In this week's episode of The TouchArcade Show, the cast and crew discuss the usual �- cats, dogs, muscles, and movies from the mid-to-late 1980s. But we also decide to do our duty and talk about the latest and greatest of this week's news and games. Specifically, we spit a little game about Sid Meier's Pirates!, Lodsys' latest lawsuits, Cat Dance Party, and the most recent cloning fiasco to hit the App Store.

We're really pumped about this episode, so we hope you like it, too. As usual, you can grab the podcast just below via direct download or streaming. Additionally, you can check us out on the Zune Marketplace and iTunes if you want to subscribe to our pods.

iTunes Link: The TouchArcade Show
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Direct Link: TouchArcadeShow-009.mp3, 47MB

Of course, we do hit a lot more than I mentioned in the opening there. Here are this week's show notes with the relevant links to the articles / games we discussed. Go nuts and, hey, have a great weekend. We'll be back next Friday for another episode.

GAMES

• Bean's Quest [$2.99]
• Cat Dance Party [$.99]

FRONT PAGE

Music, as usual, is provided as always by the talented Jim Guthrie. Specifically, we ripped the opening track of "Audio Pepsi," one song in an album he's selling. Check it out over here if you'd like to stream it or buy it.

Junk Jack is the latest super ambitious and super promising independent game to catch our all-seeing eye. At its core, it's an adventure-ish game that borrows a lot from another indie darling, Minecraft. It also seems to draw from its side-scrolling cousin Terraria. In it, you'll be tasked with gathering materials and putting them together, but mostly, you'll be left to your own devices to explore and survive inside a world filled with treasure, Red Bull, and whatever else the two-man team, Pixbits, decides to drop into it.

Inarguably, Junk Jack is derivative of Mojang's and Re-Logic's respective titles, but I think you'll be surprised when you hear that the team didn't even know about Terraria when the game and it's iconic smoking miner, Jack, were initially sketched out. Since then, the team has embraced that work and has allowed it to inform development.

"…we tried to get some inspirations without being too trivial," Pixbits told us in a recent e-mail exchange. "When you develop for the iPhone you have to think about the fact that everything goes in a different way compared to a normal desktop game, controls are different, game experience is different, and also the time pattern you spend while gaming is different, so our focus in this regard was to develop a slick and fun gameplay, while maintaining the sandbox experience that users love and that we all know."

"We don't want to go beyond, since we really both respect Minecraft and Terraria (we play together to both of them), we just like to offer a similar gameplay experience to entertain with when you are not at home."

Junk Jack is being developed with procedurally generated worlds in mind, and so a good chunk of time is being spent in the actual coding to ensure a smooth experience. The final world size hasn't been decided quite yet, but you'll get three different save files for three different worlds, none of which will trade usability in exchange for size.

Games like Minecraft typically lack structure, and that's something Pixbits wants to provide in its open-world, exploration, and crafting game.

"We can say that the main goal of Junk Jack is to explore, craft and survive inside a procedural generated world full of features that we plan to add constantly. We were unsatisfied with the 'only-sandbox' approach, just because we felt that an iPhone game should give players secondary tasks to entertain themselves.

"That's why, for example, we have implemented a simple yet effective mail system that allows the player to craft his own mailbox and use it to accept fun quests asked from various people which need to retrieve their lost items, providing rewards in exchange."

Pixbits tells us that the mailbox is just the beginning of some sort of quest line � the studio will continue to add tasks and give people something to do inside their respective worlds. Also, the studio will be looking to fans for ideas for future updates. To hear Pixbits tell it, users will have an actual stake in the game and will guide their hands after release.

Junk Jack is planned to hit at some point this September. The version you're seeing here is strictly for the iPhone and iPod Touch, but an iPad version isn't out of the question. It's just not on the docket at the moment.

