Let me tell you a story. It’s a story about a small gold fish and the wacky world he lives in. Don’t write off this pint sized piece of aquatic cuteness, however. That’s what he wants you to do. When your back is turned he’ll pounce. It’s what he’s good at.

This a story of deception and rage. This is Launching Pad Games’ Mighty Fin.

I was a bit of a skeptic when I first picked up this iOS title. Perhaps it was the control scheme and gameplay — both are extremely simple. You press down to have Fin dive; let go and he’ll jump; collect bubbles in the water for points to shoot for a high score; if you collide with an object or enemy you’ll die.

Simplicity couldn’t be the source of deception, though. When you think about it, the Mario Bros. franchise got its start with a similar simplicity. By that I mean jump, collect coins, repeat. No, simplicity is definitely not a downfall. When done right, it can make a game rather elegant. For all intents and purposes, Mighty Fin is indeed an elegant game.

The deception lied in the first stages.

I can’t avoid saying this: the first several stages of Mighty Fin toe the line between uneventful and boring. Nothing stopped me from snagging that gold medal rating at the end of the beginning stages. In retrospect, it took every ounce of that sharp, playful art style to keep my attention from drifting. Let’s save that discussion for later. Right now, I want to talk about how that goldfish lunged for my jugular — just when my defenses were down.

Before I knew it I was dying and, surprise to me, I was religiously coming back for more. You see, that little fish wants to ease you in and then once you’re in the water, turns up the heat. Call it a good thing you’re not diving and jumping blithely unhindered for long. Prepare to die. A lot.

All of a sudden Mighty Fin starts throwing obstacles at you with gusto. You’re quickly met with narrow passageways and fast coming boulders to which you must react almost by sheer reflex. The slightest hesitation is almost 100% tantamount to death.

Some would call shenanigans — where there was virtually no challenge in the beginning, without warning you have one of the hardest games you’ve ever played. That goldfish isn’t cute and innocent anymore. He’s calculating, cold. Fin is a downright bastard.

I’m ambivalent in this regard. There is a definite imbalance in difficulty. At the same time, I say it’s good to have extreme challenge. It can help sharpen one’s hand-eye coordination.

Albeit, what’s rather exceptional about Mighty Fin is that when you die, you’re not restarting the same level again. By that I mean: every time you take another crack at the stage the obstacles and bubble patterns are rearranged. It makes the sadomasochist in me scream out in pleasure.

While we’re at it, let’s talk about the obstacles. There are floating boulders and icebergs. Hungry penguins and sharks. Misplaced octopus tentacles. Cyborg robots … wait … shurikens … cake? Yes, if anything can be said about this game, it’s that once the challenge and creativity kick into high gear they never let up. You do have to wade through some blandness to get there, but you’re rewarded with an ever increasing difficulty curve and artistic visual stimulus.

Mighty Fin offers a variety of different themed levels, from a nondescript ocean to a futuristic utopia with saucer shaped building rising out of the water, a candy land that has Fin swimming through what looks like Kool-Aid, and a play on Katsushika Hokusai’s famous wood block print The Wave. These themes are all represented through a cardboard on cardboard artstyle, similar to what is seen in LittleBigPlanet. The visuals are really sharp and a treat for the eyes, especially in the later stages.

Alas, what else can I say about this iOS game that looks like a pipsqueak on the outside, but acts like a serious game? How about the replay value?

While there are only 16 levels, Mighty Fin offers three modes: Campaign, Survival and Endless Zen. If the Campaign challenges weren’t enough, try Survival mode where instead of having to beat the clock or reach benchmarks like other games, you have to navigate through the level at constantly increasing speed. Endless Zen, which is basically a play-till-you-die affair, is the least stressful of the three game modes.

There are also 60 costumes to collect through special bubbles and achieving high scores. It can be fun to see a fish with an eye patch and an unflinching bird on its back jump in and out of Kool-Aid-like water through a candy land. My favorite is the Hulk Hogan costume — “Mean, blond, and ready to wrestle” says the caption. These costumes are purely cosmetic, though, no special power ups which leaves something to be desired.

Overall, Mighty Fin is a competent game that airs on the side of simplicity to deliver addicting, challenging arcade game play. Some may find the difficulty curve rather steep, but, in the end, I will be surprised if anyone regrets paying 99 cents for this iOS title which can be played on both the iPhone and iPad.

