When Apple announced, four years ago, that they would be releasing an iPhone SDK (for free) and opening an App Store where developers far and wide could peddle their creations, it became immediately clear to us that iOS (née iPhone) gaming was going to be huge. As developers jumped on board and began crafting titles for the platform, many noted that a game creation environment emerged that harkened back to the early-'80s home computer days when a single developer could sit down with an idea, bang out some code, and sell his game at the store down the block -- a floppy wrapped up nicely in a zip-lock bag. The barrier to entry was, again, nil.

Plenty of major studios began porting iOS versions of their large console titles over, sure, but it's really been the wonderful indie developers out there, following that development model of olde, that have contributed most of what's really special to iOS gaming. It's also worth noting that a great many of the true App Store gems adhere to the gameplay model that was the standard back in those early days of video games, both in the home and in the arcade: simple gameplay that's instantly engaging, delivering "just one more game" fun in short play-sessions. They really knew how to do it way back when -- fields of encroaching Asteroids, a furiously barreling Centipede, the quick thinking demanded of a Missile Commander, and the battle with gravity that is Gravitar. Wonderful stuff.

I'm thrilled to report that something incredible has just been revealed that stands to generate gameplay opportunities for iOS gamers that marry that white-knuckle gaming excellence of decades past with the here and now of a particular mobile gaming platform. In perhaps the biggest news ever to come out of an iOS game studio, Seamus Blackley, co-creator of the Xbox, has formed the startup Innovative Leisure and has pulled together a team of famous designers from the Atari of the '70s and '80s to create original, new games for the "new arcade," which is this team's term for the iOS platform.

The veteran Atari developers in question, or "Jedi Council," includes Ed Rotberg, creator of Battlezone; Owen Rubin, creator of Major Havoc and Space Duel; Rich Adam, creator of Gravitar and co-developer of Missile Command; Ed Logg, co-creator of Asteroids and Centipede; Dennis Koble, creator of Touch Me and Shooting Gallery; Bruce Merrit, creator of Black Widow; and Tim Skelly (of Cinematronics, not Atari), creator of Rip-Off. In all, 11 developers of olde, along with several young interns, make up the group. "This is the dream team from Atari," says Blackley.

As Blackley told VentureBeat,

“We had that big collection of games, and we love the history of game design,” Blackley said. “I’m lucky because I love games and following that love has always done me well. Once we figured out the iPhone is the new arcade, that games from the old days fit this new audience and their on-the-go lifestyle, we knew what to do. There is already a group of people who know how to operate and innovate in this space. They had the longest string of hit games in history. And they wanted to get back together again.”

Blackley's partner in the venture, chief executive Van Burnham, came to know many of the early Atari game designers in writing her 2003 book Supercade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971-1984. She introduced them to Blackley, and the like-minded group formed a close relationship. During this time, Blackley and Burnham created their own arcade in an LA warehouse, which they called the "Supercade," filled with rows and rows of vintage cabinets, gathered to illustrate the history of gameplay, as viewed by its curators. And, it is within this arcade in LA that the team of designers will work together on their new iOS creations, so as to gather inspiration by the games that surround them.

To start, the team came up with 30 game ideas in all, narrowed the list down to the 10 best, and pitched them to the publishing house THQ, who indicated they wanted them all. Right now, seven of the titles are in development. (THQ has first right of refusal on all of the team's titles, in exchange for funding, but Blackley indicates he can shop around any ideas the publisher dismisses.)

As a particular retro game lover -- and lover of those titles that stay close to that lean formula of decades past -- this news excites me in ways not easy to express. And, I have a feeling I won't be the only one whose hair stood up on the back of their neck in hearing it. Rest assured we will bring full coverage of any and all news out of Innovative Leisure, including further details the team will be sharing at next week's DICE Summit in Las Vegas.

Read the full interview story over at VentureBeat, and the photo gallery at Time is worth a look.

