In the first scene, set in present-day Paris, Fryderyk Chopin climbs out of his grave, speaks with the Muses, and rap-battles a French DJ with dual-wield keyboards and a jetpack. After this, he rides a horse-and-carriage to Jamaica and gets high with a reggae artist named Rob. Amazing.

As he travels the world in his mystic carriage trying to unravel the circumstances of his undeath, Chopin runs through a series of musical duels with local artists. Mechanically, this translates into a rudimentary version of Piano Hero: notes travel on a track toward a touch-screen piano keys, and players are scored on their accuracy and combo streak.

The songs in Resurrection are modern remixes of Chopin's most famous waltzes, nocturnes, études, and marzukas, re-imagined in the style of whichever locale our hero finds himself: country in Texas, Celtic dance in Ireland, chiptunes in Tokyo. I actually like most of the music -- the Resurrection soundtrack is available for purchase on iTunes [$5.99] -- but they all tend to suffer from repetitive melody and relatively simple arrangements. Still, the lighthearted pop remixes fit into the game's absurdist aesthetic much better than an orchestral score would.

With only nine songs, Resurrection is relatively short, though some players might be able to extend its shelf-life by trying to improve their scores. But even on its hardest difficulty, at its most complex, Resurrection goes out of its way to indulge and empower the player, not defeat them with impossible challenges.

Like Climber Brothers [$0.99], the real joy of Resurrection is the one-to-one relationship between tactile input and feedback: tapping the screen of my iPad is more or less a reasonable facsimile of pressing down a physical key. This is a relatively simple pleasure, but Resurrection goes to great lengths to extend it by being overly-generous  in its design -- players have a relatively large window to hit notes in, and it's almost impossible to miss enough notes to fail a song. The goal here is to listen to the music and soak up the strange animations going on in the background.

Since failure -- and, by extension, most of the game mechanics -- is largely an illusion, Resurrection's real hook is its insane premise and matching art direction. In both its art direction and treatment of ethnic stereotypes, Resurrection draws on the bande dessinée style of mid-80s Lucky Luke. The voice acting, too, is hard to place: British English re-routed through Forever Entertainment's Polish roots.

But Resurrection's essential Europeanness isn't limited to animation and cut scenes, and this isn't a game so much as it is a rewriting of Chopin's cultural identity. During the Cadet Revolution in 1830 Chopin, the son of a Franco-Polish immigrant, fled Warsaw for Paris, never to return. Resurrection ultimately leads him back to a culturally reinvigorated Warsaw, but only after he uses his musical gifts to destroy the stereotyped, corporate shills that populate the rest of the world. Chopin is cast as the savior of music, but it's odd that he uses modern remixes, not his traditional compositions, to further his cause.

By fudging its rhythm mechanics, Frederic -- Resurrection of Music actually presents itself as more of an interactive cartoon than a game. But when viewed as such, Resurrection often comes off muddled and directionless and, even at the end of the game, it's not clear why Chopin was resurrected, who he's "saving" music from, or if he really succeeded.

Nevertheless, Resurrection is a bold product, unafraid to be campy, kitschy, and surreal, and presented as a labor of love from a team full of ideas. This game is larger than the sum of its parts and everyone I've showed it to has enjoyed basking in the art and music and in the fact that Frederic Chopin uses his second chance at life to smoke dope on the beach and learn the keytar.

Today the first update has hit for Triple Town, which mostly focuses on fixing bugs. Things like broken Game Center achievements, the inability to restart games sometimes, and tons of other quirks that come with a version 1.0 release have now been taken care of. The update description also goes on to say that there are several other known bugs that are currently in the process of being hunted down and fixed, one of which includes a problem with turns regenerating after exiting the app.

You see, Triple Town is a freemium game. It comes with a set amount of “moves” for free, and the ability to purchase in-game coins for real money which will let you buy more moves when you run out. Alternately, these moves are supposed to slowly regenerate while you aren’t playing the game, giving you a way to continue playing for free if you had the patience.

