Game Topz (gamtopz@gmail.com)

Welcome to the SwitchArcade Roundup for July 31st, 2018! Let’s close out the month of July in style with your daily dose of news, impressions, new releases, and sales just like we always do here at the Roundup. This time around I have impressions to share regarding the first Mega Man X Legacy Collection, but before diving into those, let’s take a look at our Game of the Day. Game of the Day FAST RMX ($19.99) We’re starting off in a futuristic direction for the SwitchArcade Roundup today. For years, Nintendo fans have loudly clamored for some more F-Zero , but their vocal support of a new entry in the series has fallen on deaf ears (or in Internet text form, blind eyes). While only vaguely similar to Nintendo’s futuristic racing franchise, FAST RMX from the mighty tech wizards at Shin’en manages to develop  a blisteringly quick and exciting racer that might just scratch that racing itch that F-Zero fans have missed. FAST RMX is pure racing without the use of weapons. It’s a...

When it comes to mobile gaming there are generally two camps that games fall into. We have the games that are absolutely great for dipping into when standing in line at the market and then we have the games that take hours from you in a similar vein to some of the very best console or PC games. It’s rare that you find a game that somehow manages to straddle the two camps, but in Pocket City ($4.99) we have a shining example of exactly that. This is a game that you can play in small stints but also settle down with, falling into a world other than your own. Pocket City is responsible for me going to sleep two hours later than I should have this past weekend. It’s that good. You don’t need to be a gaming fanatic to be familiar with the Sim City franchise and it is absolutely fair to say that Pocket City borrows heavily from those games. In all fairness it’s fairly difficult to create a city building game without it being compared to the game that arguably started it all, and in that...

Last year Shallot Games released Vista Golf (Free) , a stylish and minimalist mini-golfing game that you could play with just one hand. Besides having an endless mode, its biggest selling point was how it would rotate in three new 18-hole courses each week, making it a nice competitive game as players would jockey for positioning on the weekly leaderboards. Now Shallot is taking that competitive aspect and expanding on it in a follow-up title called Vista Golf Rivals . Here you’ll be able to compete with other players in asynchronous matches using the same intuitive one-handed controls of the original Vista Golf . It will also include the Skillz platform functionality built in so if you’re feeling especially confident you’ll be able to run tournaments and make real money wagers against opponents, though there’s a virtual currency system in place too if betting actual money isn’t your thing. Also Vista Golf Rivals will feature some new environments over its predecessor, which you can ...

One of the best ways you can support TouchArcade is by doing your Amazon shopping through a TouchArcade affiliate link . We’ve set up the easy to remember toucharcade.com/amazon too if you want to type that in or bookmark it. We get a small percentage of anything you buy through any of these links, which otherwise would just go to financing Jeff Bezos’s Dippin’ Dots R&D or whatever else he’s up to now, and it goes a long way to supporting the site at no additional cost to you. These Amazon Items of the Day articles are all products we have used ourselves, and feel are things that the TouchArcade audience might be interested in! I’ve been pretty wishy washy on Apple Watch charger stands, as most of them seem weirdly expensive and honestly don’t provide a ton of functionality that your normal Apple Watch charging cable doesn’t also provide. That is, until I discovered the Elago W3 Vintage Mac Apple Watch Charging Stand . Like most (all?) other Apple Watch charging stands, you ta...

Pocket City ($4.99) is a game we’ve been following for quite a while now, and a game we’ve wanted on our iPhones for far longer- before it was announced, even. I can’t even guess how many times we’ve talked about how great it would be to have a proper Sim City game on the App Store around the TouchArcade water cooler for … ages. Sure, there’s Sim City Build It (Free) , but that’s about as much of a Sim City game as Dungeon Keeper (Free) is a Dungeon Keeper game. Sure, it looks kinda sorta similar, and if you cross your eyes hard enough is sort of based on similar concepts… But if you wanted Dungeon Keeper or Sim City , those are like getting the cheapest store brand ice cream when you were looking for some Ben and Jerry’s. Pocket City is the game we’ve been waiting for. We’ll have a full review out soon, but between the above trailer and folks loving the game in our forums , I’d say this is a very safe day one purchase. Additionally, if you were among the group of people f...

Annapurna Interactive has been on my radar not just on iOS but in general ever since What Remains of Edith Finch was announced to be published by them. They’ve done some fantastic stuff across platforms but the output on iOS so far has been stellar. I’m still shocked that they managed getting the Sony owned Flower . Florence is probably my favourite game they have published by far. Ben Esposito (What Remains of Edith Finch, The Unfinished Swan) developed Donut County in his free time during the development of The Unfinished Swan . This is a game about being a hole so watch the trailer for it below: You play as BK, a raccoon who swallows up his friends to earn prizes. Donut County is a story driven physics based puzzle game. Your aim is to explore various homes and move the hole to swallow things up. There’s no stopping this hole in Donut County . Annapurna Interactive was teasing some Donut County news last night and the game had no release date outside of “2018" until now...

