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It’s 2012, and I’ve had a few years to conjure a snappy explanation of what Eufloria is and how it rolls. I haven’t. So, before I even get into how much I dig it on iPad, I’ll let my main man Rudolf Kremers — one of the handful of dudes behind the original release — do the talking. In our latest “bonus” podcast, he cheekily broke it down like this:

“Eufloria is a game of space, conquest, and exploration based on themes of plant life and flowers rather than space marines and spaceships.”

That’s the thing about Eufloria: it’s an RTS that goes against the grain. It doesn’t have any big dudes in big armor smashing space orcs in the face with apartment-sized space maces. It also doesn’t subscribe to any particular feel or taste, or really, any action-y RTS conventions. It’s a minimalist strategy game that has some cool, laid-back creative touches, and it’s all wrapped up in a sensitive production overhead that conveys the game’s core design ideals and gentle pacing well.

This much has been proven in past iterations. And for the most part, what you’ve seen is what you’ll be getting Day Zero on iPad. Eufloria on iPad still looks gorgeous, it still runs as smooth as ever, and all the little technical touches on the movement, placement and execution phases of the game have made it over. But, on the other hand, I’m not seeing a major adjustment on anything anyone has complained about before — the balance appears to be still a little touch and go, and in some of the levels I’ve been playing, the pacing is brutally, brutally slow.

What the iPad port does bring, though, are new ways to interact more intimately with the experience. Pinch and zoom can be used liberally to explore every little nook and cranny of each level. Satisfying drag, hold, and swipe gestures take care of the rest. It’s all good stuff.

I asked Kremers after the show to explain what he was shooting for with this version’s controls. He said that the main idea was to strip “all barriers between playing the game and the device you play it on.” Mission accomplished as far as I’m concerned. This is appears to be as much of a lean-back experience as ever before, and delightfully so.

Here’s a breakdown for those of you just seeing Eufloria for the first time. This is a game about asteroids, trees, and tiny, winged seedlings. In almost every scenario, the goal is to take these seedlings to an asteroid, build a tree or two, and then usher even more seedlings on to other asteroids. The tech tree is simple: trees build seedlings and asteroids have one of three different effects on seedlings, either making them strong or fast or energetic. As trees age, they become more potent and harder to kill. Eventually you’ll see some variations on unit types as well as a defensive tree that’ll keep enemy seedlings off of your rock.

The strategy factors into the picture in a variety of ways. You can’t hit up an asteroid unless you have an asteroid connected to it. Also, most asteroids are inhabited, so you’ll need to kill the enemy seedlings and then destroy their trees, which are jacked into that asteroid’s core. Cracking the core boils and tearing down an impromptu space settlement boils down to a numbers game: basically, whoever has the larger wad of dudes wins. Much later in the game, you’ll be given very specific tasks, like say, defending or finding a path through a system.

On our show, Kremers explained where these ideas came from. Eufloria proper is based on a proof-of-concept called “Dyson,” which is named after a british physicist who theorized that you could explore space by growing mechanical trees on asteroids. It’s neat to see this crazy idea living on in a game.

The beauty of Eufloria is in its simplicity; it’s artfully stripped of graphical clutter and is fairly bare-boned on the UI and sound front. It’s also strikingly easy to play for a strategy game since most of the action happens on a macro-level: clicks, drags, and drops compose all you’ll need for galactic takeovers. This type of game feels great on iPad, and it seems like Team Eufloria and Tunatech pulled it off.

My time with the preview build, for reasons of avoiding anything other than modest scrutiny at this phase in its pre-release form, has been artificially shortened, so I don’t have a verdict for you. You’ll get that later at some point this month when the game sees a release across iOS at an unannounced price. We’re expecting more details to roll in shortly. Fingers crossed.

All the screens in this write-up are from the PSN version of the game. I can’t tell a difference between the two in picture-form.

