Since EA revealed its intentions to bring Origin to the App Store, we've been wondering how it will be implemented and what it will do for enthusiasts. Those questions were kind of answered at EA's Summer Showcase event in San Francisco earlier this afternoon. In a nutshell, it's an Open Feint-like interface that sits on top of games. It'll have its own high score rankings and achievements, it'll demand its own friends list, and it'll allow you to launch other EA titles from the interface without having to switching to your dashboard.

The latter is the super interesting feature, though the friends lists, while separate from Game Center and all the other game or service-specific friends lists you've been building for years, will allow you to see what your pals are doing with their PC Origin accounts as well as their iOS accounts. That's neat. I think.

Origin is EA's attempt to cut out the middleman in the PC digital distribution space, and it appears like it's poised to try to do the same thing with this iOS extension. I'm not sure if closing off the pre-existing networking functionality that Game Center provides is the best move, but then again, EA never bothered with that service in the first place.

In this 1UP story, Need For Speed: Shift 2 was mentioned as one of the demos shown at the event. In that game, Origin usage will grant players access to more racing tracks and, hilariously, in-game cash. Following that logic, it appears as though Origin usage will be incentivized, but not mandatory, which is a good move considering the ire I'm sure this service is about to drum up.

So, what do you think? Is Origin something you're looking forward to or would you rather EA just use and leverage Game Center?

One of my favorite things about the App Store is because of how fast it moves, you never have to wait too long to see trends forming. Thinking back on it, the entire existence of the iPhone is little more than a flash in the world of technology, even though its release back in 2007 (and the launch of the App Store in 2008) feels like ancient history now. A number of things have changed over the short life of iOS devices, but I think the change that had the largest effect on App Store was Apple shifting gears to allow the free to play market to take hold.

When Steve Jobs initially announced the in-app purchase system, he made sure to emphasize that only paid apps would be allowed to use it. Or, as he put it, "free apps remain free." Apple doesn't often change their tune, but they did in a big way on October 15th of 2009 when they opened the free to play flood gates. Moments later, ngmoco announced that Eliminate would be free, officially kicking off the free to play revolution on the App Store and energizing an incredibly vocal minority who were sure that this would be the death knell of iOS gaming in one fell swoop.

Since Apple rarely reveals statistics on both the sales of iOS devices and the number of apps downloaded (200 million device sales and 15 billion downloads, per last count.) if you want to delve any deeper than that you need to get third party analytics firms involved. Flurry is one (of many) of these companies, and they've currently got their analytics package installed in over 90,000 different apps spread across over 40,000 different companies. This gives them a massive bucket of data to run all kinds of different reports which they throw up on their blog from time to time.

The latest out of Flurry is that free to play games are responsible for 65% of the revenue in the top 100 grossing list, compared to only 39% earlier this year. If you're the kind of person who would rather see this data in chart form, well, you're in luck:

Now, I'm sure there are skeptics out there that right now are thinking to themselves, "Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. The top grossing lists go to 200. These numbers are skewed in favor of free to play by chopping off the bottom half of the list!" I followed that path of logic too, since it can often be easy to manipulate statistics to promote an agenda of sorts. However, after speaking to several developers with games all over the top 200, it seems that in calculations like this positions 100 to 200 (and beyond) aren't worth that much consideration because of the extreme bell curve of the top grossing lists making 200 essentially insignificant compared to #1.

What does this mean for iOS gamers? Well, the writing has been on the wall for quite a while now that free to play is taking over the App Store. It's not a hard decision for developers to make either when laying out plans for future games either. With a 99��paid game, your profits are completely tied to your chart positioning and your options are incredibly limited for promotion, often relying entirely on making your game free and crossing your fingers for a surge of sales when the sale is over. Comparatively, there's all sorts of neat tricks to make money from a free game, even with horrid chart position.

Thankfully, even though Zynga put the original bad free to play taste in everyone's mouth with Farmville on Facebook and many developers followed suit with similar iOS games that centralized around time sinks and pay walls, there is light at the end of the tunnel. On the Mac/PC side of things, games like League of Legends and recently Team Fortress 2 have been providing some fantastic "core-gamer" experiences while being totally free. I'm sure eventually games like these will filter down to mobile devices, as it's basically impossible to argue against the financial incentive being there through a massive customer base eager to download (and optionally pay for) free to play games.

Crescent Moon's Aralon: Sword and Shadow is one of the App Store's meatier games, so it often demands a meatier price point. If its standard price of $9.99 is too much for you to swallow, I think you'll dig this news: the game, which is a Universal app, is now just $4.99. That's, like, a total of five dollars of savings! Think of all the things you can buy with the money saved!

In case you didn't know, Aralon is one of the most advanced RPGs on the App Store. A convenient analogue is the Elder Scrolls series, which generally boasts the same attributes: first-person perspective, somewhat deep spell combat systems, tons of quests, and an open-world. We reviewed it awhile back, so give that a read if you're interested in learning more.

