Here's the full list for perusing pleasure:

• Order & Chaos Online - $6.99 → $.99
• Gameloft Action Pack - $4.99 → $.99
• Shrek Forever After: The Game - $4.99 → $.99
• Shrek Forever After: The Game HD - $4.99 → $.99
• Iron Man 2 - $4.99 → $.99
• Iron Man 2 for iPad - $4.99 → $.99
• Driver - $2.99 → $.99
• Skater Nation - $2.99 → $.99

We're not 100-percent behind any of these, but we will note that the Gameloft Action Pack has a total of three decent titles bundled inside of it: Gameloft's answer to God of War, Hero of Sparta, its WWII shooter Brothers in Arms: Hour of Heroes, and its Mortal Kombat-ish homage, Blades of Fury. You could do worse with your dollar. For example: you could buy candy.

Anyway, the cause of this security breach as well as how deep this rabbit hole goes has yet to be revealed, although Gameloft says they're actively investigating. A thread on the official Order & Chaos forum indicates that players of both mobile and Facebook versions of the game have been hacked.

If you've ever played Order & Chaos and you're the kind of person who still uses the same password for everything, it's a good idea to change all your others. While you're at it, check out this New York Times article on creating strong passwords, and maybe even think about getting some password management software. I'm partial to 1Password myself, which basically exists for all platforms you'd ever want to access your passwords on and gracefully keeps all your data in sync via Dropbox.

Migrating from a single password you use for everything to a password management suite and different passwords for everything will take a little getting used to, but consider this: Once you start doing that, security breaches like this are entirely insignificant. Thanks to 1Password, I use a different password for everything. Order & Chaos getting hacked makes no difference to me, since all anyone would ever be able to access with those login credentials is my character… As opposed to desperately hunting down every login form that you've used your favorite password, "password", for.

Update: I was just reminded that Order & Chaos uses Gameloft's Gameloft Live service for logins, and if that is what was compromised, if you've ever created a Gameloft Live account it might be a good idea to get busy with the password changin' too.

If you've ever played a game like Mafia Wars, you'll have some idea of what to expect in Please Stay Calm. It's similar in design, but it takes place in your neighborhood. The world has been overrun by zombies, and you're a survivor. You'll need to scavenge for resources, build up a safehouse and a good team, and gun down the undead -- and a few of your fellow survivors.

The world Please Stay Calm inhabits is one that's on the edge of destruction. Zombies are everywhere, the government has been useless, and the survivors are on their own -- almost. The app ties you into the CVC, a network of survivors that connects you with missions, a black market and chat. While this is all done up in a simple informational interface, presenting the package as an app for survivors adds a nice bit of immersion.

As a survivor, two tasks will occupy most of your time: hunting zombies and scavenging for supplies. As you explore your neighborhood, you can visit nearby stores and landmarks. Without leaving your home, you can investigate the corner store across the street and strip it of a portion of its useful resources. Searching for supplies opens a top-down minigame where you seek out static dots that represent supplies and cash while dodging the dots that represent zombies. Hunting zombies brings up another minigame. Two dimensional zombies assault your screen while you try to pick the right weapon to use from a flashing selection screen. Both are reflex tests, so care and quickness will see you through alive.

Winning a fight or surviving a scavenging hunt rewards you with cash and supplies, two of the many, many numbers you'll need to pay attention to in this game. Some supplies can be taken to the black market and sold for cash, others are a currency on their own. You've also got health to worry about, stamina, and energy -- you can't investigate without energy. Then there are credits, the premium currency for Please Stay Calm. They can be converted to supplies and cash. Supplies upgrade equipment and pay for health packs, credits pay for items that restore stamina and energy (and public chat, strangely), and cash gives you equipment. Lost yet?

Eventually your assortment of bars will refill for free, so the patient among us can play without paying. Then you can go back to hunting. If that was all there was to the game it would get old fast, but there's always more to do. Like any MMO, Please Stay Calm is better with friends. You can choose one nearby location as your safehouse and use your supplies to upgrade it. Not only do you end up with an awesome stronghold, but its stats effect yours in battle. More friends in your safehouse means more people to cooperate with, and everyone knows you can't survive a zombie apocalypse alone.