Breakout

As far as core gameplay is concerned, Transformoid stays very close to its roots. The game places you and your paddle at the bottom of the screen versus the blocks up top; there are no barriers or enemies looking to destroy your paddle or any other twists in the formula. In this regard, Transformoid doesn’t offer anything unique or innovated, although it does offer plenty of levels to play in, along with elements that seek to separate itself from the competition, particularly when it comes to physics manipulation.

Even though it’s a typical Breakout clone in most respects, Transformoid does incorporate a few interesting ideas in an attempt to differentiate itself. For example, one of the power-ups you can collect transforms your paddle into various shapes, each changing the way your paddle interacts with the ball. Some shapes make it easier to aim where you want the ball to go, while others make it a bit more erratic. Regardless, I thought it was a good idea and actually brought some variety to the game, assuming the physics were working as desired. I also liked the Steampunk motif that Transformoid uses, although I will admit that it’s becoming increasingly prevalent in more games. Still, the visuals are done well, and little touches like the backdrop subtly moving as you tilt your device back and forth add to the experience.

Another differentiator for Transformoid is the concept of wind, which can come in all different directions and can subtly change the direction of the ball. Unfortunately, wind is one of those gameplay elements that sounds good in theory but ends up being mostly annoying in practice. This is especially true when you’re at the end of a level and the wind is making it difficult to get your ball to travel anywhere, much less to that one spot in the corner with the last brick. Even worse, wind contributes to the fact that Transformoid is simply a very slow game – the ball moves slow, the paddles move at a set speed (on the slow side), and even power-ups that speed it up don’t do much. It’s not slow enough to be unplayable, but enough to be annoying.

Transformoid is also filled with lots of strange miscues that give the game a very rough appearance. There are a few typos across the menus that really stand out, for instance. In addition, there’s no scoring system to speak of or even Game Center support, meaning that there’s no external influence or motivation affecting replayability. Even little things like always resetting the map selection to the very beginning every time you play the game and not letting you cycle from the first level to the last quickly give the game an overall amateurish impression. Of course, none of these issues are game breaking, but they are significant detractors to the overall experience and do little to convince casual players to check it out.

You’d have to be a diehard fan of Breakout-styled games in order to check out Transformoid. The lack of any sort of progression system or leaderboard support means that you’re simply playing the game for the love of the genre. If you happen to fit this description, then Transformoid, with its somewhat interesting visuals and power-up ideas may be worth checking out at its current price. However, for anyone else, the inherent slow pace of the gameplay and uneven overall presentation mean that you should probably look elsewhere.

Gameplay involves piloting your flying saucer to various Earth-based prison barracks, blasting open the doors, picking up your captive crewmates, and dropping them off at the transporter where they're beamed safely back to your alien world.  This is made challenging by evil Earth forces, including tanks, laser turrets, fighter jets, and flying attack drones.

There are a lot of nice touches to the title. The stylized, vector-based 2D graphics lend the game clean, future-retro visuals, with a day-into-night changing skyline that adds nice variation to the scene. A letter-box effect alters the aspect of the play area to provide early warning of incoming enemies. It's extremely well done.

On the iCade, the leftmost six buttons control fire / autofire in the three relevant directions -- left, down, and right. I greatly enjoy Saucelifter! via tilt-control, but I have to say that gameplay on the iCade more closely delivers the kind of fun I remember having in front of Gorlin's helicopter classic, hour after hour, back in 1984. Other iOS controller accessories that feature iCade emulation, such as the iControlPad, should also work fine with Saucelifter.

Those not sold on Saucelifter! should at least have a look at the Lite version [link].

There's a number of ways you could read into this, largely depending on which way your dowsing rod is pointing. Atari could be planning on releasing their own version of either a direct port or modern re-imagination of Battlezone, and are sweeping the App Store of "clones" (I'm using that word very loosely, mind you.) to make room. Alternatively, it's entirely possible that Atari has a whole department of lawyers whose sole purpose is to protect their IP by any means necessary, and the Vector Tanks series were just casualties of of a legal war.