One other alternative is to just buy unlimited moves with a flat in-app purchase fee of $6.99, and with all the troubles going on with the regenerating turns Spry Fox wants to entice you to go for the unlimited option by reducing its price down to $3.99. After getting hooked on Triple Town myself, I had no qualms dropping the $6.99 for unlimited play, but others have felt like it was a bit on the high side for the kind of game it is.

If you’re one of those who felt the price was high, the $3.99 price is a lot easier to swallow, especially for a game packed with such fantastic gameplay. Plus, the maintenance update makes it a much more solid game all around, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing plenty of more updates to Triple Town in the future as well.

Venture Towns, for the most part, is a carbon copy of Oh! Edo Towns set in the modern day. You'll build houses and then people will buy them; you'll build buildings and then people will work in them; you'll buy cafes, and arcades, and pastures, and parks, and then people will spend money in them. A grid-based placing system keeps everything as neat and tidy as can be, and a UI choked with options and graphs and additional mechanics will be where you spend the most of your time.

Buildings, in order to be efficient enough to profit, need to be paired with other very specific buildings. People, in order to fair well in the workplace, need to earn bonus statistics given nebulously from these buildings. Special items, on the other hand, can increase the parameters of buildings, shops, and commerce.

All these systems feed into the overall research and build structure; buildings dish out research points at unpredictable intervals, and this gives you the power to research new buildings. Money gathered then goes into building the stuff you just researched.

This is all pretty simple in theory, but there's a huge, catastrophic catch: the only way to execute well and learn what works is to continually fail, and to fail so badly that you need to start new games over and over again. This is a code-red, oh-my-god-I-hate-this-game kind of stuff -- and nothing really saves it.

I've had to dump around five hours into deficit drowning towns in order to even figure out how to position houses and stores together efficiently. Worse, it has taken over four restarts to get a handle on the combination system -- what buildings go together to create the most profit -- and how to acceptably micro-manage my citizens and buildings with boosts. Venture Towns never gives you the tools to be successful. It fails to give you any kind of blueprint for success, and there's obviously one it wants you to use, or else it wouldn't punish you so much.

This is a problem that feeds into everything else just about as well as its structure feeds into the research and build model. Kairosoft's typically sluggish pacing feels even slower as you flounder, the hot-and-cold translation effort gets even more grating as you're forced to read bad tutorial bubbles, and the dumbphone-geared interface gets even more in the way as you knowingly suck at the game for hours on end.

Venture Towns uncharacteristic ruthlessness makes what's usually forgivable with Kairosoft's formula unforgivable. It makes me feel like the whole thing has been played out; that sly hesitancy to give me all the important information up-front comes off as underhanded, the cutesy visuals feels like a mask, the resemblance to other Kairosoft games conceptually and mechanically is grosser, and the mechanics are bulky and the systems brutal. Its just all so muddled. Confidence and fun come at a costly premium of tons of your time and patience.

For what it's worth, there is a decent-enough game buried in this mess. After wrapping my head around all of the unmentioned mechanics and systems and uncovering most of the title's great mysteries -- such as how to advance as beyond as a town, how to unlock cars as vehicles, and how to grid buildings -- the actual game part, the weighing and measuring of what to build and when, became magically entertaining.

It just sucks that Venture Towns sucks until you invest massive, massive amounts of time into failing and discovering what the game is actually offering. As a whole, it doesn't feel like a fully fleshed out title -- there's too much hanging in the breeze.

Oh! Edo Towns has a similar kind of approach, so I think that game's fanatics might find something they might like in Venture Towns. I gotta say though, the modern backdrop doesn't do this game any favors; it's bland, SimCity type of stuff with Kairosoft's characteristic wrapper.

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.

