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There was quite a debate in the TouchArcade command center today regarding whether or not we were even going to post this, as our community seems to simultaneously hate it when we post about clones, but absolutely loves talking about them. So, we’re going ahead with this along with the caveat that we’re trying to get in touch with all parties involved to get to the bottom of things. With that out of the way, let’s back things up a bit.

Johann Sebastian Joust is a no-graphics game designed for the PlayStation Move controller by Die Gute Fabrik. The game seems to be a staple at any indie game developer party, and features Bach’s Brandenburg concertos as the soundtrack. The idea of the game is to jostle the PlayStation Move controllers of the other players to get them out. The threshold of how much the controller can be jostled is adjusted in time with the music, and it’s a ton of fun to watch people playing. It’s a very difficult game to explain, so, watch this trailer:

Today, ustwo released an eerily similar game called Papa Quash [ Free ]. I suppose we should cut right to the chase here, so, assuming you’ve watched the above video, imagine that… But with dub step:

The rabbit hole goes much deeper here than your typical tale of game cloning. According to ustwo marketing director Steve Bittan, the concept of the game was actually cooked up by Sam Pepper, a YouTube pseudo-celebrity whose original claim to fame was appearing on the TV series Big Brother.

Allegedly, Pepper contacted the guys at Die Gute Fabrik who gave him to go ahead with the game and wished him luck. Die Gute Fabrik fired back via Twitter by saying, “Just to be clear, we have never and would never approve, give permission, or encourage anyone to clone of any of our games.” Where things get interesting in all this is that Mills, the ustwo co-founder and self-proclaimed Chief Wonka, has been very vocal in the past regarding cloning. In the past, he’s told PocketGamer:

“Making games, entertainment, a new design, a product should always be about unearthing something that makes you proud no matter what happens on the financial side… Fakes and copycats quite simply have to absolutely f**k off to another paradigm.”

Bittan, speaking with Edge continues:

“This is a quick, short-term project, in and out of the door very quick. Obviously the concept is quite similar. We don’t want to be dragged into it too much – it’s not anything to do with our app division.

We don’t copy – everyone is influenced by certain things. It’s like saying Sega is copying Mario or something. Whale Trail people said was similar to Tiny Wings, but we went back to the drawing board with that. If people think we’re happy to clone people they’re very much mistaken.”

We’ll see how it all shakes out once more people start talking. We’ve yet to hear back from ustwo ourselves, and Die Gut Fabrik is preparing a statement on the matter. Now, I’m going to go sigh a lot.

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Details are still vague as they could possibly be regarding the upcoming Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalker 2013 coming to the iPad, but a new video just hit YouTube this afternoon that shows off some of the new cards included in the 2013 release. Give it a look:

It’s probably safe to assume that this is video of the PC (or console) version of the game, so it’ll be interesting to see how many of the various visual effects transfer over to the iPad. Either way, we’ll find out when the game finally hits sometime this summer. I can’t wait.

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London-based design studio ustwo created a heck of a game in Whale Trail, but it’s failing as a commercial entity. It’ll never hit the App Store top 10. The face of its bubbly and wide-eyed mascot, Willow, will never grace products like panties or fruit snacks. And at its current pace, it’ll be awhile before it generates a decent profit.

The studio has huge expectations that aren’t being met, and just based on trends, it’s clear that Whale Trail will continue not meeting them. It’s a failure in this life. But will it be one in its next? Again, ustwo is spending money on Whale Trail, giving it a second wind via creative mouth-to-mouth. It’s retooling and redesigning the oddball flying game as a free-to-play title in a high-bandwidth effort to attract the casual audience that the original version failed to reach, but managed to brush.

The hope is that this model, alongside some fresh content, will finally put the game over the top and onto hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of phones and tablets across the world. It’s a crazy plan. Crazy, however, is kinda its project lead’s thing.

On Conversion, Failure, And Journeys

I’ve been speaking with ustwo co-founder Mills about the upcoming transformation. Mills is like a bizarro Clint Eastwood. In the face of adversity he has the same grit and air of determination, but instead of a cowboy hat and a killer squint Mills rocks a long, flowing red wig and eyeglasses with thick, black frames. When he talks to you, even via e-mail, you feel his warmth, energy, and passion. He’s funny, too, and you see a lot of his brand of humor in his game. As we talk, he refuses to call the original Whale Trail a failure despite being able to produce evidence indicating as much. Instead, he calls it a “succailure” and the process of making it a F2P title a “journey.”