There are a few other things to do in Please Stay Calm. You can duel other players to earn cash, supplies and experience. As you level up you'll get access to missions that carry the storyline and offer great rewards. You can build outposts and harvest them for cash or supplies. And Massive Damage Inc. has more planned: they've hinted at turf wars, crafting systems and more of everything else. Still, without those things Please Stay Calm feels like it's still a bit beta, still somewhat unfinished.

The location-based MMO is a genre still growing into its own. Location-based anything is still quite new -- only since we've had GPS technology in our phones has it really caught on. Please Stay Calm is a fun example of where the genre is today, but ultimately it feels like a novelty. You can tie it into Foursquare, and then it's a more social novelty. If, like me, you're waiting for the killer app of this genre, you'll have to keep waiting, but Please Stay Calm is a satisfying way to pass the time till then. If you want to share your zombie-slaying exploits on your way to the top of the leaderboards, stop by our discussion thread.

Now, exit the Command Center and scroll over to the Reviewers’ Barracks. Enter the Barracks and select my name from the list of recruited reviewers. Drill down into the Writing Skills menu and click the sub-menu tab for Add New Skill. Spend 30 TAPs (TouchArcade Points) to activate the skill “Analogy Synopsis”. If you lack the necessary TAPs to activate the skill, a modest in-browser purchase will get you more to speed up the process. Now, launch the reviewer and see him crank out a brief overview of the experience of playing Avalon Wars in the style of Avalon Wars.

If you’re still reading at this point, you may just be the kind of person who will love the hell out of this game.

Avalon Wars is a strategy MMO which places you in charge of a regiment from one of 3 initial factions. By developing your base, your technology, and your troops, you prepare yourself to face off against players from other factions or against the computer controlled Rogues. Why all the fighting? Well, the planet of Avalon is the only source of a valuable substance called Domistal, and he who controls the Domistal controls the universe.

Incidentally, Domistal is also the basis for being able to charge micro-transactions to players who are bottle-necked in their production process. Thankfully, this is not a common occurrence. If the intro didn’t properly convey my point: this game is thick. There are many different types of resources in Avalon Wars, and they’re not all required for every action. There’s always some facet of the game to be focusing on that won’t require the resource you’re short on.

The main focus of the game is in building and upgrading your base. There are a multitude of structures to erect, and the options for prioritization in your build order are legion. Focusing on resource management alone will prevent you from earning all the rewards that come from winning battles, but focusing on troop development too much will find you quickly overmatched once you begin running into enemies with better tech than you, which will send you right back to develop your base/troops more.

Thankfully, the game does offer some valuable assistance in the form of a lengthy and detailed tutorial. The poorly localized but thorough tutorial text is distractingly presented on the generous cartoon cleavage of your lieutenant, who will guide you through the functions and strategy for your initial base-building and combat skills. Once she’s done showing you the ropes, you’re free to tackle the insane number of quests, jobs, and challenges the game has to offer.

Once you have your resource gathering structures functioning well, you’ll move on to focusing on generating troops and recruiting heroes to lead them. Once you’ve got them on your team, you’ll research new technology to equip them, train them to raise their stats and gain new abilities, outfit them with an endless stream of purchasable gear, and then put them in charge of a regiment of soldiers. This is where the min/maxing gets crazy, as certain hero stats match perfectly with different troop types. Jack-of-all-trade heroes are worthless in combat.

Combat is where the game begins to fall short, unfortunately. There’s the illusion of strategic depth when it comes to the way you build formations of different troop types, but beyond the obvious “put your tank units up front and your weak death-dealers in back”, you won’t find a lot of variation in the tactics required to succeed. Victory is almost entirely predicated on how well you’ve developed your team and their stats prior to the fight. Once the fight begins, the game automatically plays out the turn-based affair, doles out your rewards, and sends you home to pick up your shovel and go back to digging through sub-menus.

