As most of you already know, we're a man down for the next two weeks on The TouchArcade Show as Jared explores the infinite wonders of Europe. Have no fear, though, for we grabbed a capable voice to join us this week: Adult Swim and Player One Podcast's Chris Johnston. At the top of this week's show, we discuss Adult Swim's new initiative and then flow into the usual: video games, video games, and more video games.

Specifically, we have a good time talking about the PS Vita's impending launch and possible line-up, the whole "Nintendo won't developer mobile games ever" thing, and dig into a really great user e-mail. Also, we give a lot of room to our recently played games section. If you'd like to give us a listen, you can do so just below via these links. You can also subscribe to us on iTunes and Zune to get our latest podcasts the second they're listenable.

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Here's your show notes, but before you leave us, know that Destructoid's Jim Sterling will be our special guest next week. Should be fun! We'll see you soon.

GAMES

I think at this point it's safe to say that Backflip Studios has embraced the free-to-play market. From the acclaimed Army of Darkness Defense [Free] to iOS classic Paper Toss [Free / HD], most of its titles have gone free and are now supported by ads or premium currency options. DragonVale [Free] is something a little different, though. It's built from the ground up to compete in the crowded freemium marketplace that have you managing zoos, pet stores, restaurants or, in this case, dragon parks.

Just between you and me, dragon parks are pretty rad.

Even with it's blazing dragons, DragonVale isn't going to set the freemium sim world on fire. It's not revolutionary in any way. So if you're not interested in games where you breed animals, build habitats and collect resources, you're not going to be interested in this one. If, on the other hand, you're looking for a strong contender that's well made and has dragons, read on.

You begin with a floating island that is completely devoid of dragons. To remedy this unfortunate situation, the game walks you through the early steps of creating a dragontopia: building your first habitat, buying and hatching your first egg, and learning how to use gems, the premium currency. It kindly lets go of your hand almost immediately, and with the help of the Goals system you won't have much trouble finding your own way.

In the broadest sense, your goal in DragonVale is to breed or buy dragons to entertain the visitors who come to your off-leash dragon park. Seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen, but these dragons have a diet of treats, not people. You build farms to harvest those treats, habitats to house your dragons and decor to pretty up the place. Much of my time in DragonVale has been spent getting my habitats and decor laid out just so.

But dressing up your islands is just a sideshow to the main act: breeding. Once you put a few levels behind you, you'll start getting your hands dirty with the fine art of cross-breeding. You begin with access to a few basic types of dragons, like plant, fire and earth. When you unlock and build a breeding cave the game opens up. Nearly every combination of those basic elemental types has a hybrid or two to be bred, and getting them into your park will occupy the days, weeks or months you're playing this game.

It's not that it's particularly difficult to find the combinations to produce hybrids. All but one are eventually available for sale in the game's Market, and the combination of dragons to breed is plainly listed. But there's an element of randomness to the results, and hybrids take their time before hatching. It's not uncommon for hybrid eggs to be bred over the course of a dozen hours or more, and then the eggs take that long again to hatch. The impatient can purchase gems or get them from friends to speed up the process, but it won't be cheap.

There's still plenty to do while you wait for your dragons to get down to, um, business. Aside from decorating and farming treats, you need to pop in fairly often to collect the money your dragon exhibits earn. Thankfully, DragonVale doesn't have a decay mechanism. The only thing to lose if you walk away from the game for too long is potential profits when your habitats fill up.

This is one of many smart decisions apparent in the game. Another is the granular notification control Backflip Studios has given players. There are four types of notifications available, and you're free to turn off any or all of them. It's little touches like that that make me so fond of this game. That and the dragons. Each one is adorable and weird in turns, especially as they grow.

Interested in taking up a second career as a dragon breeder? Then swing by this thread once you've picked up DragonVale. It's filled with folks who are looking for friends to give gems to. There's also an ongoing hunt for the secret of the Rainbow Dragon, the one missing breed. I haven't found one yet. Will you?

I can't help but want to think that Calibre Games' Hunger Calls [99� / HD] is meant as a metaphor for fast food culture. The purpose of the game is to shove as much food into people's mouths as you can, as quickly as possible, then after they overeat, you have to either hit them with some Alka-Seltzer or they die.

At first, I thought�Hunger Calls was just going to be some kind of resource management game in the vein of Diner Dash, then after a few minutes, I was worried it might be a clone of the Flash game, Sweatshop, but it's neither � the only way I can think to describe Hunger Calls is as a reverse tower defense game.

