Galaga Remix was created by Namco, and it is a brilliant remake of the original arcade game. Galaga Remix includes an updated version as well as the original 1981 Galaga. The old version of the game does allow you to reclaim a captured ship so you can have double the firepower with dual ships like in the old arcade game, however this app really shines with the updated version. The new Galaga’s graphics are much easier on the eyes, and includes new boss battles, multiple upgrades for your ship, and plenty of levels.

The rest of the review is after the break.

One feature from the old Galaga was to save a ship if it got captured, which then would give you a dual fighter, the updated Galaga takes that idea and runs with it. If your ship is captured by one of 3 different types of enemies, once you free your ship, it will give you a new ability, a different one based on which enemy captured you. You can upgrade in three different ways, a more powerful attack, a spread shot, or faster shooting. Each one of these can stack twice, or with one other ability. So, you can get yourself a fast shooting spread attack, or stack two power attacks to make a devastating super cannon. This allows you to create a total of 9 ships (3 basic upgraded ships, and 6 stacked upgraded ships).

The game gives you several different methods in order to control your ship, either with arrow buttons, a slider, or you can use the built-in accelerometers. However, due to the portrait setup of the classic Galaga, the controls are a bit harder to use due to their small size. For the updated version, since it is in landscape, the controls are much easier to use.

The only thing I could complain about is that it never is quite clear which monsters will kamikaze into you, or if they will change direction at the last moment and avoid a collision. This does keep it more true to the original, but Namco has shown they can take an old concept and make it much better, so it would be nice if they would give you a warning when you are about to get rammed by one of those buggers. Other than that, it would be nice to have some more levels, the game comes with a little over 30, but the more the merrier.

Great visuals, a good variety of gameplay, and 30+ stages, Galaga Remix is available at $5.99, so go grab it from the App Store here.

Flight Control, created by Firemint, is an addictive little game where you draw the flight paths of different aircraft to their landing strips, basically you are an air traffic controller. There are 4 different types of aircraft, a blue helicopter, a yellow Cessna type plane, and two different kinds of red jets, one being faster than the other.

The graphics are simple but clean. There isn’t any in-game music while you are directing things, and you can’t listen to music and the game sounds at the same time. The game sounds are helpful, they warn you when aircraft get close to each other, and ding whenever you land one, but if you are playing a long time it is better to listen to music. Otherwise, the game keeps track of your statistics (most likely aircraft to crash, most planes landed, last game’s planes landed) so you can see how you’ve improved.

This game could use some improvements, like a fast-forward, especially at the beginning. Every time you restart, you have to wait a long time for airplanes to show up, which makes the start of each run very slow. Otherwise, the graphics are a bit simple, a plane or helicopter landing just shows them fade away as opposed to actually landing. When there is a mid-air collision, they just blink to show they have hit each other. It would be more interesting (and a better finale to each game) if they exploded. Lastly, a few more gameplay elements would be good, like if they had clouds float over the airport to make it harder to see what is going on. However, all of these minor faults don’t hurt the game enough to avoid buying it.

Flight Control is addictive and entertaining, and it only costs $0.99, which is a great price for this game! You can pick it up from the App Store here.

WordsWorth is a fun unique game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Basically, its a combination of a solo player game of Boggle, and a ever changing word search.  Hexagonal tiles are spaced out along the board, and its your job to earn enough points to advance to the next level. It keeps getting harder, level after level, up to level 30. The game as two modes, Timed and Classic. I really preferred the classic mode, as a way to just relax and keep me busy when I had nothing else to do, since I always have my iPod Touch on me.

See more about WordsWorth, after the jump.

Overall, I really enjoyed playing WordsWorth, which was surprising because I usually dislike word games because I can never find anything. Luckily, WordsWorth has a handy scramble feature which will shuffle all of the tiles on the board. I really liked how you activated it, by shaking your iPhone, kind of like boggle. Even if you do play in a more relaxed classic mode, there are still some challenges. For example, there are timed tiles which appear every time you scrabble the board as a penalty, and also pop up as you progress through out the levels of the game. You have to be fast, and use these red tiles, because otherwise it’s game over.

The game also has other features which help keep the game interesting, like wildcards, and “buzzwords” where a random word is chosen and if you make it, you get extra points. Most of the time, the correct letter combination is not on the board, so you have to stay on the look out and selectively get rid of tiles so you can make them line up correctly, if you chose to go for it. there is no time limit or penalty for not completing buzzwords.

