Numberlys [$5.99] is an interactive story from Moonbot Studios, which is promoted as a story, mystery and game. It started out as a short film, but when the iPad was announced they changed direction and eventually created this lovely visual experience for us to enjoy.

We don't usually review interactive stories or children's games, but Numberlys caught our eye due to it's stylish artistic quality ...and, for the record, it does include mini-games.

In a colorless world filled with numbers, five of the citizens wanted a change and set about inventing the alphabet. The story is told through beautiful black and white animated graphics which are clearly inspired by the classic sci-fi film Metropolis, but with a modern touch.

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LostWinds [$3.99] from Frontier was originally released for the Wii in 2008 and we've been waiting for the iOS port since it was reported in July.  It's a beautiful adventure platforming game with puzzle elements, which rates highly in almost every way.

The story opens with little Toku asleep on the grass, but once you swipe him awake, there's a lovely layered platform world to explore, with pink trees, waterfalls, caves, villages and other characters to discover. Just tap the screen to walk in that direction, or hold your finger down for a second to keep moving automatically.

On the first level, you discover Enril the wind spirit and gain the ability to generate gusts of wind with a finger swipe. So if you swipe a plant it sways in the breeze, swiping a tree causes it to shake and rustle, while swiping a waterfall splashes water around. You can also swipe at objects - like large rock balls - to move them, or swipe burning fires to fan or direct the flames. These abilities help your search for the evil Balasar, so you can lift his dark curse.

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Back in November, we took an early look at SummitX Snowboarding [99¢] from Com2uS and Free Range Games. Since then, the game's been released, so now the rest of us can hit the virtual slopes for $99¢. After investing some time into the final release of the game I've reached the same conclusion as our preview: - I like what see.

There's six different mountains to conquer, including 36 different multiple-branching down-hill runs. The first slope is 'Glacier' which has six runs and you can unlock the other peaks - like Mt. Payne and Angel Peak - by winning medal points (3 points for gold, 2 for silver or 1 point for bronze). You can choose which valley to enter and each route contains different gates, with blue for time bonuses and red for a score multiplier, so it's worth exploring.

After choosing to be male or female, you start with $1000 and can earn money in the game, which is handy for buying tricks, such as the ability to tilt the device for air-control. There's a decent assortment of tricks available, such as flips, rolls and tail grabs. Doing tricks earns time bonuses and points as you fly down the mountain towards the finish.

When you leave the ground, six new buttons conveniently appear on-screen for performing tricks.  You can press one button for a simple trick, two buttons for a trickier trick or hold and slide your finger to extend the move, for the trickiest of tricks. Two landing buttons appear when you're about to hit the snow and these can be pressed to level-out the board for a safe landing, or to stop a spin, roll or flip.  These trick buttons only appear when needed and then disappear to keep the screen uncluttered, so you have a clear view of the terrain.

The main navigational controls are rather unusual. A two-thumbed split steering-wheel is used to turn left or right. For example, to turn left sharply:  The left thumb moves down, while the right right thumb moves up simultaneously like using a virtual steering wheel of sorts. This control scheme wasn't immediately intuitive to me, however, I persevered and after five minutes I was carving the snow quite happily. So, potentially be prepared for a little practice time at the start.

Some highlights of the game include finding massive jumps on the side of the course or jumping off a cliff, onto a small snow-coated plateau, then immediately off a ramp for some big air. There's also caves and a deep rocky ravine to jump across, with a turning landing required on the other side. These "hell yeah" moments really add to the experience and make this game a lot of fun.

You can spend your game money on a variety of snowboards, for improved performance. There's six decks, ranging from the entry-level "basix" up to the "pro board". Each board has different attributes for air-time, air-control, acrobatics, speed and toughness. Plus, there's over 20 skins to buy: Perhaps you want a zombie ape on your deck, a tiger shark or a stylish green cyclops.

