Following the port of their 1993 arcade shooter RayForce [$11.99] to the App Store, Taito announced over the weekend that they'll be bringing another shooter, Darius Burst: Second Prologue, to iOS in the future, according to Andriasang.

Darius Burst was originally a Sony PSP game released in late 2009, and was an official new entry in the fabled Darius series of shmups. An arcade version came a year later called Darius Burst Another Chronicle, and it was especially noteworthy due to its insanely wide screen and cabinet. Sadly, neither game was released outside of Japan.

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It's Z-Day, baby, and the cure for what ails the undead populace isn't going to find itself. In SKS Games' upcoming survival-horror title End Night, you play as a grizzled marine dude on a simple quest: find the core components of a vaccine that might end the crazy stuff that's going on outside of a cozy lab. In a not-so-unusual video game turn of events, most of these ingredients have to be discovered in the wild.

It ain't going to be easy. It's the apocalypse, man; Z-Day. The dead have risen and are roving anxiously. Some are even armed or armored. These aren't your typical slow-walking types of creeps, either. In my short preview session, I met runners as well as amblers, and even had the pleasure of running into one or two seriously hopped up bullet-sponges.

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In case you've never heard of it before, Dominion is a deck building card game created by game designer Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games in 2008. Since its release, Dominion has been ripping up the charts over on BoardGameGeek, and has won all sorts of other awards including taking home game of the year at Germany's Spiel board game festival. In fact, Dominion's success and popularity have spawned an entire genre of other similar deck building games.

A few days ago, Dominion Donald X. Vaccarino [Free] hit the App Store, and since then I've been trying to verify the validity of this port. It seemed pretty shady, and the developer's web site sure didn't help things. After some additional digging, I came across a post by Rio Grande Games' Jay Tummelson over on BoardGameGeek. It turns out that over the years they've given their blessing to a number of developers to release iOS versions of Dominion, provided they agree to remove it once the official version hits the App Store.

What's more interesting though, is that the official licensed version, per this same forum post, is only "a few weeks" away. Even more curious though is that Chillingo currently has a game titled Dominion [$1.99] on the App Store as well. We'll just have to wait and see how the dust settles on all of this. If you're interested in Dominion, I'd snag the free version out now, and if you own Chillingo's Dominion it might not be a bad idea to back up the .ipa just in case there's any hijinks with take-down requests by Rio Grande Games so they can score the "Dominion" title on the App Store.

I hope Rio Grande is serious about this "few weeks" thing, as an official version of Dominion has potential to be awesome.

When prompted via Twitter by Xperia Play fan site XperiaGamer when we might see Reckless Racing 2, the sequel to 2010's excellent top-down arcade racer Reckless Racing [99¢/Lite/HD], the game's developer Polarbit responded that we can expect the game to hit next week on February 2nd.

We really liked the original Reckless Racing in our review, and the sequel looks to up the ante with a fleshed-out single-player campaign, longer tracks, and improved visuals over the already gorgeous first game. You can catch a glimpse of Reckless Racing 2 in the all-to-brief teaser video above, and we'll have more of the game when it launches next week.

[Via PocketGamer]

Developer Microids and publisher Anuman Interactive have announced that Barbarian - The Death Sword will be hitting the App Store early next month. Barbarian is a modern remake of the classic Commodore 64 title Barbarian - The Ultimate Warrior, also known in the US as simply Death Sword. Released in 1987, the original Barbarian was a one-on-one fighting game pitting buff and brutal warriors against each other.

Despite the fighting genre being in its infancy, Barbarian was critically acclaimed for its competitive gameplay. However, most of its notoriety outside of the gaming world was garnered by its violent nature where you were able to decapitate your opponent in a shower of blood, as well as the scantily clad models featured on its packaging.

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Bullet hell experts Cave have today announced their next forthcoming iOS shooter Dodonpachi Blissful Death. Known as Dodonpachi Dai Ou Jou in Japan, it's the fourth game in the Donpachi series and was followed up with Dodonpachi Dai Fukkatsu several years later, which we know as Dodonpachi Resurrection [$7.99/Lite] here on the US App Store.

There aren't any details just yet for Dodonpachi Blissful Death, but based on Cave's previous iOS releases I think it's pretty safe to assume a few things. It will likely include an arcade mode that stays faithful to the original release as well as a special Smartphone mode that has been retooled for touch screens and given some additional features.

While most of Cave's iOS releases follow this formula, they bucked that trend with their last release Bug Princess [$4.99/Lite], which was more or less just a direct port of the arcade version. This wasn't exactly a bad thing, as the arcade game was (and is) amazingly fun, but I've grown to really like the special Smartphone modes that Cave puts so much thought into. Hopefully we'll see this in Dodonpachi Blissful Death.

Beyond that, you can expect multiple ship types, weapon augmenters called Element Dolls, insane combo scoring, and hidden loops and bosses. So basically, tons of Cave shmup goodness. Really great news too, considering Cave has been contemplating focusing more on less hardcore, more social games. Glad to see them still bringing great titles to iOS.

As soon as we have more information on Dodonpachi Blissful Death's arrival on the App Store, like pricing and release date, we'll be sure to let you know. For now though, it's probably safe to hit up our forums and start drooling.

Stolen Couch Games' tactical RPG Kids vs Goblins has been getting a lot of traction on our message board for good reason: it looks hot. In the game, you'll control three kids with up to 80 different spells on a quest that'll see them exploring a total of seven unique environments. As you'll see in the new trailer below, the spell system takes a cue from Magicka; it encourages users to combine individual spells and then exploit the combined power in order to progress and beat up waves of bad dudes. There seems to be a fair bit of standard action RPG-ery, too.