“Whale Trail was our first proper game release,” Mills tells TouchArcade. “Full heart, full passion. The launch was a success for our studio, showering loads of eyeballs on us but something didn’t quite click. Although we were hitting 12,000 downloads a day at launch, it tailed off pretty quick.”

In fact, Whale Trail has just hit over 188,000 total sales, and it shifts around 250 units a day across Android and iPhone and iPad. These kind of numbers would be enough for a lot of studios, but ustwo spent oodles of cash on the game. It needed Whale Trail to be up there with the Angry Birds and Fruit Ninjas and the Cut the Ropes of the world.

How those titles manage to stay up top is a matter of debate. Mills doesn’t believe that featuring, reviews, or exposure brings in new downloads. He thinks that word of mouth is now driving sales. As evidence, he notes that the game’s trailers still get around 500 new views a day and the music video for the theme used in the game drives interest, too. Riding on a wave of featuring, however, Whale Trail managed to light up the charts for a short period. Mills shot us the following handy chart, for those of you into the numbers:

Learning about why the game didn’t keep selling at its initial, breakneck pace is an important component of its upcoming transformation. Mills is soaking up everything he can. He frequently frames this entire ordeal as a learning experience.

“We went back to the drawing board and dove deep into the blue waters to understand why Whale Trail wasn’t quite able to take off. We had made a wonderful experience but there wasn’t enough ‘replay’ value in the current game. The new challenge levels added in iteration release two and three helped, but we needed more. Much more,” he adds.

The new version of the game is, indeed, functionally different. As you collect bubbles and travel, you’ll collect an in-game currency called Krill. With Krill, you can buy new powers, “useable treats,” costumes for Willow and its five new playable friends. If you want this stuff without the grind, you can buy Krill straight-up.

“The game is so much better. Players are now in full control of their destiny and each play rewards them. This was missing before,” he says.

If you’ve already purchased Whale Trail, Mills says you’ll receive a “BIG” bag of Krill when you update to the new version. Additionally, you’ll receive a message designed to make you feel “special.” Mills worries about how the current install base is going to react to this massive change, since the regular version will essentially die after this update. Perhaps that’s why this message to fans will be “like finding a bag of money in your house that you can use to pimp it right up 50 style” or “like finding a bag of candy that is so sweet, yet so sticky.”

When I bring up failure, Mills says I have a point, but he describes the experience so far as a “journey.” His studio has had opportunities to sell off the IP or actually make money, but ustwo as a whole is more interested in learning at this point.

“You can look at it as a failure, but I see it as journey,” Mills says. “Each iteration of Whale Trail has created a new buzz and has engaged the players more. It’s been a big lesson for me especially in regards to releasing something I wanted and releasing something that the majority of players want. We were very successful at creating buzz, we were very open about the whole experience and the story of Whale Trail will now be told via Penguin,” he tells us. He means the publishing company, not an actual penguin.

“We had two Whale Trail acquisition offers for the game as it currently stands now, but we were not interested in money. We were interested in better understanding what we could do to make the game better. I couldn’t walk away from it now, knowing it was not the game we wanted it to be. The game we have since built and are testing now with players is the game we should have released back then but didn’t realize it at the time.”

Even though the Whale Trail flopped, Mills notes some positives. It gave his studio new business opportunities, a higher-profile in the development community, and a lot of good will. These things, however, aren’t going to make new Whale Trail sail. A balance of IAP and fun mechanics are the only thing that’ll save it.

“I want to know more about free-to-play,” Mills says. “We are not being aggressive with the monetization potential. Players need never spend, but the joy they feel should allow the game to be pretty viral. We get a small social virility through Twitter right now, but the potential at the higher numbers is unreal. I guess the plan is for Willow to find some real Whales!”

We’ll have to see if the new version of Whale Trail hits the heights that Mills thinks it can reach. Regardless if it does or not, it’s going to be hard to call this iteration a failure. To Mills, success is all about what you do as you try to succeed.

“We didn’t set out to make something generic. Success is about crafting something you believe in and telling that story, granted it may never be a smash hit as the very concept of a little fat flying whale called Willow who lives in a psychedelic land is too far out for many to stomach, but we made something we are so proud of.”

