Set some twenty years after the events of Ultima 4, Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar is a completely redesigned, fully realized MMO for your iOS device. Our time with the game at GDC this year showed an amazingly faithful full-on MMO on the iPad, something we haven’t seen to this day. The game should release in the next few months, and we’ll be keeping our beady little eye on it until then.

Big Fish Games previewed their new match three game, Zombies Zombies Zombies, for us today. The mechanic actually works well, here, as you tap same-color zombies in triangle patterns to have your apocalypse survivors blow hem to smithereens. There are a ton of fun power-ups, and playing it was super easy to get into, and very satisfying to play. Look for it to come out this summer.

Josh Boggs of Australian gaming developer, Loveshack, showed us an early build of Framed, a beautifully designed puzzle cum comic-style storytelling game. We played through the first few episodes, moving animated panels around to change the outcome of the story in each level. The studio hopes to build the game out to a feature movie length in the coming months.

We sat down with Thomas Bleyer of Ravensburger, the veteran of board games both analog and digital, for a quick coffee meeting this morning. We took an early look at Las Vegas, a new game from the studio that involves dice and a frenetic pace. Check the VIne video below for a sneak peek, and be ready to check the full game out in a couple of months.

If you’ve played any of the Bloons TD games, you know how frantic–and downright fun–the tower defense with balloons and monkeys game can get. With the upcoming Bloons TD Battles, from the Ninja Kiwi/Digital Goldfish dream team, you’ll get to test your skills against real opponents on the same iPad or over the internet. Get ready, ’cause its gonna get insane.

2012 was an amazing year. It was full of new things, old things, and big changes. But of everything that came about in the past year, these are my favorite things:

“Super” Challenging Games

In particular, Super Crate Box and Super Hexagon both left me in states of constant desire, wanting to get that high score while tackling the immense difficulty both games presented. Yet there was one consistent thread in both: failure was usually my fault, the factor of poor execution rather than random chance. It makes success feel all that more empowering. The byproduct of it is constant failure, and frequent profanity usage.

The Story of Mikey Shorts

Another one of my favorite games of the year, and one of the cooler stories too. Developers Mike Gaughen and Mike Meade met on the TouchArcade forums while competing for high scores, and eventually they got together to make the kind of speedrun game that they wanted, and they absolutely stuck the landing on this one.

The indie spirit lives on

2012 was not an easy year for indie developers, and it didn’t get easier. Yet, there were still so many great games from small studios, trying to just execute a great idea or hopefully hit it big. I fear for the future of indies on iOS, but the fact that they keep on trucking is inspiring.

Getting to Attend Game Developers Conference

This was my first GDC, and it was an amazing experience. To go around and talk to the people who create the games we love to play in person is a fantastic experience. And it’s refreshing to see that even those who have hit the mobile gaming jackpot still talk with those who have not had that kind of success get. And hey, nothing makes you feel important like having a press pass and getting into exclusive events. And San Francisco is a beautiful city.

Chicago

But Chicago is now my home. 2012 was a year of big life events for me, and I finally was able to make a big move, to leave Texas (where I had lived my entire life) and move out far away on my own. I live in a bustling and exciting city, I get to talk to a community game developers and writers that also live here, and the food ain’t bad either.

Note that this is a list of my favorite things of 2012 – I keep getting reminded that winter is coming and it is awful. As such, Chicago may not be on my 2013 list.

148Apps

Finally, 148Apps. Being part of one of the best app review sites on the Internet has changed my life in innumerable ways. The two and a half years I have been here have opened up new opportunities for me, and allow me to pursue the things that I am passionate about as a career. So for everyone that reads the site and listens to the podcast, I thank you for your support.

We sat down with publisher BulkyPix today to talk about a slew of upcoming games for iOS, including The Sandbox, Lightopus, Kung Fu Rabbit, Saving Private Sheep 2, and Gnu Revenge.

Pixowl led off the meeting with The Sandbox, previewed on 148Apps here. It’s exactly what its name implies: an open-ended game with retro-pixel charm and a TON of things to do, play with, and create with. We’re pretty excited about the potential of this little toy/game, and look forward to it’s release, hopefully in May of this year.

Lightopus, developed by Appxplore, comes out this coming Thursday, and has a neon-colored look with some surprisingly subtle gameplay mechanics. Players take on the role of a protozoan-like creature who must gather its babies, while avoiding and attacking enemies with those very same babies. The gameplay feels a lot like fl0w or the initial level of Spore, which isn’t a bad thing, and has a relaxing electronica score. Stay tuned here for a review soon.

Kung Fu Rabbit features a cute but dangerous rabbit with all the right kung fu moves. Previewed here a week or so ago, the game tasks players to take on the role of the aforementioned rabbit, out to save rabbit babies from the evil shadow man. Kung Fu Rabbit looks adorable, but make no mistake, it’s a tough platformer to beat. This combination of tough yet cute could be a winner when it releases March 15.

