Hey, guys, Atari is resurrecting Asteroids and making it a free-to-play game -- no, really. The other afternoon, Atari sent us its first word on Asteroids: Gunner, a re-imagined take on the classic arcade space rock-obliterator that combines new dual-stick controls, fancy 3D visuals, wave-based play, power-ups, ship upgrades and the usual free-to-play trimmings including IAP ad removal and IAP unlocks.

Obviously, this isn't the Asteroids we grew up with, but this is definitely the kind of game that's doing particularly well now and the kind of game that fits Atari's new metric-driven direction. If you're especially interested in diving into Gunner, but want to get your expectations in line beforehand, go give the Slide2Play preview for it a read. Spoiler: Gunner sounds like a well-rounded and easy to pick-up-and-play action game built for all audiences.

Here's some screens:

Gunner is set to hit this coming November 10 at $0, so the wait isn't much longer. Oh! And for this generious price, you'll get the first 50 levels.

[Via Destructoid]

At first glance, Sad Robot [Free] doesn't seem to offer anything that hasn't already been done on iOS. This is simple obstacle-avoidance arcade game that offers pseudo cave-flyer gameplay. Similarly, the retro-inspired graphics have been seen countless times during the resurgence of retro in the iOS games universe. But while Sad Robot's components are not unique, they're executed well and form a cohesive whole that has some equally good core action to offer.

In the game you control a humanoid as he goes from galaxy to galaxy dodging obstacles while collecting coins and power-ups. Mechanically, Sad Robot plays like most other vertical cave-flyers, with the difficulty always starting slow and ramping up the longer you stay alive. There really isn't much else to the core experience, although the game does manage to pace itself in such a way that each run doesn't appear to be too easy or hard. However, Sad Robot is probably not for gamers looking for substantial depth.

Sad Robot manages to supplement its simple core gameplay with a few elements to extend its shelf life. In addition to the standard high score leaderboard, it has both an experience system as well as a coin/inventory system. The experience system doesn't appear to have any affect the gameplay and is used mainly as a self-progression tool. The coin collection, however, is a bit more substantive. In addition to using coins to purchase additional robots, each with different attributes, you can also use coins to purchase and upgrade power-ups.

Oh, and while the upgrades don't substantially change the gameplay, they do offer enough of an advantage to keep you coming back to collect coins. There's an option to purchase additional coins in-game, but it's certainly not necessary as you can quickly collect lots of coins with a few playthroughs.

Like most other games in its genre, Sad Robot relies heavily on the precision of its controls and it offers both tilt-based and touch options. While the game defaults to the tilt controls, I found the touch-based controls to much more manageable (once you take a few minutes to get acquainted with the quirks). My preference was mainly based on the lack of calibration with the tilt controls, which made it hard for me to find my sweet spot controlling. However, I've also heard reports of the tilt controls being manageable without calibration, so it may just be my experience. Creator Colorbox has stated that an update fixing the controls is in the works, so this issue may be settled soon. �Regardless, Sad Robot's control scheme does work in its current incarnation, which is important part of its gameplay.

I feel compelled to give a special mention to the music, which I thought was amazing. There is only one song, Pornophonique's Sad Robot. While not composed for this game, the song is surprisingly appropriate (and, based on developer comments, a chief inspiration while creating the game). Since there's only one song, and it starts over again with each new game, monotony can become a problem after playing the game many times. However, I personally never got tired of it, as the song continued to enhance my experience every single time. This is one of those elements that really makes or breaks the overall presentation of a title, and I think Sad Robot succeeds from a music standpoint.

As mentioned earlier, Sad Robot is truly an example of the sum of its parts being greater than each element taken separately. Both the graphics and music do a great job in enhancing the experience of what is otherwise a simple game. Everything just flows well in a sort of existential way, which is a feeling I do not get often while playing games. If you have any interest in arcade games with retro graphics, Sad Robot is definitely worth a download, even more so since it's currently being offered for free.

