App Store News Round-Up For August 10th

While AT&T was quietly changing your contract in their favor, of course, we’ve been scouring the tubes for app store news.

SId Meier’s Civilization Revolution comes to the iPhone. We teased the release of this game on Friday, and now it’s here (a day early). We first saw Civilization Revolution during WWDC. 2K Games came down to San Francisco to show it off to press under a strict embargo. What we saw then was impressive, but we couldn’t talk about it. This is actually the real thing. The real Civilization Revolution by the real Sid Meier. Civilization Revolution, for those unfamiliar, is a long play turn based strategy game and is the latest in a long line of games of this genre from Sid Meier. Released last year for the XBox 360 and PS3, it has now been ported, with some reduced graphics, to the iPhone. But they were very clear that it’s the full game, just with iPhone optimized graphics. The controls on a game like this are always fairly complex and due to that, the controls on the iPhone are a little cramped. Good news is that you can get used to them fairly quickly. There are also some early reports of sluggish gameplay on older devices. We’ll have a full review up real soon. If you try out the free lite/demo or full version, let us know what you think in the comments. Also, SlideToPlay has posted a hands on video to YouTube, take a look.

Where To? Updated – Where To? Two? One of our favorite early release apps for the iPhone was Where To? A 2.0 update has been released today to take advantage of a couple featured of OS 3.0 and in the end make the app even more useful. Now included are integrated maps that show your search results and they also update in real time on the map as you are moving. You can also email, sms, or copy results to the clipboard. Now for the bad news. This app was sold by it’s original developer to FutureTap early this year. Due to this, if you purchased it before June 23rd, you can’t upgrade for free. The app had to be transferred to a new developer on iTunes therefore breaking the upgrade path. For full details, check FutureTap’s Upgrade page.

To celebrate this new release and to give previous purchasers a chance to upgrade cheaply, the app has been put on sale for only $0.99 until August 23rd. A great bargain for an app this useful. Take a look on their site for a video walkthrough of the app.

Red Bull X-Fighters Motocross Game from iPlay is looking pretty impressive. It’s not in the app store yet but you can take a look at a gameplay video preview on YouTube. The in-game graphics look good, but we’ll see if it can deliver.

Bumper Stars is running just a bazillion giveaways right now. The most important one, of course, is the one they are running with us to give away an iPhone 3GS (enter soon, the giveaway will be this week). For full details on that contest, check out the contest page.

They are also giving away a $100 iTunes gift card every week and now launched a new promo where they will give away from 25 to 100 $15 iTunes gift cards. Check it out you freebie junkies.

Someone’s got a case of the Mondays. Will posted his weekly column on the app store this morning. And as usual it’s a good post with a (lot of) opinions on recent happenings in the app store and the apps available. Please give it a read and leave a comment if you haven’t already.

Hidden Gem: Lunarcy is an arcade, puzzle orbit simulation game. It’s a little odd, but I’m digging it so far. It might be priced a little high for the current market, but only time will tell.

Another Big iPhone Development Company Implodes

Tap Tap Tap, developer of a couple of the most popular and beautifully designed applications like Where To? (4.5 stars), Tipluator (3.5 stars) has imploded over differences in direction between it’s founders. It’s a theme we’ve seen before in iPhone developer Tapulous.

In this corporate divorce, most of the software has gone to Sophia Teutschler and will go under her Sophiestication Software name. This includes Tipulator, Groceries (unreleased), and Where Am I? (unreleased). The one odd ball, Where To? will be sold off by Tap Tap Tap and has already been removed from the App Store.

Tap Tap Tap has a few other projects in the works, though no details have been released.

For more info on this, see the latest Tap Tap Tap blog post here.