HauntedHallow
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Some excellent new games on the App Store right now
Apple traditionally releases big new apps all together on Thursday, and this week there's an exceptionally good slate of releases arriving, including some games we've been waiting on for a while. As expected, Angry Birds Friends has arrived, and it's a social take on the popular Angry Birds series. You can get it for free. Eclipse is a spectacular (if a little complicated) take on the award-winning board game, available for US$6.99. We'll have more on this one as a Daily iPad App later today. Firaxis' Haunted Hollow is now officially out, and it's just plain great. Free-to-play, deep (but accessible) strategy from one of the best game developers around. This one is a must-download. Wizard Ops Tactics is a free-to-play tactical strategy version of the Wizard Ops shooter that released a while back. The Kickstarter-fueled Star Command is now available for $2.99. It looks good, but the game has gotten some flak for not quite fulfilling all of its promises to Kickstarter backers. The interactive book/RPG that is Steve Jackson's Sorcery! has finally arrived as well. It's a nice bit of nostalgia, and you can grab it for $4.99. There are even more new releases on the App Store, but those are the big ones. Some of those, like Haunted Hollow especially, I've been waiting to play since GDC this year. And now they're all out -- go get 'em!
Firaxis' Haunted Hollow appears on, disappears from the App Store
There's good news, bad news, and the best news on this one, and I'll give you the good news first. Firaxis' Haunted Hallow appeared on the App Store this morning, which means the game is just about ready for prime time. The free-to-play strategy title was one of my favorite games I got to see at GDC a few months ago. It's a board game, basically, in that you move various monsters around a board trying to claim and conquer space as best you can, though there's a fun house-building mechanic as well, in the way you choose which monsters to summon and fight for you. Firaxis, the creators of Civilization and the recent hit XCOM: Enemy Unknown, are some of the most experienced strategy developers out there, and Haunted Hallow is a free-to-play gift from them straight to the App Store, so it's great to see the game is almost done. The bad news, however, is that while I was writing this post to let you know the game was out, the title has disappeared from the US App Store. It is still available on the New Zealand App Store, so if you want to change your country to download the app from there, you can do that. But presumably this means the app wasn't supposed to be live on the US Store yet, so either there's more testing to be done, or we'll have to wait until this evening, as new App Store titles go official across the world. The best news is that Haunted Hallow is just the beginning. Firaxis has also announced that it's porting XCOM to the iPad in the future, and there are some other, not-yet-announced exciting strategy titles on the way as well. Firaxis has some great things planned for iOS, and this game is only the first. At any rate, Haunted Hallow is almost ready, and that's worth getting excited about. It's free to play (you get a certain number of monsters to start with, and you'll be able to buy more via in-app purchase), so whenever it is ready to download in your region, it'll be a must grab for sure. Update: 2K has confirmed that this was an accidental release. The game will be available worldwide next Thursday, May 2. So we just have a short wait until then!