The MMO aspects of the game are nice to have, but like the core gameplay are extremely cumbersome to manage. Avalon Wars offers the ability to form legions (read: guilds) with other players, and offers chat-rooms to organize and shoot the breeze. Unfortunately, it’s all so unwieldy that you’re hardly compelled to jump through the additional hoops to engage with other players. Taking into consideration that most PvP battles leave you either dramatically overpowered or underpowered compared to your opponent, treating this game as a single player experience might be wise.

Some gamers love the experience of crafting the perfect fighting force and sending it out to annihilate the enemy. The building, the tweaking, and the arcane knowledge of every tiny sub-menu are the draws of this type of game for them. Like Sun Tzu said in The Art of War, “Every battle is won before it is fought.”

Others thrive on the uncertainty of the moment and the adrenaline that comes with the possibility of defeat. These sorts will be absolutely turned off by the labyrinthine user interface, the lack of balance, and the insane amount of patience it takes to really begin succeeding at the game’s core mechanics.

As for me, I found myself fascinated at first and impressed with the level of depth the game offered. However, the lack of combat challenge wore on me, and I disliked having to relearn all the menus whenever I had to put the game down for a while. I really appreciated that I never felt forced to rely on IAPs to get to the fun aspects of the game, but I didn’t find myself compelled to dive into Avalon Wars for the long haul. At the low price of free, it can’t hurt to pick it up and make up your own mind if you’ve had the interest and fortitude to see this review to its conclusion.

Forever Drive, if you didn't know, is a futuristic racing game, complete with track building and neat customization elements, sorta like ModNation Racers. The coolest element, on paper at least, is its online, perpetual city. Supermono describes the game as “Outrun-meets-SimCity-in-the-future-online,” if you need some analogues.

Of course, it also dropped some screenshots. There’s probably a great word for this kind of art style, but because my brain doesn't work so great all the time, I’ll just say it looks great (in a TRON kind of way) and let you tell me my business in the comments.

If you’re familiar with this project, you might be wondering why it’s now called Forever Drive instead of "Drive Forever." According to Supermono, there’s a legal reason for the flip. It didn't go into the details in the official blog's latest post, probably because the story would be REALLY boring.

It also didn't discuss release date. We've got in touch and hope to bring you that information and more in the near future.

Utilizing the Unity web player plugin, Gameloft has (since this podcast was released) brought Order & Chaos to Facebook. Playing is as simple as downloading the plugin (if you don't have it already) and heading over to the Order & Chaos Facebook page. It's completely free until level 10, and after that you'll need to subscribe. There's a number of payment options ranging from 1 Facebook credit (equal to 10¢) for a day of access, or 30 Facebook credits for six moths.

Unfortunately, Facebook players play on separate servers from mobile players, so you will need to start fresh. Regardless, this is incredibly cool to see Gameloft doing and just goes to show the sheer ubiquity of the Unity engine. It's always neat to see iOS titles hopping platforms, and it will be interesting to see how Order & Chaos does on Facebook since it's basically now a passable World of Warcraft clone that people can play at work in their browser.

Anyway, it’s with great honor that I tell you about Gameloft’s massive $.99 Father’s Day sale, a sale meant to stir your loins and your wallet. I can’t pin down a rhyme or reason for what games are being offered at their discounted rates, but hey, they’re cheap and I think that’s all that matters at the end of the day.

Here’s the list. The first link you’ll see is connected to a write-up of ours about the game, while the second will take you straight to the App Store:

Eternal Legacy - 99¢
Eternal Legacy HD - 99¢
Fast Five: The Movie: Official Game - 99¢
Fast Five: The Movie: Official Game: HD - 99¢
Fishing Kings - 99¢
Gangstar: Miami Vindication - 99¢
Gangstar: Miami Vindication HD - 99¢
NFL 2011 - 99¢
NFL 2011 HD - 99¢
Order & Chaos Online - 99¢ [Universal]
Real Soccer 2011 - 99¢
Real Soccer 2011 HD - 99¢
Spider-Man: Total Mayhem - 99¢
Spider-Man - Total Mayhem HD - 99¢

You know, maybe these are supposed to be games that father's dig? My dad refuses to play anything without the words "King's Quest" or "Hearts" in the title, but to each his own I suppose.