The iOS marketplace is highly known for their plentiful free app days, and today is no exception. Fire up your favorite iOS device to pick up the highly popular Spirits for zero bucks. Spirits tasks you with blowing the cousins of the little critters from Princess Mononoke to and fro in a whimsical fashion throughout beautiful hand-drawn landscapes. If you’re on the fence, think “Artsy Lemmings”, and just go download it right now.

As usual, this sale probably won’t last often, so at the very least, get on iTunes and pick this one up immediately so it’s locked to your account forever.

[Standard/iPad]

We all only have One Single Life: unless of course, we’re talking about our favorite fantasy nether realm - the video game world. Often times we’ll run into buildings in Call of Duty without thinking, or jumping over a gap in Mario without surveying the other side first – recklessness is just one of gamer’s many idiosyncrasies. While you still have your various consequences, some games, such as Prince of Persia, go a step further, and remove the element of death entirely.

But what would happen if, after you died one time, even by mistake, the game was completely over?
One Single Life is a free version of those “endless runner” games you’ve played, well, endless amounts of, except it has one twist: once you’re dead, it’s game over entirely. The levels themselves are presented beautifully, with very unique visuals and animation. Each level will begin with an ominous billboard that states “Warning (x) %) of players will die here” – my guess is that they’re there to justify your death, by saying “well, a ton of other people died here, so it’s ok!” Either way, it’s a nice little feature that helps differentiate it from the pack.

Each level contains a jump that must be completed with pinpoint accuracy, or it’s lights out (although if you just make it you’ll be able to pull yourself up from the ledge). When you actually make the jump, the view will zoom out, and either have you cheering or gasping depending on your character’s mid-leap status: it also doesn’t help that the game dramatically presents each jump in slow-motion. If you miss the jump – well, that’s it. Your character plummets to the ground, and the game is over. I can’t stress enough how nerve racking each jump is, and how much you’ll lament failure the more you progress.

There is a secret way to get an extra life, but honestly, it doesn’t really interest me that much – my final resting place was the lowly level four, and I’m happy to leave it be. My guess is that the development team put this feature in so that they could quell the many gamers who would rate it low on iTunes, but at the asking price of “$0″, it’s hard to complain about something that’s basically the entire crux of the game.

One Single Life is the perfect embodiment of a quick iPhone game: you pick it up for free, without any guilt, experience it, and move on. While the game can’t guarantee instant spiritual enlightenment, it can guarantee a pretty fun game session.

Gamer Limit gives One Single Life an 8.5/10.
You can pick it up here

I feel obligated to preface this review with a bold statement: I’m not a fan of vanilla Angry Birds. The original Angry Birds leaves a lot to be desired, and while AB: Seasons tried to mix things up a bit, it ultimately felt the same. Other than the designs for the titular adorable feathered fiends, there really isn’t a whole lot there to justify all of the hype it’s receieved over the past year.

Thankfully, Angry Birds Rio proves that Rovio has a few tricks up their sleeve.

Angry Birds Rio follows the same “bite sized level based” scheme of the Angry Birds series, albeit with a few twists. Rio features sixty levels spanning [currently, pre-updates] two “acts”, both of which are markedly different than Angry Bird’s typical pallette swap during level transitions. Act One tasks the birds with freeing the star of the feature film, Blu, and friends from the evil Cockatoo Nigel. While it isn’t a completely new concept, it is refreshing to not see the same monotonous green pig enemy over and over.

In addition to the new setup, unlike the original Angry Birds, the level designs are much more solid this time around, and never really feel impossible or luck based. You’ll have pretty much all of the different types of birds at the very beginning as well, instead of slowly ramping up with the same types, which helps vary the gameplay a bit.

Act Two features villanous monkeys instead of cages, and even culminates in a boss battle against Nigel himself. While the boss mechanic is only on one level, it really demonstrates the versatility of the Angry Birds engine – in other words, it’s not just for for flinging pixels at static targets for hours on end: an entire adventure style game could easily be on the horizon from Rovio. While the main game will only last you two to three hours, with listed updates in May, July, October, and November on the horizon, there’s bound to be more gameplay variations. There are also more trophies to earn, and a few hidden secrets that are a bit more robust than the original.

If you absolutely hated the original Angry Birds, AB: Rio isn’t really going to sway you into becoming a fan; but if you at least had *some* fun with the original, you should most definately come back for more, especially at the .99 price point.

Gamer Limit gives Angry Birds Rio a 9.0/10
You can buy it here

Retro themed games are really starting to find their center on the iOS platform. While they aren’t exactly flooding the marketplace, gems like Karoshi, Forget Me Not, Kami Retro, and League of Evil are gracing iTunes more and more these days. The latest entry to the iOS retro family is “Mos Speedrun“: an old school platformer with an adorable lady bug mascot.