I could really go either way on that one, as Atari is all about milking their old IP, but they've also become a company that seems to consist of little more than retro branding and lawyers. Either way, it's just sad to see Vector Tanks and Extreme caught in the crossfire, as I never saw those games as "rip-offs" or "clones" of Battlezone, rather, just very tasteful fan-made homages.

If you haven't already, it's a good idea to backup the .ipa files for both Vector Tanks and Vector Tanks Extreme, as it's unclear if they'll ever be back on the App Store.

Rayforce is a vertical shooter which I'd guess not many North Americans have much experience with. It originally hit in the early 90's, with a new name for seemingly every region it was released in, you might remember it as Galactic Attack or Gunlock. Or, you might not remember it at all, since outside of Japanese and European arcades it was only ever available as a Sega Saturn game until PC ports started materializing much later.

[Andriasang via Joystiq]

Within, Sanglard details the results of two weeks spent reading and reverse engineering the source code to Another World. He starts his post off with a brief introduction.

I was amazed to discover an elegant system based on a virtual machine interpreting bytecode in realtime and generating fullscreen vectorial cinematic in order to produce one of the best game of all time.

All this shipping on a 1.44MB floppy disk and running within 600KB of RAM: Not bad for 1991 ! As usual I cleaned up my notes, it may save a few hours to someone.

In explaining the internal structure of the system, Sanglard draws upon original author Eric Chahi's own descriptions of how his virtual machine is structured, to augment his own analysis.

Sanglard's post delves into the extremely technical, but does offer several illuminating videos that demonstrate what is happening as the game executes. It's a look under the hood that helps explain how the title has been ported to so many different platforms over the years, including iOS, with relative ease.

I would encourage any readers intrigued by this analysis to have a look at Eric Chahi's GDC 2011 presentation Classic Game Postmortem: Another World / Out of this World, hosted at the GDC Vault, as well as our own interview with Chahi, conducted just prior to the iOS version's release. It's also worth nothing that Another World isn't Fabien Sanglard's first in-depth code review; he has also gone spelunking within Quake 2, DOOM (both for DOS and iOS), Wolfiphone, and Quake, all of which are linked from his home page. He's also the author of the iPhone shooter Shmup [App Store, forum thread], released last year.

The crazy part about iDOS is there seemed to be nearly no limit to what it was capable of. If you scroll down on this story you'll even find someone successfully installing Microsoft Windows, within iDOS, on their iPad. iDOS was quickly pulled, then re-appeared in late January of this year with quite a bit of its functionality stripped. Regardless, people quickly figured out how to load things into iDOS, utilizing utilities like iExplorer and other Mac/Windows programs that allow you to fiddle with the file system of your iOS device. Once again, iDOS was removed from the App Store.

Yesterday, iDOS hit the App Store once again, this time as Aemula Oldies [Free] for the iPad and Aemula Oldies S [Free] for smaller screen devices. There's also the Aemula Gamepad [99¢] which works a lot like the other gamepad apps and pairs with an iPad playing a game. It seems that the functionality has been stripped even further, as all the previous command line access has been traded for a simple menu to load the included games.

The freebies packed in with Aemula Oldies are Mille Bornes, Commander Keen 4: Secret of the Oracle, Duke Nukem, Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, Scorched Earth, CD-Man, The Catacomb Abyss, Bio Menace, Monster Bash, StarMines II: Planet of Mines, 4D Prince of Persia and CHAMP Kong. They all seem to work decently well, too.

I sort of think third time is the charm for iDOS, err, Aemula Oldies, as I'd imagine that there aren't any holes for slipping other things to emulate in left anymore. Of course, I could be totally wrong on that, so if anyone figures out any tricks, be sure to let us know.

iMame comes preloaded with nine less than stellar ROMs to play, but the real interesting part is going to be whether or not it's possible to side load other ROM files into the app. I've been tinkering around with various tricks to load other ROMs into the app that have worked in other instances of similar emulators on to the App Store, and so far haven't had anything work. Regardless, I give it about two hours (or potentially much less) before someone figures it out, and a few hours after that for Apple to pull it from the App Store.