You can also use your new wind-generating abilities to help Toku explore. Swiping upwards through Toku causes him to jump upwards, carried on a gust of wind. And as you progress, you unlock the ability to use double-gusts to blow him further. Toku can ascend to even greater heights by climbing inside a poyak plant, which spits him skyward, or by gusting him downwards into a large mushroom, for a trampoline effect. Alternatively, you could burn a poyak plant and take it's seed to plant strategically somewhere else, as a new jumping point.

There are enemies to avoid, including glorbs which cling to you and must be swiped away before they deplete one of your four lives. However, by swiping the background vegetation, blue birds fly into the sky and tapping enough of these eventually restores a life. Along the way you discover and activate statues which act as re-spawn points when you die.

With three game save slots, Game Center integration, innovative game-mechanics, a storyline, lovely graphics, interesting levels with multiple exits and a chilled-out soundtrack which I haven't tired off, Lost Winds was heading towards an easy five-star rating, however: As I mentioned at the start, this game rates highly in almost (but not quite) every way.

Sometimes the controls are frustrating. Especially when there's a series of double-gust jumps in a row, where a single failure causes you to fall and restart. After numerous attempts I walked away from my device in frustration, a few times. Other players in our discussion thread have described the wind controls as  "unforgiving", which is a suitable description. Apparently the Wii version had a tiny pause before the jumps, which is missing from the IOS version, which could be a factor (as discussed in our latest TouchArcade podcast).

However, the jumps do get easier with practice. My two pro tips are:  Run off ledges to automatically jump, rather than jumping off ledges manually and always swipe from directly below Toku in a straight line. That helps, a little.

Lost Winds is such a delightful game in all other regards that I'm still enjoying it, but the controls have tested my patience. If you're not a fan of swipe controls, you may want to wait and see if the developers make them more consistent, more responsive and more forgiving. As it stands, the controls are - at times - part of this games challenge. Yet, for large parts of the game, the controls are fine.

The sequel to Lost Winds, Winter of the Melodias, was released for Wii in 2009, so hopefully that will be ported that to iOS too, as it allows players to strategically switch between summer and winter and includes a new cyclone ability. In the meantime, keep an eye on our thread for any updates on the controls.

The first thing you’ll notice when you jump into a race in Mini Motor Racing is the high quality visuals. Both the vehicle models as well as the actual tracks look great and it all runs at a fast framerate. Added touches like weather conditions (the rain looks great) do a good job making the game come alive. In addition, Mini Motor Racing also features a rocking soundtrack that I thought added to the feel of the game. All of these elements combine for a smooth and engaging presentation that simply adds to the overall experience while playing.

Gameplay-wise, Mini Motor Racing plays great and features tons of content to keep you playing for quite a while. Like most racers, each race is a quest to finish first, with the higher your position, the more money you earn. That money can in turn be used to upgrade your vehicle, giving you a better chance to beat later cups and tracks. While upgrades go a long way towards track success, a lot of the strategy in Mini Motor Racing involves memorizing track patterns and understanding the intricacies of the physics of each map. Of course, you could always just spend some money on IAP cash and immediately upgrade the hell out of your racer.

Mini Motor Racing includes both a quickplay and career mode. The career mode features the vast majority of the content and has dozens of maps separated out into quite a few cups. True, a lot of the tracks are reused with mirroring or different weather conditions, but the game does a great job altering camera angles to make each version look adequately different. This is one of the few racing games I’ve played where I didn’t feel like I was playing the same maps over and over again with little change. There’s also a multiplayer mode, but it is restricted to local play currently (something I hope is addressed in future updates).

One of the biggest elements that can make or break any racing title is its controls. Thankfully, Mini Motor Racing looks to address any potential control issues with a wide variety of options. The default control method is the ‘wheel’ which places a small steering wheel in a corner of the screen that you drag to steer. Other options include simple left/right toggle options and the slider, which is a control method I still can’t get used to. Each control scheme works well enough meaning that it’s really up to the player to choose the one that feels the most comfortable (although I felt the wheel offered the most precise control out of all of them). Regardless, it’s nice to play an arcade racer that offers a variety of controls that work.