Your runs are scored based on tricks performed and time taken. SummitX connects to the Com2uS gameHub, but pleasingly, it also supports Game Center for leader-boards and 15 achievements and games are automatically saved to iCloud. The music is great, featuring over 20 licensed rock soundtracks, which play in a slow-motion effect when you're aerial. Alternatively, you can pump your own iTunes playlist. There are in-app purchases (IAP) available, to unlock features, however so far it hasn't felt intrusive or necessary which is good as Com2uS have been criticized for heavy-handed IAP in the past.

SummitX Snowboarding only has one game mode and I haven't seen any other boarders to race, however, this is a cool looking and sounding snowboarding game, with peaks, runs, boards, skins and tricks to unlock, plus a variety of routes down each run, which ensures there's plenty of replay value. Unfortunately, after downloading their update v1.01 and installing it on both devices, I lost my medal points and progress, which has dented my otherwise positive impression. If you're downloading the game for the first time, this obviously won't be an issue for you.

We've all been in a mind-numbingly tense "Oh, god, Super Crate Box is about to release" state for a bit since hearing about its submission to Apple, and, sadly, we'll have to survive with this burden a wee bit longer. Developer Vlambeer has just announced that Super Crate Box won't appear on the App Store before Christmas as was expected. Instead, it'll launch this January 5th on the platform.

That's not too bad as far as release date pushes go. And besides, it's not like you'll have trouble finding something to bide your time with while you wait. As you've noticed by the look of our page the last couple of days, there are a lot of games, and a lot of new updates, to dig into. Go get'em Cowboy!

Making opera and ballet seem fun and accessible must be an uphill battle. There's no shortage of people with preconceptions about the arts, and most of those preconceptions are about how opera houses may be great places to take a nap. But if The Show Must Go On [$0.99] is any indication, the Royal Opera House has what it takes to make opera interesting to any crowd -- or at least, to put it into the hands of those that can.

In this case, that's Hide & Seek and Big Pixel Studios. They've come together to make a sweet and compelling mini-game compilation about the life backstage at the opera house.

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We've nailed our collective pants to our chairs, but they keep flying off when we look at the first image from Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas. Finnish developer Cornfox & Bros describes it as a Zelda-'inspired' action adventure game that seeks to put the focus on puzzles and exploration instead of RPG sub-systems and menus. It's also gorgeous -- like, your-pants-will-pop-off kind of gorgeous.

The name of the game is derived from the fiction's ancient sea monster who "terrorizes" the World of Uncharted Seas. You'll play as a "nameless hero" tasked with killing this monster and saving his sister. In order to accomplish these things, you'll need to explore the world in boat and on foot, and undoubtedly plunge into some puzzle-y areas filled with treasure.

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I've been searching for a new asynchronous multi-player game for a while, so when I saw Poker Pals [99c / Free / HD] released by Chillingo: a poker-based  game with asynchronous multiplayer mode, my eyes went wide. What I didn't anticipate was that within a few hours I would be snatching up my iPod every couple of minutes to make my next turn, juggling several games at once, like a crazed poker addict. (Thank goodness there's no real money at stake, just bragging rights.)

Poker Pals is not a regular poker game. There's no chips in the middle of the table, no antes and no calling, raising or bluffing. This is actually poker redesigned as a board-game and it resembles a mixture of poker and Scrabble, which works really well. It's reminiscent of Sword and Poker 2 [$3.99 / Free], which also presented poker as a board-game, but included RPG elements.

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Adult Swim has been on a roll lately publishing flat-out incredible games, and if you thought Monsters Ate My Condo [99¢] great, the publisher has somehow managed to ever-so-slightly one up themselves with Bring Me Sandwiches!! [99¢]. The premise is simple, and delightfully ridiculous-- You play as Jimmy Nugget, a hapless employee of Stuffy's, a local fast food joint. For some reason, you and you alone have been put to the task of feeding an evil alien would-be overlord named Gourmo who has the strangest taste in sandwiches.