Go go go!!! I'll keep this post updated as new things develop.

Update: It seems that the same method used to get games into iDOS also works in iMAME. Twitter user @mattlukens mentions, "Yep, add a .zip rom to the Docs folder through PhoneView and it works perfect! Just tried Crime Fighters!" He also provided a screenshot. The clock is really ticking now on Apple pulling this down.

Update: iMAME supports the iCade.

Update 12/23: iMAME has been pulled from the App Store.

Mad Dog McCree has not aged well, and I'm not so sure it was ever a very good game to begin with. With a certain part of the video game spectrum always striving for the most realistic visuals possible, and the introduction of disc-based storage in gaming which started becoming prevalent in the late 80s and early 90s, mankind embarked on one of its most hideous inventions of all time – full-motion video games. What could be more real than actual real-life video footage?! It was THE FUTURE.

Unfortunately, the biggest drawback to full-motion video is that it's extremely linear. Rather than an artificial world which you built from the ground up and could manipulate in an infinite amount of ways, you had to plan ahead for what could happen and then produce those results on film, limiting the level of variety in the game. As such, games like Mad Dog McCree allowed very little player interaction or variation.

My 9 year old me didn't care about these things, though. All I knew is that I could point a big plastic revolver at cowboy outlaws on a massive screen and they would react to me shooting them. Crazy stuff. That also brings up one major point of contention with the iOS version of Mad Dog McCree – there's no light gun. This sort of takes away a huge part of the appeal of a game like this, however, I actually found the tap-to-shoot mechanic on the touch screen to work just fine and I didn't end up feeling like I was missing out by not having a gun peripheral.

As for how well the rest of the game translates, the port itself is very good. The video sequences look good enough, though obviously lightyears away from the high definition visuals we're all accustomed to nowadays. Aside from the natural old-school look of a 20+ year old title, the menus and interface in the iOS version are really quite ugly. They look especially jagged and blurry on Retina Display devices, and could use a high resolution upgrade. It's a pretty minor thing, but it sticks out.

Gameplay comes in an original Arcade mode and a new, easier Casual mode. Truthfully, both of them are stupid hard. Mad Dog McCree requires lightning quick reaction times and good memorization of how the levels play out in order to be successful. Enemies can be hard to see in the environment, so tremendous amounts of trial-and-error are necessary to learn the ins and outs of each level. In the iOS version, it's easy to skip cutscenes and retry sections quickly, and the ability to quit and continue where you left off makes actually completing the game a more realistic endeavor (not to mention, at $1 a pop in the arcades if memory serves me correctly, a whole lot cheaper).

Mad Dog McCree is the product of a FMV era that was light on gameplay and heavy on the "omg look the graphics are actual people!", but it's definitely earned its spot in gaming history. The iOS port is really pretty good, and whether or not you should pick it up will ultimately come down to if you actually enjoyed the original game or if you just remember it through the rose-colored glasses of a 9 year old, like me. Strangely, as shallow and frustrating as the game is, I find myself going back to it over and over again. For some reason I really want to see it through, most likely because I never would have been able to as a kid in the arcade.

I don't think it's as fun as other iOS laserdisc ports like Road Blaster [$4.99/HD] and Cobra Command [$6.99], but Mad Dog McCree does a solid job at translating the gunslinging action of the arcade original to the touchscreen of iOS. If you're a fan of the source material, then you should be pretty satisfied with this port.

The new iPad-only release, entitled Battle Squadron ONE 2-player [App Store], allows two players to face off on the same device, thanks to a new split-screen, portrait play mode that lets you and a friend share in the action (for those equipped with a friend). In this mode, each player is able to choose their own control configuration, and gameplay is as smooth and fast-paced as it is in the one-player mode. What's more, two-player network gameplay is planned for a future update.