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Eufloria, Alex May and Rudolf Kremer’s award-winning ambient real-time strategy game, is coming to iPad and iPhone in February, the dynamic duo have confirmed on the game’s blog. And while you should expect a port of the full experience that saw its initial release on PC and then PSN, it appears as if iOS owners are going to get a tad bit more via updates.

“The initial release and update will be by far the most comprehensive and enjoyable release of Eufloria to date. And the price will be pretty darn reasonable,” Team Eufloria writes on its blog. The first content update will roll in a new Ambient mode that adds a “new terraforming mechanic.” We’ve included the debut trailer just below for your viewing pleasure. It looks great!

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When I play a music game, the most important things I’m looking for are good music and approachable gameplay. Cytus [$0.99] by Rayark manages to nail both of those and even adds a little bit of visual flair on top of it. While Cytus does have a few small issues and miscues in regards to a few elements, it’s still great to play and is a worthy addition to the iOS rhythm genre.

Cytus plays similarly to Elite Beat Agents – note bubbles appear on your screen and must be tapped to the rhythm of the song. An ‘Active Scan Line’ moves up and down the screen to the beat of the song and helps you time the hits on each note. In addition to normal notes, the game also features holds and slides which add some variety to the gameplay. Hits are scored on a system ranging from ‘Perfect’ to ‘Bad’ with a final ranking at song completion dependent on the length of your hit chain and the amount perfect hits.

As you can imagine, the gameplay is pretty simple, but well executed. While the note positioning is mostly done well, there were a few songs where the notes seemed slightly off or not in tune with either the beat or off-beat. There weren’t too many instances of this, but it was still annoying nonetheless.

Where Cytus really shines is in its music selection and presentation. Song-wise, players can choose from 15 songs ranging from J-Pop to Techno with a little bit of Synthpop thrown into the mix. The song selection is very much Bemani-inspired and should sound familiar to anyone that has played those types of games before.

While I imagine some gamers may immediately scoff at the music genres I just listed, I’d plead with you to give it a chance. One of the things I loved about each song in Cytus is the approachability regardless of whether you’re a fan of that sort of music. It’s not very often that I play through a music game and I pretty much like every single song that’s thrown at me, which should speak volumes of the care put into the selection in this game. Just make sure you play with some headphones in order to do the music justice.

The overall presentation, meanwhile, is one of the more striking aspects of Cytus. Everything has a very clean, minimalistic feel accompanied with some beautiful artwork. It’s hard to explain what in particular is so appealing – maybe it’s because the whole game looks like a modern Final Fantasy-menu. Also included is Game Center support as well as social network integration. There were a few instances where the interface was a little too bare (for example, the tutorial fails to explain the various pop-up mode options), but otherwise I came away impressed.

While Cytus gets a lot of things right, there are a few elements missing that are typically standard in most music games. For example, there’s no ‘life meter’ in Cytus, meaning that you could just simply launch a song, not do anything and still see the level through (technically, you ‘Fail’ the level, but you don’t know until after the song ends). Granted, you actually have to get a ranking higher than the minimum in order to unlock the ‘Hard’ difficulty and new songs, but some of the fun with music games is working under the pressure of an all-powerful meter judging your performance (or maybe I’m just a masochist).

Another weakness in Cytus is in regards to the hit detection. Basically, the hit window is relatively loose, meaning that you have a wide margin of error between what is considered a ‘Perfect’ tap and what is considered merely a ‘Good’ hit (or between ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’ for that matter). While some folks wouldn’t necessarily consider this a bad thing it does decrease the overall challenge, particularly for those of us that are veterans of music games that were rather unforgiving.

Despite these omissions, Cytus still does a great job executing the features it does have. Considering its relative minimalism, I think Cytus is a good title for gamers looking to get into the music genre on iOS devices. I would have liked to have seen more songs, but I’m hoping the developers will add more in the future. Regardless, with a great selection of music, simple but well-executed gameplay, and a good, clean overall presentation, Cytus is well worth a recommendation for anyone interested in rhythm games.