In addition, there's also an update on the way which fill add some new quests, the ability to migrate characters between servers, and separate chat channels for each language. After that, future updates are planned which will include things like new dungeons and PvP arenas. Something tells me that with the kind of cash Order & Chaos is making, Gameloft will be supporting it very well.

If this is the first you've heard of Order & Chaos, we posted both some early impressions as well as describing what it was like leveling from 1-10. The thread on our forums is massive, and worth checking out as well. If you've even vaguely dabbled in WoW, consider giving O&C a download. It's crazy just how much Gameloft has duplicated.

The PR isn’t much better, though the press releases and the buzz around it are the things that drew our attention in the first place. Shadow Cities is billed as a PVP-centric ARG that uses wherever you are as the game’s map. Like an MMO, it supposedly offers a cool and deep leveling system and a ton of missions and ‘activities.’

That's real high-concept stuff. What I actually see is a weird, blacked-out Google Maps-style world with little purple, blue, red, and green orbs floating around like neon snowflakes. With a couple of flicks of my wrists, my orange orb can decimate these other colored orbs. Then, I get experience points and, I guess, the implied promise of further orb decimation.

It seems like the point of the game revolves around killing these orbs. With each victory, I come closer to dominating my urban center, which happens to be a small city deep in the American south. I don’t see any progress bars or anything of that sort, though, so I’ll just assume that the forthcoming tyranny will take some time to seed.

In Shadow Cities, you play as a mage of one of two sides. I picked the “tech priest”-type of dudes assuming that the meld of man, psychic powers, and machines would fair better against the earthy, organic types of mages. I don’t think there’s a substantial difference in what “team” you pick. At least, I don’t get that impression.

There are two chat rooms available to you once you start the game. It isn’t, at least here, specific to your urban center. The guys talking in the chat are from my state in general and they’re looking for people to battle because app hasn’t reached the kind of critical and consumer response that it needs to flourish and become more than a proof of concept that sounds neat in press releases.

Over on the game’s official blog, proof of stuff that can happen in the game can be found. Earlier in May, users were encouraged to join battle groups, which are, essentially, global communities of 100 mages assigned to a country. There was a campaign in which one team won over another by keeping large cities to themselves, while destroying the other team’s big cities. That sounds pretty cool, actually.

I’d like to get a sense of that scale, but through the app, I can’t. I just see city streets and AI-controlled wisps of color that dance around my orange wisp. I destroy these wisps and then more generate and then I destroy them. If I could see where my battle is going, how my individual fights are factoring into a larger picture, or if I actually felt like I was interacting with a larger world, Shadow Cities would click better with me.

There's a lot of promise here. I mean, think about it. Just by whipping out your phone and spending the 15 seconds it takes to crush an orb, you could be helping to decide the fate of a global battle. That's heavy, man, and fun-sounding idea to boot. Or, additionally, if you live in a dense area, this could be like Yelp!, except with mage battles. You walk into a store some jerk checked-in to and then BOOM -- you take him out.

I should note that the studio behind Shadow Cities, Grey Area, is behind the project and willing to keep iterating on top of the existing software. Gamasutra caught up with its CEO recently and he said as much, adding some specifics on new mechanics being added in the future:

"We want to develop it further and enable people to interact in the way that they want," he said, "we’ve been really conscious and paying attention how people want to create the battles... that’s what people want to do: strategize, plan, raid locations together, and all of that, so it’s definitely in the works, if you will.”

Cool. Come next update, I hope someone, anyone, around here picks up the game so I can put a spell all over his face.