Back in early March, developer Kimmo Lahtinen aka Gimblll announced a new hack ‘n slash game called Barbearian , and it looked awesome. It features a bear who is also a barbarian (hence the game’s title) who is transported to a strange world, and his only chance for returning home is to master the art of combat and absolutely destroy everything in his path. Barbearian features an isometric perspective and enemies who attack in droves, creating an almost overwhelming amount of mayhem. Oh, and did I mention you play as a BEAR who is a BARBARIAN and that the game is called BARBEARIAN ? That is a major selling point to me. Anyway, over the weekend Gimblll announced that Barbearian is all set to launch on August 15th, and recently created a new trailer showing all that mayhem in action. As the developer notes in our forums , Barbearian will be a premium game priced at $8.99 and for those who aren’t big fans of touchscreen controls it’ll support MFi controllers. In case you were not ...

I was just shy of five years old when the Chernonobyl disaster took place in 1986, so I remember it being a major news story of the time but never really thought much of it since. Then when Call of Duty 4 came out in 2007 and featured a level that took place in the city where the Chernobyl power plant was located, I found it totally fascinating to wander around a digital representation of that world, and it got me interested in learning more about what happened all those years earlier. Chernobyl is in Pripyat, Ukraine, and initially after the explosion at the nuclear power plant the government evacuated the city on what was supposed to be a temporary basis, just a few days at most. That turned into a permanent evacuation, which meant that the nearly 50,000 people who lived there ended up leaving all most all of their possessions behind, thinking they’d be coming back. This created a unique situation where there’s an entire city where it appears everyone just up and vanished one day, an...

Arena of Valor (Free) has been a strange game for us here at TouchArcade, as when it comes to the Chinese version, Tencent could likely take a page out of John Lennon’s playbook an accurately say that Honor of Kings is bigger than Jesus. ( Honor of Kings being the Chinese iteration of Arena of Valor .) In the North American market, however, it seems Arena of Valor is still struggling to find its stride. Our community of hardcore iOS gamers love complex games like Arena of Valor , while the rest of North America focuses on far more casual titles. In a sense, it’s a fascinating cultural phenomenon as in the USA, it’s super common for gamers to have a current-generation console or two, and maybe even a gaming PC which likely serves their gaming needs fully- Even though they might have an iPhone X or high-end Android phone in their pocket. In Asia, if you’re gaming, you’re doing it on your smartphone, full stop. In a way, it feels like Tencent is playing the long game on the North Am...

Earlier this month we shared the trailer for an upcoming platforming game called Dribble! from developer WojWorks. It’s a game that’s been in the works for quite some time and is built from the ground up for the touchscreen, utilizing a swiping system to move your bouncing character around the game’s colorful environments. Expanding on that core idea of swiping and bouncing are the game’s levels which all feature various elements to spice up the gameplay, and you could see a bit of this in that initial trailer but due to it being a montage it was hard to grasp just what some of those extra elements were. So WojWorks has recently released four new videos of Dribble! that each take a brief, uninterrupted trek through a different level in the game and show a little more closely what some of the special environmental aspects are. Check ’em out. As you can see in that first video for the level Loony Land, things are pretty tame with bounce pad areas allowing you to jump even hig...

Finally, playing with a digital dog can help save a real one! Blue Goji, a wellness technology company from Austin, Texas, has announced its upcoming augmented reality (AR) game, Furiends . It has also announced that a portion of proceeds from the free-to-play title’s in-app purchases will be donated to a local no-kill animal shelter, Austin Pets Alive! Furiends allows users to bring their dog with them, anytime and anywhere. The idea is that the AR allows you to be more connected to your virtual pup. The employees at Blue Goji often bring their own dogs to the office, so they understand the benefit of having that connection – but without the time, money, and energy required for a living pet. The goal in Furiends is to take good care of your virtual dog. That means walking them, playing with them, feeding them, tummy rubs… the same things you’d expect to do to properly care for a real dog. The game has a step-tracking feature at its core: the more you walk, the more Fur-coins you’...