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Blogger and DIYer Paul Rickards wrote about an awesome discovery today: he figured out how to rig an NES controller, via USB, to his iPad. Even better, he made it work like an iCade does, which theoretically opens up the support of his homebrew controller to every iCade-enabled game out there. He hasn’t posted the code yet, but he did go over the story of how he made discovery and linked to some pretty important literature.

Like most of the world’s greatest inventions, this was the result of an accident. While playing in iMAME, Rickards accidentally pressed some keys on his homebrew Commodore 64 USB keyboard. The app then said it was enabling iCade mode. Cue the “A-ha!” moment.

From here, Rickards manufactured another USB keyboard utilizing Arduino, but instead of using a keyboard matrix, he used his NES gamepad. A couple of legos for casing and two jacks later, he had a working NES controller for his iPad. Sweet!

We’ve asked Rickards if he intends to do more controllers in the future because this is pretty exciting news. Think about it: someday, you might finally be able to play an iPad game with the Duke, the ultimate gaming controller.

Well … that is, if every game plays nice. Atari Greatest Hits [Free] collection and iMAME are the only games he’s tested so far.

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Hey, guys, remember when Tamagotchis were a thing? I hope so, because a big part of why we’re so excited about Portable Pixels‘ Hatchi is directly tied to nostalgia. Our all-seeing eye recently caught a first-look posting of the app on our message board, and we couldn’t be more pleased with the find.

Hatchi is a fine-looking Tamagotchi-style, er, throwback that provides a similar same kind of experience. You’ll feed, teach, train, and clean your digital little animal and then, as a result, forge some sort of emotional bond to it. Basically, it’s like a dog that can’t do the annoying things like, say, pee on the carpet or drool.

Tamagotchis were huge for a spell and we had more than a few hanging from our keychains, so we’re pretty stoked to give this mobile iteration on the idea a shot. Portable Pixels has submitted the app for review, so it should hit within the week.

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Walkabout Journeys [$0.99] is a game of almosts. It’s almost a puzzle game, almost a platformer. It’s almost beautiful enough, almost clever enough, almost deep enough – but always falls just short.

It’s love at first sight, too, with its striking visual style and a solid central conceit. A little bit Lemmings, a little bit And Yet It Moves, Walkabout Journeys gives you a handful of Burton-esque characters to shepherd, characters that will die tragically given the slightest neglect. Rotating the world around them, you have to ensure they stay alive and stay together as they slip back and forth across each level. It’s almost wonderful.

For a short jaunt, Walkabout Journeys is a delight. I adore the nameless characters – the tall one, the tiny one, the one with the umbrella and all – the cheerful music and the colorful backdrops. The gameplay is no slouch, either. It’s quite fun to rotate the game world to and fro, tilting the little fellows just far enough forward to clear the next obstacle, or back just a touch so they don’t smack into something deadly. You can even choose your flavor of controls – slider, tilt or a dragging rotation. The last of those is, by far, the best.

There’s a sing-song, storybook quality to the whole experience, brought together with charming bits of doggerel on each loading screen. You march the characters through the season in a world scattered with names like “The Pumpkin Promenade” and “Persephone’s Fall.” Almost, almost worth it alone.

But not quite. Though the game grows more difficult over the course of its 16 levels, its formula never really grows. You may encounter a few tricky gates, or clever platformy sections, but what works in the first level will work in the 16th. Similarly, the music and aesthetic never much change or grow. What’s terribly sweet for the first few levels grows cloying without variety.

What results is a game that feels under-developed. The sixteen levels go by in a flash, and the addition of four with Christmas themes doesn’t much help. More length would only be a band-aid fix, highlighting the lack of variety, and an unfortunate opacity in the scoring mechanism. The more survivors the better, true, but what marks a high score beyond that? Players can’t play faster as the camera moves at a steady pace. There’s nothing to collect, no clever techniques to pull off or secrets to find. So why have a star system and a high score system at all?