While there are plenty of reasons to love Mini Motor Racing, there are a few issues that hold the game back from perfection. While the physics engine adds personality to the gameplay, there are some occasions in which your vehicle will interact with the environment in ways that don’t make sense. This is exasperated somewhat when you get to later levels and the AI begins headhunting for your vehicle, slamming you into walls and into other cars which makes it very hard to take first place. In addition, there have been reports of instability in earlier iPhone/touch and iPad generations, causing lots of crashes. While I personally haven’t had these issues on my 4S, the problems seemed widespread enough to mention. Luckily, The Binary Mill has already begun to address these issues, with a recent update expanding the width of certain tracks as well as addressing the stability problems.

Despite these issues, I love Mini Motor Racing and feel that it’s a worthy candidate for being one of the better arcade racers currently on the App Store. Not only are the gameplay elements sound, there’s tons of worthy maps and content that’ll keep you coming back. Furthermore, recent updates to the game show that the developers are willing to put the effort necessary to smooth out any issues. Simply put, if you’re a fan of top-down racers, definitely check out Mini Motor Racing.

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!

However, determination won over, and even though it took more than 3 years True Axis completed their goal of releasing Space Tripper for iOS. And spoiler alert: it kicks major ass, as evidenced in our review. But it wasn't all happy times and rainbows, as the one glaring omission from Space Tripper was any sort of option for touch controls. As it stood, the game only offered a tilt control scheme.

Now, I'm lukewarm at best towards tilt controls most of the time, but Space Tripper was different. The tilt controls feel wonderful, and by now I couldn't imagine playing the game any other way. But I know that not everybody will have this sort of same epiphany, and there are other gamers who either are suffering through a control scheme that they don't like or even worse have avoided Space Tripper altogether based solely on its tilt controls. True Axis knows this too, and that is why they have moved quickly to bring a relative touch control scheme to Space Tripper, which you can see demonstrated in the video below.

So there you go touch control enthusiasts, you're finally getting your wish. If the lack of touch controls was preventing you from picking up Space Tripper, then soon enough you will have no excuse. Despite being a tilt control convert with this game, I myself am looking forward to giving the touch controls a try, just to see what they're like. Also being wrapped up into this update is an auto calibration option for the tilt controls and a new Easy mode for the campaign. The 1.1 update for Space Tripper is currently submitted to Apple and is awaiting review, so you should keep your eye out for it to hit in the next week or two with any luck.

Although I'm happy to recommend this game now, my initial impressions were less favorable. You see, Space Tripper offers tilt controls as the only option for movement, but strangely, it appears no auto-calibration occurs at the start of the game, so the craft was unresponsive to tilts and left sitting like a lame duck. However, after discovering the tilt calibration and tilt-sensitivity options and testing a few different configurations, the craft became very responsive, ducking and weaving around enemies.

The decision to implement only tilt controls will immediately put some players off, but it actually works rather well (after you play with the settings). The developers conducted some trials with touch-based controls early on in their development process, but decided that touch controls obscured the action and weren't responsive enough.

Tilting moves your craft, while tapping the left side of the screen changes weapon and tapping the right side flips the craft around, to face the opposite way. When you flip direction, the craft also slides back a little, which is a subtle movement, but it's often life-saving when you spin to face an enemy that's too close. This game requires careful approaches rather than always rushing in, however there's also time limits for each level, so you need to keep attacking.

The weapons shoot left or right, so you need to move alongside an enemy to attack, but there's no fire button as your selected weapon fires automatically, non-stop. Your ship is equipped with two weapons: red and blue. The blue lazer fires a direct forwards-facing beam, while the red weapon fires a three pronged blast, covering a wider range. When you collect a red or blue power-up, the weapon of that color is leveled-up, so you could potentially have a very strong red weapon, but a weak blue one, or vice versa.  These level-ups are definitely worth grabbing, as the extra fire-power is helpful for destroying enemies, but importantly, it also looks cool.