The day is almost here, folks: game creator extraordinaire Phil Hassey's chicken-themed successor to his award-winning strategy game Galcon [$1.99] hits this November 16. Hassey shot us a kind note this morning confirming the release of Chickon and fleshing out what we know about the game. According to him it's "very much like" Galcon, but paradoxically "very different" and, as you'd assume, sillier.

As you'll see in the assets we have below, Chickon replaces Galcon's planets with nests, it's ammunition with chickens, and its enemies with, uh, robotic chickens. There's also a ton of special abilities you'll be to utilize in battle, including bombs and nuclear warheads. You'd think radioactivity and poultry don't go together, but stop by a KFC sometime. You'll learn things. Hard things.

We'll be giving this a spin in the coming days and reporting to you about our experience with the game. While you wait, check out Hassey's latest video starring a large man in a chicken costume doing crazy things (plus gameplay nods):

On November 10, FDG Entertainment, makers of Beyond Ynth [$1.99 / HD] and Cover Orange [$.99 / HD], is planning to release its next big thing: a puzzle game going by the name of Blueprint 3D. That name might not be the imaginative one in the world, but it appears as though the is poised to offer a lot of amusement, if not some possible head-scratching challenge.

In a nutshell, Blueprint 3D is one a rotation-based puzzler with a natural world twist. In the game, you start out with a chaotic blueprint that you'll need to manipulate and torture until the mess of lines form a coherent picture. As its name implies, you'll be working with all the planes of reality available to mortal men, which sets this apart to some degree on a mechanical level and also introduces the possibility of some crazy puzzles. But if anything, it'll rock a lot of content: 240 levels and seven themes, including architecture, medieval, and electronics, have been confirmed to be in the release version.

Not many of these games nail their look and tone, so this this'll definitely be something we'll follow as it hits the App Store in a couple of days. Speaking of that, expect to pay $.99 on the iPhone and iPod Touch or $2.99 on the iPad.

Assassin's Creed, as far as I can tell, is about stabbing dudes and pushing down NPCs while on the way to stab more dudes. The upcoming board game for the iPad,�on the other hand, is about building a beastly deck of cards and pummeling dudes into submission and taking their territories in real-time. Intrigued? We still are, even though the new details out there are still pretty vague.

IGN recently got their hands on with�Assassin's Creed Recollection and are reporting that it features several mechanics from other collectible card games, but fiddles with pacing by introducing a "looping timeline" as seen in, say, Lumines. Cards apparently have the power to attack players or seize a territory, so that's how the action part of the game works, at least.

Ubisoft is still tossing out phrases like "deep tactical gameplay" and "challenging political battles" in regards to what Recollection will offers, but we're not sure how it's going to execute on these promises. We'd look to the new trailer to see what's up, but Ubisoft is still in full-blast mystery mode for its November-bound game.

Regardless of the lack of intel, this continues to be something our all-seeing eye is keyed in on.�Assassin's Creed fans�should definitely stay with Recollections, too, as it'll deliver collectible assets from all the games, as well as reconnect you with characters and "memories" from Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed 2.

[Via IGN]

Fantasy Flight Games is a company that's known for creating very complicated tabletop games from geek-friendly properties, like A Song of Ice and Fire, Battlestar Galactica, The Lord of the Rings, and the works of H.P. Lovecraft. One of their most popular offerings is Arkham Horror, a game with approximately 700 cards, tokens and markers to keep track of and a play time of up to four hours. Earlier this year, the company released Elder Sign, a game that takes the Lovecraftian horror of Arkham Horror and distills it down to about half the time and only 200 pieces or so.

I love these games, but there's really no such thing as a quick game of, well, any of them. Between set up, tear down and the inevitable time taken to teach new players and reference forgotten rules, you're looking at a full evening's entertainment. So imagine my delight playing Elder Sign: Omens [$3.99 / HD], the first of Fantasy Flight's more mature games to arrive on the App Store. It's quick to play, can be learned (mostly) as you go, and can be played solo or hotseat with friends. What's not to like?

