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TouchDown - Issue 3

By Nigel Wood, UK
for www.touchgen.com

Published: November 30, 2009

As well as a run down of the week’s news, we get hands-on at Gameloft’s London pad with GT Racing, Avatar, Driver and the game everyone has been waiting for… NOVA! Other games covered in this issue include Ace Combat, Astro Ranch, Big Brain Of Fire, Ceville, Chronicles of inotia, Delicious Vinyl DJ, Low grav racer, Mission: Deep Sea, Seed, and The Infinity Project…

Gameloft visit

GT Racing Hands-on

GT Racing is Gameloft’s answer to Project Gotham Racing (PGR), allowing you to drive the worlds greatest performance cars around real world tracks. The usual suspects are all there from Lamborghini’s to Audi’s, and Ferrari’s to Nissan Skylines… plus you’ll be speeding round the big cities and well known tracks around the world.

The game allows you to get straight in the driving seat with arcade mode, or earn your way to glory through the career mode. Career mode is the main bulk of the game, giving you a map like overview of your racing career, beginning with the obvious place to start a driving game… the dealership! Here you can view the range of manufacturers and models, spin them around in 3D shiny glory, and even take a snapshot PGR style. Like PGR all but a few cars from each manufacturer are available from the off, requiring you instead to partake in races and challenges to earn money to purchase more cars for your garage. The car models look great, rivalling those of Real Racing, and Gameloft’s own Asphalt 5.

Out on the track things look equally as good. This isn’t all garish and arcadey like Asphalt, everything has a more subdued hue to it, for a more sim like realism. The in car view is particularly nice with well rendered cockpits for each car. For controls you have the usual options of tilt; buttons; touch wheel; auto gears, auto brakes, auto gas, as well as the ability to turn all assists off. In a nod to Forza the game includes on-track guides, helping you gauge the breaking and keep on the racing line, again these can be turned off, but are vital in the early stages of learning to handle the car. On the subject of handling, I found the cars to be very sensitive, more so than Real Racing and miles away from Asphalt. This isn’t a bad thing of course as realism is the key. With all assists on it’s no problem, but play the way it’s intended and you’ll have a good challenge ahead.

Avatar

Those who listen to our podcast may remember that I had a very early hands-on with this game a few months back. I literally had a few minutes, which included dispatching a foe and running up a tree. Today I had a little more time to play, and was surprised how engrossing the world of Pandora felt on the small touchscreen. Played as an action platformer, you play as Ryan, the game’s lead, a marine who enrolls in the Avatar program, allowing you to control an alien body to infiltrate the locals of a world know as Pandora. The story takes place two decades before the movie, and over 16 levels tells the story of the first Avatar. It’s presented in full 3D, but the camera is on auto, shooting the best angle to allow you to see what’s ahead and navigate the vertical and horizontal challenges that await. This allows you to concentrate on controlling Jake in his Avatar form. Much like Gameloft’s Assassin’s creed, context sensitive buttons change and alert you to actions such as jumping, climbing, and activating levers and general object interaction. The controls, complete with virtual analogue stick, felt very fluid and intuitive, allowing for great movement and firing ability…. and it’s good to see a high level of effort put into licensed movie tie-ins such as this.

Look for Avatar to hit the Appstore on december 15th.

Driver

Based on the PS1 original, Driver is built from the ground up for iPhone and iPod Touch, using what looks to be the same 3D engine used for Gangstar. I had a quick play of the main story, as well as play on the bonus pursuit mode. Anyone who played the original, will remember how it was the first 3D ‘go anywhere’ sandbox style game, way before GTA 3 on PS2. It runs very well on iPhone, particulary with accelerometer controls, allowing you easy access to the handbrake for those all important tight turns to escape the law. Graphically it looks a lot better than the PS1 original, with detailed car models and buildings and their textures. There seemed to be less environment pop-in in the distance than Gangstar had, and overall the framerate was smoother. The game features GTA style radio stations and music, and like most Gameloft games, you can play your own from your iPod playlists. One downside to this port, is the lack of the director mode. This allowed you to replay your free-ride sessions, and do basic cuts and camera edits to piece together a Heat movie-like car chase. It was a great addition to the original game, however, newcomers won’t miss it, as the the main game is still great, though later sequels didn’t fair so well.

NOVA

Halo meets Metroid in this upcoming FPS actioner from Gameloft… Our hands-on impressions, plus 10 minutes of in-game video await your viewing pleasure… read more

Watch ten minutes of in-game footage below:

The week’s news

Get low!

Cobra mobile shared with us a preview build of Low Gav Racer 2, the sequel to their Wipeout style racer of the same name. You can catch our original review here:

The new game features improved graphics and sound, 18 more tracks (as opposed to the original 12) and six class of ship. To me it’s as close as youa re going to get to F-Zero X on the iPhone, with it’s great sense of speed and twitch handling. Unfortunately, while it does feature Plus+ for online leaderboards and achievments, it doesn’t feature multiplayer, which is a damn shame. Check out footage of the game in action:

Inotia 2

Com3uS have announced that the sequel to their hit RPG game series ‘Chronicles of Inotia’ has been submitted to Apple. ‘Chronicles of Inotia: A Wanderer of Luone’ is due to hit the App Store mid-December and promises to be one of the best role-playing games on the App Store.