One thing that really annoyed me was the background music, which was pretty short (about a minute) and didn’t loop very well. So, every time the music restarted, you hear a “jump”. Luckily, you can either turn the music off in the settings, or play your own music and automatically override the background music.

I have to say, it’s great to have a game that you can always turn to, that you can always play more, and it keeps your mind active! And, even if you manage to make it to level 30, the game is completely different every time, but restarting might be a bit easy at first. It’s definitely worth the $1.99, and it’s available in the App Store (Need iTunes to view). You can also try out the “Light” version for free. The lite version only has 3 levels, and is clasic mode only, among a few other things. You can also get it in the app store.

Pros:
Ever Changing Game Play
Flex your brain
Two Game Modes

Cons:
Annoying Background music

P.S:  This game and review is real, and not an April Fools joke. Have Fun!

Time Crisis Strike is a rail-shooter, fire-and-duck game just like his arcade brothers. Your goal is to stop the evil Wild Dog from his new (unknown) plot to cause mayhem. It’s a single campaign with 3 stages totaling 23 screens, and you face off against about a half dozen different types of enemies. Controls are simple, touch where you want to shoot, tilt the iPhone forward to duck and reload, then tilt it back to stand up and continue to shoot.

This game is a lot of fun, especially because it’s Time Crisis. Its graphics are good, and the music and sounds are all great. There were no noticeable bugs or gameplay issues, the game was very well polished. They also have five unlockable “Crisis Missions”, which each challenges you to accomplish a specific task, like only shoot the yellow soldiers. Overall the Time Crisis feel of the game is great, although it does lack the light-gun and foot-pedal, it is a great port to the iPhone.

The only drawbacks to this game are that even though you have a tilt-meter for ducking, sometimes it feels like a button would be much more useful. Otherwise, the game can feel short if you only play through the arcade mode once, but honing your skill at this game can be very entertaining, plus the unlockable challenge missions, or you can challenge friend to see who can get the highest score.

Fans of Time Crisis absolutely have to get this game. Otherwise, if you just want a good rail-shooter, Time Crisis Strike is the way to go. You can pick it up from the App Store for $5.99

The iLife: First off tell us a little about yourself, where are you from and how did you get involved with designing games?

Noam Abta: Nitako was founded by me (Noam Abta) and Yuval Markovich and we are located in Rishon Le Zion, Israel.
We are both animation film makers and In the 2 years prior to starting Nitako, we were the founding team of Aniboom.com, an animation portal which is also an international animation studio. In Aniboom we were heavily involved in the product and technology, so when we decided to leave there, game design seemed like the most natural choice considering the combination of our skills and the love we had towards gaming.
It seems that with todays tools and technologies, and the increasing awareness to the fact that Indie gaming could also be profitable, more and more people like us who come from either art or technology are drawn into this line of work.

The iLife: Where did the idea for rastafarian monkeys come from?

Noam: Good question. Basically the game started out as a pretty abstract gameplay. We were fiddling with all sorts of movements you can create using physics elements (like springs for example), connecting those elements together and watching how they behave and move when gravity comes into action. In a while, different characters began to emmerge and we chose to use something that reminded us of a monkey. Since we love reggae music so much (our office band, together with our musician friend, Nimrod sarda, recorded all the music for Rasta Monkey here in our offices), we decided we want a Rastafarian theme to the game, and the idea of Rasta Monkey was first conceived.

The entire interview is after the break.

The iLife: Do you plan on updating Rasta Monkey with more levels or features, possibly as a purchasable upgrade? Maybe allow for user-created content?

Noam: We definitely will release more content to this version, and maybe also create a sequel. In fact right now we are working on our first update which will include all kinds of improvements we were asked to perform by our users. We believe that in creating a game, the art is in finding the perfect gameplay. We are doing it by using player input and making changes, to deliver the best game experience we can for the iPhone and iPod touch.

The iLife: The $1.99 price tag is just a introductory price, what do you plan on raising it to? In the future will you consider dropping the price again?

Noam: Yes, we intend to raise the price in the future, I can’t yet specify when or how much. It really all depends on the market. As to later price decrease, I’m pretty sure we will – everybody has to do it since the game gets old and you have to make it more attractive with time.

The iLife: What are your thoughts on the App Store model overall?