Elder Sign: Omens is harder to explain than it is to learn, but let's give it a shot. Azathoth, one of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, is showing signs of awakening. This would basically be the end of the world, filled with eldritch abominations and mindless gibbering, so you must assemble a team to stop this from occurring.

You can choose from a list of 16 investigators to create a team of 1 to 4 members. The investigators all have their own strengths and weaknesses. Some have more sanity, others more stamina, some get more items than others and all have unique abilities to help you on your mission.

Once you enter the museum in which Elder Sign takes place, you're faced with a selection of missions. Each one is horrifying in its own way, and your investigators risk losing their lives or their sanity by facing them down. In each mission, you roll the dice (proverbially in this game, and literally in the tabletop version) to see if you can match the symbols that come up, things like Terror, Peril and Lore, to the symbols needed to defeat the nameless horror you face.

If you do, you're well rewarded, earning items for your investigators that help you improve your odds and occasionally Elder Signs. If you don't, you fail the mission and suffer, losing sanity, stamina and sometimes gaining Doom. If the Doom Track moves up by twelve spaces before you collect the fourteen Elder Signs needed to seal away the Great Old One, Azathoth awakens and all is lost.

There are a few other details that can effect the outcome of your game. As you succeed at missions you earn trophies that can be exchanged for healing, items or expensive Elder Signs. Time passes on as you take your turns, and at midnight terrible things happen depending on how many monsters or Midnight signs you've left on the board. And occasionally portals open to Other Worlds, where the stakes are higher but so are the rewards.

As a result, success in Elder Sign is part luck, part strategy, but it's certainly weighted toward luck. If you fail at rolling the signs you need, there's little you can do. But making sure you pick the right investigator for the job, keep them alive and choose the missions you can defeat -- therein lies strategy.

For the most part, the transition to digital has been very kind to Elder Sign. Azathoth is the only Ancient One that features -- the others and their varied win conditions aren't present in Omens. But otherwise the game is intact and elegantly presented. The interface is superb, aside from a few small oversights. I would prefer to be able to see what items can do at a glance even when they're not usable, and I didn't discover that tapping the title of a mission would bring up more information about it even while you were in the midst of it until I was quite deep in the game. But on the whole, Fantasy Flight has done a fantastic job of making a complicated game simple and easy to play.

They've done such a good job, in fact, that you don't need to worry about learning much at all before you play. I'd recommend watching the tutorials so you don't get lost, but this is a game you can muddle through and understand within a single playthrough. That's outstandingly intuitive for this sort of thing. Playthroughs are much quicker than in the tabletop game, too, though not as speedy as they could be -- a bit too much focus is placed on fancy but slow scene transitions.

You can play Elder Sign: Omens alone, using up to four investigators to explore the museum. You're given a local high score when you finish the game, win or lose, and it's endlessly satisfying to try to defeat that score with different teams and strategies. Alternately, you can play hotseat with friends -- assign each person to a single investigator and pass your device around. The game doesn't change, but it works brilliantly both ways.

Best of all? Win or lose, no one has to clean up the table when you're done. There's no overstating how much I'd like to see more of Fantasy Flight's catalog brought to iOS. If you agree, voice your support in our discussion thread. And do try to keep your sanity intact while you wait.

It was just last week that we were singing the praises of Mika Mobile's Zombieville USA 2 [99�] in our review and discussing it further on our latest podcast. But already, Mika Mobile has released an update to the game which fixes a few bugs, makes some adjustments, and adds a new playable character.

The first major improvement is to the control wheel. The touch radius has been increased significantly, which means that should your thumbs slide beyond the visual boundaries of the control stick circle, then you will still continue to move in the direction you are pushing. Previously, if your thumb went beyond the control stick your character would stop dead in its tracks, causing all sorts of trouble.

