One thing about this week: you'll save some money if you're looking to stock up for a big drive or just content to use as "Ignore Family" fuel. The worldwide leaders of Sonic games, for example, is holding a fairly comprehensive sale, so if you were in the mood for a, uh ... more historic afternoon of App Store appreciation, then get your download fingers ready.
The big ticket items, as usual whenever Sega holds a sale, are its Sonic series games. It seems like the general fan audience is mixed on the quality of these, but at prices like one dollar, it's hard to feel too conned by the much-beloved, yet also heatedly criticized publisher. Also, of note? The oft-featured Monkey Ball games have been lowered to a buck.
It's a good time to be a word game fan. Every few weeks a new genre standout arrives, ready to tide you over until the next big hit. Now App Store superstar Zach Gage (Unify [$1.99/Free], Bit Pilot [99¢], Halcyon [$1.99]) has thrown his hat into the word game ring with SpellTower [$1.99] . Those of us who fit in the Venn diagram intersection of iPad owners and word game fans benefit -- SpellTower is elegant, clever and fun.
Not that it's entirely unique. We've all played any number of games that make use of SpellTower's main mechanic. Presented with a grid of letters, you spot a word and trace a path through its letters to select it. You can trace in any direction, loop diagonally back on your path, and make words of any length past two. And if that were all there was to it, this would be a yawn and a skip. But it's not.
OrangePixel have a few iOS platform games under their belt. Back in June, we reviewed Meganoid [$1.99] calling it a quality retro platformer with responsive controls. In September, our review of Stardash [$1.99] highlighted the challenging difficulty levels and Game Boy style presentation. Plus they've released Super Drill Panic [$1.99] and Time Chaos [99¢]. Now, OrangePixel has released their latest action platform game, named simply: INC [$1.99], which is probably my favorite of their releases.
INC uses a comic-inspired silhouette art style which immediately captured my interest. Your character is a square with legs and blinking little eyes who runs, jumps and shoots his way through levels that are intentionally pixelated with rough edges. The graphics are 8-bit and chunky, with backgrounds reminiscent of Canabalt [$2.99]. And there's a chip-tune soundtrack, which is always popular in any retro platform game.
Highline Games have released W.E.L.D.E.R. [$1.99] which stands for 'Word Examination Laboratory for Dynamic Extraction and Reassessment", The amusing game trailer (below) suggests that words are at risk of becoming extinct, but that's not really part of the gameplay. It's just more interesting than saying: "Move letters around to form words", which might sound dull and done-to-death; but this intriguing word game is neither of those things, it's unique and will activate your brain.
The game features an 8x8 grid which is full of letter tiles. The idea is to form words with four or more letters, by moving letter tiles around in various ways. The "Basic Swap" involves tapping any two neighboring letters (horizontally, vertically or diagonally adjoining) so they swap positions. The words must be written from left-to-right or top-to-bottom, much like a crossword puzzle. There's no time limits (thank goodness), although a certain number of words must be formed to complete each level.
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 [$3.99 / Free], which also presented poker as a board-game, but included RPG elements.
Growing up, I had one of those grandfathers that was obsessed with gold and keeping money out of the banks. He used to show me these little pieces of gold he had and would be like “If you work hard, all this can be yours.” (In other news, my grandfather may be Scrooge McDuck.) As such, I’m sure he would be a superfan of Colorbox’sPeak Gold [$.99/UHD], a fun little hooking game dedicated to the pursuit of gold.
Peak Gold might be lacking in coherent tutorials (sample text: “Reach 1000m depth and collect Big Diamond to PEAK GOLD!”), but it makes up for it with cutesy graphics, fun hooking action and challenging levels. Seriously, for being marketed as a casual game, this sucker is difficult. The premise is simple enough; tap the screen to grab gold and other goodies while avoiding bats and rocks before running out of time.
