Coming Soon to Your iDevice

What a week in apps. With so many new apps and updates available, I definitely haven't payed enough attention to the apps that are being announced. I feel like I just went to a movie and showed up too late to see the previews. What a waste! To make up for this, I am going to create a Thursday roundup of everything (well maybe not everything) awesome that is coming soon to the app store.

First off is the greatest mystery in the history of the app store. I had a friend send me a link to this site the other day, and I wasn't sure what to say. Is it GTA for the iPhone? Is it... not?

I did a bit of research (I scoured the Touch Arcade forums) and found a few different opinions. One clever person, dpmpolo, went to http://whois.domaintools.com/coming-on-iphone.com, and found that the site is registered to Gameloft. DaveMc99 claims that the game is called Gangstar, while another guy CDubby94 said, "It's called The Cartel. I beta tested it. It's almost ready for submission." I love forums.

Admittedly lost, and a bit anxious, I was forced to contact the internet Oracle, who told me that the trailer is actually for Poker vs. Girls 2. Check out the original here, it's amazing.

With that squared away, my attention turned to Doom Resurrection, an amazing app that we reviewed a day or two ago. After reading the review, I thought, "Wow, that looks awesome. I wonder where the original Doom is?". Fortunately, the gaming gods heard my plea and told me to hop over to idsoftware.com to check out the "iPhone Doom Classic Progress Report".

Basically, the article states that John Carmack, the inventor of the modern FPS and the technical director of id Software (he's famous), wanted to hire contractors to double the original resolution of the game. After seeing the results, and I'm sure the amount of money that he would have to pay to get them, he scrapped the resolution project and decided to keep the artwork the same. It still looks much nicer than the original due to the increased graphics capabilities, (my iPhone today works faster than my $3000 computer that originally ran Doom) but all in all, the game is the same. Expect Classic Doom to come out sometime this summer.

In an interesting twist, while doing an interview with Macworld, (read the Macworld article here) Carmack said that, "from a hardware perspective, the iPhone is even more capable than Sony's handheld system, the PlayStation Portable (PSP)." This makes me happy.

So while I was having dreams of playing Crysis on my iPhone, my attention was diverted to one of the most graphically intensive genres out there... pinball. Scoff all you want, you fickle fools, this pinball game, made by GameProm, the makers of the newly free Wild West Pinball, looks stunning. Check out the promo video, and be sure to watch it in HD.

Wild West Pinball is expected to be out very soon. Hopefully tomorrow, but I doubt it.

Last but not least in this roundup of roundups is the new Worms game that is coming to the iPhone. PocketGamer.co.uk got all sorts of exclusive playtime with the game (I want to play too guys... hello!), and it looks amazing. The game is going to be a direct port of the PS3 version of worms... just a bit scaled down in the graphics department, but not much. There is also going to be full on multiplayer, which wasn't really a big deal to me until I got my grubby hands on Baseball Sluggers and learned how nice iPhone multiplayer could be.

In the interview, the Worms team says that, "Alongside ad hoc Bluetooth multiplayer, we'll also be adding full on internet multiplayer although wi-fi and 3G," explains lead programmer Matt Bishop. "So you'll be able to play on the bus against friends and guys in America."" Hopefully the multiplayer turns out well, because I look forward to destroying you guys,the readers with Team 148. I would certainly hop on over to pocketgamer.co.uk to read the rest of the article, it's quite interesting.

Here is the PocketGamer gameplay video for Worms.

Judging by the video, Team 148 is definitely going to beat up on Team PocketGamer when the game finally comes out (the gauntlet has been dropped). The app has already been submitted to Apple, which means that the expected release date should be sometime in mid-December. Yup, that sounds about right.

Well I hope you enjoyed it... the roundup that is. If there are any apps that I missed, let me know and I'll think about doing another roundup tomorrow.