London-based developer, Mediatonic recently released Must.Eat.Birds. [App Store], a "picnic defense" game which seems to be becoming a cult hit.

The main characters of Must.Eat.Birds. are the nomsters, who were enjoying a picnic of various desserts when a seemingly endless supply of parachuting birds launched their attack. The nomsters, left with no choice but to defend their precious supply of cupcakes and other goodies fashioned a makeshift defense using two forks and a rubber band.

To launch your counter-attack against the bird offensive,  draw back the nomster currently loaded in the fork slingshot and release in the direction you want to fire. Nomsters can eat each other to create bigger nomsters, capable of clearing more birds off the screen by launching another nomster in to the existing airborne nomster.

Scoring is largely based on combos, you will want to launch your nomsters to clear out the most birds with each attack. As your combo grows, a multi-layered cake appears in the background. If you're able to score a large enough series of combos for it to reach the top, that's when the magic happens: Maximum Bake, which powers up your nomsters, easily allowing you to easily defeat even more of the bird invaders.

Must.Eat.Birds. comes packed with 9 mission levels of increasing difficulty with different type of birds that require more nomster hits before they can be eaten as the game progresses. Aside from that, there are also 4 unlockable challenge modes and an array of achievements to increase replay value.

Similar to Namco's smash hit series, Katamari Damacy, Must.Eat.Birds. is absolutely dripping with wacky over-the-top Japanese game show flavor. Everything is extremely colorful, and the game has a fun, fast paced Eastern themed soundtrack. Must.Eat.Birds. also has an (intentional) bad translation feel to it with English labels in black labels covering the various Japanese interface elements.

If you find yourself looking at screenshots and watching the trailer trying to make sense of what is going on in the game, I don't think you're supposed to. The absurdity present in Must.Eat.Birds. between the concept behind the game, Maximum Bake, and everything in between is a large part of what makes Must.Eat.Birds. so great.

At 99¢, Must.Eat.Birds. is a simple and strange game that goes so far off the deep end that you can't help but smile while playing it.

App Store Link: Must.Eat.Birds., 99¢

Update: There seems to be a stability issue for some. A restart will help and according to the developer an update/fix has been submitted.

I wish there was more to post about this game trailer, but all standard Internet detective tricks haven't turned up anything worthwhile. What you see is what we know.

http://www.coming-on-iPhone.com/

Featured in the trailer is a bank robbery, high speed police chases, and the ambiguous release date of "Summer 2009". It's anyone's guess whether this is going to be another GTA-like game, some kind of racing game, or even a shooter.

Think you have an idea of what this game is? Come speculate in the thread on our forums or leave a comment.

Yesterday we pointed readers to Firemint's tech demo, which sprang from developer Rob Murray's desire to see just how far he could push the new iPhone 3GS hardware.

Murray created a test build of his studio's Real Racing [App Store], which normally features six cars on a track at the same time, and started adding cars in order to see when the new hardware would falter.  He was able to push the game to 40 cars on-track at once without any perceptible loss in framerate.  As he concluded, the results are fairly "mind blowing."

Pocket Gamer recently spoke with Murray, who shared his thoughts on what the more powerful iPhone 3GS means to iPhone developers, in general.

"To get value from your 3GS-specific investment you would want to feature and promote its benefits. However, when you do that, at the same time you can very easily give the non-3GS market false expectations," he says.

"So if you do differentiate the 3GS, you need to think carefully about how much noise to make about it. If you make too much noise it may backfire with negative user reviews from non-3GS customers, if you don't promote it at all then you haven't really gotten full value out of your investment."

Murray feels that the best overall strategy for developers is to focus on the lowest common denominator -- the early iPhone platform devices -- and let 3GS users enjoy the added smoothness that the device's beefier hardware brings.  In fact, he feels that few games currently in the App Store are pushing even the earlier generation hardware.

"From what I have observed on the App Store, I don't think there are many apps that have pushed the limit of the existing hardware. For the vast majority of apps, there is little that they can do power-wise on the 3GS that they couldn't equally do on the prior models with just a little bit more care and optimisation."

With the base iPhone 3G selling at $99, Apple should be moving more of the lower-end devices than ever.  And while the iPhone 3GS is indeed the new flagship of the iPhone family, it's higher-end specs are far from the "standard platform."  It will be interesting to see how each developer approaches the problem of making all iPhone gamers happy with future releases.

See the Firemint 40-car Real Racing demo, if you missed it earlier.

Muteki Corporation has released their pirate defense game Battle of Pirate Bay [$0.99] into the App store last night.

We previewed the game back at E3 and my first impression was that I loved the concept.

The game places you in command of three different ships to defend your base against incoming pirates. Each of the three ships have a different size, speed, attack radius and ammo supply. The largest ship is the slowest and has carries the least amount of ammo but has the longest attack radius. Meanwhile, the smallest ship is fast but needs to be right up against a pirate ship to fire its cannon. Using Flight Control-like multi-touch swipe controls, you direct your ships to cover their respective areas on the playfield. Incoming pirate ships are automatically fired at when they come within range of your ships.

As you run out of ammo, you will need to start managing your resources by juggling your ships around to get the best coverage. Incoming supply ships will replenish a ship's ammo if intercepted so you'll want to keep a look out for those. If a pirate makes it past your ships, it will start bombarding your base with cannon fire and you won't last very long. Tapping on your base fires an emergency cannon to take out the closest invader, but there is a recharge time before you can fire it again. It's your last ditch defense option if no ships are close enough.

The game seems to offer a good mix of mild strategy along with fast-paced action that should keep you coming back for more. Deciding where and when to deploy specific ships can become a challenge. I found the emergency cannon to be a useful tool that can be used strategically at critical moments. The game also comes with a global leaderboard system which lets you compare your score to the rest of the world.

The developer's trailer below shows some of the gameplay, while our pre-release video shows some actual hands on time with an early version of the game.

Muteki has already committed to at least a couple of updates to the game and has started soliciting feedback using an in-game voting system. The first vote asks players what feature do you want next? Options include Ship Powerups, New Battle Maps, Typhoons, and Score Combos. We'll be interested to see how this voting experiment turns out.

Overall a fun and challenging resource management game that's only $0.99.

App Store Link: The Battle of Pirate Bay, $0.99

Chillingo is running a limited time App Store sale on Two Tribes' iPhone version of Toki Tori [link].

Toki Tori is a puzzle platformer in which you control the actions of a cute chick across 80 levels. The goal of each level is for Toki Tori to free his siblings who have been mysteriously kidnapped. Each level has a number of eggs that much be rescued and a certain inventory of tools to accomplish that task. The levels consist of a side-scrolling platformed environment with ladders, obstacles and enemies. Solving a level involves finding a way to collect all the eggs without getting stuck or killed by an enemy. Judicious use of your special tools is the only way to succeed.

We reviewed Toki Tori in May and found it to be  a wonderfully challenging puzzle game that has been very well adapted to the iPhone.  It comes highly recommended.

A free, lite version of the game [App Store] also exists for those wanting to try before giving up the $0.99.

[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]

App Store Links: Toki Tori, $0.99 (sale), Toki Tori Lite, Free