Saving Private Sheep is getting a sequel, the cleverly named Saving Private Sheep 2. Militant sheep aim their hedgehog at the exposed parts of their nemesis, an evil fox. The mechanics may look familiar; aiming and powering the slingshot full of hedgehog feels a lot like Angry Birds. However, the actual content is more puzzler than physics destruction, as players need to find the best way to pass the hedgehog ordinance from sheep to sheep.

Gnu Revenge is a humorous puzzle game that uses the concept of gravity and acceleration as its main, pardon the pun, thrust. Players shoot a wacky-looking gnu at a dastardly crocodile in a spaceship, saving fellow gnus from some horrendous-yet-unspecified fate, shooting around planetary bodies with various amounts of gravitational pull. Using just the right amount of boost to avoid crashing into planets or flying off into space is tricky yet strangely compelling at the same time. Look for this one to come out at the end of March.

Three other titles, releasing in April and May of this year, include a hidden object game based on the point and click PC game, Runaway, and a darkly mysterious app titled Yesterday, which features a serial killer and the homeless with some beautifully gritty graphics.

We will, of course, be keeping our eye on all these titles as they release. Our thanks to BulkyPix for spending time with us at the conference today.

Remember iSwifter and its impressive capabilities in terms of bringing Flash to the iPad? That same cloud-based technology has gone one step further now, with news coming out of GDC, that the firm will now be offering a licensing program for PC-based gaming applications to be streamed to iOS devices.

As co-founder of iSwifter, Rajat Gupta, explains “It is virtually impossible for developers to bring PC games to mobile as quickly as we can through our lowest cost streaming cloud service, and to provide a native-like user experience with automatic enablement of touch gestures,” so this is potentially huge news for iOS device owners. The lofty ambition, according to co-founder and Chairman, Peter Relan, is to “do to applications what Netflix™ did for movies.”

As always, we’ll keep up to date on the latest progress with such a move. While waiting for companies to embrace this concept, why not check out the current iSwifter app?

FREE!

iSwifter Games Browser - play all the hottest flash MMOs & social web games on the iPad, instantly

iPad Only App - Designed for the iPad
Released: 2010-09-09 :: Category: Utilities

We’ll be covering the famous Game Developers Conference this year en force, and wanted to let you know about it. The conference is scheduled for March 7 – 9, with some pre-show sessions on the 5th and 6th. It’s a fantastic time for developers, vendors, and press covering the games industry to get together and talk about games. Game developers and publishers go to present on their latest game ideas and upcoming releases, gaming hardware and middleware companies go to show off their wares in the exhibitor hall, and the press gathers like excited gadflies, tweeting, posting, and emailing with abandon.

If you’re a publisher or developer of iOS (or Android!) games, and you’d like to schedule a meeting with us, shoot an email to us at editor [at] 148Apps [dot] com and we’ll figure out a mutually beneficial time to meet up.

Keep an eye on this space and on our twitter accounts (@148Apps, @portablegamer) for all the important news from the show floor.

As you probably already know, GDC or the Game Developers Conference in San Fransisco is an annual conference at which game developer get together to share development, tools, tips and technologies. This year, independent development companies Semi Secret and Backflip Studios were quick to share just how successful their dive into the App Store has been. Between the two of them, they have 8 paid applications on the store.

Yesterday, co-founder of Semi Secret, Eric Johnson revealed to Pocket Biz that the company had sold 115,000 copies of their popular side-scroller adventure Canabalt. Whats interesting though is these download statistics he said were based upon Canabalt selling at the $2.99 price point over 5 months. He was also quick to estimate the ball-park piracy rate of Canabalt, which he put at 20 percent over those 5 months.

Similarly, Backflip Studio revealed it had generated $2.5 Million in around nine and a half months of being on the store. The company stated these figure were based on enjoying a staggering 22 Million downloads overall, revealing 17 Million of those came from just one of their App Store titles – Paper Toss. On a side note Backflip also announced mobile advertising is making them a substantial $1 Million in just six months and $379,000 in December last year, alone.

One for the game developers now. Since the iPhone’s launch and the App Store’s debut, we’ve seen a slurry of companies take it upon themselves to create a “social” medium or space in which gamers of all ages and skill levels can communicate and interact with each other on a device to device basis. But so far, supposedly due to the limitations of the iPhone SDK, this has been restricted to three methods of gameplay for us here gamers; iPhone to iPhone. iPhone to iPod touch or iPod touch to iPod touch.