We’ll have hands-on impressions in the near future.

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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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Late last year, iOS game developer Two Lives Left released Codea [ $9.99 (HD)]. Originally known as Codify, Codea offered developers everything they needed to rapidly prototype an iPad game… On an actual iPad. Codea has come a long way since then, and today, the first game developed entirely inside of the app has been released.

Cargo-Bot [ Free (HD)] is a puzzle game where players program a robot to move crates around. 36 levels in all are included, there’s a 3 star grading system, and you can even record solutions to upload them to YouTube.

Cargo-Bot is free, and worth a look to see what’s possible inside of Codea. According to the Cargo-Bot site, the Codea Xcode Template used to convert the Codea files into an actual game that can be submitted to Apple will be released soon. Neat!

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Do you remember the Bullet Time Wars of the early ’00s? Every game had to have it, and not one of them got it right. We lost a lot of good games during that time; lost to the unnecessary addition of a dumb movie gimmick.

But then Max Payne [ $2.99 ] was released, and overnight the war ended. There was no disputing that, finally, a game had gotten bullet time right. That day was almost 11 years ago, and since then the world has changed. Games still implement bullet time, most of them successfully, but they all owe it to Max Payne.

For those of you who somehow missed out on it the first go around, Max Payne is revenge story wrapped in a noir coat that is so thick that the game occasionally comments on how warm it is. It serves as almost a noir for dummies book. Can’t sit through Chinatown? Max Payne will teach you all there is to know about noir.

But, for as silly as the writing occasionally is, it is still a good story. You will run into some truly gut-wrenching moments before you hit the 5 minute mark. But I wouldn’t dare spoil an 11 year old game, so I’ll stop right there. If you want to know more… Well, I assume you know what to do.

There is little sense in reviewing an 11 year old game that won nearly every award it could when it was first released. It’s well established that Max Payne is a fantastic game, but it is also ELEVEN years old. That means it comes with all the baggage that an 11 year old game has earned. So, rather than focusing on Max Payne the game, lets talk about Max Payne the iOS port instead.

This is the absolute best this game has ever looked. On the new iPad, the game sees resolutions and clarity that were pipe dreams when it first came out. Granted, the textures are low resolution, but they still look pretty good rendered on the iPad’s Retina Display. The between level “comic book” sequences are not Retina resolution, but it’s not a great mystery as to why.

I doubt anyone at Remedy envisioned people wanting to play the game at ridiculous resolutions, so it’s likely that they never created super high-resolution assets for anything. But, thanks to how well everything upscales, they still look pretty good. While it didn’t age as well as Grand Theft Auto 3 [ $4.99 ] did visually, it is still a great looking game. Bonus points if you can make it through the whole game without giggling at Max’s facial texture.

Controls are about what you would expect from virtual joysticks. Max feels a bit floaty when he moves, and looking around can be a pain, but the game is still very playable, thanks in part to a pretty competent auto aiming system. I know a lot of folks scoff at the idea of auto-aim, but it really does make the experience more cinematic and fun. When I turned off auto-aim, the results were decidedly less than fun (and often borderline frustrating), but your mileage may vary.

The real problem with the default virtual control layout is that the hit zones for buttons are too close to each other. Because you are aiming at a nondescript part of the screen, rather than a button, you will often find yourself jumping when you want to enter bullet time. A minor problem once or twice, but growing in annoyance significantly over the course of an 8 hour game. Like GTA3, you can move the buttons around on screen in the options, but you never really shake the feeling that this is a game made for a controller (or keyboard and mouse).

(Original E3 2011 trailer for PC version.)

Playing Max Payne to completion takes anywhere from 7 to 10 hours. If you intend to make that journey, please be sure to manage your own save files. Yes, Max Payne offers an auto-save, but I found it to be unreliable at best, and downright abusive at it’s worst. Unfortunately, games ported from PCs seem to bring more quirks than if they were ported from a console. Max Payne is from a time where we didn’t trust the game to save for us, so we took that responsibility upon ourselves. Max Payne for iOS has ported that feature spectacularly, so make sure you adjust your habits accordingly.