This is exacerbated by the lack of achievements or leaderboards. There’s a bit of artificiality to extending a game with achievements, but they’re also a challenge to developers to expand a game’s horizons. Walkabout Journeys doesn’t feel intentionally minimalistic, so why not throw in some additional objectives and give players a reason to replay and improve? Instead it feels more than a bit unfinished.

Ultimately, Walkabout Journeys never arrives at its full potential, but as it sweetly proclaims at each of our deaths, “this place is nice too.” It is for a time, and that’s almost enough. It’s a lovely little lark, so if you enjoy the screenshots it’s certainly worth a go. Just don’t expect more than a stroll.

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If the golden days of Lucasarts adventure titles such as Maniac Mansion, Day of the Tentacle and Zak McKracken and the Alien Mindbenders recall fond memories, there’s a good chance you’re destined to love any and everything about Kaptain Brawe: A Brawe New World [Free / HD]. After all, who didn’t get a perverse joy out of wandering aimlessly and trying to figure out puzzles that were so odd that using basic logic on them meant you would never advance?

Those types of puzzles make their appearances here, but so does a lot of solid gameplay. Kaptain Brawe opens up with an intro to the title character, a big goofy dude who somehow managed to get hired as a space officer despite the fact he’s clearly not the brightest bulb in the room. Already, we have a recipe for some laughs — that’s what adventure game fans are used to. You’ll start out solo, but eventually meet new characters like Row Boat (a robot of few words) and Luna (a bit of a mystery all around) who you can swap between at different points in the game, offering a bit of new perspective.

What starts out as a basic exploration of a ship on a deserted island segways into Brawe stumbling headfirst into a complex conspiracy that will send him across the galaxy searching for answers. It’s a proper adventure game story, and it never failed to entertain. The humor of the game is pretty spot-on, although I felt it fell a little short from time to time (but in that cheesy way that all adventure games seem to touch on at one time or another.)

Speaking of genre tropes, one thing that Kaptain Brawe also has nailed when it comes to adventure game homage is the difficulty level of the puzzle solving. While there are options here (Casual and Hardcore), some of the solutions to puzzles are so downright ridiculous that it reminded me of playing Myst back in the day. A hint system proves helpful if you get really stuck (Lord knows we never had THOSE back in the day), but there are times when it won’t reveal missing something very small and you will just kind of be sitting there without a clue on how to proceed. In other words, get ready touse your noggin in the most creative of ways.

The interface and controls are pretty basic — an icon rests in each corner of the screen, and all movement is produced by the touch of a fingertip. It makes the game easy to get lost in, but the visuals also take a hand in that, and they do a grand job. The game has a sweeping cartoon feel, but the style is very distinct and memorable. 2D backgrounds and 3D characters work together nicely, and there’s a lot of locations to explore, all of them rendered in loving detail. I personally loved the world of Kaptain Brawe, as it offered a tone and setting that you can mostly only find in Telltale Games titles these days.

While Kaptain Brawe may not be the perfect intro to the genre due to its difficulty levels, it does offer an excellent story and clever writing that ought to draw longtime fans of adventure games into its clutches quickly. There’s no denying the retro appeal, but overall this is a solid title even by today’s standards. If you like the taste offered by the initial free download, you can unlock the full game via IAP, which will set you back $4.99 on iPhone and $6.99 on iPad. If you ever passed time on a game like Leisure Suit Larry or Space Quest, you will adore Kaptain Brawe and all of his fumbling attempts at saving the galaxy.

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This is probably ancient news for the biggest of big fans of Catan [$4.99 / HD] in general, but check this: USM, the same dudes responsible for the App Store port of the popular board game, are putting out a port of Rivals of Catan. This morning, actually, we were told that the “first version” is currently in testing, and USM is inviting its users into a beta to give it a spin.

