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Weekend App Store sales: Crescent Moon, EA, King of Fighters, more
There's no holiday this weekend, but there are some great app sales floating around. Here's some to look out for. Steam is wrapping up its annual summer sale soon, and while most of the offerings are PC only (which you can still play by Boot Camping over to Windows) there are a few titles in there that are Mac-compatible as well. Crescent Moon Games is having a big sale, featuring titles like Paper Monsters and Pocket RPG at rock-bottom prices. EA is having a big sale as well, featuring lots of its "winningest" titles for just 99 cents. Burnout Crash and FIFA are both included, among others. SNK's King of Fighters -i- is just 99 cents. The wild-looking Tentacle Wars HD is only 99 cents to celebrate the iPhone launch. Ubisoft's MotoHeroz (both standard and HD versions) is free again. Containment: The Zombie Puzzler is also just a buck. So it's not exactly a huge weekend of sales, but there are more than a few good games in there to pick up if you haven't yet.
TUAW's Daily iPad App: Pocket RPG
Crescent Moon Games made the excellent Aralon for iOS in the past, and that was a full-fledged RPG, featuring a whole world to explore and lots of gear to collect and quests to complete. Now, the company's gone back to the fantasy well to deliver another hack-and-slash style RPG game, though this one is a little simpler (and a little more focused on just the dungeons). Pocket RPG is exactly what it sounds like: A colorful dungeon-crawler with three classes, a fun and slick style and some great dual-stick gameplay. If there's an issue with this one, it's probably that things are a little too simple. Each level is its own contained world, which means you're leveling up what's basically a separate character in each. Gameplay itself is pretty mindless, too -- there are a few special encounters to break things up, but you're pretty much just using a few different abilities over and over against the enemy hordes. Still, Pocket RPG is plenty of fun, and the game's being updated steadily with new features (not to mention that it comes with full Game Center integration, and it looks particularly great on the iPad). Right now, the title's on sale for just US $4.99, and if you enjoy plumbing through dungeons of all kinds (and come on, who doesn't?), it's an excellent experience.
TUAW's Daily iOS App: Gears
Crescent Moon Games is the developer behind popular iOS titles like Aralon and Ravensword, and it's returned to the platform recently with a new game called Gears. This is a sphere rolling game in the vein of the old Marble Madness, though as you can see from the screenshot above, we've come a long way since that first isometric title. In Gears, you use a finger (or the tilt controls, though those don't work quite as precisely) to roll a ball around on your iPhone or iPad, guiding it through a series of obstacles of different types. As you might expect, gameplay's simple to pick up, but complexity gets added in later on with more mechanics and tougher levels. There are 27 different levels to play through, with undoubtedly more to come. While the app is a universal build, there are actually a few different graphical settings so that you can run it faster on an older device or make it look really great on a newer one. Game Center leaderboard integration is included, so Gears turns out to be a quality title wrapped in a very feature-rich package. Gears is at an introductory price of just US$0.99 as of this writing, and at that price, it's highly recommended. Crescent Moon has already shown that it can create really in-depth RPG titles, but with Gears, the company proves it can bring that polish to smaller titles, too.