Details on the complete patch and its eventual release are still cloudy, but we do know a number of key fixes, tweaks, and enhancements that it’ll package in. Foremost, expect to see a number of new quests in “the last two high-level regions” and a new teleport in the Greenmont region of world. Also, forget about killing dudes in cemeteries -- with the arrival of this patch, these zones are to become hands-off, non-PVP areas.

Of course, there’s more. The ever descriptive “additional content and ... fixes” has been promised and game creator Gameloft is still teasing new dungeon, PVP arena, and level cap add-ons.

“We'll notify you as soon as possible about the complete details of this update and its timing,” the post reads. “Be sure to check back regularly if you want more info about the progress that our development team has made.”

Sure, I’ll check back regularly, but only if there’s a new mount in it for me. Gameloft gives out mounts, right? It should. For the record, I want a space snapping turtle with rocket boots. Make it happen, Gameloft. Make it happen.

That’s a deal, but you have to wonder how Space Time plans to make money while a large swathe of its instance-based content is free. That’s where this comes in: the studio has just announced a brand new “premium” area called the “Sandstone Caves.”

It’s made for players around level 20 to 25 and includes what you want: a new town, a new series of quests, new enemies, new bosses, and new weapons, armor and items.

The price? 10 in-game Platinums, which should help satisfy the need for Space Time to fill its coffers. The lowest amount of Platinums that you can buy at the moment is 30 for $4.95, which is likely the catch here.

It’s also possible to earn free in-game cash in exchange for taking part in one of those now-infamous marketing loops. “Yes, you can still get free Platinum with Tapjoy in both Apple and Android devices," a representative told us.

Just for reference, the areas that are set to remain free are Balefort Castle, Fathom Crypts, The Lost Expedition, The Ancient Swamps, Balefort Sewers, and last but not least, The Alien Oasis Trilogy.

Pocket Legends is one of the deepest, most well designed mobile MMOs on the market to date. As we've previously noted, we reviewed the game last year, but a lot has changed since then, so you'd probably be better off reading the official "Quick Start" guide to get a good sense of what Pocket Legends is about. Oh, and if you're in the market for a more in-depth look at Sandstone Caves, these two articles wouldn't be a bad start.

And as soon as you do, disable global chat for the love of all things true and decent. To do so, bring up the text entry and instead of tapping the "Global Chat" button to talk in that channel, holdit down until it is blocked. For whatever reason, Gameloft apparently hasn't segregated servers at all, so Global chat is a mishmash of every language under the sun.

I'm not sure how much of a "review" I can even do for a game like Order & Chaos. I played basically all day yesterday, and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface. I've yet to really even make it outside of what feels like the starting area, and my talent trees haven't even breached the second tier of skills. This seems like a massive game, and the TouchArcade guild chat seems to have unanimously agree that Order & Chaos Online is "as good as vanilla World of Warcraft." I'm not sure I'd go that far, but there certainly is absolutely nothing else like this available on the App Store.

With that being said, as I mentioned in a previous post, Order & Chaos is definitely textbook Gameloft. They cloned the art, gameplay, and everything else that matters while leaving out a lot of the "soul" (for lack of a better way to put it) that Blizzard always has in their games. It's technically competent, but at times it feels like you're just going through the motions of an MMO, doing kill quests and running around while not really being invested in the game world itself. I've yet to really even come across anything I'd describe as "lore," which could be a fairly negative thing in the eyes of many.

There's also the legitimate concern that Gameloft might not keep Order & Chaos fresh with updates. A vital part of any MMO is a constant stream of content for your subscribers to play through, and Gameloft hasn't exactly had the best track record when it comes to providing additional content to their games at all. Without a fairly functional crystal ball, it's hard to say if this will ring true for Order & Chaos or not. Also, the WiFi-only limitation sucks. The game works just fine for jailbroken users with 3G Unrestrictor, and not being able to play on the go with my 3G iPad is seriously a drag.