A number of other improvements have arrived in this new release, as well. The game features 36 Game Center achievements and a new super-tough "Air Commodore" difficulty level (get it?) with a particularly intense level ending. Cope-Com has listened to player feedback and has tweaked every control mode and rolled-in a new one. The main user complaint was that it was "tedious" to have to move a finger all over the entire screen to control the ship. To address this, a drag control mode with 2x the movement vs. finger rate was added (with the original 1x control still available). Additionally, the joypad and tilt control modes have been adjusted to allow movement in all directions (analog) as opposed to the earlier release's 8-way (digital) movement.

While the iPad-only Battle Squadron ONE 2-player is indeed a new release, the original, universal version of the game has been renamed Battle Squadron ONE [App Store] (from BattleSquadr1) and has inherited all of the enhancements that the new iPad-only release brings, plus the ability to run on both the iPhone (one-player only, right now) and the iPad, natively. What's more, Cope-Com has lowered the bar on the minimum-spec supported devices, bringing support for the iPhone 3G and 2G iPod touch. An important distinction to iOS gamers just walking into this situation is that the iPad-only release is priced $1 less than the universal version.

As I've indicated in the past, Battle Squadron is perhaps my favorite scrolling shooter of all time. The Amiga version is superb, and the iOS version has been excellently translated. With this release, there's even more goodness to be had. I can't recommend Battle Squadron ONE highly enough to any iOS gamer out there.

And, my Amiga-using brothers and sisters, note the little bit of goodness pictured down in the corner of the options screen. We've mentioned it here before, but it's a happy reminder -- the precursor of Battle Squadron, the Amiga scrolling shooter Hybris from Cope-Com, will be arriving in the App Store sometime next year. Stay tuned!

Sonic CD, or Sonic the Hedgehog CD was originally released in late 1993 for the Sega CD, Sega's CD-ROM accessory for the Genesis console. Sega CD had actually come out earlier that year, and many gamers (myself included) couldn't wait to get their hands on one as the promise of full motion video powered gaming seemed incredible. Unfortunately, both due to the many technical limitations of the system, as well as the games themselves just not being very good, the Sega CD never really took off quite how I imagined Sega wanted it to. (There's actually a bunch of reasons I could also get into, but I digress.)

Sonic CD represented a blazing torch of promise that I had hoped was going to give the Sega CD the boost it needed, serving as that ever-important position as "system seller." Again, unfortunately, the relative low popularity of the Sega CD accessory made Sonic CD a commercial failure, even though it was a critical success. In fact, I'd still say Sonic CD is the best Sonic game ever released. It was a particularly great Sega CD game, as it played to the strengths of the Genesis with familiar Sonic-style gameplay enhanced through a few tasteful full motion video scenes and some fantastic CD audio.

Fast forward nearly 16 years to a curious question that Sega posted to the iOS community. Previously, Sega's efforts on the App Store were limited to decidedly mediocre games, centralizing almost entirely around emulated Genesis games wrapped in an emulator that really wasn't that great, and still isn't that great. They asked gamers what they'd like to see on the iPhone next, and literally a day later Christian Whitehead revealed his idea. Check out the video from 2009:

While that video might not be that entirely impressive now, remember at the time we were busy wagging our finger at Sega for continuing to release emulated Genesis ports that played poorly, performed even worse, and just weren't any fun. Then Christian Whitehead comes along with not only a port of the best Sonic game, but also running at 60fps? The emulated Genesis games barely ran at a quarter of that. Our minds were beyond blown, but like all cool things utilizing IP of a larger company, we didn't expect this fan-made Sonic CD project to wind up anywhere other than in a cease and desist letter fired off from Sega's legal department.