Whereas many shoot'em-ups are set in a rectangular play-field, Star Tripper uses various different shaped arenas, with 3D features like ramps which you can jump off. You can't fly beyond the arena, but your enemies can enter from outside, shooting at you even before you can get to them. To keep track of their position, you constantly refer to a handy radar, which shows the position of all enemies on the level. The green enemy blips on the radar turn red when they become aggressive and accelerate towards you, which helps prioritize your targets.

There are four unique worlds, each with their own graphics, enemies and objective. Sometimes it's all about shooting down enemies, but other times you're destroying generators or knocking down pillars (while also blasting enemies!). The enemies are nicely varied, including tanks, helicopters, heat-seeking missile turrets and even swarms of insects, fizz wheels and killer-worms.  Plus there are big boss fights to reward your efforts. Like a massive yellow spider that crawls and jumps, a big fat tank or a massive one-eyed sea creature. You need to find and exploit each bosses weak-spots to take it out.

When your three ships are destroyed, you're presented with two options – either stop playing and record your score, or continue playing but forfeit your score from the high-score rankings.  At first, this seemed like a great feature, as it allows less competent players to continue their game without being forced to restart from the very beginning. However, the continue option only gives one additional life at a time - which is sometimes lost within 30 seconds. This forces you to frequently re-choose continue. It would be better if "continue" granted another set of three lives.

There's three levels of difficulty: Normal, Hard and Hardest. Although one member of our discussion forums joked the levels should be named: "Hard, Yeah right  and LOLWUT".  Fortunately, there's some cheats built into the game (as described in the App Store game description). The cheat menu offers unlimited lives and/or invulnerability and the ability to skip levels. The unlimited lives option is great, as it's still a challenge to complete the levels, but you can keep re-trying and your weapon power-up's don't reset when you die. As soon as you enable a cheat, all leaderboards, achievements, game mode unlocking and progress saving are disabled until game over, or you quit. This means legit players can still aim for ranks on the Game Center or OpenFeint leaderboards, without worrying about competing against "cheats".

Star Tripper is a fast-paced, nice-looking and challenging game which will appeal to any hard-core shoot-em-up fans, but anyone can progress through the levels to try the boss fights thanks to the "continue" option and cheat modes. It's taken several years for this game to reach our iOS devices, so perhaps we'll end up seeing Space Tripper 2, sometime around 2018!

As a quick recap, Space Tripper started as a Mac and PC game created by PomPom Games back in 2001. In 2006, it was rereleased on the PlayStation Network as an enhanced version by the name of Astro Tripper. True Axis began working on an iOS port of the game back in mid-2008, but were riddled with setbacks that pushed the release back many times.

It features 14 different levels across 4 worlds in Campaign, Time Attack, and Challenge modes. There is OpenFeint and Game Center integration for leaderboards and achievements, and there's even a built-in cheat menu if you're finding the game a bit too difficult (though this will disable leaderboard and achievement tracking), just like the old days!

Now I don't think anybody would argue that Space Tripper doesn't look quite gorgeous, with vibrant colors, interesting enemies littering the screen, and huge boss fights. But, I'm betting at least a few of you are feeling hesitant about the game's tilt-only control scheme. Heck, I'm not typically a fan of tilt controls either, unless they're done extremely well. After playing with Space Tripper for just a short while, I can see that the tilt controls are indeed rock solid. However, as good as the tilt controls are, if enough people request it True Axis will look into a touch control option. They've tried it already and weren't happy with the results, hence why they aren't included already.

At any rate, Space Tripper seems to be good arcade shooter action already. We'll be taking a closer look at the game in the coming days, and you can check out early impressions of Space Tripper from gamers in our forums.