Speedrun’s premise is simple: get to the end of the level without falling onto spikes, or becoming an insidious enemies’ lunch. While it all sounds well and fun, is it worth the $1.99 asking price? Read on to find out.

Like most touch screen retro games, Mos Speedrun gives you two options: classic style arrows with a jump button, and a “two finger” iOS scheme. Essentially, each side of the screen signifies a direction, and pressing both sides at once will cause your hero to jump. Unfortunately, both of these schemes have their own problems. The classic style is problematic if you have fat fingers, as a lot of your real estate is going to be blocked by your chubby nubs. A quick fix for this would be an update that separates the control interface and the game itself, but as it stands, you’ll have to make due. The iOS style is incredibly hard to navigate, and in my opinion, isn’t really usable on the later levels (at least in comparison to the classic style). Because of this, purists may want to avoid the game if they can’t handle the classic control scheme.

As previously mentioned, getting to the end of the game’s twenty levels isn’t your sole goal. One medal each is earned for completion, grabbing all the coins in a level, stealing the hidden skull treasure, and going under the par time limit. Along the way, you’ll encounter enemy bugs, zombies, jumping fireballs, and of course, every platform protagonist’s worst nightmare: giant spikes of doom. Speedrun has a lot of homages to past games such as Sonic and Mario 3, but at the same time, it feels inherently unique. There’s plenty of variation in terms of the setting and enemy selection to keep you going, and like most iOS titles, it isn’t unrealistic to expect an update with more levels in the future.

Thankfully, the fact that there’s that additional medal awarded for a speed run really adds to the game’s replay value. In all likelihood, you’re not going to get the speed medal in any level you’re playing for the first time, provided that you’re going coin and/or treasure hunting. While it may seem like a cheap trick to force players to beat a level twice, it really helps add to the overall package: when you go back to a level the second time, you’re likely to see it in a whole new light, given how robust the designs are. Achievement lovers will also no doubt rejoice at full Gamer Center support.

Mos Speedrun doesn’t really do anything above and beyond the call of duty, but retro fans craving a challenge are sure to find yet another hidden gem in this title. While it isn’t as good as, say, League of Evil, it’s a pretty solid companion game for any retronauts out there.

Gamer Limit gives Mos Speedrun an 8/10
You can buy it here

Grasshopper Manufacture, the guys behind No More Heroes and Killer 7, released a game called Frog Minutes for iOS devices earlier today. Our Editor-in-Chief, Chris Carter, was nice enough to forward us the image above from his iPhone.

While it appears to be some sort of nature documentary meets arcade game, Frog Minutes boils down to collecting and feeding  different types of bugs to, yes you guessed it, frogs in effort to catch them. Not necessarily the punk rock style we usually see from Suda 51, but its definitely a little off the wall.

Frog Minutes only costs $0.99 and proceeds go towards Japanese disaster relief.

Today independent film studio The Weinstein Company announced that it is launching its own videogame label. Dubbed TWC Games, the new division will work closely with developers and publisher to help create mobile, social, and console games based off of intellectual properties owned by The Weinstein Company and its subsidiarity Dimension Films.

While the press release did not mention any specific titles that TWC has in the works, it did make a point to list off some of it’s popular IPs, such as: Scream, Hellraiser, Scary Movie, and Children of the Corn.
I don’t know about you guys, but Hellraiser 1 and 2 are two of my favorite movies. I can imagine how cool it would be if there was a game like Amnesia: The Dark Descent set in the Hellraiser universe. You’d have to run around the Hell dimension looking for the puzzle box before the Cenobite find you. Just thinking about it is getting me excited. Hopefully The Weinstein Company is a fan of Gamer Limit and will make my horror game dreams come true.

What do you guys think about this? What Weinstein Company IP do you think would make a good game and why? Let us know what you think with a comment below.

Source: Shacknews

Exactly one week ago I wrote up a little news story about how Rebellion Games was opening up a new social games division. At the end of the article I asked you guys if you thought more game developers were going to follow in Rebellion’s footsteps. Well, those of you who said yes were correct.

Today, developer Insomniac (best known for Resistance and Ratchet & Clank) announced that it has opened up a new social gaming division. Dubbed Insomniac Click, the new development studio will focus on creating games for the web and mobile devices.