Hello everyone, and welcome to the week! It’s time once again for our look back at the noteworthy updates of the last seven days. Today is my birthday! So please be kind if I didn’t catch a cool update or something like that. I am full of pizza, happiness, and cake at the moment. Nevertheless, I found some nifty updates you’ll want to check out. Of course, you can keep an eye out for updates yourself using AppShopper or by participating in the TouchArcade forums. This weekly summary is just here to fill you in on the things you might have missed. If you’re a developer with a cool update you’d like to see here, get in touch! With that said, let’s dig in! Choice of Games , Free If there’s an update for Choice of Games , it probably means there’s a new game to play. And what do you know? That’s the case here! The new gamebook is titled Werewolves: Haven Rising , and it’s a 285,000-word tale that puts you in the furry feet of a werewolf who is being confined and used by the government...

One of the best ways you can support TouchArcade is by doing your Amazon shopping through a TouchArcade affiliate link . We’ve set up the easy to remember toucharcade.com/amazon too if you want to type that in or bookmark it. We get a small percentage of anything you buy through any of these links, which otherwise would just go to financing Jeff Bezos’s cyborg crime fighters or whatever else he’s up to now, and it goes a long way to supporting the site at no additional cost to you. These Amazon Items of the Day articles are all products we have used ourselves, and feel are things that the TouchArcade audience might be interested in! I originally bought the Tryone Gooseneck Tablet Stand for a weirdly specific purpose: To play the Nintendo Switch while I exercised on my elliptical machine. I’ve got a junky hand-me-down elliptical I got for free that I use every day, which is fine for exercising but the thing was made before exercise equipment manufacturers started considering peopl...

Sony’s Arc the Lad franchise debuted in Japan back in 1995 on the original PlayStation and it is coming to Mobile 23 years later. Sony announced ForwardWorks to bring some of its IP and some third party IP in Japan to iOS and Android. We already know how the Wild Arms game will be and today, the teams at ForwardWorks and altplus have revealed Arc the Lad R for iOS and Android in Japan. It looks like the development team consists of the core staff who made the first two PlayStation entries in the 90s and will be set 10 years after the events of Arc the Lad II . Watch the original announcement trailer for it below: Arc the Lad R is an RPG for smartphones and it will feature strategic battles. As with most announcements for mobile RPGs in Japan, pre-registration is now live and you can pre-register for iOS or Android here. The team has also put up the full website for the game including character details and story details (albeit all in Japanese). It looks like you will need iOS...

The idea behind the TouchArcade Game of the Week is that every Friday afternoon we post the one game that came out this week that we think is worth giving a special nod to. Now, before anyone goes over-thinking this, it doesn’t necessarily mean our Game of the Week pick is the highest scoring game in a review, the game with the best graphics, or really any other quantifiable “best" thing. Instead, it’s more just us picking out the single game out of the week’s releases that we think is the most noteworthy, surprising, interesting, or really any other hard to describe quality that makes it worth having if you were just going to pick up one . These picks might be controversial, and that’s OK. If you disagree with what we’ve chosen, let’s try to use the comments of these articles to have conversations about what game is your game of the week and why . Without further ado…   Super Starfish I always love when I’m not expecting too much from a game but it ends up knocking my sock...

Welcome to the twelfth Arena of Valor Weekly Roundup! Can you believe it’s been three months already? With a new hero showing up to play every 2 weeks on average, this week isn’t a big one for those not interested in competitive play. But for those who are? The AWC finals start today! For e veryone else, there’s new Swag Sunday details, a new skin promotion that’s already throwing out freebies, and a Summe r Bash skin animation that’s not quite as cringe-inducing as the last. Let’s get to it. The Arena of Valor World Cup Finals Kick Off Today With the massive Esports focus across Arena of Valor lately and all the stuff we’ve had to cover in the roundups week after week, we hope you’ve been paying attention to the AWC – which is about to enter its final two days. After 5 days of competition during the AWC Group Stage competition in Los Angeles last week, 4 teams managed to fight hard for their place in this week’s semi-final. North America, while lasting much longer than Europe ...

Welcome to the SwitchArcade Roundup for July 27th, 2018. This is your destination for all Switch news, new releases, and sales neatly and nicely rounded up for your reading (and occasionally watching) pleasure. There might not be a lot of news today in the Roundup, but what’s here is pretty hefty! There are two new game announcements, a welcomed updated to a colorful platformer starring a character with an insatiable appetite, and even some sales for our European friends! Before we get into all that awesomeness, let’s dive right into Friday’s Game of the Day! Game of the Day Infinite Minigolf ($14.99) It’s summer–the perfect time to go out and play some miniature golf with your friends and/or family. But screw that! It’s way too hot outside! So, instead, why not stay in and play some virtual minigolf with Zen Studios’ Infinite Minigolf . The “Infinite" in Infinite Minigolf originates from the ability to create, share, and download your own/other folks’ custom holes online, th...