We quickly got together with Whitehead, and conducted a fascinating interview where one thing started to become crystal clear: This is a project motivated solely by love for the game. Christian built an entire game engine specifically for porting retro classics, and he had aspirations of working with Sega to actually get his version of Sonic CD in gamers' hands. Following that, things went dark. The fan-made Sonic CD web site vanished and the above video disappeared from YouTube. We assumed the worst, as it seemed reasonable that Sega's legal hammer came down on the project.

Jump ahead another two years, and out of nowhere that Sonic CD was coming to iOS. We quickly confirmed that this was in fact Christian Whitehead's Sonic CD, and we couldn't have been happier. Sure, the particulars such as release date and other things like that weren't in the open yet, but it was coming, and that was enough.

Tonight, Sonic CD is released to the world, based on the very same demonstration we saw back in 2009, which I suppose brings us to the actual "review" portion of this review. Sonic CD plays like every other Sonic game in that you run from the start to the finish, collecting rings, and fighting bosses every few levels. One radical addition to Sonic CD is the addition of the "Past" and "Future" system. Running past either a "Past" or "Future" sign sends Sonic time traveling to a slightly different version of the level. Initially, the future will be a "bad" future, overrun by robots. However, if you go into the past first, and destroy the robot generator, you'll be able to enjoy the "good" future which significantly fewer enemies. Alternatively, you can just ignore time traveling all together, although I believe (If my memory serves me.) getting the best ending requires unlocking every "good" future.

In a word, Sonic CD is incredible. It redefines what gamers can expect out of retro iOS ports, while simultaneously making all of Sega's existing ports look absolutely horrid in comparison. The on-screen controls work great, the game performs even better than the original, and they've included not only the Japanese soundtrack, but also the American one. (Note: It defaults to the Japanese soundtrack, so if you're wondering where the familiar "Sonic Boom" song is, you'll need to toggle it in the options.) It's even Universal. I can't think of a single thing that's missing or lacking in any way, in fact, they've even added Tails, who wasn't even present in the original.

I'm not sure what else to say. Here we have the best installment of one of the greatest gaming franchises, which received both flawless review scores and game of the year awards when it was originally released ported with complete perfection to iOS. This is a game you flat out need to buy if you even vaguely consider yourself an iOS gamer. Not only because it's such an impeccable port of an important piece of gaming history, but because we need to vote with our wallets to tell Sega (and anyone else who might be watching) that this is the quality we demand out of retro games brought to the App Store.

International App Store Link: Sonic CD, $1.99

Note: Sonic CD will be available in the USA at 11:00 PM Eastern, it should be available everywhere else in the world right now though.

In early February of this year, we learned that a rogue developer named Daniel Blezek was spending his spare few minutes in-between a full time job and a full time family life toiling away at bringing Bungie's seminal FPS Marathon to Apple's iPad. The port was in progress at the time and looking great, but there was still a bit of uncertainty whether or not a release of Marathon would completely jive with some of the rules of App Store and the open source licensing of the codebase.

Then in June, Bungie sort of shocked everyone by announcing that they had picked up the project and would be officially supporting its release. Just a couple of weeks later, on Bungie Day no less, Marathon 1 [Free] launched for the iPad and we thought it was pretty dang awesome. Perhaps the best part was the choice of business model, as the entirety of Marathon 1 was available for free, with the ability to purchase hi-res assets or a cheat mode as optional IAP. While having the entire first entry in the Marathon trilogy literally at my fingertips was fantastic in its own right, we still couldn't help but wonder if the second and third entries in the series would make it to the App Store too.

Today we know the answer to that, as we've learned that the second game in the trilogy, Marathon 2: Durandal, has already been approved by Apple and will be launching this Thursday (or more specifically Wednesday night) along with the onslaught of other heavy hitting titles slated for release. And, Marathon 2 will be launching with a whole set of new features.

First, it will be a Universal app with full support for Retina Display devices, and actually it uses the same assets as the Xbox Live HD release of the game. There will be Game Center integration with achievements and leaderboards, as well as Joypad [Free] support with specific enhancements for the Fling Joystick controller. Finally, the menu interface throughout the game has been dramatically improved. Want to know the ultra secret special bit of extra news about all this? An update will also hit this week for Marathon 1, adding in all of these same new features from Marathon 2 that I've just discussed.