Saving Moo [$0.99 / HD], one of several recent offerings from ClickGamer, is the latest addition to the elusive genre of Cow Defense. If rescuing our four-legged brethren suits your fancy (or if you’re a fan of certain classic tower defense games), then Saving Moo’s weird story and presentation, combined with solid tower defense gameplay elements, should work for you.
Saving Moo puts you in the role of a farmer that acquired psychic powers after an alien abduction. In order to prevent future abductions, you must use the farmer’s newfound powers to telekinetically place weapons on your cows to ward off the impending UFO invasion. Even though the story is mainly told through a short introductory cutscene, I still found it hilarious and absolutely befitting for the sort of offbeat attitude that Saving Moo offers.
There's something dodgy about Ninja Pong's [99¢ / HD] premise. You're telling me that professional ninjas would jump a huge gap onto a tiny platform that has to be manually controlled? And that they'd do it wearing any number of silly hats? I just don't buy it.
You might want to, though. Silly and simple as it might be, Ninja Pong is a fun bit of arcade play that boasts a surprisingly in-depth list of upgrades. Save ninjas, earn shinies, buy things that let you save more ninjas. Sound good?
As master of the platform, you control life and death for your tiny ninja buddies. They need to get from the building or cliff on the left of the screen to its fellow on the right, and you control the only bridge for the gap between. It's one-sided Pong and you control the paddle, dragging it back and forth along the bottom of the screen to bounce ninjas and dodge bombs.
Every logic puzzle lover should know about nonograms. You might know them as picross puzzles, or griddlers, or maybe just the younger sibling of Sudoku, but you should know them. If you don't, no foul: Fugazo'sWorld Mosaics [$1.99] is a good place to start.
If you're not in the know, here's the quick version: a nonogram puzzle presents you with a grid. Each row and column has numbers listed with it, and those numbers correspond to how many of its cells must be filled in. A row with 5 and 7 listed beside it would need 5 adjoining cells filled in with boxes, then at least one space before 7 more cells are boxed in. The clues intersect so you can puzzle out the solution, and when you're done you'll have formed a pixelated picture.
There are some great nonogram apps on iOS already, though fewer than I'd like. World Mosaics joins these after enjoying a successful career on PC and Mac. It's not perfect, but it scratches the logic puzzle itch nicely.
Our main man at Kode 80, Ben Hopkins, launched a huge update to 1-Bit Ninja [$1.99] yesterday, adding in the ability to save video and export your game replays from your photo roll. Making this sweeter, the game now also supports an unlockable "follow-cam" that should add to the dramatic flair of whatever you choose to unleash on the Internet. This update comes as a free download to a platformer built around the pride of a perfect run and the thrill of accomplishing ridiculous feats of skill and memorization.
Another thing to mention about this update? 1-Bit Ninja now has Game Center support. You'll be able to earn some achievements, as well as see your times on an in-game leaderboard. Neat!
We're pretty big fans of 1-Bit Ninja, so we're stoked to see a new iteration. On an unrelated note, we spoke with Kode 80's Hopkins earlier this September on The TouchArcade Show and got a good sense that things like this update were coming down the pipe. He also spoke to an HD version for the iPad, which we sincerely hope is still something he's interested in.
Not to be left out in the holiday liquidation going on in the App Store at the moment, Namco Bandai has been conducting some price-slashery magics of its own. Starting today and rolling into the weekend, you can save oodles on the publisher's stable of titles. Games like Pac-Man and Mr. Driller and even its Universal selection of titles including Fossil Feast are available at either at $.99 to $3.99. That's not bad, really, considering what price these things usually sit at when there isn't a holiday to celebrate. Yay, Halloween!
Here's the full list of the sales we've caught so far:
I'm a huge fan of Puzzle Quest 2, and even though it's hovering around a "premium" price point during this ale, it's still worth picking up. The match-3 component is as rich and strong as ever, and the dungeon-crawling and RPG aspects do wonders for the title. You can check out our review here.