I’ll be the first to admit that I was super stoked about Max Payne coming to iOS. It was a game I loved on the PC 11 years ago, and I wanted to see how rose the colored glasses were. The answer is, surprisingly, not that rose. While it looks old, and has virtual joysticks, Max Payne is every bit the great game it was 11 years ago. I wish Rockstar had put more love into the port, but for costing me 1/25th of the original game, I’ll cut them some budgetary slack.

Now if I could just get rid of these war flashbacks, I’d be in business.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Reviewing games you have a history with is always difficult, especially when they’re derivative titles from a series you hold dear to your heart. Looking back on it, at some point I’ve owned each of the eight Burnout games that make up the franchise going back to the original that was released all the way back in 2001.

If you’ve never played a proper Burnout game (which is a problem you really should look into solving) here’s what the series is all about- Imagine a high-octane arcade racer that not only has a fabulous sense of speed, but takes the typical car damage system dozens of steps further into a car crashing system. Instead of merely beating the competition to the finish line, gameplay focuses on making sure your your opponents never actually make it there.

Subsequent sequels took this many steps further, even evolving into entire game modes that focused entirely on orchestrating the most elaborate pile-ups you can. It’s from these game modes that Burnout Crash [ $4.99 ] is distilled from, making its original appearance on Xbox Live Arcade and PSN late last year.

In Crash, the familiar racing game camera angle is replaced with an overhead birds-eye view of your car. The game consists of a series of intersections, each with slightly different layouts and traffic patterns, and you need to unleash as much damage as possible. Initially, you drive in, and slam into some cars. Cause enough damage, and you’ll be able to explode again, and vaguely control where your car gets blasted to in the process. This continues until you’ve either let five cars escape off screen, or you’ve reached the damage threshold for the level.

Burnout Crash perfectly embodies the horrid cliche of “Easy to learn, but difficult to master.” It’ll only take you a few tries to get a handle on the game physics, but actually learning the nuances of where to try to stack up cars on each intersection and how to position your own car to not mess up existing piles almost turns Crash an entirely unexpected physics puzzle game, especially if you jump into it expecting something like previous Burnout titles.

Gameplay is further spiced up by special cars that appear such as a wave of police cars that block part of the intersection to the insufferably terrible driver Dr. Beat who will restore one of your missed cars if he survives his drive on and off screen. (However, as Penny Arcade points out, he’ll crash into anything.) Additional game modes also add a decent amount of replay value.

My first experience with Burnout Crash was on Xbox Live Arcade, as a $15 title. Like most Burnout games, the overall energy of the game was amplified by a real soundtrack, heavy amounts of voice work, and a fabulous tutorial, creating an absolutely fantastic first impression. Those last two things? Nowhere to be found in the iOS port of the game. I could understand cutting a lot of the voice overs if EA was shooting for the 3G download limit, but the game weighs in at 146MB currently. The lack of any kind of tutorial is even more puzzling, and has left players in our forums confused as to what you’re even supposed to do in the game.

That’s not what has me personally disappointed the most though, as I already know how to play and usually play iOS games with the sound very low or off so voiceovers don’t do much for me. What I’m bummed about is that for whatever reason, EA thought the best (and only) way to control the game was via a weird system of swiping gestures to move your car around after each crash breaker explosion.

If you can “see the Matrix” behind Burnout Crash, it’s apparent that what you’re playing is a very elaborate and cleverly disguised ball-rolling game. Imagine something like Labyrinth 2 [ $4.99 ], except instead of freely rolling the ball you can only move when a crash breaker triggers, and instead of trying to make it to the end, you’re trying to roll into as much as you can. It’s because of this that tilt controls, even when playing on the Xbox 360, felt like they’d make the most sense- as they often do in top-down games.

On the technical side of things, given just how long EA has been working on the iOS port of Burnout Crash, there’s some odd flaws. While I’m thankful the game is universal, some of the textures in game are blatantly low-resolution on the new iPad. I’ve experienced Game Center weirdness, with popups often telling me that the game is not recognized by Game Center. Additionally, most intersections start with some noticeable frame rate drops as you race towards them. Also, the little springy “boing” sound that plays each time you swipe the screen really needs to go.

Admittedly, I’m probably being overly nitpicky because of my experience with this game. However, the things Crash feels like it’s missing don’t make a whole lot of sense, especially when it comes to the game’s tutorial. Regardless, I’m still going to play through Crash over and over again on my iPad, with my fingers crossed that EA eventually addresses some of these things. And even if they don’t, if you’ve never played the console version, I’m not even sure you’ll care or notice.