Another chief complaint about the initial release of Zombieville USA 2 besides the control stick was the lack of loot drops from enemies. The times that a zombie would drop off some coins for you to collect in the release version of the game was few and far between. A much more reliable place to gather loot was in the destructible objects peppered throughout each level. This led to some people actively avoiding killing zombies in favor of running through more of each level in order to run into treasure producing objects.

Seeing as killing zombies is a major facet of the game, Mika Mobile has balanced out this issue by making sure that zombies will drop money much more frequently now. They've also increased the overall rate that money is earned, and have double the amount of cash that drops on a level during co-op play to compensate for the extra player.

Joining the already impressive lineup of playable characters in Zombieville USA 2 is the new Tycoon, a dandy looking gentleman who resembles a 19th century philanthropist. Word is that the Tycoon is planning on opening up several businesses in Zombieville, but must first rid the streets of the actual zombies to make room for a railroad, bank, and oil rig.

Finally, Mika Mobile has found and rectified a couple of rare but nasty bugs that might have lost your iCloud date or caused the game to crash. It's nice to see these various issues addressed so quickly after the release of Zombieville USA 2, and I'll be looking forward to what's in store with future updates.

We spied Oh! Edo Towns [$3.99/Lite] on the App store in early September, and ever since, I've been wringing my hands in anticipation at the thought of a new Kairosoft game to fill up my free time. After all, Game Dev Story earned our coveted five-star score, and we've enjoyed the clever and cute take on the pleasures of city sims every since. Throw in my slight obsession with historical Japan, and then tell me I get to build my own town in Edo-period Japan, and here you have a very excited gamer. Can I be a shogun? Paint some ukiyo-e? Maybe even thwart Saigo Takamori before he reaches the borders of my humble town?

In all seriousness, though -- if you have ever played a Kairosoft title, you will know what to expect here. Oh! Edo Towns follows the formula of the previous games by kicking it off giving you your own plot of land to build up into something spectacular. Considering the theme, everything plays on Japan's Edo period, from the ability to build things like Public Baths and Dumpling Shops to small details such as character dress and design. If you're a fan of Japanese history, as I am, you are sure to have a soft spot for this one.

Just in case you have never played a Kairosoft sim before, here's how it works: the clock ticks as you survey your land and make choices about how to build it up. A full menu is available at the touch of a finger, and from there you can build everything from fields for crops to homes, and even eventually castles. As you make your town more appealing, more people will move into it, and as you build more structures that your residents can use to educate themselves, such as libraries, they can then better themselves and therefore benefit the town and boost your 'Yield" (meaning how much money your town makes).

To keep the flow of your town building going, you'll get periodical updates from the local newspaper. This is Kairosoft's gentle way of nudging you and giving you hints as to what to do next, such as what to build to help your town prosper. Oh! Edo Towns is a great game for anyone with a hardcore case of OCD (cough, cough) because you can also examine the stats of your residents, town, buildings and finances at all times and analyze how it can be improved.

Keep working, and your town will grow into a burgeoning community. The pace is well set and helps to allay boredom by keeping updates consistent as your new residents move in and your town flourishes. Planting trees and other landscaping near buildings or paying close attention to what buildings are compatible with one another is a key tactic to making sure your town ranks high when the time comes around to win some awards. Get to buildin!

The only pitfall I can see when it comes to Oh! Edo Towns is someone saying, "This is the same game as the others with a new skin." Technically, they would be right, as it does follow the same formula, though the flow of gameplay and hints are better than ever before. If you've had enough, you can probably replay the ones you played before. On the other hand, if the idea of having a slew of new possible combos at your fingertips to transform your little town into a booming rural metropolis makes you salivate a little, what you want is here, and there's even a brand new lite version to try out. Time to carve your own spot in Japanese history, my friends.