Fantasy Flight Games

I love these games, but there's really no such thing as a quick game of, well, any of them. Between set up, tear down and the inevitable time taken to teach new players and reference forgotten rules, you're looking at a full evening's entertainment. So imagine my delight playing Elder Sign: Omens [$3.99 / HD], the first of Fantasy Flight's more mature games to arrive on the App Store. It's quick to play, can be learned (mostly) as you go, and can be played solo or hotseat with friends. What's not to like?

Elder Sign: Omens is harder to explain than it is to learn, but let's give it a shot. Azathoth, one of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, is showing signs of awakening. This would basically be the end of the world, filled with eldritch abominations and mindless gibbering, so you must assemble a team to stop this from occurring.

You can choose from a list of 16 investigators to create a team of 1 to 4 members. The investigators all have their own strengths and weaknesses. Some have more sanity, others more stamina, some get more items than others and all have unique abilities to help you on your mission.

Once you enter the museum in which Elder Sign takes place, you're faced with a selection of missions. Each one is horrifying in its own way, and your investigators risk losing their lives or their sanity by facing them down. In each mission, you roll the dice (proverbially in this game, and literally in the tabletop version) to see if you can match the symbols that come up, things like Terror, Peril and Lore, to the symbols needed to defeat the nameless horror you face.

If you do, you're well rewarded, earning items for your investigators that help you improve your odds and occasionally Elder Signs. If you don't, you fail the mission and suffer, losing sanity, stamina and sometimes gaining Doom. If the Doom Track moves up by twelve spaces before you collect the fourteen Elder Signs needed to seal away the Great Old One, Azathoth awakens and all is lost.

There are a few other details that can effect the outcome of your game. As you succeed at missions you earn trophies that can be exchanged for healing, items or expensive Elder Signs. Time passes on as you take your turns, and at midnight terrible things happen depending on how many monsters or Midnight signs you've left on the board. And occasionally portals open to Other Worlds, where the stakes are higher but so are the rewards.

As a result, success in Elder Sign is part luck, part strategy, but it's certainly weighted toward luck. If you fail at rolling the signs you need, there's little you can do. But making sure you pick the right investigator for the job, keep them alive and choose the missions you can defeat -- therein lies strategy.

For the most part, the transition to digital has been very kind to Elder Sign. Azathoth is the only Ancient One that features -- the others and their varied win conditions aren't present in Omens. But otherwise the game is intact and elegantly presented. The interface is superb, aside from a few small oversights. I would prefer to be able to see what items can do at a glance even when they're not usable, and I didn't discover that tapping the title of a mission would bring up more information about it even while you were in the midst of it until I was quite deep in the game. But on the whole, Fantasy Flight has done a fantastic job of making a complicated game simple and easy to play.

They've done such a good job, in fact, that you don't need to worry about learning much at all before you play. I'd recommend watching the tutorials so you don't get lost, but this is a game you can muddle through and understand within a single playthrough. That's outstandingly intuitive for this sort of thing. Playthroughs are much quicker than in the tabletop game, too, though not as speedy as they could be -- a bit too much focus is placed on fancy but slow scene transitions.

You can play Elder Sign: Omens alone, using up to four investigators to explore the museum. You're given a local high score when you finish the game, win or lose, and it's endlessly satisfying to try to defeat that score with different teams and strategies. Alternately, you can play hotseat with friends -- assign each person to a single investigator and pass your device around. The game doesn't change, but it works brilliantly both ways.

Best of all? Win or lose, no one has to clean up the table when you're done. There's no overstating how much I'd like to see more of Fantasy Flight's catalog brought to iOS. If you agree, voice your support in our discussion thread. And do try to keep your sanity intact while you wait.

In all seriousness, though -- if you have ever played a Kairosoft title, you will know what to expect here. Oh! Edo Towns follows the formula of the previous games by kicking it off giving you your own plot of land to build up into something spectacular. Considering the theme, everything plays on Japan's Edo period, from the ability to build things like Public Baths and Dumpling Shops to small details such as character dress and design. If you're a fan of Japanese history, as I am, you are sure to have a soft spot for this one.