Rivals of Catan is a card game adaptation of Catan proper built for two players. In brief, it’s all about expanding principalities and scoring points for various things in a fairly rapid-fire fashion — players roll dice for bonuses and draw cards each round, some of which activate a special event or allow general improvements. You can read more about it here, if this is tickling you in any special way.

And by the way, that Cities & Knights expansion is still coming to Catan. A beta test is planned to start at the beginning of the year, and DSM hopes to release at some point around February or even March. Cross-platform multiplayer is also still scheduled to hit at some point after this update, FYI.

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WOW! This week, or actually, the last two weeks have been insane. We’ve been pulling some crazy hours here getting everything up, and as a result, the front page of TouchArcade has been moving at about mach 3. I’m pretty sure Brad, Jared, and I all Tebowed at one point this week in hopes that the emails would stop coming.

Anyway, here’s a reverse chronological recap of the stories really worth checking out over the past couple of weeks, in case you missed anything! If you’ve already read everything I’m linking here, congratulations, you just earned your TouchArcade holiday season merit badge.

Best iOS Games November 2011

Our ratings for games we reviewed in November are now in place, and we now present to you the ones that are on the top of the heap. Each game reviewed receives a 1-5 star rating relative to the other games from that month. Generally, a three-star or higher is considered a “good” rating.

The ‘Time Ducks’ Trailer Will Melt Your Brain

A couple of weeks ago, Tough Guy Studios released their first iOS game called Time Ducks [$1.99], and I’m going to be honest, I bought it based solely on the fact that it was called Time Ducks. I figured with a name like that, there was no way I could go wrong. As it turned out, Time Ducks ended up being a pretty fun and unique take on line drawing games, and it sort of sat on the back burner as something I’d been planning on writing about.

Controller Update: More on the GameBone, A Bluetooth 4.0 Revelation

iPhone controller accessories have been generating a good bit of news, here lately. More and more existing iOS titles are gaining physical control options via updates, and just last week we detailed the upcoming Gametel Bluetooth controller that will soon become a game-enhancing iOS controller option, alongside the iCade and iControlPad. The more the merrier, true, but long time readers may recall yet another controller we covered over a year ago that has been off the radar ever since. Does anyone remember the GameBone?

Microsoft Releases Official Xbox Live App

Microsoft, via Xbox Live evangelist Larry “Major Nelson” Hryb, has just announced the immediate release of the company’s first Xbox Live iOS app, My Xbox Live [Free]. It’s a free app that basically acts as a mobile companion to some of the more important aspects of the service. You can read and send messages to anyone on your Friend’s List, manage that list or invite new people onto it, edit your profile, gander at all of your hard-earned achievements, or even mess with your Avatar’s apparel.

The OnLive iOS Client is Finally Arriving

At E3 back in June of this year, we got an impressive hands-on demo of the OnLive service running and playable on the iPad. In case you’re not familiar, OnLive is the cloud-based gaming service that allows you to play from a fairly large selection of console and PC games by way of streaming them to an OnLive client running on your computer or a specially designed set-top box that connects to your TV. In simpler terms, it’s a lot like instantly streaming movies over NetFlix, except it’s video games, and you get to actually play them in real time with minimal lag if you’re internet speeds are up to snuff.

Out Now: ‘Batman Arkham City Lockdown’, ‘Mini Motor Racing’, ‘Six Guns’, ‘TXT Fighter HD’, and More

Holy jeez! We’re pretty used to the typical Wednesday onslaught of new releases in the App Store, but today has been a truly insane undertaking. Between Batman making a surprise drop from the shadows and into the App Store with Arkham City Lockdown, the exciting OnLive iOS client finally seeing the light of day (soon anyway), and the normal barrage of new releases we usually see every week, it’s been a wild roller coaster ride of iOS craziness. To top it off, Eli is out in Finland hobnobbing with The Mighty Eagle, ensuring that Brad and I are up to our ear balls in busy work.

