The more you have to suffer for something, the more you are able to find pleasure in the consummation. At least, that’s what my old dominatrix used to say. Difficulty is a double-edged sword, and doubly so in the case of the recent iPhone port of XBLIG title Soul, from Kydos Studio.

On the one hand, completing a stage will compel you to sound your barbaric yawp across the rooftops of the world in triumph. On the other hand, getting to that point may compel you to buy a much thicker case to protect your iPhone from your impulse to launch it out the window. Read on to learn more about this cruel portable mistress.

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We all knew the iPhone adaptation of Plants Vs. Zombies was going to be a huge hit with consumers.  For one thing, almost anything PopCap touches turns to gold (Bejeweled, Peggle).  For another, it’s tough for people not to fall in love with PvZ’s addictive strategic gameplay.

However, results that arrived yesterday add solid statistical fact to our assumptions.  Plants Vs. Zombies for iPhone is an absolute mobile phenomena.  As of yesterday, February 24th, over 300,000 iPhones have downloaded PopCaps latest release for the Apple device, with the number growing everyday.  Added to the fact that the game is now the fastest selling iPhone release in the first 24 hours of availability, and you have yourself a bonafide success. Read more… »

If there’s one genre that is over-represented on the iPhone, it has got to be tower defense. With a minimal investment of money and people power, you can push a serviceable game out to the market in a short period of time. With a few exceptions (the excellent GeoDefense comes to mind), the platform is saturated with mediocre clones of clones of clones of TD standards.

It’s no secret that the Gamer Limit crew went a bit ga-ga over the PC release of Plants Vs. Zombies; it came in runner up to Torchlight for best PC game in our 2009 Game of the Year Awards. With the transition to the iPhone, PopCap faced the twin challenges of recreating the original PvZ magic with a new control scheme/hardware and standing out amidst the shambling horde of tower defense offerings already available. Read on for the official Gamer Limit verdict!

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It looks like Ryu and his friends will fight their way onto the App Store, according to always-get-the-exclusives-first gaming site IGN. That’s right folks, fans of the fighting franchise who happen to own iPhones as well will surprisingly get a taste of Ryu’s fist (or Ken’s, more likely) later this month. Capcom broke the news that their bonafide, prized baby Street Fighter IV has been in development for quite some time now, and will be heading to the iDevices sooner than later.

We’re pretty happy about this. Considering fighting games on the platform come few and far between, we’re not complaining about the sudden release. Screenshots after the jump. Read more… »

The current formula used by Rockstar in their Grand Theft Auto franchise has been a staple of the industry for nearly a decade.  Ever since Grand Theft Auto III exploded onto the PS2 in October of 2001, the sandbox genre has never been the same.

Offering an incredible amount of freedom (and controversial content) for the time, Grand Theft Auto III represented a huge departure from the first two titles in the series.  The games that followed built on this foundation, culminating in the critically and commercially acclaimed Grand Theft Auto IV, and its downloadable episodes.

With IV, Rockstar placed a heavier focus on characters and story than ever before, resulting in Niko Bellic, the first character to really elicit emotional reactions and connections from players.  The franchise had really evolved from its early top-down days. Read more… »

Videogame-movie tie-ins usually suck, but you knew that. Well trusted sources and statistics have shown that approximately 10/473.95 tie-in products show promise, while the rest fail to be nothing more than Regis Philbin’s babies, or as Nick insists, cousins of the infamous cottage cheese. Of the ten that show promise, maybe only half realize its nipple-nipping potential.

Avatar’s currently killing silver screen numbers, which means that there’s probably a product that ties in with it somewhere in this desolate, desperate planet. Alas, they have indeed inevitably made an iPhone game if you didn’t know by now. It is, after all, the trendy thing to do these days. What you may or may not know is that this Avatar game for the iDevice actually doesn’t suck like, well … basically every videogame-movie game out there. Read more… »

In a nutshell, Hand of Greed is a puzzle game that I have dubbed part of the “hand in the cookie jar sub-genre”. The object is to steal a multitude of gems and coins from various trap boxes without getting your fingers sliced off. It features tons of different levels (boxes), and from what I’ve played of it, they’re quite varied.

The end result is incredibly fun, to the point where I actually feel the figurative pain of my avatar when his hand is sliced to bits. It’s an incredibly unique puzzle concept that I would have easily paid $5 for. Try it out!

The facts of the case are clear. The characters from the Sherlock Holmes stories created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were recently re-imagined in a film directed by Guy Ritchie. When a major picture hits the theatres, merchandising is sure to follow. Ergo, it is no surprise to this investigator to see the release of Sherlock Holmes Mysteries for the iPhone.

The salient question to be posed, dear readers, is in regards to the quality of said movie tie-in game. Trusting solely to historical data would push us overwhelmingly towards assuming poor quality; movie games are almost always a steaming pile of offal.

However, logic dictates that just because something is likely does not mean that it is certain. Therefore, we must examine the evidence closely to find out if the truth matches our theory. There’s no time to waste. Read on, the game is afoot! (athumb?)

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When it comes to non-conventional control schemes, developers are constantly trying to fit square pegs into round holes. The Wii and Sixaxis have often resulted in designers asking themselves, “How do we make the existing experience work with these controls?”, when they should be asking themselves, “What new kinds of experiences will these controls allow us to explore?”.

The iPhone platform is another fertile breeding ground for this kind of poor practice. We’ve seen many attempts to shoehorn an analog stick or d-pad into the touch-screen environment unsuccessfully. This is a shame, since the iPhone offers a surplus of untapped potential for creating new styles of gameplay and control.

When someone takes the risk to create a different experience, there will be something to learn from the effort whether it succeeds or fails. Read on to see what Gamer Limit took away from the time we spent with Tiger Style’s 8-legged app, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor.

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At times, it feels that the boundaries we use to categorize games grow blurrier by the day. It is wildly apparent by now that genre blending is a gaming trend with legs. RPG elements, in particular, have sunk their heroin-coated hooks into nearly every type of game over the past five years.

There’s certainly nothing wrong with combining disparate gameplay elements, despite the vocal outrage of a few misguided retro purists. Let’s be honest; everything tastes better with some character progression or dice rolls tossed in the mix, no?

Japanese developer Gaia certainly thinks so. They combine simplistic character progression and dungeon crawling with a unique twist on turn-based card strategy in their release of Sword & Poker for the iPhone. Read on to get the official Gamer Limit verdict!

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Last week in his blog, all around swell guy Hironobu Sakaguchi announced that an iPhone game from Mistwalker – developers of JRPG Blue Dragon – will be coming “soon”. While we don’t know what this game specifically is, many have speculated an iDevice version of Blue Dragon.

Last night, we decided to ask what the buzz is all about. While we didn’t get much of a response on Twitter, at least we know one thing. Read more… »