Just in case you have never played a Kairosoft sim before, here's how it works: the clock ticks as you survey your land and make choices about how to build it up. A full menu is available at the touch of a finger, and from there you can build everything from fields for crops to homes, and even eventually castles. As you make your town more appealing, more people will move into it, and as you build more structures that your residents can use to educate themselves, such as libraries, they can then better themselves and therefore benefit the town and boost your 'Yield" (meaning how much money your town makes).

To keep the flow of your town building going, you'll get periodical updates from the local newspaper. This is Kairosoft's gentle way of nudging you and giving you hints as to what to do next, such as what to build to help your town prosper. Oh! Edo Towns is a great game for anyone with a hardcore case of OCD (cough, cough) because you can also examine the stats of your residents, town, buildings and finances at all times and analyze how it can be improved.

Keep working, and your town will grow into a burgeoning community. The pace is well set and helps to allay boredom by keeping updates consistent as your new residents move in and your town flourishes. Planting trees and other landscaping near buildings or paying close attention to what buildings are compatible with one another is a key tactic to making sure your town ranks high when the time comes around to win some awards. Get to buildin!

The only pitfall I can see when it comes to Oh! Edo Towns is someone saying, "This is the same game as the others with a new skin." Technically, they would be right, as it does follow the same formula, though the flow of gameplay and hints are better than ever before. If you've had enough, you can probably replay the ones you played before. On the other hand, if the idea of having a slew of new possible combos at your fingertips to transform your little town into a booming rural metropolis makes you salivate a little, what you want is here, and there's even a brand new lite version to try out. Time to carve your own spot in Japanese history, my friends.

At that time, we donned our speculation hats and ventured that Oh! Edo Towns might be hitting the US App Store sometime in October. Well, as it turns out, October came and went with no sign of the game, but just a few hours ago Oh! Edo Towns did indeed pop up in the US App Store. Sure, we were a few days off, but that's still some impressive guesstimating as far as I'm concerned. Miss Cleo would be proud.

Here's a bit of video of the Japanese version of Oh! Edo Towns from our friends at AppBank:

Now, you might remember about a week and a half ago we spotted yet another Kairosoft town-creating sim, called Zaibatsu Towns, that was released in Japan. The key difference with that title compared to Oh! Edo Towns, it seemed, was that it didn't have you building a traditional Edo period Japanese style town, and instead had you creating a city in modern times more akin to SimCity. I'm going to go ahead and start the speculation train, and I'll put out there that we'll be seeing a US release of Zaibatsu Towns before the end of the year. Go ahead and mark that down, dear readers, because if it turns out I'm wrong you can point and laugh in my face.

While it's fun to guess the future and all, let's not forget that there's a brand new Kairosoft title available to us in the US right now. As with most of their releases, it's a pretty good bet that it will be a strong simulation title, so might be worth just diving right in with the link below. Otherwise you can check out impressions in our forums, and you can also be sure we'll have a review of Oh! Edo Towns in the very near future. In fact, despite it being 3am where he's located, I'm calling Brad right now to tell him to download it.

Here's the full list of the sales we've caught so far:

• Buccaneer Blitz - $2.99 → $.99 [Universal]
• Fossil Feast - $1.99 → $.99 [Universal]
• Isaac Newton's Gravity - $2.99 → $.99
• Mishap - $4.99 → $1.99
• Mishap for the iPad - $4.99 → $1.99
• Mooniacs - $1.99 → $.99 [Universal]
• More Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima - $4.99 → $1.99
• More Brain Exercise with Dr. Kawashima for the iPad - $6.99 → $1.99
• Mr. Driller - $1.99 → $.99
• Ms. Pac-Man - $4.99 → $1.99
• Ms. Pac-Man for the iPad - $4.99 → $1.99
• Pac-Man - $4.99 → $1.99
• Pac-Man for the iPad - $4.99 → $1.99
• Pole Position: Remix - $2.99 → $.99
• Pool Pro Online 3 - $1.99 → $.99
• Pool Pro Online 3 for the iPad - $1.99 → $.99
• Puzzle Quest 2 - $4.99 → $3.99
• Star Trigon - $1.99 → $.99
• Tamagotchi: 'Round The World - $4.99 → $1.99

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.