Kids vs Goblins is being published by Crescent Moon Games, and is expected to hit the iPad first later this February. In the game's message board thread, the publisher has noted that Apple has it in its hands right now, so it's just a matter of approval. We'll continue keeping our eye on this one, for sure.

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Way back in April of last year, we caught wind of an interesting looking Kickstarter project called Tweet Land. The idea was that Tweet Land would create randomly generated gameplay events based off of certain keywords sent out over Twitter. So essentially, real people tweeting would power what happened in the game.

It’s a really clever concept on paper, but we were a bit skeptical about how it would pan out in an actual game. Well, it looks like we’ll be able to find out later this month as Tweet Land is set to launch on January 31st.

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After some deliberation with Brad while recording our podcast today, we determined that it is in fact Wednesday, which means a whole slew of games coming out tonight. We're still not seeing the massive influx of games that we were seeing towards the end of 2011, but we're getting back to where we used to be.

This week is a massive improvement over a few weeks ago where we were struggling to find four games to post about. All of this stuff should be available at 11:00 PM Eastern, or potentially much earlier if you're the kind of person who lives east of North America.

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Adventure Bar Story, a Recettear-like RPG that originally released in Japan as Adventure Bar of Wonderland Portable on PSP, is being localized and fitted for iPhone and iPod Touch. Zigza Game, the studio behind this new effort, revealed its intentions to do this over on our message board, and even dropped a few new screenshots to stimulate the community. We're including a much less, er, eye-melting PSP selection below.

Knock out the "item" part of Recettear's title and insert "bar" if you want a decent idea of what you'll be getting into with Adventure Bar Story. The goal is to have the best bar in the kingdom; To accomplish this, you'll need to dungeon crawl and harvest the component parts of a variety of monsters to win cooking and drink contests. You know, just like in real life.

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The Indie Fund's first release, Q.U.B.E., is also its first success story: after just a few days on PC download, the first-person puzzle game has generated enough dough to repay its 90k investment from the Fund. Now, Toxic Games is looking to launch the title on other platforms, including iOS. "We're currently prototyping an iOS version, and a Mac version has been in the works for months now," a studio representative told Joystiq.

Q.U.B.E. is a fascinating puzzler that has you, as a telekinesis-wielding dude, rotating and generally fiddling with the size and shape of colored blocks in sterile rooms. It's a style of game that we don't really have on iOS, so we're stoked about the possibility and excited about what it could open up on the platform it ever does see a release. This isn't exactly a match-three, you know?

[Via Joystiq]

So, there you were. Looking at our upcoming games list and getting psyched about Smash Cops. And then the game was pulled before you could buy it. Good news: it's re-hitting the App Store this week, and reviews should be follow it on January 19th or so. Yay!

What was up with the delay? Licensing issues. In a statement sent to us at the time of the postponement, developer Hutch explained soberly that it hoped to "get [its] forms straightened out" and get back into the App Store this week. And, hey, it did -- but not before about 5,000 lucky dudes purchased the game.

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Galaxy on Fire 2 [$9.99 / HD / Lite] is receiving its second add-on in Q2 of 2012, the studio behind the outer space adventure game announced earlier today on its blog. The new stuff sounds cool, too. The add-on, a 10 plus hour adventure dubbed "Supernova," will incorporate new mission types, new stories, better visuals, and even some fun callbacks to the series' more memorable characters, like Khador.

Supernova takes place immediately after events in the last expansion, Valkryie. Here's a blurb that explains what's going on in Supernova specifically:

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Red Zebra Game's Raid Leader reminds me a lot of Mika Mobile's Battleheart [$2.99]. Like that game, it's a real-time strategy RPG hybrid that seamlessly blends these two styles of play into a series of trying instance-based conflicts. Where the two depart the most dramatically is in the name: raid.

In Raid Leader, you'll be taking a knight, a mage, and an archer, against a variety of damage-eating, MMO-like bosses that all appear to have special mechanical hooks. For example, there's a yeti-like monster with a freeze spell that turns its target into a block of ice. In order to break out, you'll have to tap on the screen. There's also a worm that, much to the archer and mage's chagrin, spawns mobs of life-sucking blood leaches all over the battlefield.

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Back in October we told you that Namco's classic 3D arcade fighter SoulCalibur was coming to iOS, and now it looks like we have a release date for the game. According to Andriasang (and noted by Joystiq), Namco Bandai will be releasing the iOS SoulCalibur as a Universal app this coming week on the 19th.

SoulCalibur on iOS will feature 19 different fighters and lots of game modes, including arcade, time attack, survival, extra survival, practice and museum modes. Sadly, there is no sign of team battle mode or any kind of multiplayer mode, which is pretty odd for a fighting game. The lack of online multiplayer isn't really surprising, but I sure hope we see some sort of local multiplayer option in an update in the future.

But even with the lack of multiplayer, SoulCalibur is an absolute classic that I spent countless hours with on my Dreamcast and I'm really looking forward to playing again on my iPhone and iPad. There will be Game Center support for 3 of the above modes, so there will be somewhat of a competitive aspect. Unfortunately, it looks like at release only owners of 4th generation devices or either version of the iPad will be able to run the game. Hopefully the hardware requirements will be able to be lowered down the line at some point.

We'll be sure to give SoulCalibur a spin and see how it's stood the test of time when it hits the App Store this week, and you can check out our forums for further discussion of the game.

Update: Here's a trailer for the game:

[Via Andriasang and Joystiq]