The idea is to make a sandwich by collecting ingredients from around the platform level. You can start with a basic cheese sandwich, but, you can add non-standard fillings like burgers, apples, oranges or hot-dogs. And then, what the heck, let's throw in: Wine bottles, flowers, tins, potted plants, beach-balls, and much much more. Each time you add another filling, your sandwich gets taller, until you're carrying around a giant towering treat filled with the craziest ingredients. A sandwich meter of sorts lets you know when your sandwich has grown large enough to please your alien master.

Soon, Gourmo starts placing more specific food orders: "Bring me ...1 sandwich with a cat!"  The particulars of his order are displayed as icons at the top of the screen which are ticked off you collect them.  To find the ingredients, you must explore the busy levels, which include buildings to climb, bouncy roofs, clothes-lines to cross and water hydrants to smash so you can ride the gushing water into the air. There's dissolving clouds, larger items to push around, locked sections that need a key and even hidden areas to discover. And all this time, you're still carrying around a massive sandwich, which expands and contracts depending where you are.

Once the food is prepared, you take it to a waiting alien representative, who transports it up to the obese invader Gourmo, who devours it hungrily. There's an indicator on the screen which always points towards the alien, so it's easy to find. As the game progresses, you're put to the task of building multiple sandwiches as well.

When you make a second sandwich, your slice of bread gets larger, so you can dump bigger fillings on it, like crates, televisions or satellite dishes. Apparently Gourmo isn't too fussy about his nutritional intake. When you make a third sandwich, you're given a VERY large slice of bread, which allows even larger fillings, like say, a fridge. I won't keep listing the ingredients, but according to the "Food Journal" in the main menu, there's heaps of fillings to discover.

After a while Gourmo starts asking for other things to eat; like cake. But food's not the only thing to collect. There's also 29 alien spaceship parts to discover (one per stage) and presumably these help you reach "the mysterious Planet Nuzz" mentioned in the iTunes description. There's also special pick-up items like the alien rocket pack for double jumping, or a food-magnet to attract out-of-reach items.

It''s not always easy to walk around with a towering sandwich. Birds and dogs are attracted to it and a protesting hippie might hit you with his protest sign, knocking  some fillings off your bread. Naughty children might fire slingshots at you and beware of dogs and nasty little girls on pogo-sticks. These hostile characters can all be slapped onto a large piece of bread and fed to the alien. Problem solved.

After being hurt five times, such as falling into a hole, your health meter is depleted and the stage ends. Although you can restart from a checkpoint, with the same score, stage time and sandwich percentage you possessed back at that point. Discovering a red heart will restore some health. Or, If you collect 50 coins, you earn one heart. With all the sandwich making, it's easy to forget this is also a platform game.

There are four chapters to play (USA, Mexico, Italy and Japan) with 29 stages in total, including four auto-scrolling stages which play like an endless runner in a platform game. Each chapter has one bonus stage to unlock. The chapters are all uniquely themed. For example, the Mexico chapter has a desert setting with prickly cacti and kicking donkeys, with Mexican-style music, bandits in sombreros and Mexican food items to collect, like tacos. The last stage in each chapter is a larger level, which can't be by-passed with the skip level function. Plus there's a special final chapter, at the very end of the game which you need enough spaceship parts to unlock.

Instead of a star-scoring system, three slices of gold bread are awarded for each level, based on specific targets for score, time taken and number of food spills. These three goals can each be achieved in different runs, which provides an incentive to replay levels. Although just by reaching the end of a level, you unlock the next level, even if you fail the time, score and spill targets.

Three control options are provided, including tilt, touch (choose one half of screen for running and the other half for jumping) or buttons. The developers even get bonus points for implementing buttons that can each be individually re-positioned on the screen. Although strangely, when the game starts you're presented with two control options to choose from, as this wonderful button option is not mentioned. Although it's available, in the options menu. My only criticism is that the jumping is a bit awkward when bouncing off someone's head, sometimes requiring multiple attempts. Apart from this the controls work perfectly fine.

We gave the last wacky game from Adult Swim, Monsters ate my Condo, a five star review, and Sandwiches!! is another quality well-constructed release, with similarly vibrant graphics. It's amusing, varied, highly entertaining and excellent value for a dollar.  Also, for you hopeful iPad owners out there, while an iPad version isn't available (and also isn't currently in the works, per the developers) it also hasn't been ruled out as a future possibility.