Back in May, we reviewed a clever little game called Foodies [99¢] from developer Nano Titans. It featured a rotund little creature named Sam who was in love with his best gal Pam, and proposed marriage to her. Unfortunately, Sam wasn't quite rotund enough for Pam's taste. She gives Sam exactly one week to eat everything in sight and gain enough weight to appease her before she would agree to marry him. Ah, unhealthy eating and forced obesity, the signs of true love.
While the story is certainly silly, and the graphics and presentation are appropriately adorable, the thing that really stood out in Foodies was the clever mechanics and controls. Each level in Foodies is littered with different kinds of food items, and the goal is to bounce Sam around the screen to collect them all. This is accomplished in an intuitive way by placing both thumbs on the screen which creates a bouncy platform in the space in-between them. You can change the size and angle of this platform by adjusting the placement of your thumbs, and the whole system just works incredibly well as you bounce Sam around the levels in the game.
Penny Parlor [$1.99] wraps four antique coin-operated sports games into one release. But we're not talking about classic arcade games ...no, Australian-based GamesLab Apps are taking us further back in time, like pre-1950's, to the era of mechanical arcade machines which used to cost one penny to play.
The game displays a room (parlor) with four antique amusement machines shown in 3D, including: American Pro Football, Super Swing Baseball, The Amazing Golf Game and Smack'n'Whack Cricket. The old-fashioned color schemes, carnival music, and mechanical style movements and controls are all designed to convey the original feeling of playing these games at the fairground.
Halloween is great. It's the only day of the year you can get away with dressing as the bug-eyed rabbit from Donnie Darko and not immediately be sent to a crisis center. Also, it turns out that it's also a great holiday to save some cash on video games. 2K Games has joined the price-cut party with some stellar deals of its own, all of which are slated to run into this weekend. And if you decide to buy, they could possibly occupy the entire thing. Games like Civilization Revolution are time warps -- you boot them up and all of a sudden it's 4AM .
Here's the full list of what 2K is offering on the cheap. Take note that Sid Meier's Pirates, which is another great time sink, has hit rockbottom sales-wise, too:
I've been playing Civ Rev on my iPad for a long, long time now, so I've got zero problems with telling you to buy this thing now. Despite being a simpler version of Civilization proper, Civ Rev's easily manageable strategy components are deep, compelling and satisfying. Give it like an hour or so to learn and then wave goodbye to your fun-fun iPad free time for a couple of months. Also, this is the biggest sale it's ever seen. I mean, it's eleven dollars off! Definitely jump all over that while you have the chance.
In 3D Pixel Racing [$1.99] the car graphics look extremely blocky - there's simply no anti-aliasing (or smoothing of the edges) ...but that's not a bad thing, because it's completely intentional! This car racing game uses 8-bit pixelated graphics to depict the 3D cars, tracks and menus, so they look like they're constructed from tiny blocks of Lego. You might think this sounds like 8-bit Rally [99¢], but no, this is far more pixelated than that.
While the unusual "pixel" graphics are definitely the main draw, there's also quite a few other features, including 5 game modes, 11 cars, 10 tracks, and various weather conditions, which all sounds really good on paper. However, this game has received mixed feedback in our discussion thread, with the menu system in particular being singled out for criticism.
One thing about this week: you'll save some money if you're looking to stock up for a big drive or just content to use as "Ignore Family" fuel. The worldwide leaders of Sonic games, for example, is holding a fairly comprehensive sale, so if you were in the mood for a, uh ... more historic afternoon of App Store appreciation, then get your download fingers ready.
I've been searching for a new asynchronous multi-player game for a while, so when I saw Poker Pals [
Our main man at 
Not to be left out in the holiday liquidation going on in the App Store at the moment, Namco Bandai has been conducting some price-slashery magics of its own. Starting today and rolling into the weekend, you can save oodles on the publisher's stable of titles. Games like Pac-Man and Mr. Driller and even its Universal selection of titles including Fossil Feast are available at either at $.99 to $3.99. That's not bad, really, considering what price these things usually sit at when there isn't a holiday to celebrate. Yay, Halloween!
Halloween is great. It's the only day of the year you can get away with dressing as the 