Noam: The Apple Store model is simply amazing! Coming from the world of internet, where we saw a lot of start ups who raised millions but had very vague business models, It’s really refreshing to see how apple gives an opportunity to small developers like ourselves make money instantly, and sometimes even a lot of money. I hope more mobile companies will try this model, which is based on sales and not just vague advertising statistics that never deliver. Also the apple model is great for improving your game, getting amazing feedback from the incredible iphone gaming communities you can find on the web. Plus the ability to post an infinite number of updates – this is most valuble for a developer who is truly comitted to creating a game that works.

The iLife: I played the Rasta Monkey demo a month or so ago on the computer, were there any features that were lost when you transfered to the iPhone/iPod?

Noam: Well we did have to simplify the game a little, in terms of the physics engine and graphics, due to the small screen size and other limitations. Other than that the game is pretty much the same game, which tells you a lot about how amazing a game platform the iPhone is.

The iLife: I’m sure you’ve heard about choppy graphics and/or game performance issues, when do you plan to patch the game? Will you be able to make the graphics more crisp without sacrificing performance?

Noam: Well, these were the first issues we started working on, and we rae fixing them right now. Yes, improving the graphics can cause performance issues, but I’m sure we can solve these issues too. I hope to release our first update in about a week from now, but I can’t tell you the exact date yet.

The iLife: Are there any other game ideas you are working on that we may get to see in the near future?

Noam: Well, we have a lot of ideas, I might say too many:) But they are very rough and we havent settled on any one idea yet, so it would also be unfair to raise any false expectations. All I can say is that we do want to raise our own bar and create an even better game, and we are checking the possibility of working with an established game publisher, in order to have more time and money to create true quality games.

The iLife: Is there anything else you would like to add or like readers to know?

Noam: Yes there is. For all of you who bought or plan to buy Rasta Monkey, Please help us continuously beta-test the game, send us all your thoughts, suggestions, frustrations but more importantly – what you DO like about the game (it’s much easier to make a game better when you improve it’s good sides) to noam@nitako.com
Jah bless!

The iLife: Thank you for your time and good luck!

Rasta Monkey is a 2D platformer where you play as a (gasp) monkey swinging in the trees trying to collect fruit to make smoothies. It uses a nice little physics engine to accomplish jumps, swings, and some puzzles. You’ll have to contend with monsters and some tricky jumps to finish each level.

The game only comes with 10 levels, two of which are tutorial levels. The levels aren’t very long, though they do have a lot of variety. Each level you are given a set amount of each type of fruit to collect. The game definitely doesn’t make it hard to collect these fruit, and a lot of the time you’ll find you’ve collected more than you needed. It never penalizes you for falling out of the trees, which is a huge relief in some of the harder areas. All it will do it set you back to your last checkpoint, which are never too far off.

The controls work surprising well. You hold the the corner of the screen where you wish to go, and hold with two fingers to swing on the branch. If you let go of both fingers at the same time you’ll jump, or you can abort the jump by letting go of one finger at a time.

The art is cartoony and colorful, which fits the game very well. The music, even though there seems to only be two songs, are catchy and, at worst, can just be turned off.

The only downsides to the game are its intermittent slow-downs and some frustrating monsters you face later on in the game. On my first generation iPod Touch when the camera zoomed out I’d occasionally run into a frame-rate drop. It wasn’t terrible, it was still playable, though it does makes the game feel buggy. Lastly, certain monsters are just plain annoying to get past. Some are big and move fast, and constantly knock you off the branches. It gets tricky, you either have to move fast and nail the jumps to avoid them, or get lucky and have the monster boot you in the right direction.

For the (currently introductory) $1.99 price tag it is definitely worth the couple days of fun you’ll get from this game. It isn’t a huge amount of content, but the actual game has a lot of variety and was put together very well.

Enigmo is a game with a simple concept – get the water/fire/oil into their respective containers. You get to use a variety of tools, like ramps, cannons, sponges, and springs to move the droplets around the level. The goal of the game is to fill up containers to their maximum of 40 drops, simultaneously,  to move on to the next level. What’s interesting is that you also have to deal with obstacles, like force-fields that you have to turn off by shooting some of your drops through a ring to shut the force field down.

There is a lot of content in this game. The game comes with 50 levels, and you can download user-generated content so you never run out of challenges. But you won’t fly too quickly through all of the original 50 levels, some are very difficult and require a lot time to figure out.