The legal worker bees over at Lodsys have been incredibly busy lately. The company originally appeared on our collective iOS radar quite a while ago as the company has threatened to sue various iOS developers for not only using in-app purchase, but also links to upgrade to other versions of a game which Lodsys believes they hold patents for. Throughout all this, Apple has provided some backing for developers, and Lodsys was quick to respond with promises of paying $1,000 to each target of this suit if they were wrong in their claims.

Previously, they've been targeting various indie developers with their legal requests and demands that said developers pay license fees. This type of tactic is particularly effective against smaller outfits, as often it can be both cheaper and easier to just pay whatever fees patent trolls demand instead of getting involved in drawn out and potentially considerably more expensive legal battles. However, as of today, things are about to get a lot more hairy.

Per a recent report from FOSS Patents, Lodsys is now including Rovio, Electronic Arts, Atari, Square Enix, and Take-Two Interactive. This brings about some interesting parallels between some previous legal drama on the App Store between Mobigame and Tim Langdell regarding a trademark over the name of the game Edge [$2.99]. Langdell was (mostly) getting away with legal intimidation tactics with Mobigame, then similarly decided to set his sights on EA. Needless to say, this turned out poorly for him.

It remains to be seen what will happen between Lodsys and the new targets of their wide-spread patent trolling, but now they've targeted companies who do actually have the resources to turn this into a proper legal war. I can't imagine things turning out well for Lodsys especially in US courts where all too often cases are decided by who has the deeper legal pockets to pay for lawyers… And really, in the mobile gaming industry, it's hard to find deeper pockets than the sleeping giants Lodsys has just awoken.

4th & Battery, the creative wing of developer PopCap Games, has released its second iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch title. It's a track-based strategy game called Allied Star Police [Free], and its available for the low-low price of $0 just like the studio's previous work, Unpleasant Horse [Free].

As a whole, Allied Star Police is an OK title as far as free games go. The "build and deploy on tracks" concept works well enough in execution, but the economy over substance approach to the design doesn't do the game any favors. Then again, this was a special project developed for and produced by a special person in a special studio that specializes in releasing massaged proof-of-concept material. It jives, in other words with the mission of the place.

The special dude, by the way? That would be nine-year-old Owain Weinert. This game was his Make-A-Wish dream and 4th & Battery saw the development through. According to the studio, Weinert was in the office every morning and was allowed to steer the production and development. The studio and Weinert are both pleased with the outcome and with the experience, which makes me really feel like a complete jerk for criticizing the effort.

"I have to say, my brother can't stop playing it, my dad can't stop playing it, and neither can I," Weinert said in a statement. "This started off as a dream of mine, and now my friends and people all over the world can play my creation."

You can expect several more games from 4th & Battery in the near-ish future. The studio is primed to release several a year and across other platforms, too, like the PC and Facebook.

Famed game producer and co-designer of Mega Man, Keiji Inafune, fled Capcom earlier this year to pursue his own goals. At a press conference this week, the man announced his first project with his new studio Comcept. It's called�The Island of Dr. Momo, and it's a social game because, duh, that's what all the hip designers who rag on their huge publishers for being complacent do�once they jump screaming from the ship.

Details are light on Dr. Momo at the moment, but we do know that it's centered on a man named Dr. Momo. He's a lover of 'cute' stuff and you'll somehow help him on a quest to gather the cutest animals on Earth to make something… cute.

(This is not Dr. Momo, FYI.)

Dr. Momo will be released in Japan via GREE, which is yet another Japanese mobile games service that offers free games in vast quantities and makes its revenue through IAP options like, say, clothing or bonus perks. Think Mobage, as it's a pretty good analogue.

At the press conference, Inafune didn't say if the game was bound for a worldwide release. I wouldn't hold my breath on that, though.

Social games won't be the only thing Inafune has to offer the world going forward, but it seems like a big part of what he wants to do in the near future. In a conversation with Kotaku earlier this summer he said that he wants to learn from this genre and push a few titles out quickly. After he feels fulfilled, though, who knows?