Brian Hastings, Chief creative officer at Insomniac Games, made a lengthy blog post outlining the types of games the new studio would be working on. In this blog post, he makes five promises to gamers. They are: “1. Social interaction must be mutually enjoyable” “2. Game tuning must benefit the player experience” “3. Gameplay Depth” “4. Easy to Learn, Hard to Master” “5. Make It Fun First.”

Hastings also criticised current social games stating, “Many social games out there are more activities than games–that is, a set of tools but no problem. For instance, you plant crops and then harvest them to make more money so you can plant more crops. Your tools are: pick a crop, plant it somewhere, harvest a ripened crop. But what problem are you solving? There really isn’t one. You can’t succeed and you can’t fail and that’s part of the fun. But at the same time, without having a problem to solve, it’s less of an actual game than Tic-Tac-Toe.”

I don’t know about you guys, but I have the feeling that Insomniac Click is going to make some pretty cool games. Maybe I’m just out of touch or whatever, but the current generation of social and mobile games just don’t do it for me. Hopefully Insomniac Click will be able to keep those five promises and come out with some gnarly games.

Source: Shacknews.com

Swedish publisher Pan Vision announced that their iOS title Pirates vs Ninjas vs Zombies vs Pandas: Puzzle Wars is now available for download from the App Store.

It looks like the developers took a kitchen sink approach judging by how many pop culture memes they appropriated for this game. Hit the jump for more details about PvNvZvP: Puzzle Wars. (I refuse to type out the full title again)

According to the official press release, PvNvZvP: Puzzle Wars is “a humorous action puzzle game featuring more feuds and battles between the popular Pirate, Ninja, Zombie and Panda characters.” Gameplay appears to be a similar to the match 3 style perfected by the Bejeweled series.

“In this new game, players must rearrange and match the individual characters in an 8 x 10 matrix , triggering explosions that clear the grid and rack up high scores.”

The game also takes advantage of the iPhone and iTouch’s accelerometer to enhance gameplay. Apparently if you rotate your device, gravity will rotate with it, changing the way the puzzle pieces act. Though to be perfectly honest, what really caught my attention was the game’s horrendous brilliant title. How can anything that’s trying to cash in on the popularity of pirates, ninjas, zombies, and pandas?! be bad?

PvNvZvP: Puzzle Wars costs $.99 and the iPad version is coming soon.

Blimp: The Flying Adventures is not a terribly deep or substantial game. It’s a twenty level downloadable Steampunk 2D version of Crazy Taxi with bombs available for the PS3, PSP and iOS devices. If that sounds like your cup of tea hit the jump for the full review.

In Blimp, you take control of hardened war veteran, Zed Pelin, who is forced back into service when his small planet is attacked by a big evil empire. The story is told through text and still images before missions. It’s there if you want it, but for the most part it’s neither terribly gripping nor consequential – merely servicing as a backbone for the real meat of the game: the gameplay.

In Blimp, you control…a blimp. While there is a war going on, instead of being out there on the front lines you’ll be more like the resistance’s taxi service. You’ll spend your time be picking things up from one point and dropping them off somewhere else. At first you’ll literally be a taxi service shuttling people around, but before long you’ll be dropping reinforcements off into combat zones, planting explosives and bombing enemy airships.

Everything controls well, as well as you would expect a blimp to anyway. Just don’t expect to have pin-point accuracy. A little bit of realism here is actually nice. I imagine it would be a little disconcerting to be looking at a blimp that controls like the Ikaruga.

It starts off fairly easy and you may even think you’ll be able to beat the game in a half hour. While I imagine that is possible, and the game encourages it since you’re constantly playing against the clock,  the difficulty begins to increase steadily and ramps up a lot towards the end of the game. The last level is particularly challenging and definitely involves quite a bit of strategy, finesse and luck to successfully complete.

The visuals are all really nice and I really love the Steampunk vibe.  Everything is animated smoothly and is really crisp. The art style is bright, colourful and looks really good. The landscapes are particularly notable, looking like something out of a well-illustrated children’s book.

I played the PSP Minis version of the game, and the entire time I played it Blimp came across like something you could find on the AppStore for a dollar or two. In fact, it is on the AppStore for $0.99. Now compare that with Blimp’s $4.99 price-tag on the PlayStation Network and you run into my only real criticism of the title.

As horrendous as most touch screen controls are, the ability to use real buttons isn’t really worth an extra four dollars. If Sony wants to be competitive in the portable gaming market, they are really going to need to figure out how to be smarter with pricing. For the most part, people just aren’t going to be willing to pay five, ten, fifteen dollars for an experience they can get elsewhere for a buck or two just so they can play it on a Sony.