The arcade shoot'em-up Crossfire was released for Xbox in July 2010, followed by Crossfire 2 a few months later. Now Radian Games and their publisher, Chillingo, have released Super Crossfire [99¢ / HD] for our iOS devices. This game plays like a colorful version of the classic 1978 game Space Invaders, with one key difference: When a wall of bullets and lazers rains down on you, leaving you boxed in the corner and about to be destroyed ...your spaceship can flee to safety by warping between the top and bottom of the screen.

But warping to the top of the screen doesn't necessarily ensure your safety, as the aliens can shoot upwards too. Some enemies have shields and can only be hit from one side, which necessitates warping up and down to get a clear shot. By collecting the gems dropped by destroyed aliens, you can charge up segments of your super-fire meter, then briefly shoot anything, even if it's shielded.

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I am what you would call a horror genre fangirl. I wait with baited breath for new installments of Silent Hill (or used to anyway, when Team Silent was at the helm), sucked up every survival horror title that didn't look totally terrible (and a few that did, just for kicks), and and pretty much lived and died by how perfect I could get a photograph score in Fatal Frame. There's something about decaying hospitals and shambling, unidentifiable demons that just appeals to me, I guess. I think what this says about me is that I have a taste for the weird, I may or may not collect strange objet d'art, and that I possibly may have a bonafide future as a crazy cat lady. I hope I'm wrong about the latter.

At any rate, the very first screens of The Dark Meadow [$5.99] had me foaming at the mouth, and rightfully so -- it was a first person perspective exploration game with pieced-together baddies, a super atmospheric setting, and best of all, powered by the rather esteemed Unreal Engine, which is still winning awards to this day. It had all the makings of a truly standout game on the iOS platform, and I wont deny that my hopes were very high for it.

Speaking of atmosphere, when it comes to making the setting appropriately spooky and weird, The Dark Meadow has it down to a fine art. The game itself looks terrific, and the music is dark without being overpowering or ridiculous. You will navigate your way around with simple touch controls and by moving from spot to spot, which foregoes the need for a directional pad. And I truly appreciated how little clutter there was on the screen -- Phosphor Games wanted this to be a clean, immersive experience for the player, and the attention to detail is evident.It's easy to get lost in this world.

As you explore darkened hallways, you'll come across baddies that you'll need to clear out in order to progress. My first few go-rounds with them, I was pretty pleased with the way combat worked. They always appear at a distance, so when you first see them you'll be armed with a crossbow (and later down the line, other weapons will be available.) You'll use your finger to aim and you'll let go when you want to fire, which feels smooth and makes the experience pleasant overall, at least initially.

Once your enemy is really close, you'll switch to melee. The fights are designed so that you can slash with a finger swipe and dodge by tapping an arrow to the right or left. The game is good about telling you when to act, so if you pay attention, you can really get the rhythm of fights down. For instance, after a dodge, if the game prompts you to "attack now!", it's time to get your slashes in, but if not, there's another attack coming, so wait for it. It works a little like a toned down version of Infinity Blade [$5.99], although missing most of the finesse and feeling fairly basic comparatively.

Keep up your fights, and you'll keep gaining experience, and the game makes sure you know it. After each fight the game grinds to a halt, at which point the game tallies your experience while you wait, which not only feels really unnecessary, but also hurts the pacing of the game. When you hit a level, you'll be able to assign experience points how you please. Enough of these and you'll gain new weapons as well, so know that your efforts will be rewarded.

You aren't completely alone on this journey, either. There's an old man you'll meet in the beginning who will communicate with you via radio and give you advice on how to survive in this dark world. His advice can be quite handy (and in addition, it's pretty decently voice-acted, too). In fact, if you die a few times, he will tell you different things, and some of it is pretty hilarious - -bravo for the writer or sticking in bits of tongue-in-cheek humor! You can also find scraps of paper and notes that will shed some light on the world you're in and divulge its backstory. It adds some nice detail, some of which will factor in as you get further into the game.