The premise is that you need to get food to people by manipulating the direction of a conveyer belt. You swipe your finger across an arrow to change the belt's direction and you need to deliver the correct food to the right patron. They will continue to sit there eating until they start to turn green and they need some Alka-Seltzer. They literally gorge on what you send them until they're sick and in need of help and if you don't help them, either out of conceited spite, or because you can't, they die.

I didn't want to help these people. I wanted them to die right there because they sat there and ate a burger followed by a soda followed by a pizza. It was disgusting and I didn't think they needed saving. But, if two of your patrons die, you have to start over, so for the interest of the game and the overall success of my apparently soulless restaurant, I keep feeding them.

You feed them until you make a certain amount of money, then you close up shop for the day, just like one of those obnoxious restaurants in small neighborhoods that don't have hours posted on the door. The amount of money you make off each sale depends on how quickly you serve them and how much you've upgrades the "tastiness" of that meal. There's a time limit on each level, but I never got close in any of the 39 levels to running out of time.

That's the bulk of the game, but as you move on, you get access to more food to serve out and you can upgrade your food and your restaurant. I don't think upgrading your restaurant actually does anything, but it seems like upgrading your food makes it worth more money. There are power-ups as well, where you can gift your denizens, slow down and speed up time. Gifting is handy if you've screwed up a bunch of order because it resets everyone, and the speed power-up can help you get that burger into the hands of a pissed off person before they storm out.

The feeling of reverse tower defense comes from the fact you're essentially playing on a small, predefined area with limited paths to a destination. Just imagine if in Anomaly: Warzone if you had to deliver specific goods to one section instead of having a certain type of unit. You have to change the direction of your conveyer belt to keep up with the food churning out of it and it quickly challenging and overwhelming.

I can't exactly say what compelled me to play through Hunger Calls in its entirety. The look and feel of it screams cheap Flash game, but something about it makes it difficult to walk away from it. You put the game down for a few moments and suddenly want more. You want to continue shoving food down the throats of these people until they explode and die, then send a "revive" pill over so you can continue on with your business.

I've never had any desire to work in a fast food restaurant because this is how I imagine it actually being. �total chaos while one customer is nearly dead and the one next to him is complaining about not getting his burger yet. It's awful, addicting and worst of all, you stop caring about the health and well being of your patrons and just want to make enough money to finish the day.

On the heels of another great release in Grand Prix Story [$2.99], the simulation gurus at Kairosoft have dropped its SimCity-lite offering, Edo Town, in the Japanese App Store. Putting English-based speculation on the back-burner for a moment, Edo Town has you play the role of a city manager charged with putting together a thriving town complete with businesses, facilities, and utilities. No doubt, you'll have to walk the line between citizen happiness and overall revenue, which can make for some compelling play, as Maxis has proven time and time again.

Now, for the tea leaves � if Kairosoft keeps up with its current model, there's a good chance we could see an English version of Edo Town as early as next month. If this happens, Edo Town would be the studio's next US release following it's racing simulation game. Localization is not an easy process and Kairosoft has said before that it has a special release schedule for the rest of the world, however, so let's keep anticipation in check for the moment.

For what it's worth, we're doing our best to independently confirm if we'll see Edo Town in English. We'll definitely bring those details when or if we get them.

[Via Kairospot]

Globulos Mania [Free] might look a bit familiar. It's built off a very popular free-to-play web game and seems to contain the same content as Globulos Party on DSiware. Haven't played either? Then you'll want to give this one a shot. It's a simple competitive game that's positively oozing with content. And, frankly, it's a lot of fun.

A caveat, however: you'll want to try this game before investing in its premium offerings. Globulos Mania is an exceedingly simple game. In each of its 20 modes, you'll find yourself doing the same thing. You aim your globulos by pulling a line out from them in the direction you want to travel. At the same time your opponent will aim his. You'll press the Go button, and you'll watch the turn play out. You'll repeat this until one of you achieves whatever goal has been set before you. If you find that fun then by all means, pay and play more. If it's starting to wear on you by the time you've played through the free content, you'll want to stop there. The many modes offer a startling amount of variety, but Globulos Mania lives and dies by that single mechanic.

What can you do within the confines of that mechanic? Quite a few things, as it turns out. You can play all manner of sports, or games like darts, croquet or tic-tac-toe. You can race. You can play king-of-the-hill or sumo fight. You can dodge bombs. About the only things you won't find amongst the game's modes are death match and capture-the-flag.

The free-to-play model in Globulos Mania is almost perfect. In its cost-free form, the game offers up four minigames. You can play them for a taste of the action, decide if you like the gameplay, and then choose whether or not to make a purchase. Almost any purchase will remove the banner ads, if that's a concern for you. Normally I'd also like the way the game divides its IAP into easily digested packages, but here I consider it a misstep. Partly because the way the packs are presented is overwhelming at best. But more so because this is a multiplayer game, and finding a match requires you and your opponent to share the same modes.