We've been keeping an eye on Dream Track Nation [$0.99] since we caught a peek of it on Chillingo's YouTube channel earlier this year. Even back in the depths of April, it looked like a leader in the 2D physics racing genre. Now that it's reached the finish line, the question remains � is it a winner? Well, it's complicated.

If you're really into games like the Jelly Car [Free] series, then you're going to want this game. It has familiar 2D cars and levels, similarly wacky physics and a lot of content to enjoy. A ridiculous amount of content for its $0.99 price tag, in fact.

The sheer volume of content is Dream Track Nation's main selling point. The game includes 60 levels that can be played in star collect mode. Then you can play them again in time trial mode, which is a notably different experience. Throughout these modes you'll unlock vehicles to play with. You can also play the official levels against another racer in multiplayer mode. If you get bored of the built-in content, you can download new levels made by other players. Any time you don't feel like racing, you can work on building your own masterpiece of a level, which you can then upload to share with the world at large. It's frankly unreasonable that a game with so much content should be so cheap. It's basically Sony's whole "Play. Create. Share" model wrapped up in a one dollar package.

So now I'm left in an awkward position. On one hand, this game is definitely worth the price of admission. On the other hand, I didn't enjoy it nearly as much as I'd hoped to. There are a lot of problems in Dream Track Nation. I can count on one hand the number of times I fell through a solid section of a level, but that's still a handful too many. The difficulty curve is also out of whack. Early levels can be completed by doing little more than holding the forward and reverse buttons at appropriate times, but so can some later levels. And some in between are incredibly difficult, relying on careful exploration and jumps that require a speedy car and a good amount of luck to complete.

I could take or leave the game's physics. Sometimes driving through a level feels fast and fantastic. Other times it feels like a struggle, leaving you tapping back and forth and desperately rotating your phone just so to get by. Many levels rely on spring pickups and items that let your vehicle float, which don't feel nearly as good as speeding through loops and taking great jumps should. Switching the tilt controls to on-screen controls made things a little better, but I still found myself teetering on the edge of an assortment of platforms too often for comfort. You can do tricks to shave time off your final result, but opportunities to pull them off feel too far apart. Mostly you'll be rotating or hitting the tilt buttons to right yourself after yet another awkward landing.

Multiplayer is also a mixed bag. It's fun when you can get it, but finding another Game Center player waiting to go is a trial, and then you have to hope that they'll stick with the game for a while. If you have a friend to play with you, multiplayer is a lot of fun. It's only been a couple days, so hopefully a larger install base will make random multiplayer fun too.

The level editor has a lot of potential, but we'll need to wait and see how PowPowGames does with curating content. There's a rating option, but no obvious way to see how a level is rated. And it's hard to blame people for putting together basic test levels to see how they run. With no tutorial for the level editor and no check to ensure only playable levels get uploaded, there's really no reason not to toss your baby steps into the ring.

I'm coming down harder on Dream Track Nation than I'd like. It's a fun game, and there's enough content here to keep you occupied for hours. If you like 2D physics-focused racers and you're okay with touchy physics and a game that could still use a little smoothing out, you should definitely get this one. The art is charming, the music isn't half bad and the game is a lot of fun. It's just a little rough around the edges. Folks in our forums are largely pleased, and so was I. I just hope to see things get cleaned up a little as time goes by.

Just a few short months ago, The 7th Guest: Infection [$2.99] emerged on iPad. It was iOS's first great take on 1988's Infection, and it was chock-full of nostalgia for PC players who looked back fondly on 1993, the year The 7th Guest made its debut. But if you lacked that nostalgic view of the subject matter, you might have found the game a bit mystifying. Enter Battle Slugs, [$0.99 / Lite] a reimagining of Infection that has a little more to offer the modern iOS gamer.

In Battle Slugs, players take turns placing their slugs. Each turn, you're given two options: clone your slug to an adjacent hex space, or jump it to one a step further away. Wherever you land, you'll convert adjacent enemy slugs to your team. The player with the most slugs on the board when there are no free hexes left wins.