Dragon Shout: A Great ‘Skyrim’ Map App

Dragon Shout [Free] has cleared the certification hurdle and it’s available now at the low, low price of $0. What it does, it does well, and it proves a point. Games as deep as Skyrim should be embracing mobile companion apps across the board. Dragon Shout is an app that not only makes Skyrim better, but down the road, it might add an entirely new layer to the experience: social.

‘Chrono Trigger’ Hits the App Store

Hey guys! Here’s a surprise, Chrono Trigger [$9.99] just came out of nowhere. Well, not entirely out of nowhere, since Square Enix had mentioned that it was coming this month… But after the rampant delays that Final Fantasy Tactics saw, my hopes that they’d hit this release window could be best described as “cautiously optimistic.”

Apple’s “App Store Rewind 2011″ Features ‘Tiny Tower’ and ‘Dead Space for iPad’ as Games of the Year

If you’re new to iOS devices, or haven’t been following the scene as closely as you should have been over the last year, Apple’s year end feature App Store Rewind 2011 has an incredible amount of must-have games and apps that, in my opinion, you can basically just blindly download as they did a great job of picking out the cream of the crop.

‘WildChords’ is One of the Coolest Things I’ve Seen the iPad Do

Easily one of my most anticipated games this year, and I’m sure many of yours out there as well, is Warballoon Games‘ Star Command.

‘Kinectimals’ Review – Making Connections

Kinectimals on Kinect is an experiential game that does a solid job of luring its users into forming an emotional bond with its assortment of on-screen, rascally pets.

Out Now: ‘Bug Princess’, ‘Ice Rage’, ‘Marathon 2′, ‘Sonic CD’, ‘Trenches II’ and TONS More

If you’ve been sitting on a massive emergency food supply waiting for the right occasion to open the first gallon sized can of preserved potato chunks, this might be it.

‘Sonic CD’ Review – Absolutely Incredible and Redefines Expectations of iOS Ports

The only way I can start this review is with a little history lesson, both for people who aren’t familiar with Sonic CD, as well as those of you who might not have been reading TouchArcade since the summer of 2009. Let’s start at the beginning, so everyone can truly appreciate just how wonderful the very existence of this game is.

‘Grand Theft Auto III’ Review – Ten Years Later, Still a Great Game

Prior to Grand Theft Auto III I’d say I had fun messing around in Grand Theft Auto games, but never really enjoyed myself. The top-down view felt incredibly claustrophobic, and, at least for me, made getting immersed into the game world incredibly difficult. I don’t think it’s hyperbole at all to say that GTA 3 changed everything.

Carcassonne’ Update Adds Expansion, Baby Mode

Remember when we wrote about the fact that Carcassonne [$9.99] will receive expansion support in the future? It has that right now.

‘Mad Dog McCree’ Coming To iPhone Next Week

American Laser Games’s so-awful-it-ends-up-being-good FMV shooter, Mad Dog McCree, is coming to the iPhone and iPod Touch this December 20, according to caretaker Digital Leisure. This is a port of the original arcade release of the game, so don’t expect anything too fancy, however the team is noting that it has converted the game’s silly footage for phones and even added an “all new casual mode” for those without hardcore gunslinging skills.

‘Bug Princess’ Review – Unsurprisingly, CAVE’s Latest Bullet Hell Shooter is Another Winner

In April of last year, iOS gamers scored big when longtime Japanese developer CAVE decided to task their mobile division with bringing some of their classic shooter titles to the Apple App Store. All of these games – Espgaluda II, Dodonpachi Resurrection, and Deathsmiles – received critical acclaim from media and gamers alike, and set the benchmark for what we should expect from our bullet hell shmups on the App Store.

I told you it has been a crazy couple of weeks! I only cherry picked the really good stuff that we posted for this list too! Now, it’s time for a beer and a weekend away from my inbox…!

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