A new update, by the way, has hit since we last talked about Aralon. The latest version has hammers and maces, as well as 'specialty' IAP items. Several bug fixes, including the crash bug in Uthu's Fortress, have been fixed, too. Not too bad for a free update.

In other Crescent Moon news, the studio has given us a few new screens of Pocket RPG, which development for appears to be going well. We're told that the game will launch alongside an update that adds "target assistance" (read: auto-aim) for casual players and includes notable refinements and tweaks to the overall product. Neat! Now, check out those screens I mentioned earlier:

Pocket RPG launches this Thursday, July 14th.

Adding color to a black and white world isn't exactly a new concept in games, but Kaia Games' Color Bandits [99� / HD] attempts to add that layer to a side scrolling shooter with a resemblance to Contra in terms of gameplay, but not in challenge.

As far as story and setting is concerned, Color Bandits keeps it as simple as possible. An evil steam punk boss has stolen color from the world and you, a cat with a gun, needs to reintroduce color by blowing up robots. To do so, you'll travel across six different stages each broken up into three different levels, but the levels aren't levels in a traditional sense, they're just checkpoints scattered throughout each linear stage.

Control wise, you control the forward and reverse of you character with a slider on the left and the shooting direction with a right analog stick. The screen moves automatically to push you toward the right.

From there, enemies pop up and attack you in a wide variety of ways. For the most part, you'll spend your time dodging and shooting and for the bulk of the game, it's not a difficult affair. You can shoot somewhat randomly and you'll usually survive the onslaught. By the last couple of levels, you'll feel an actual challenge coming up, but it ends up being a little too late. Along the way, you'll get weapon power-ups, but you only get a small portion of bullets and most of the weapons feel similar to one another.

You can cruise through the main campaign in under an hour, but getting three stars on each level is a lot more complicated. The combo system is a bit unusual in that you rack up combos by shooting enemies, but the second one dies, the combo meter starts counting down. You don't lose the whole combo if you miss a shot, but it counts down quickly enough you'll get frustrated more enemies aren't the screen. By stringing together the combo kills you'll multiply the score of each kill and the higher the score, the more stars you'll get at the end of the level.

Once you get about halfway through, you'll unlock a survival mode, which is the same core game but the screen doesn't move to the right. The mode is all about high scores, which can be shared and compared on Crystal and Game Center.

Visually, Color Bandits has a hand-drawn aesthetic to it. The character and enemy designs look great and are tinged with a steam punk aesthetic without being overwhelming. As you improve your score and get more stars, the background starts to fill in with color. While they're relatively static, the backgrounds are well done and the transition from black and white into color is subtle, but works well.

The foundation of Color Bandits is a casual take on a Contra-style shooter but since you can't jump, the game can't ever get as complicated as Contra. It tries to make it up by bombarded you with enemies in the end, but it's going to be too little too late for a lot of players. That said, Color Bandits might be a better high-score game than it is a shooter.

Even looking at Color Bandits as just a high-score game, it's hard for it not to feel stale toward the end. The experience doesn't change throughout the levels, which for a game this short isn't necessarily a big deal, but it would have been nice if things were mixed up a little throughout. Even still, the high-score nature of the experience makes it an enjoyable experience for anyone who has that part of their brain take over when a score is in place. The controls are precise and work terrifically, even if the campaign isn't particularly amazing, the survival mode is well executed.

Ronimo Games' Swords & Soldiers [$2.99 / HD] is a stripped-down, side-scrolling RTS that offers a decent amount of creative situational content inside a shell that otherwise doesn't torture standard genre tropes. The gorgeous visual direction and whimsical writing emits an unusual, but comfortable warmth. Most levels boast sharp, sometimes dramatic change-of-pace mechanics or objectives with different factions. And there's several different types, and modes, of play mixed into and out-of its feature-complete and content-rich campaign. Yet, at its core, this is still a game that revolves around troop spam just like all the others � it's this other stuff that makes it a unique offering.

Sword & Soldiers first appeared on downloadable console platforms in 2009 and later on PC and Mac. Nothing I've noticed has been added since those respective debuts aside from the touch implementation found in this specific version, which is smooth to the point that it feels natural, as if this was the lead platform.

There are three goofy, well-animated factions: the Vikings, the Aztecs, and the Chinese. The campaign mode boasts three separate mini-campaigns using each where you'll see the qualities that separate each faction from the other. The Aztecs boast mechanics that revolve around death. The Vikings, on the other hand, heal with spells and use defensive structures, while the Chinese can conjure statues that bolster spell casting. The mini-campaigns' weaves are a part of the whole tapestry and they spin into each other after a few missions. These plot points are as�satisfactorily�offbeat as the overall aesthetic.

To the game's credit, it often leverages the unique abilities of each faction in missions, but the moment-to-moment action revolves around "troop spam" tak. It counts on it, in fact, because the game, at its core, is about management: can you manage building gold miners while also babysitting an upgrade tree and spitting out troops? That's the typical question it asks throughout the campaign, which does, despite being somewhat mechanically dull with its defend-the-castle missions, hold up over the haul.