To keep this formula from growing dull, Battle Slugs offers a few different options for variety. You can play against AI of three difficulty levels, or you can play hot-seat multiplayer. Whichever you choose, you'll have up to 25 different fields to choose from. The layout of the field can make a huge difference to the strategy you'll need to employ to win, so this selection keeps things fresh for quite a long time.

You won't have all the fields available at the start, however. You'll need to unlock them by playing against the computer on previous boards and winning. This is easier said than done � even on easy difficulty, your AI opponent will put up quite a fight. The early fields are small enough that you can evaluate your errors and improve, but later levels get huge. You'll need a strategic mind to master and unlock them all.

It helps that Battle Slugs throws in a ton of character to keep you entertained. The art is well-done and pretty adorable, in a mutated-slug sort of way. The music is also great � I've found myself listening to the title theme with its singing slugs an embarrassingly large amount. Whether you win or lose your matches against the game's AI, you earn experience, and that experience goes toward unlocking locations. Locations are randomly assigned when you start the game, and they give you new backgrounds, loading screens and music to play with.

There are a few things that keep me from recommending Battle Slugs unreservedly. For one thing, like every similar game, this one's hard. Even on Easy, the computer will probably stomp you a few times while you work out your strategy. It's also a bit opaque. You unlock new fields by winning on two prior fields, but the game doesn't make this obvious. Unlocking locations feels like a matter of bashing your head against the AI until you eventually earn enough experience, and even then there's no way to pick where you'd like to play.

But those are minor complaints. Gameprom is building quite a reputation for great games, and Battle Slugs is no exception. According to their posts in our forums, there are more fields coming in an update, along with online multiplayer and Game Center achievements. I couldn't really ask for more, but at the time of this writing the game is free. So there's absolutely no reason not to check it out � it's even Universal. Go grab it, and prepare to break against an army of devilish slugs.

It should be no secret that we're pretty big Disc Drivin' [$1.99/Free/HD] junkies around here at TouchArcade. Well, almost all of us (I'm looking at you, Eli). Disc Drivin' launched back in December of last year, and we were pretty much hooked following our review. Since that time, I've continued to play the game every single day without fail, and I honestly can't say that about any other iOS game.

But lately, I've noticed that my playtime (and the playtime of the many dedicated friends that I am usually playing with) has started to dwindle. Normally I'm running at least 15 to 20 games at a time, but in the past few weeks that number has shrunken down to a mere 4 or 5, sometimes less. As can happen in even the best of relationships, things were just starting to get a bit stale around the Nelson-Drivin' household.

Enter developer Pixelocity Software, ready like Cupid to shoot a new update into the posterior of Disc Drivin' and ignite our romance once more. This marks the third big content update to the game, as it received online matchmaking back in February and 3 brand new tracks as well as a refined UI back in April. This newest update adds another 3 brand new tracks, for a total of 18, as well as a new track element called the Flipper. You can see the overhead design of each of the tracks in the icons below:

As for the Flipper, pictured at the top of this post, you'll come across this obstacle placed in various parts of the ground in each of the 3 new tracks. When you slide over it, it propels you forwards and upwards, catapult style. This can either be a very good thing or a very bad thing, mostly depending on where you end up finally landing. The faster you're going when you hit the Flipper, the farther you'll get launched, so there should be some good strategic uses of the new object if utilized correctly.

If you haven't yet tried Disc Drivin', I highly recommend downloading the fully-featured ad-supported version for free and giving the game a spin. It's one of those games that you won't be good at right away, so give it time and practice. You can ask advice or find opponents in the game's discussion thread in our forums, too. If you like it, the ad-free version is currently $1.99, and you'd be fueling support for even more updates down the line. This newest update to Disc Drivin' is already done and submitted, so keep your eyes peeled for it to go live most likely sometime in the next week.