If The Dark Meadow has any weakness, it's that the fights eventually begin to feel a bit rote, and I found myself wishing creatures would stop popping up so I could just explore my surroundings and progress through the story without hinderances. On the other hand, I'm sure I'd feel the same way if the situation were real, but hey, there's some pains in the ass in every dark and twisted universe, and this is one of them. As long as you don't mind the grindy feel to the combat, then you really shouldn't be bothered by this much.

Overall, The Dark Meadow is a standout in almost every way. From look to setting to the touch-centric gameplay, it shines, and you can tell this title was crafted with much love from its developers. Any horror fan will be thrilled by it, especially if your traditional iPhone fare is stuff like that wretched Silent Hill game [99¢] (even this fangirl couldn't swallow that.) It's quite a bit more expensive than the usual iOS title, and it's worth every bit of the money you'll spend. It doesn't quite hit the note of perfection largely becomes of the combat mechanic, but it edges damn close -- and even at that distance, it's well worth your time and money.

Here's a brief public service announcement of sorts to those of you out there who are still rocking the click wheel iPod and regularly use it to play games-- At some point last night they vanished from iTunes entirely. If you haven't already, now is a fantastic time to back up your existing library of click wheel games, as it's really not clear if you'll ever be able to download them again. A free Dropbox account would work perfectly for this, or really any other cloud storage service that you can just upload your games to and forget about.

Reading further into this move by Apple, it seems reasonable to think that this might be the end of the iconic click wheel line of iPods. MacRumors notes that there haven't even been any new releases in the click wheel iPod game library since 2009. The click wheel iPod wasn't updated in last year's iPod event either, casting even further doubt onto the fate of the device. With Apple pushing so hard into cloud-based services and the shocking array of media streaming apps available for iOS devices, it seems reasonable to think that the company feels there's no longer a place for the non-iOS large-capacity traditional iPod.

Seriously though, back up those games.

When a new "jumping game" appears on the App Store, it's sometimes difficult to feel excited because there's just so many of them, and they usually all feel the same. But, despite the genre being thrashed to death, it appears there's still room for a little creativity. Com2uS have recently released Escape the Ape [99c], which while definitely fitting nicely inside of the vertical jumper mold, mixes things up a bit by requiring you to draw your own platforms to jump on in real time.

Here's the story: Jo-Jo the curious chimpanzee tried to snatch a precious jewel, which was clutched in the hands of a giant gorilla statue. Unfortunately for Jo-Jo, the statue came to life and wasn't impressed with the little furry kleptomaniac. The thieving monkey fled upwards, into the trees, with the agitated ape in hot pursuit. ...And that's where you step in.

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So, we got a build of Forever Drive and decided to put the pedal on the floor in order to bring you some early impressions. And, wow, guys, does this seem cool.

With Forever Drive, Supermono Studios is taking a way smarter approach to user-created content design: instead of asking players to shape entire experiences, it asks that they mold a fraction of a blip of an infinitely expandable super-highway. By managing expectations before you even start creating, Supermono is freeing you from failure and the game’s players at wide from having to filter out tons of garbage. Most user-created content leaning titles, including Media Molecule’s venerable series, don't enforce any kind of control or creative constraint, which makes Forever Drive unique, and as we’ve been discovering, pretty fun.

Forever Drive is built by you and everyone else. There are no curated races, no lifeless campaign, and no attempts at narrative. Supermono is shooting from the hip and guessing that its approach to user-content will be enough to keep everyone interested in the racing part, which by the way, is more about the journey instead of the destination or wins. It's some next level stuff.

“What we've tried to create is a very streamlined experience — something a little different from the "load a track, do 3 laps, stop, repeat" gameplay that's become almost universal in driving games,” Supermono’s Dave Ferner told us earlier this year.