Full disclosure: I'm a Katamari fan from way back. I got in on the ground floor with Katamari Damacy on PS2 and I've played every console release since. Over the years the formula has become a little stale, the craziness has started to feel a little forced, but I'm still a person who loves to roll things up. Sushi, cats, Ultraman, I'm not picky. So it's with a heavy heart that I tell you that Katamari Amore is a loveless thing.

Yes, yes, it's Katamari! On iOS! But that's not enough. The framerate gets choppy at times, especially on my 3GS. The controls are improved over the last outing, now offering one virtual pad, two virtual pads or tilt. The two-stick method is essentially the same as the console controls, if a bit stiff. The method for switching controls is awkward and confusing, but whatever. Technically this game is pretty much fine. It's just completely and utterly joyless.

The level design is the worst offender. One of the joys of the Katamari series is exploration. Strange scenarios can be found if you pay attention. You might find bears corralling humans at a campfire, or a hidden shrine to sashimi. It doesn't often make sense, but it rewards curiosity. In Katamari Amore, you'll find whatever random items are needed to make you bigger, strewn appropriately to allow you to progress. The most interesting thing I found in my travels was a space dog with an astronaut, and I guess the game thought it was interesting too because I got an achievement for rolling it up.

And that's emblematic of the whole problem with Katamari Amore. Nothing is there just for fun. To clear most of the Story Mode levels you'll need to roll up nearly every item available. This turns the game from a frantic size race to a tedious exercise in hunting down the one item you need to get just big enough to get the next batch of items. It's a bare-minimum philosophy that permeates everything -- the King of All Cosmos's dialogue, the levels, the items and the entertainment value.

We mentioned that this game would have a special Pac-Man themed level, and it does. But don't get too excited. It's basically one level of the classic game, but with terrible controls and an obnoxious camera angle. There are better ways to play Pac-Man.

If none of this concerns you and you just want to get your Katamari on, here's what you need to know. The game is free to download, and contains one level of Time Attack mode. With an in-app purchase of $3.99, you can unlock all six currently available levels. Each has a Story Mode (in which the King asks you to roll up a specific item that always happens to be the largest item in the level), time attack, an exact size challenge and eternal mode. There are more packs on their way, but there's a reasonable amount of content here to start with.

It's not that Katamari Amore is completely terrible. There are a few technical speedbumps, but it's competent on the whole. Some of our forum users have decried the graphics, but simple art is a series staple. And it's a functional game, with plenty to do. It's just that it could be so much more.

Most of the things Namco has left out aren't the things that would push the limits of the platform - they're the humor and the spirit of the series. iOS games can be made with love and joy, they can be funny and charming. Those are things the Katamari series has had in spades, and it's a shame they're missing here.

Expect 24 missions at launch, six of which are “completely new stages.” Also, expect to play across four different modes, including a regular campaign, a time attack mode, “Exact Size Challenge,” and “Eternal Mode.” For you Pac-Man fans out there, Namco is rolling in a special themed level complete with dots, ghosts, and a controllable Pac-Man. Neat!

The free version of the title will include Time Attack mode, while the full $3.99 version (special price) will have all of the aforementioned launch content from the get-go. Namco has promised that more content is on the way, too, which is cool because if Amore is able to overcome the technical woes its predecessor I Love Katamari [$6.99] had, it should absolutely rock. I mean, the last one did until the framerate took crazy dives, at least.