The sad thing is, there’s nothing wrong with Blimp as an experience. There are just much deeper, more enjoyable downloadable titles out there for the price. While I haven’t played the phone version myself (it’s not available on the Droid Market) if you’re at all interested, for a dollar, I would definitely recommend picking up iOS version.

Now, it can’t be shiny if it hasn’t been launched yet. With that context, this article’s title is a misnomer. There are several reasons why, however, when amazon.com’s Appstore is launched, it will make Apple’s squint — if not from the shine, then from the sheer affront of invading its personal space to convert iPhone owners into Android enthusiasts. More after the jump.

Type in “developer.” instead of the usual “www.” before amazon.com and you’ll be greeted with the beta portal, which the company just opened to developers on Tuesday. Dig a little deeper by clicking on the blog link at the bottom and you can read the pitch. Can you guess which notable gaming publisher has most likely read it already?

Since December, EA Mobile has focused on building a gaming audience on the Android platform, riding the success it has been having on the iPhone with smash app hits the likes of Need For Speed Shift. The publishing behemoth’s mobile arm will most likely be on the forefront of amazon.com’s new app outlet given recent statements made by its VP of worldwide publishing. Why else should us gamers take note of amazon.com’s latest foray into the application market?

Up until now, those who wished to play on their Android devices had to purchase applications from the Google driven Android Market. While sufficient in trumpeting the more popular apps on the platform, Market also lets a good number of faulty apps slip through to the ire of many mobile gamers due to Google’s lax approval policies. Too many apps have been downloaded only to malfunction or simply crash upon loading.

According to Tech Crunch, amazon.com’s Appstore will have a more stringent approval process similar to Apple’s. This means Android device owners can expect better quality applications. As always, when there’s better quality, there’s a better chance more gamers will pay attention. Couple that with amazon.com’s stellar marketing expertise and the gauntlet has been thrown. Let the iStore – Appstore battle begin.

If I asked you what Spectrum Shock was, you may be mistaken in thinking it was an unheard of spiritual successor to System Shock, or maybe a bad TV show about a guy who can manipulate electromagnetism, or maybe even a movie with Alan Rickman. In fact, it is the debut game from Boxfrog Games featuring all the tilting and tapping you can fit into a device rife for tilting and tapping.

So how does it shape up to the other titles on the app store? Is it a Canabalt or a Can Of Ba… Okay, even I’m not crass enough to finish that pun. Hit the jump to find out why Spectrum Shock should be the next game you download to your iPhone.

A worrying trend in the indie game development community at present, fuelled heavily by the runaway successes of games utilising simple mechanics, is the seeming belief that simple means a lack of effort. You only have to hop on to an app store, or a ‘speciality store’ to realise just how much you need to wade through to find the quality entertainment, well wade no more as this one is a diamond in a sea of rough. Hm, I don’t think that metaphor went right.

The controls boil down to tilting the iPhone for rotation of your base, and tapping on the screen to fire, with a tap of the base you have sworn to defend creating an impulse that blasts any enemies on the screen away. However, there is a twist in how you can destroy the enemies which takes the gameplay beyond the conventional tap to shoot things mechanic, and into a realm of frustration and frantic tilting that can only be compared to balancing a basketball on a watermelon on a jello shaped like Paraguay. Or a somewhat less specific analogy that still involves alot of tilting.

If you can grasp the basic ’round peg goes into round hole and square peg goes into square hole’ idea, then you should be fine; as you have three turrets on your base (square,triangle and circle) which can only hit their respective shape-sake targets. It is this unique twist that gets the game going, as you swivel your base round in desperation before the enemies can latch onto you. If they do manage to do so, then they will begin to slowly drain your health with the only way to get rid of them being the impulse clearing the screen of any and all enemies.

A sleek and stylish theme underpins the entire game, with simplicity thankfully coming through as a design choice, and not as the unfortunate byproduct of apathy I mentioned before. Now, don’t fool yourselves if you think simple mechanics mean it is an easy game. Spectrum Shock is a game in which you may die rather quickly at first, and if you are anything like me, at second, third and all the way through to at about fifty-ninth, but stick with it, because there is a point the game just clicks. No mass epiphany happens, and don’t expect to be basked in a radiant ethereal glow, but at some point your hands and your brain suddenly look at the game and at once say “Oh, it’s on now” in a manly action movie way, not the camp way that it would come out if I actually said that out loud.

Gamer Limit gives Spectrum Shock for the iPhone 8.5/10