Namco, most famous for its worldwide Pac-Man franchise, have announced at GDC yesterday that they have been working on a new, different method. Unite is a cross-platform gaming technology that will allow users to play against gamers using different types of devices and machines and challenge each other in the same game. Acting very much like a social network, Unites aim is to unite gamers the world over, no matter which device they choose to play on.

“For example, an iPhone gamer could play a game against a PC player in Pool Pro Online 3. Unite will have a single login across all platforms supported by the platform. Gamers have a profile fronted by an avatar and a score, boosted by the accumulation of achievements in Unite-powered games.And having a central web site (and soon, an iPhone app) where you can manage your account should also make it an attractive alternative to developers looking for a social solution for their games.”

Continue reading Namco Unveil Unite SDK .. iPhone-to-iPhone Gaming is so 2009. »

The 2010 Game Developers Conference is rapidly approaching. GDC is again this year focusing a special track on iPhone game development, and we’re expecting a bunch of iPhone developers to attend.

If you’re going to be in town for GDC, make sure you hit up the iPhone Developers Union / IUGO party at the Marriott Wednesday night. The party last year was a great time and a wonderful way to meet up with iPhone game developers from all over the world.

Since I’m based in SF, I’ll be around all week and available to meet up. I would love to meet up and see what you are working on, talk iPhone and iPad gaming, or just grab a beer. If you’d like to meet up, please contact me at jeff.scott {at} 148apps.com.

If it’s one thing that GDC taught me it’s that the iPhone has a long way to go as a game console. It’s still a tiny little player in the whole gigantic video games world. But in the nine months since the app store launch, it has made some great strides.

For one thing, the iPhone totally dominated the Independent Games Festival Mobile awards. Not only did they will all the categories, they had most of the nominations as well. The iPhone is now, as far as most are concerned, the best mobile phone platform to develop on. As one developer put it, finally a mobile platform that doesn’t suck.

This past week we did get many clues about what 2009 will bring for iPhone games. First, this will be the year the big boys go full force after the iPhone market. EA, Chillingo, Glu, and others have announced some huge portfolios of games coming out this year.

We will also see an explosion in backend community systems, think XBox Live for your iPhone, and probably some consolidation of those services as well. Consumers aren’t best served by having multiple community systems, everyone knows that, but who will win out as the best? With GameSpy announcing they are bringing over their backend that already powers many console and desktop titles, they will likely start out in the lead. Then ngmoco announced they were opening up their platform to third party developers, another strong contender, but no release date announced. Then you have the underdogs such as OpenFeint, ByteClub, and a new contender, Agon. Then there’s also the Facebook Connect for iPhone that many systems are using. It’s not purely a gaming system, but many have adapted it. A force for sure, with Facebook having over 160 million users.

We also were fortunate to meet with some really cool developers and get a sneak peak at some of the great games coming out in the not too distant future.

Real Racing from Firemint
Release Date: Late April, 2009 at an unknown price
Without a doubt, the best we saw was Real Racing from Firemint. Real Racing is a racing game just short of a racing sim. It’s ultra-realistic and features some amazing community and asynchronous multiplayer modes. You even have the ability to publish hot laps to YouTube, automatically. The controls by default work great and are very responsive. This is one to watch for. Firemint are being close to the chest with the price on this one, but it will be released late April.

Touch Pets from ngmoco
Release Date: unknown
I’ll have to admit I was originally nonplussed on Touch Pets. But after spending some time with it I can see what the excitement it about it. For one this, this game is deep. There’s lots to do, lots of things to collect, there are missions to go on, there are achievements, tons of stuff. But above all, this game has a social aspect that could set it apart from all of the other virtual pet type games. This all ads up to a game that will be very enormously engrossing to many people, maybe even me.

Star Defense from ngmoco
Release Date: pretty soon at an unknown price
Tower Defense games are filling up the app store quickly. And many are really good. Star Defense takes a slightly different direction and adds 3D to the standard game. So instead of playing tower defense on a flat landscape, you play it on a 3D world. One of the more interesting parts of this is that, in one level, you are playing on a cube instead of a sphere. This basically divides up each level into 6 parts as you have to place defense on each of the sides since the weapons don’t seem to work around the corners of the cube. The game itself seems really well done and stable, and should be released soon. We’ll give it more playtime when it comes out and get a full review.

Star Trader: Moon Madness from HermitWorks
Release Date: very soon at $0.99
This game is an expanded version of the DopeWars genre that I’m sure everyone is familiar with. But it’s set in outerspace and uses the Quake engine to provide a 3D world where you can walk around and barter. The controls are a modified 2 location virtual touch pad as we’ve seen on other games and works well for movement and changing the angle you are viewing the world. The developers are releasing this at $0.99 and will be raising the price as they add features such as multiplayer in the future.

All in all a fantastic GDC. Had to great opportunity to speak with some amazing people. We’ll try to get full reviews of these games up as soon as they are available.