“We're trying to create something that feels more like an epic journey, with that feeling of discovery and wonder you get driving fast into an unfamiliar land…”

I recently gave the level editing portion of the title a go and I’ve been surprised by how deceptively simple it is and how graceful most of your projects end up being, even if you’re just goofing around and attempting to make something phallic. You’ll probably never make a level on par with 1-1, but you’ll make something that works and fits with the game.

Basically, there are two parts to the creation process: track editing and environmental editing. The former editor lets you build a small swathe of track from one end of the editor to the other, while the latter gives you the power to add scenery. Other tools give you the power to raise or lower the track where you please, as well as make fine adjustments on the turns you may or may not choose to have.

It’s not rocket science and I think that’s important: executing on the design concepts floating around in your head at any given time is about as hard as drawing your bedroom realistically from the mental picture you see when you close your eyes. By making the editor simple and keeping the bar low with the amount of content you’re responsible for, Supermono is constricting the scope of your ideas, but not their potential.

And while whatever you make will probably be gold, there are tricks to making a good track, as I’ve learned from Dave. He suggests paying attention to the actual curvature of tracks, how a straight benefits the overall design, other high-concept-y things. He also suggests checking out this article by Luke McMillan called A Rational Approach To Racing Game Track Design, which is crazy good read if you’re into design or production.

"One of the main barriers to mainstream acceptance of user-created tracks is the complexity of the editors -- we didn't want a PC style professional tool with a million hotkeys, we wanted a super-streamlined editor which was fun to use," Ferner tells us. "We honestly spent months on that thing -- it takes a lot of work to make something simple out of something complicated!

"And because our game relies on users to create the content, we aimed to create an editor that was almost a mini-game in itself -- there's even some unlocks which you can only get by building popular tracks, and we may even put a highscore table for track creators... it's all a big experiment, but hey, you never know until you've tried it!"

If a section of track somehow manages to suck, you’ll be able to down-vote it. After enough, it’ll be removed from the rotation.

The track I made while farting around (after the no-no shaped one, that is) was a simple “S”-shaped joint. The game automatically integrates in spots where players can drift to earn XP (which is currency used to purchase upgrades, cars, and more stuff for the editor) and it also auto-scaled the height in order to accommodate some lackluster building placement. The actual placement was a simple as dragging and dropping or pinching to zoom to smooth out the rough spots. You’ll see a few images of it if you look around this write-up.

We still haven’t seen the full-full game -- you know, the one with the potentially hundreds of thousands of user-created sections of tracks, so we haven’t really dug into the core of the experience. We’ll definitely do that when the game goes wide later this October.

On that note, this is definitely a game that’ll live and die by its audience. It’s a title that will rely on a community and a vast one at that, so we’ll have to wait and see how people react to it when it hits and how long they’ll stick with the user-creation component in a post-release environment. Provided there is an audience, Forever Drive has the potential to fulfill the promise of its insane conceit, and really, we can’t wait to see if it can manage.

Real Steel [$4.99] was released to the App Store this month by Indian developers, Jump Games as a tie-in to the boxing movie of the same name. The film is due to be released on October 7th, and as far as we can tell from trailers, combines Wolverine and Kate from Lost with an $80 million dollar budget and a likely drunken bet in the Hollywood production rings that they could get people to pay money to sit through a movie based on Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots.

If you don't generally follow upcoming releases of robot-centric movies with lots of explosions, this trailer will get you up to speed:

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After writing reviews for Feed Me Oil [99¢ / HD / review] and Sprinkle [99c / review] earlier this year, I was keen to check out the latest liquid-based game from Disney Mobile, the people behind Jelly Car 3 [Lite / 99c]. Their popular new game, Where's my Water? [99c] is based on 'Swampy the Alligator', who lives in the sewers and enjoys taking relaxing baths, but unfortunately the other alligators keep sabotaging his water supply, so he needs some help.

Our job is to guide the water to Swampy's bath, by swiping tunnels through the dirt, to direct the water's flow. Along the way the water can collect three rubber duckies to unlock subsequent worlds and levels. Your score is based on the time taken to full the bath, number of rubber ducks collected and a bonus for water overflow.

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