Crescent Moon Games made a huge splash with their entrance on to the App Store with Ravensword: The Fallen King [$2.99 / Free]. Since the success of Ravensword, Crescent Moon Games has been extremely busy, both on developing their own games and positioning themselves as a publisher for other indie developers as well. These projects include the recently released Rimelands: Hammer of Thor [$4.99], UltraKid: Mystery of the Mutants, and others. Much like the recent dramatic before and after trailers of Aralon: Sword and Shadow, Crescent Moon's involvement in Mobile Game Garage's Gears seems to be a similar extreme graphical makeover.

Check out the before and after:

Gears is going to be a ball roller based heavily on Steampunk influences filled with puzzles that involve turning gears, growing vines, and other fantasy-based elements. The game is going to launch with full Retina Display support sometime before Christmas along with the other games Crescent Moon Games has in production. There have been a ton of ball rollers released on the App Store, mostly because the games work so well with the tilt controls of the iPhone, but I'm always excited to see familiar game types taken to new levels.

Martin Kool describes himself as "'just some guy' with a family at home with 3 kids to take care of (and one coming up) and a day job" who also happens to have an insatiable love for old school Sierra adventure games. That day job he mentions involves doing "kick ass things with the web," as he put it, so it's not much of a surprise that when looking for tools to bring these old games to modern platforms he settled on completely cross-platform HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Currently, nine of these classic adventure games including the Kings Quest series, a Leisure Suit Larry game, and others are playable on his web site Sarien.net.

This all would be cool enough by itself, but Martin is hard at work on the final touches of adapting his web game engine that all these games run in to be (as he put it) "a real kick-ass iPad experience". When finished, these games will have their own special URL's users will be able to navigate to, then save as icons via the add to home screen functionality that already exists on the device without any jailbreaking, emulation, or anything else. These games will be entirely touch friendly, and require no typing. Check out the video he put together:

When Kool approached us about this, I definitely thought this was something that needed to be on TouchArcade, but had to ask the inevitable question of whether or not he was ready for the attention he will get. (Specifically, from Activision's legal department.) To him, this is a labor of love. He's running these games at his own cost, without ads. So far he's had over 2 million players stop by his site. He said he'd stop immediately if Activision sends him a cease and desist� but more than anything he just hopes that Activision either grants him a noncommercial license or somehow involves him in republishing these games in HD like he has.

Sarien.net is an outstanding tribute to these old school adventure games, and if all goes as planned, the site will have iPad friendly versions of the included titles within a month. It's no secret we love retro gaming around here, and we'll post more information on this project as soon as we get it.