App Store shoppers. Whether the particular review has a positive or negative slant usually doesn’t matter, as people who are leaving reviews just for the sake of leaving reviews often form at least a semi-intelligent argument for why you should (or shouldn’t) download something.

Then two things started happening.

Developers started putting these sorts of annoying pop-ups in game, interrupting gameplay to pressure players into leaving a review. Also, they forged this strange ultimatum of sorts, dangling the potential promise of future updates in exchange for five star reviews. In my opinion, both of these things taint the entire review process to the point of bordering on complete uselessness.

If you’re already into the second world of Ragdoll Blaster 3 [99¢] and you get this confusing pop-up asking if you like the game, why would you tap “no”? So, you hit “yes,” but at this point your head isn’t in a “alright I’m going to sit down and write something useful” space, you’re thinking, “I just want to get back to the game.” Similarly, if you’ve got a game you even vaguely enjoy and you notice the all-too-common update text that mentions something along the lines of “your five star reviews keep updates coming!” you’re not leaving a review because you want to assist in the purchasing decisions of the iOS gaming community, you’re doing it because you like free stuff.

I can’t really fault developers for this behavior either. It’s difficult to keep your head above water on the App Store, especially when there’s only space on the top lists for around couple hundred apps/games to be even making a decent amount of money at a time. Deciding you’re going to take the moral high ground and not beg for reviews could make the difference between keeping the lights on in your studio or not.

So, anyway, switching gears back to Yelp, if you’ve used it at all you’ve likely noticed that nearly all reviews you come across are at least somewhat useful. You almost never see reviews like these on Yelp:

You might stumble across the occasional funny but vague review, or reviews that are as simple as “Try the tacos!” but I’d argue that both of those are more useful than “love it” or “hate it” with an accompaniment of one to five stars.

Yelp accomplishes this in two interesting ways.

First off, there’s a real motivation to build your own profile up on Yelp. They’ve done an outstanding job of making your Yelp profile something you’d link your friends to show them what sort of things you enjoy locally, or maybe places you went to on vacation. It features all the social networking tropes that make it feel like home, complete with a basic avatar system and space for superfluous personal details such as “favorite thing.” As a Yelp user, you don’t want to leave a useless review because the profile creates a feeling of ownership to your reviews, and provides a record of all the places you’ve been. Comparatively, this is about the closest thing you have on iTunes.

There’s no ownership to that page. No customization, and no reason at all why you’d ever link it to someone or include it on the links on the side of your blog, or anywhere else that you’d normally put links you care about. There’s more to it than that. Even with a profile, some people will just flat out never get invested enough into things to put forth that effort to produce good reviews. Similarly, automated review spammers don’t care at all that they can have an avatar. This is where the truly ingenious Yelp review filter comes in to play.

Check out this fantastic video which details how and why it works:

The crazy part about the Yelp review filter is it works so well you don’t even know it’s there. As mentioned, I’ve been using Yelp for years. Yelp explained how the filter worked around the same time I officially joined the site. I discovered that it existed only a few weeks ago when I noticed that I could solve a CAPTCHA at the bottom of a restaurant’s review listing. Doing so revealed reviews of the same caliber of App Store reviews, what have systematically been deemed worthless by the Yelp review filter.

Apple has the resources to make the App Store incredible, and make app reviews just as useful as Yelp reviews for a new restaurant. They’ve already dabbled in building a low-level social network inside of iTunes via the Ping music service. A similar feed or apps that friends of mine are buying (and hopefully reviewing) would be immensely useful. From there, you’re only an avatar, a tidy URL, and a few silly profile data points to having something that people would genuinely want to link people, and in the process, pour effort into maintaining beyond “★☆☆☆☆ sux” or “★★★★★ ownz”.

Genius for apps already exists, and provides great recommendations for things you should try based on your previous purchases. I can’t imagine it being much effort to massage that same algorithm into flagging drive-by low-content reviews from people who can’t be bothered to spend more than 10 seconds typing out a coherent thought, review bots up voting, or people mudslinging with one star reviews of apps/games they don’t like- Especially if it falls out of line with what this customer would typically enjoy per Genuis.

Can you even imagine how different the purchase experience would be on the App Store if reading customer reviews was closer to reading product reviews on Amazon? Comparatively, just think for a second how much a wild west style review system like the App Store currently has would completely ruin sites like Amazon, Yelp, and others that are dependent on honest and thoughtful customer reviews for purchase decisions.

And no, the “Was this review helpful?” system is not a solution. All that seems to have proven is that, in some strange way, the App Store hive mind believes that of the 11,546 reviews for the current version of Angry Birds, this is the most useful:

This is one of the best games I’ve ever played! Plus it extends your time on the toilet by a good 10 hours.”

I rest my case.

The Yelp system is by no means perfect. Yelp has been the the target of all sorts of accusations both from business owners and internet conspiracy theorists. However, the fact remains: When I read Yelp, I almost without fail genuinely feel like the reviews are useful to me. App Store reviews, on the other hand, generally just result in a whole series of face palms.

I’d love if that changed.

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I can’t really believe what I’m about to post, but here I am. We’re over two weeks out from GDC in San Francisco and we’re completely booked up. More accurately, we were completely booked up on Tuesday, and I’ve been trying as hard as I can to squeeze in a few extra meetings since then. However, I can say beyond a doubt we are at absolute maximum capacity right now.

Needless to say, the demand for meeting requests have completely taken us by surprise. Typically they dribble in for a few weeks leading up to the event, but this year, my IM client was crashing as a result of the flood of messages I was receiving. We’re going to have to come up with a better solution next year to handle more developers.

If you’re coming to GDC and have a new game to show off, please email tips@toucharcade.com with the subject GDC 2012 to help our email filters out. Shoot us some links to screenshots or video and a brief description of what you’ve been working on, and if we come up with a solution for somehow cramming more meetings into our schedule, we’ll get back to you.

Regardless of whether or not you’ve got a meeting with us, you should still come to our party. Everyone with a GDC pass and/or an industry-relevant business card is totally invited to stop by and have a beer on us. Here’s the details:

• WHEN: Tuesday March 6th, 7:00 PM until they kick us out.
• WHERE: Bin 55 in the lobby of the Marriott Marquis at 55 4th St.
• WHY: Because there’s way more cool people we want to meet than we have meeting time slots for!

The good news of all this is that our readers are going to have a ridiculous amount of GDC coverage to look forward to in a couple weeks.

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If you’re from outside of the USA, or just don’t pay attention to politics (and who can blame you), I’ll get you caught up to speed on what this is all about: As we get closer and closer to an actual presidential election (which is still nearly 8 months away), more and more weird personal details about all of the candidates come to the surface. This usually has to do with the individual campaigns trying to make their respective candidates seem more likable, or opposing campaigns trying to discredit candidates in some way.

Well, it turns out Rick Santorum, one of the dudes seeking the Republican nomination in hopes to become a United States President, is a huge fan of Imangi Studios’ Temple Run [Free]. In fact, per the man himself, he’s given up Angry Birds he likes the game so much:

Now, say what you will about Rick Santorum, but it’s always crazy (at least to me) to see iOS games, or, hell, video games in general, with this sort of mainstream appeal. I almost wish I could take this video back in time to the mid-80’s when my parents were desperately trying to get me to play less Nintendo so I could be like, “Look, this guy is running for President of the United States and can score over a million in Temple Run.”

Actually, they’d probably still tell me to play less Nintendo-I’m sure they’d be impressed by the time machine though.

[via Kotaku]

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