Part of what makes Sword & Soldiers satisfying is that you don't have to budget build orders, consider micro-details, or give much of consideration to strategies. You build and fight with a small number of troops in manageable streams, while complimenting your troop attacks with muddle, attack, or defensive-minded spells. This is RTS stripped to its core, and for what it's worth, it's a nice, easy-going approach that I enjoy. You're afforded time to zone out and simply enjoy the experience.

The game has a tendency to break down in some specific instances. When the AI decides to toss out globs of enemies to attack your streams of individual troops, there's not much you can do about that other than buckle down and hope you've picked the right troops in your streams, else they'll be knocking at your door soon. Also, some of the missions in the campaign mixes the action up by giving you simple defend objectives, no gold supply, or limited resources to work with. In some of these missions, it's obvious the designers want you to use a specific tool, and if you don't, you'll lose fast and hard annoyingly.

There is no online multiplayer, but it does offers a horizontal local two-player mode. I don't have a pal that would be interested in giving this a go with me, but just in general testing I've noticed that, like in the campaign, mass and smart spell usage are the keys to success.

Sword & Soldiers might be shackled to side-scrolling RTS convention, but it's smart and vibrant where it counts. The HD version in particular is the best, as the extra screen space goes a long way in bringing the game to life in a comfortable and manageable way. If you're in the mood for a full-featured title, this wouldn't be a bad one to scoop up. I dig it, at least.

Note: Although Chillingo is currently advertising Swords & Soldiers with us, advertising has no effect on coverage or review outcomes. For more information, take a look at our advertising and editorial policies.

It was back in February that we first learned about the guerilla porting project of Bungie's classic Mac first-person shooter trilogy Marathon [Free] to the iPad. Lone wolf coder Daniel Blezek had taken it upon himself to take these games, which were by this time a part of the open source community, and adapt them for the touch screen. But, there were still questions about certain aspects of the open source licensing and whether or not things would jive with Apple's App Store distribution methods. Silence about the Marathon iPad project in the months that followed hinted that it indeed might have hit a permanent roadblock.

Then just a couple of weeks ago, Bungie posted an interview on their blog with Daniel Blezek talking about the project. It turns out that they had caught wind of Daniel's planned port and were stoked on it, and decided to officially get behind it. A refreshing turn of events considering some of the unfortunate turnouts of other fan projects like the Streets of Rage Remake or various awesome looking Sonic the Hedgehog games over the years.

If you're a fan of Bungie or the Halo series then it may not be surprising that Marathon has launched on July 7th, or otherwise known as Bungie Day.�As had already been announced, the game launched for free and comes with the complete first game in the Marathon trilogy, which contains 9 chapters and 27 levels. I'd like to believe that the remaining two games Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity will appear on the App Store in similar fashion sometime down the line, though there aren't any concrete details on this just yet.

The catch to the game being free, if you can even call it a catch, is that the whole game is in a standard texture resolution. Should you feel so inclined, you can download a high resolution texture pack as a $3.99 in-app purchase. The improved visuals admittedly do look nice, but they don't look that much better than what comes in the game initially. Of course, I wouldn't blame you one bit if you felt like throwing the four bucks at the game just to support such a great project, and received the slight visual upgrade in return as an added bonus.

Another interesting in-app purchase is the ability to buy a Master Chief mode for 99�. What this means is that options for unlocking all weapons, infinite ammo, invincibility, and instant shields are all available in the pause menu at any time, as well as the ability to select any stage and save anywhere during play. The game saves your state when you exit with the home button, but actual game progress is normally only saved at specific checkpoints in each level.

All of these cheats may sound like they'd suck the fun out of the game, and for some people that would be true. But Marathon is a hard game, and its retro gameplay hasn't aged entirely well. Whereas a game like Doom is more of a straight up blast-a-thon, Marathon contains many (sometimes) confusing puzzles and even relies on some light platforming elements that can be pretty challenging. The option of buying some cheats for a buck is actually a welcome one if you're just looking to experience the game again with minimal frustration.

The game itself plays pretty well on the iPad's touch screen. A virtual stick on the left controls your movement and swiping anywhere on the screen controls your aim. Buttons in the lower right control firing and switching weapons, though you can toggle an option to fire by tapping anywhere on the screen too. Opening doors and toggling switches lies right below the virtual stick, as does access to an overhead map. There's not the fully customizable controls seen in other FPS games, but what's here works pretty well.

If you like old-school first-person shooters like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D, then you should feel right at home with Marathon. It's nothing groundbreaking as far as iOS first-person shooters go, but it's a solid port of a classic game. Marathon tells an interesting story via the computer terminals spread throughout the game, and has a great moody atmosphere.�Whether you're new to the series or an old-school Mac gamer looking for a nostalgia fix, Marathon is an easy recommendation for free and is definitely worth considering the IAP upgrades for the total experience. You can drop your own opinions of Marathon in our forums, and we'll keep an eye out for news on the release of the remainder of the trilogy.