This leads to the little problem of a splintered community. If you only want to play the modes in, say, the Pub Pack but none of your potential opponents have it, you're out of luck. In practical terms, this means much of the online multiplayer is going to be played on those four free modes. Hope you like them.

If, on the other hand, you're really into the single player or you have someone to play with (on either one device or two � this game is all about options), go for the Premium Pack at $4.99. It contains all the various modes, most of which are great fun, the ability to save replays and the ability to customize your globulos. If the asking price is too steep and you'd rather buy piecemeal packs, I'd skip the Sports Pack. While most of the packs offer a variety of different play styles, all the modes in the Sports Pack pretty much boil down to putting a ball in the opposing goal without dropping your globulos into the goal with it. Hockey and football may be nuanced games in real life, but in Globulos Mania they're functionally very similar.

If 20 modes doesn't sound like enough content, the game has you covered. Each mode has multiple fields you can play on for different challenges, and multiple difficulty levels. These range from AI so dumb it will launch its globules directly into its own goal to so hard you'll work yourself into a stalemate and spend five minutes finding your way back out, only to get defeated anyways. My one complaint with these is that they're presented as unlockable tiers. You need to win the crown in each difficulty to play the next, and after a while I really didn't want to bother with the easy AI. Better to let players find their own levels, and allow them to avoid the boredom and frustration of facing off against AI that's too simple or too difficult.

From what I've experienced, the multiplayer is designed quite well. Each player has to declare readiness and work within a turn timer, and connectivity hasn't been an issue while I've played. Finding a match has been, though. Hopefully this will improve as more players jump in, but you might want to go in with a Game Center friend or a local buddy in the meantime. There's no real ranking or stat tracking to speak of, so it doesn't really matter who you play with � this is a great game for filling a few empty minutes with a friend, but it's not a serious multiplayer experience.

Globulos Mania has room for improvement. Aside from the issues I've already mentioned, I've run into a few small annoyances. There's no way to check the rules of a game once you've started it, so if you're wondering what the win conditions are, you're out of luck. And it can be difficult to see where you're aiming when the arrow is under your fingertip, so you may lose some precision. But if you're into it, this is a great game. There's a ton of content no matter how you want to play, and plenty of achievements to go with it. If you're looking for hours of multiplayer and single-player content and don't mind slow and slightly repetitive play, this is your game. Go get it, and then bounce by our discussion thread to tell us what you think.

Whoa, hey, stop the presses even though nobody reads newspapers or magazines or uses paper anymore! Adult Swim Digital, the publishing wing of Adult Swim, has just announced a much broader original content initiative that'll see the release of several App Store exclusive games in 2011 and 2012. In 2011 specifically, we'll see a total of five originals from Adult Swim. Its first original,�Monsters Ate My Condo [$.99], is on the 'Store right now, actually.

We're pretty sure we don't need to remind you, but just in case you're not hip with Adult Swim, this is the publisher�responsible for sharing�Robot Unicorn Attack [$.99 /�HD] and other delectables like the flash-tastic�Cream Wolf, with the world.

Monsters Ate My Condo is�a fast-flowing, almost Jenga-esque puzzle game developed by PikPok, the New Zealand-based studio who handles the Flick Kick franchise. In the stupidly vibrant�Monsters, you match up colored floors in towering condos in order to feed monsters. If you suck, the tower falls.

One of the coolest things about it is its look, which riffs on Japanese anime, pop-culture, and monster flicks. You can grab the game right now because it's good, but just so you know, we'll have a proper review-y write-up shortly.

The second game in this initiative has been revealed, too. Adult Swim is getting together with the studio that brought us Wispin [$1.99 / HD], Grumpyface Studios, for Bring Me Sandwiches. Slated to hit a little later this month, this is another title revolving around feeding a monstrosity. Specifically, you'll be tasked with making sandwiches out of whatever an alien wants, including people and junk.

Overall, we're totally stoked about Adult Swim's push for original content. As much as we've loved the flash game ports in the past, it'll be refreshing to see the publisher's creativity and moneybags dropped into games catered specifically for iOS. Adult Swim is stoked, too.

This afternoon you're in for a treat if you're a fan of our weekly podcast. Adult Swim producer and all-around awesome dude Chris Johnston joined Eli and I for a regular episode. At the top, we have a good discussion revolving around Monsters and this initiative. Also, we do the regular podcast thing and because we're all so pro, it turned out pretty well.