Anyway, what I do know is I've been having a blast with the game. It's been scratching the eternal itch I've had for a WoW-like MMO on my iPad, and the fact that the client is universal is just icing on the cake. The TouchArcade guild seems to be having a blast too. Speaking of which, let's see if we can just take over the Arcadian Forest server. I was actively recruiting today for the TouchArcade guild, but it hit the 60 character limit in about 45 minutes... So we're going to need to make other arrangements. If you're a guildmaster looking for players, stop by this thread. Alternatively, if you're a player looking for a guild, feel free to post here.

I decided to play an orc ranger because I wanted to play on the chaos side of things and I've always been partial to ranger-like classes in general. Starting the game, you're inundated with various tips, all of which will be incredibly obvious to anyone who has played an MMORPG before. The early quests, like most (all?) MMORPG's walk you through how the basics of the game works, and the path my orc ranger took involved slaying pigs, killing crabs, and various other low-level kill quests before I decided to go exploring.

Fast travel in the game works through a portal system, instead of flying places you're able to find a portal and just instantly warp from place to place for a small fee. I actually like this quite a bit because when playing World of Warcraft, flying somewhere was basically little more than a time sink. As mentioned in the previous post, the quest system also includes a waypoint arrow that points from your character to either the quest objective or the quest giver to go turn it in.

By and large this works decent, up until you get into areas that are a little more complicated than the starting town that have hills and other obstacles that prevent you from running directly to where the arrow is pointing. In these instances, finding the objective can be fairly difficult because the objectives don't appear on your map anywhere, and the quest text is often fairly vague (likely assuming you're going to be using the arrow.) Also, things get really confusing once you start warping around, as quests don't seem to be broken up by region. Early on it suggested I warp to Silence, a nearby town. It took me a good 20 minutes to figure out where I was originally and how to get back to all of my low level quests.

The interface of the game works basically how you would expect. Touching the left side of the screen works like a virtual joystick, and touching the right controls the camera. Pinching moves the camera in and out, and buttons frame the screen that perform all of the other functions. Targetting is as simple as tapping enemies, and for the most part combat works reasonably well.

Of course Order & Chaos isn't without its launch day flaws. Pathfinding for monsters seems laughably exploitable, and attacks don't seem to obey line of sight. If you're experienced at kiting, you can take down enemies that are much tougher than you should be able to fight. Monsters also seem to have very short leashes so you're rarely ever in danger of dying because you can just run away a few steps.

Death is handled in an interesting way, and is one of the most useful things that I've stumbled across so far that the IAP runes can do. When you die, you're given two choices: Respawn at a graveyard, or at the cost of one rune, resurrect right where you are. Otherwise, the runes seem to serve little permanent purpose aside from buying in-game vanity pets. Other uses for these runes include both temporary stat boosts along with boosting the rate that you gain experience.

Potential players on our forums are worried about this upsetting the balance of the game, but I don't really see that happening in the long term. The experience boost item costs 25 runes, which amounts to almost $5 and only lasts an hour. Sure, I'm sure that some people will buy these items, but the low length of time that they're effective combined with their pricing makes me think it really won't be much of an issue.

Also, while you can buy gold in game to buy things, you also seem to earn plenty of money for whatever you'd want to do just by playing. Every MMORPG that I know of has third party markets that players can buy gold from, so all Gameloft is doing here is moving things in house and cutting off any third party market. What I'm getting at here is I don't think the IAP is anything to get worked up over.

Anyway, on my way to level 10 I've come to the sad realization that there doesn't seem to be any world PvP (Yet?). The order and chaos factions don't seem to make any difference, as you're able to hang out with people from either faction and even invite order characters in to a guild started with my chaos character. The only PvP I've stumbled across is finding someone to duel me in town.

I'm liking the quest system, even though it doesn't really do anything new or exciting. In fact, almost all of the core gameplay is lifted straight out of World of Warcraft, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. Quests chains often have you going back and forth between different NPC's, and delving deeper and deeper into enemy camps. Loot is plentiful, and it always seems like you're either on the verge of upgrading something, or leveling and getting another talent point to assign somewhere (which also works very WoW-like).