TouchArcade Rating:

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Eerily similar to getting Samsunged, iPad-owning Tetris fans got EA’d today. iPhone Tetris fans will know this song and dance all too well, as EA pulled it on them late last year. In a nutshell, the Tetris for iPad that you may know, love, and already own now ceases to exist. EA pulled it off the App Store to make room for the “new and improved” Tetris for iPad.

What’s new with this version of the game? A whole hell of a lot of in-app purchase, extending as far as monthly and yearly memberships to the T-Club, which will get you a 15% bonus on top of the lines and T-Coins (the game’s consumable currency) that you earn by playing. Oh, EA’s Origin has also been shoehorned in.

The sad part is that the Retina-ready graphics in this new Tetris look great on the new iPad, and the addition of the “one touch” control method make the game a lot more fun to play. But, again, much like the iPhone version, it makes absolutely no sense why this couldn’t have been an update to the existing game that everyone already paid anywhere between 99¢ and $7.99 for.

It’s really hard to get behind EA as a developer or publisher on the App Store when they’re more than willing to pull these kind of hijinks. It’s one thing to submit new users to a bevy of IAP options, but by pulling the old game from the store entirely, if you lose the original Tetris .ipa file for any number of reasons, getting the game again is going to set you back the full purchase price.

So, if you’ve got the original Tetris for iPad, make sure you keep it backed up in a safe place.

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Let’s face it, kids: If you are going to become a giant, fire-breathing monster and take over a city by way of stomping on it, you want to do it right. In style. So if I play a videogame that puts me in the role of said monster, I have one rule — I want to have fun. Glorious, building stomping, people eating fun.

That’s why the original Rampage was such a bounding success. When I saw screens of Monster Takedown [$0.99], I thought I was looking at the same kind of thing. You get to be a big octopus or monster with too many eyeballs or whatever and fend off flying helicopters and incoming bombs. The art looked crisp and cute, and I thought if the gameplay hit the mark, we could have a winner on our hands here. Could. Maybe.

Unfortunately, I can’t report that, because Monster Takedown is pretty boring despite its good looks (and oh, haven’t we all fallen for that formula a few times).  It goes with a very pared down approach, which goes something like this: pick a monster out of five, find yourself splayed over a city doing basically nothing, and wait with a glazed look while helicopters and bombs fly in to attack you. You can’t even move, which really takes the fun out of being eighty feet tall with giant eyeballs stalks.

Seriously though, the lack of movement wouldn’t have bugged me that much had there been something more exciting going on. The helicopters and other flying stuff can be taken out with the touch of a finger, and that can get more complex as you go, although it’s nothing to complain to your friends about.

But the killer is when a nuke flies in from above, which you are supposed to be able to swipe away. I say supposed because no matter how much I swiped or in how many directions, I had trouble getting the game to be responsive when it came to this. It did happen a few times (try a quick left to right swipe), but considering that if that bomb touches your monster, you instantly die — well, let’s just say this little snag took quite a bit of the fun out of things.

You do start each level with one Slow power and one Bomb power, and you can guess what they do by their names. And that’s about all I have to tell you. Oh, except you can post your scores to Facebook and Twitter as well as the Game Center leaderboards, but I’m guessing you already figured that out.

Monster Takedown is completely mediocre, but I think what hurts here is that the look is so cute and you can really see they could have done a lot more with just a little bit of effort. Ah well, there’s always next time. For now, save your dollar, or put it towards a better game.

TouchArcade Rating:

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The latest update to Super Crate Box [$1.99] introduces a new kind of crate, developer Vlambeer told us via e-mail this afternoon. Version 1.1, which just hit, adds extremely rare, and random, golden crates. In all, there are just 100 to collect globally. Also, as if that wasn’t Willy Wonka enough for you, a rare golden enemy type is being added, as well. As soon as fans find all of the golden crates, Vlambeer plans to release the next update.

This update will also introduce two more indie characters to unlock: one from Starguard, and the other from Psychosomnium. Bug fixes, tweaks, and prep work for version 1.2 are also expected to drop when this hits. Oh! And the first person to download this will score the world’s very first golden crate. Dibs!

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