The iFriday Roundup, No. 16

HotGen Releases Hot Freebies

HotGen dropped some sizzlin’ news into our inbox this week: both the original To-Fu: The Trials of Chi and Spacelings have received Free editions! You can read Tim’s review of To-Fu here, by the way — definitely a great game to pick up at no cost. These are ad supported, as you might guess, and the original paid versions without ads are still available at the App Store.

A Little Housekeeping

Just an FYI to devs and readers — we’ve started going through our review articles and leaving notes when updates have addressed issues that reduced the game’s score. The review content will remain unchanged to reflect the state of the game when we first played it, but an editor’s or writer’s note will direct readers to an “Addendums” section following the original verdict, which links directly to our roundup commentary regarding updates. Our Galaxy Pirate Adventure, Danger Alliance: Battles, and Magic Defenders articles provide some examples of the new setup.

By the way, you may notice that we’re doing a ton of hands-on previews and interviews nowadays! Landing on the front page of iFanzine isn’t hard as long as we’ve got enough hands on deck to cover most of the games that fly in. Whether you’re a big AAA studio or the little guy and want some early coverage of your game, just pop a quick email into Ruan’s inbox at [email protected] to let us know! We accept preview builds as ad hocs or via TestFlight, the latter of which makes things way easier for everyone involved. And if you’re not ready to share a playable build quite yet, we can always start with a First Look article or an interview.

Woozzle Gets Huge (But Still Environmentally Friendly) Update

The Mugeaters have more than doubled the size of Woozzle, a nicely polished puzzle game we reviewed way back in April. To go along with 75 new levels are extra obstacles, another marble color, and minor technical improvements. Woozzle was already huge when it first released, but if you’ve managed to wear out all its content since then, you’ve got a big reason to come back!

Pickpawcket Becomes Even More of a Steal

Not to be outdone, Loopycube has packed an extra set of levels and entirely brand-new features into Pickpawcket, which was already a fantastic stealth game to begin with. Of the newly introduced features, our favorite has to be that performance awards now feed back into power-ups the player can acquire between levels.

Yes, We’ll Have More of the Soup du Jour, Please

Also not to be outdone is the developer of Contre Jour, which has received 20 new levels and some new gameplay quirks since we first reviewed it. And if you loved the game’s serene piano soundtrack as much as we did, composer David Ari Leon has just made it available on iTunes!

Mighty Mouse Gets a Mighty Update

Even Munkadoo Games has jumped into this week’s intense extra level frenzy! Silly, challenging, stress relieving, and just all-around fun, Bouncy Mouse is offering ten new levels in addition to some new bells and whistles. If you’re a fan of casual action games and physics puzzlers, you pretty much owe it to yourself to try the new Lite version that released at the same time as the update!

App Store Doesn’t Update Games…Ninja Do!

Rounding out this week’s fantastic updates is Ninja Guy, the one-of-a-kind Action Adventure that’s bursting at the seams with punny one-liners. One of our complaints at release was how clunky the game’s combat system felt, but thankfully it’s gotten a little more fluid and varied this week.

It’s Almost Time for Bullet Time

Kiloo Games announced via Twitter that Bullet Time was submitted to Apple for approval this week! While you’re reading Slide To Play’s preview article, also be sure to check out our interview with the developers, and get ready to load up that mutant-piercing crossbow of yours while we wait for an official release date.

Pod Odyssey to Go Universal

That’s right, Coffee Pot Labs stopped in earlier this week to let us know that Pod Odyssey will soon be touching down on an iPhone or iPod Touch near you! No concrete word on when the Universal update will hit the App Store, but the devs tell us it’s likely to be within the next two weeks. Also, don’t forget that the art contest we reported on a few weeks ago is still running, with details on the game’s site — and there could be an iPad 2 in it for you!

Are you an iOS videogame developer or publisher with a cool update, video, or other news that you want to get out to the masses? iFanzine probably has an eye on you already, but don’t hesitate to get in touch via our Twitter feed or Contact page. We want to fill our iFriday Roundups with all your beautiful stuff!