Key features include:
• Over 200 Single player quests.
• Match up Mode:Endless online battles against other players on our server.
• Classes:Choose from 5 classes. Knight, Magician, Priest, Thief, Templar.
• Party System: Ally with up to 2 mercenaries which can be customized by the user.
• Look System: Change your character appearance with each new armor you equip.
• Controls: Choose between Touch Screen controls or V-Pad.
• Online Ranking: Post your best character’s rank through our online ranking system
• Upgraded Armory: Hundreds of equipment and weapons to upgrade and enchant.
• Class Uniqueness:Each class offers a different experience and strategy.
• Skills: Each class has 12 skills that can be upgraded according to the user.

Ace Combat screenshots galore

Not to be outdone with Gameloft’s announcement of HAWX (which we also played this week) Namco have released a slew of screenshots for Ace Combat Xi. Click on the thumbnails below to view:

Music on the brain

This unique looking music game/app caught my eye. Big Brain Of Fire is a new music game, where you can play whatever you want on drums, guitar and even
a whole octave of vocals.

Every instrument has its own control scheme and features high quality sound. The game includes a classic tour mode in which you can practice your skills and gather points.
Complete the tour mode to unlock jam session, where you can free style whenever you like.

Features include: (developers wording)
- Great songs, beautiful and stylish, full 3D environment
- Original and funny scenario
- 2 instruments to play on and a vocalist to master
- Tutorial for every instrument
- 3 types of difficulty
- 2 types of gameplay: tour and jam session (free style), where BBoF really shines!

While this might not seem that original as whole, the unique visual style it’s presented in certainly is, check out the trailer below:

Big Brain of Fire is out now for $0.99/59p

Ceville is coming

Publisher Kalypso Media are releasing Ceville. The game is an arcade version of the hit PC adventure of the same name. The two main characters, Ceville and Lilly, are tasked with achieving the highest scores across three levels of arcade action. Graphically very close to the PC title, the iPhone version also features the original game music and voice-overs , which will be available in both English and German languages.

Stefan Marcinek, Global Managing Director Kalypso Media Group adds: “The iPhone and iPod Touch gaming market allows us to connect with a whole new audience and adds to our ever growing portfolio. If successful, further releases based on Kalypso brands could be released next year.”

Scratch your iPhone…. in a good way!

Delicious Vinyl and Ten23 Software have released Delicious Vinyl DJ, a new music rhythm game for the iPhone and iPod touch. The game puts you behind the decks, cutting and scratching across the golden era hip-hop. Like most music games you must match multi-colored notes as they flow down the screen by triggering scratches on two turntables with a thumb twist, or tap of a button on the mixer.

Features include: (developers wording)

• Scratch and trigger samples using two touch turntables and a mixer
• First iPhone DJ game with actual scratching movements
• Be a DJ - don’t just drop the track, add to it and make it yours! For more than just tapping!
• Listen for the groove, if you don’t spin or sample correctly, the scratches and samples won’t sound fresh!
• DVDJ features hit songs from Delicious Vinyl – three Platinum selling #1 singles, block rocking remixes, and classic Hip Hop hits!
• Each track features 3 levels of difficulty per song
• Custom scratches made for each track by DJ M-WALK
• New songs and downloadable content coming soon!

Song list:
• Young MC, “Bust A Move”
• Tone Loc, “Funky Cold Medina”
• Tone Loc, “Wild Thing (Peaches RMX)”
• The Pharcyde, “Passin’ Me By”
• Masta Ace, “Born To Roll”
• Mr. Vegas (feat. Pitbull & Lil’Jon), “Pull Up (Club Mix)”
• Masta Ace, “Slaughtahouse (Eminem RMX)”

Delicious Vinyl is out now for $2.99/£1.79

Timeline to Infinity

Back in August we showed video of Crazy Robot Game’s FPS ‘Timeline’, well after some extensive beta testing and a new change to ‘The Infinity Project’, they have released a new video:

Go deep!

Chillingo have released details of a new game recently submitted to Apple, that sees you in control of a sea turtle. Control is via swiping left or right on the turtles flippers to get him swimming as you navigate the sea in search of treasures. Check out the trailer for Mission: Deep Sea below:

Plant the seed

More from Chillingo, this time in game footage of their upcoming RPG ‘Seed’, check it out:

Space farming and dance off

Tag Games have announced that they will be publishing their first third party game. B-Boy Brawl is a rhythm, action and battle game, and features a unique control method that allows players to ‘finger break’ for the first time, street style visuals, various crews to ‘battle’ and loads of hip hop.

Paul Farley, Managing Director of Tag Games, said, “since we demonstrated how effective our marketing efforts could be with the launch of Car Jack Streets earlier in the year, the telephone hasn’t stopped ringing with iPhone developers interested in Tag publishing their content. Given our understanding and success in delivering games to the App Store it was therefore inevitable that we would eventually take the plunge into publishing external content. ”

Also in TAG news, we’ve been playing the closed beta of their Animal Crossing style game ‘Astro Ranch’. We can’t reveal too much yet, so stay tuned for a full hands-on later in December.

Until then, check out this spy shot of the game

That’s it for the news this week. Don’t forget to check the site for our hands-on impressions of NOVA on Tuesday, and keep your eyes peeled to our reviews over the last week including reviews of Rogue Planet, A.D.D, Piyo Blocks, Enviro Bear and Star Wars trench run.

Finally, if you want to win a Red Bull Hoodie, Cap and T-shirt, click here

Remember to follow us on Twitter @TouchGEN

Review disclosure: Any games reviewed on this page may have been provided to us by the developer for the purposes of this review. Note: the resulting review score is never impeded by this fact, all opinions are that of the TouchGen reviewer and not the developer. This is in keeping with our O.A.T.S oath. Read more about O.A.T.S here