It looks like Marathon 2: Durandal will follow in the footsteps of its predecessor and launch for free, with in-app purchases available for high-resolution textures, the Master Chief Mode cheat options, and a new custom reticule pack, if you feel like throwing some money to support the effort and snag a few non-essential features. As another exciting tidbit of news, several screens from the final entry in the trilogy, Marathon Infinity, were mixed in amongst those from the first two games. So it sounds like we'll be getting the entire trilogy on iOS before too long. If you had told my fifteen year old self that I'd one day be playing the Marathon trilogy in portable form with all sorts of added features and enhancements, it would have blown my tiny mind.

We will of course be grabbing Marathon 2 just as soon as it's available in the App Store tomorrow evening, and until then you can join in the discussion thread in our forums.

As we detailed earlier in October, the Elite Collection apps will come bundled with the following titles:

• Elite Collection Vol. #1:
  • featuring ALTERNATE REALITY: THE CITY and also including
  • Black Magic
  • Alternate Reality: The Dungeon
• Elite Collection Vol. #2:
  • featuring URIDIUM and also including
  • Buggy Boy (a.k.a. Speed Buggy)
  • First Samurai
• Elite Collection Vol. #3:
  • featuring BUNDESLIGA MANAGER and also including
  • Denaris
  • Enforcer: Fullmetal Megablaster
• Additional 8-bit "Singles":
  • Battleships (a.k.a. Battleship)
  • Frank Bruno's Boxing
  • Batty

In addition, at launch, there will be 16 more titles available for purchase through the in-app game store. We will provide full details of everything that's available, as well as a closer look at the collection itself, when the apps land this weekend.

But, for now, know that some of the particular stand-outs include:

• Datasoft's Bruce Lee
• Palace's Cauldron
• Gremlin's Monty on the Run
• Alternative Software's Skool Daze
• Thalamus' visually stunning Creatures 2: Torture Trouble

Elite mentions, in their release, that they are committed to improving and furthering the apps in the months ahead, as well as adding to the titles available in the in-app game store. A few of the titles they name as planned / hopeful additions are Archon II: Adept, Stunt Car Racer, Mercenary: Escape from Targ, and M.U.L.E. At the time of the October delay announcement, The Bards Tale (I, II & III), Wasteland, Dragon Wars, and Neuromancer were also named as titles likely to become available through the Elite Collection.

Many of the titles in the coming Elite Collection apps are also being released as stand-alone games. Their most recent round of releases consisted of Denaris, Paradroid, and Alternate Reality: The Dungeon. All of the Elite Collection games feature the studio's customizable "iDaptive" control system, and iCade support is said to be on the way.

Elite Systems also offers the ZX Spectrum: Elite Collection for the iPhone as well as the iPad, which are collections of ZX Spectrum games along with an associated in-app game store.

My first impressions are fairly positive so far with this port, mostly because Square has re-rendered all of the text and game UI to actually be legible, unlike Final Fantasy Tactics! We'll offer a more thorough review in the not too distant future, but in the meantime you can swing by the thread to check out forum user impressions as well.

Some of its goals might change based on hitting different levels of funding. The best example of this is in the multiplayer arena. Depending on the cash received, the team might or might not be able to incorporate world wide, Internet multiplayer. Or consider platforms like the PC or XBLA.

If this project succeeds, chances are that we'll see more Vector Tanks in the future. On the game's funding page, it's mentioned that this is just one chapter of up to seven in the series, all following the adventures of Vic Vector.

We're huge fans of the first two Vector Tanks games, so we'd love to be able to get our hands on Vector Tanks 3 at some point in the future. Extreme, in particular, was a sharp, focused, and really well-executed iteration that amped up the action in glorious ways. If the trend of bigger and better continues with each new game, Vector Tanks 3 could be really special.