The biggest downfall of the game is that the difficulty curve isn’t gradual. At times you’ll be ready to delete the game  in frustration because it’s so hard, and you don’t want to deal with it anymore, but then the next level is a cakewalk.

For the $1.99 price tag, you could do a whole lot worse than Enigmo. The game gives you a lot of content for a small price, and when you feel like your brain needs some exercise it’s a great little game to play.

But when Apple announced its ambitious touch screen iPhone device in early 2007, many gamers hoped that Apple would break into the mobile gaming market. The device seemed to be ideal for game design, featuring a large bright screen, input in the form of a touch screen and accelerometer, a 3D acceleration chip and the ability to download games from anywhere with cellular reception. Also, by entering the market four years after the release of the Nintendo DS and the PSP, the iPhone will have a substantial technical advantage over its competition. The PSP uses a 333 MHz CPU, the DS uses two co-processers, clocked at 67 and 33 MHz, where the iPhone utilizes a 620 MHz ARM chip. The iPhone has similar advantages in terms of RAM, storage and wireless capabilites. In fact, the only thing holding the Apple device back is its less than ideal input capabilites.

After repeatedly denying that they would allow 3rd party software development for an entire year, Apple confirmed that they would open the device up to developers, subsequently causing a flood of speculation into the prospects for gaming on the device. The first demonstrations of the iPhone’s gaming abilities were promising to say the very least. At Apple’s iPhone SDK announcement in March, Apple engineers demonstrated the capabilities of the platform with their internally developed game titled Touch Fighter, a Rouge Squadron/StarFox like flight combat sim. The game utilized the touch screen for aiming/shooting, the accelerometer for direction, and was fully 3D, even utilizing the OpenAL API to perform a limited 3D sound function. Mega-publisher EA, who had previously committed to develop more games for the Mac platform, demonstrated a mobile version of the first stage of its upcoming Spore franchise. And Sega showed off a build of Super Monkey Ball, making good use of the accelerometer, a control scheme that had gained much acclaim on the Nintendo Wii system. Apple and the other developers that had time with the SDK claimed that some of these applications, such as SMB had been developed in a period as short as just two weeks. The demonstration was a success; anticipation for iPhone games became frenzied.

During the past week at WWDC, iPhone gaming came back into the spotlight. Apple demonstrated numerous games, including additions from Pangaea Software in the form of two ports: the puzzle game Enigmo, and a port of its cult classic title Cro-Mag Rally. Moo Cow Music presented a suite of instrument simulations in an application called Band, featuring a virtual drum set, guitar, bass, keyboard and multi-function blues simulator. Band also allows for a number of recording features and the ability to combine tracks from multiple recordings, putting it several steps ahead of more casual games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

But the real test will come once developers start to push the iPhone 2.0 platform into the same arena as the DS and PSP game systems. Vying for the hardcore gamer market is not something that any mobile phone system has been successful in doing as of yet, despite the efforts of Nokia’s N-Gage platform. Enter Digital Legends Entertainment, formerly one of the few N-Gage exclusive developers. Their entry into the iPhone foray is the platform exclusive Kroll, a third person sidescroller title that bears some resemblance to God of War, to which the developer has compared Kroll to.

Resting the fate of the iPhone’s hardcore gaming potential on an untried N-Gage developer isn’t exactly fair however. To fill that niche steps in John Carmack of iD, who has promised that his studio will create an iPhone title. As of now, no commercial titles have been confirmed, but several videos have popped up of Doom 3/Doom Arena running on iPhone hardware. As if that wasn’t enough, a multi-player, networked version has also been demonstrated. There’s no question that the level of graphical prowess is rapidly approaching that of mainstream mobile game systems, but whether or not the iPhone can successfully emulate the gameplay of a dedicated gaming device remains to be seen.

Apple has a real chance to get gaming right this time around, let’s only hope they have what it takes. If you liked this article and would like to read more about iPhone gaming, check out our guide of upcoming iPhone games.

EA – Spore

SEGA – Super Monkey Ball

Pangaea – Enigmo and Cro-Mag Rally

GameLoft – Multiple

Int13 – Crazy Cart 2

iD – Doom 3, Doom Arena

Digital Legends Entertainment – Kroll

PopCap Games – Bejeweled, Zuma and Peggle

Namco – PacMan

IG Fun – Re-Volt and BioShock

This list was compiled through research on the internet. As we uncover more information, we will bring it to you. However, if you know of a developer or game we missed, or would like to tell us more about your game, please contact us!