As mentioned, I've yet to come across any kind of PvP, or any dungeons to speak of. Because of the Canadian release, the world is quite barren of players so I'm not even sure grouping up is possible right now. Regardless, I'm going to keep playing and see what else I come across. My initial impressions from five or so hours of playing is that Order & Chaos Online is a textbook Gameloft game. It copies the important parts from what it's imitating, loses some depth in the process, but overall feels remarkably competent. If you've been looking to get your WoW fix on the go, this is it.

I've started a TouchArcade guild on the Arcadian Forest server, and my character name is "Eli". If you add me to your friends list, then send me a whisper in game I'll invite you to the guild. I'm also not sure what purpose being in said guild has, but at least we'll have some rockin' guild chat if nothing else.

Canadian App Store Link: Order & Chaos Online, $6.99

I've downloaded the game and put around an hour of playtime into it so far, and in the process discovered quite a few of the things we were wondering from the trailers Gameloft previously released. First off, the game isn't freemium which may be a relief for some. It's launching at $6.99, which includes three months worth of subscription to the game. Following that, you can subscribe for a single month for 99¢, three months for $1.99, or six months for $2.99.

There are four playable races. Humans and elves are on the "order" side, and orcs and undead are on the "chaos" side. These races look remarkably similar to World of Warcraft, and as of right now four basic classes are included: Warriors, mages, monks, and rangers. Each class also seems to have two talent trees to invest points in. For instance, my ranger can specialize in being an "archer" or an "assassin".

In the hour I've played I've barely scratched the surface of the game, and most of my time has been spent completing basic kill quests and running around trying to get my bearings. One thing that's very nice about Order & Chaos is that there's an arrow you can enable or disable to always point you in the direction you need to go for the next quest, and a great map system hasn't allowed me to get lost anywhere.

Order & Chaos also features two different types of IAP. Runes can be purchased in differently sized packs and then spent on things like vanity pets and what appear to be high-end crafting items or enchantments. Gold can also be bought, but according to the Order & Chaos thread in our forums it can also be earned in game. So far the only thing I've come across that specifically requires a gold piece is increasing the size of my inventory.

As mentioned, I'm only around an hour into the game so far and it isn't immediately apparent how much any of these IAP items are needed. Every quest rewards money, although I'm far too low level right now to see if that money does in fact add up to the same gold pieces you can buy. I'm going to keep at it though, and will update this story as I hit any walls that require IAP.

All in all, Order & Chaos seems like the real deal, it's a great effort by Gameloft and a surprisingly accurate, although substantially toned down, clone of World of Warcraft. I'm curious to see how the whole order and chaos factions eventually play in, as I was able to create two characters on different factions on the same server. The terms of use does have all kinds of provisions for player vs player combat, I just haven't found it yet.

Anyway, if you're a Canadian or a "Canadian," give Order & Chaos a shot. I'm fairly impressed so far, although I wish it worked over 3G. Requiring WiFi is a drag, especially since my iPad tethered via 3G seems to work flawlessly while playing the game. If you're creating characters, do so on the Arcadian Forest server, that way we can all play together.

And of course, we have no word when this game will actually see an international release. Historically though, when developers release things in Canada they're just doing final testing to make sure their infrastructure is working. We could see Order & Chaos Online is the rest of the world as early as this Thursday.

Canadian App Store Link: Order & Chaos Online, $6.99]

Unfortunately, details are practically non-existent outside of this trailer and the previously released teaser. Will it be a buy once then play forever game like Guild Wars? Will Gameloft employ the newly implemented iTunes subscription functionality? Will Order & Chaos be free to play with all kinds of IAP? It's hard to say, but I'm thinking we'll find out soon. Historically speaking, Gameloft rarely ever releases trailers for games that are at least somewhat close to release.

If you'd like to join in on the rampant speculation taking place on our forums, it's a pretty good place to hang out with other people remarkably excited for the game.