I have longed for World of Goo for the iPhone and then the iPad for literally years now. Hard to believe it’s been that long. The model of the game has just seemed perfect for a touch interface. Having played through the game three times on three different platforms (Wii, PC, Mac), I just wanted more. My PC is packed up. It’s loaded down with so much anti-virus software it can hardly be used anymore. My Wii has, like most Wii consoles, an inch of dust on top of it. And my Mac, well when I sit down at my Mac I see I have 1,000 unanswered emails. Makes me feel too guilty to play World of Goo anymore. I want it on my new cool device of choice, the iPad!

Well that day has finally come. 2DBoy were kind enough to send us a final build of the World of Goo for the iPad. And I’m in heaven. I had to stop playing long enough to finish this preview, but after this is done, I’m right back to it.

World of Goo for the iPad is the full game that you know and love. But what about if you’ve been living under a rock. What is the game about? Well, it’s a physics based puzzle game. One where you build structures out of these interconnected goo balls.

You start out not really knowing what the story is. You are just presented with a silhouetted world, the World of Goo. On the first level of Chapter 1 you are presented with a simple structure and a few goo balls roaming around. Your task is to help these goo balls escape via a vacuum tube at the top of the screen. To do this, you need to build a structure by dragging these balls, making connecting points, and thereby building structures that the free roaming goo balls can travel on.

Sounds harder to understand than it really is. It’s pretty easy to get a handle on once you have played a couple levels. Take a look at the following video and it will all make sense.

Seems simple enough, right? The difficulty does ramp up considerably. And alone the multiple chapters and levels you’ll encounter new types of goo balls. Some float, some are rubbery. All produce new challenges.

For a little background on the game, take a look at this promo video produced by the filmmakers behind Indie Game: The Movie, an in production movie about indie game developers.

World of Goo has something so many games are missing, personality, finish. It’s a great game, and it’s great to finally have it on the iPad. World of Goo in all it’s gooey glory releases on December 16th for the iPad at $9.99.

[ Hands-on Preview: World of Goo – Coming to iPad December 16th! is a post from 148Apps ]

With “Black Friday” well in the past, this is that magical time of year when developers start looking towards the upcoming rush of new holiday iOS device purchasers and ready themselves with some of their premier releases.  Gameloft is no exception to rule, letting slip three of their exciting new titles, which include a couple of sequels and one newly premiering franchise.  So without further ado, lets dig into the details, shall we?

NOVA 2

Acting as a direct sequel to last year’s Near Orbital Vanguard Alliance, or NOVA for short, NOVA 2 takes place six years after the original’s events.  Humankind is now in the midst of an extreme civil war, which as you can imagine leads to the introduction of interesting new alliances being made and several new factions emerging.  They have released several new pieces of concept art that can be seen in the gallery below.  These can help give players a glimpse at what they can expect to see when the game releases at some point in December.

Shadow Guardian

Obviously following in the footstep of the tremendously successful PlayStation 3 release Uncharted, Shadow Guardian places players directly into a treasure hunt of the historical variety, looking for a centuries old relic that has been lost for over one thousand years.  Players will be running, jumping, shooting and exploring their way through a wide variety of different stages, all of which look absolutely stunning in the screen shots and trailer that you can see below.  You can look forward to this bad boy landing in the App Store “very soon.”

Asphalt 6: Adrenaline

What would a holiday season be without a trip back to the well of racing games on iOS?  Marking their sixth (yes, that was not a typo) entry in the Asphalt series, Gameloft has gone out and licensed some of the biggest names in automobiles, to help better flesh out their vehicle roster.  More information on that lineup should be coming very soon, but in the meantime, why not check out the teaser trailer and screen shots in the gallery?  This should be burning rubber soon, with a release date set for sometime in December.

[ Gameloft Debuts Upcoming Lineup is a post from 148Apps ]

World of Goo could be considered the poster child for the Indie game movement. The game caused a bit of a wave in the game industry at a time when copy protection was getting insane and prices even more insane. It was a fully formed, professionally developed game released for just $20 without any copy protection whatsoever – and it became a hit.

If you are unfamiliar with the game, it’s a physics builder / puzzle game where the goal is to use the cute bouncy Goo balls to build a structure to allow them to escape. It’s elegant, well designed, and very engrossing. So engrossing that I’ve now bought 4 different copies of World of Goo and played through it on 3 different platforms. Yeah, it’s that good.

But World of Goo is no spring chicken. It’s been around for a few years now, yet it seems as though the iPad is a perfect fir for it. Touch makes a perfect control mechanism to control the Goo balls and the platform is large enough now that not having World of Goo available just seemed wrong. As early as late last year, the developers of 2DBoy had told us they were working in it. We find out today that it’s finally been completed and submitted to Apple for approval. We should have it really soon now.

Take a look here at a couple of the first screen shots of the game from the 2DBoy blog.

We’ll let you know as soon as we know more.

[Source: 2DBoy Blog]

[ World of Goo for iPad Coming Soon! is a post from 148Apps ]

As I mentioned in our Backbreaker 2: Vengeance Preview, I recently got a chance to sit down with NaturalMotion CEO and co-founder, Torsten Reil. We talked games, coffee, and how NaturalMotion have created some amazing, geeky stuff.

NaturalMotion Games is the new publishing wing of NaturalMotion. While they have released one game on multiple platforms previously, their main focus was developing and selling physics engines to game developers. These engines have shown up in some games you may have heard of such as Grand Theft Auto IV, Tony Hawk Ride, and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. These are not lightweight physics we’re talking about either — not some simple ragdoll stuff. But some high end stuff that allows the models react to and interact with their environment.

NaturalMotion Games was formed after the amazing success of Backbreaker Football, particularly on the iOS platform. They currently have 6 games in development including Backbreaker 2: Vengance mentioned earlier and Jenga. A digital representation, in the geekiest form, of the classic table game.

Jenga
Jenga takes that classic party game and brings it to your iOS device. And in NaturalMotion style, it’s done so with amazing realism. They worked closely with Leslie Scott, the inventor of the game Jenga, to make sure it was accurate. This isn’t just a simple demo with a stack of blocks, true care has been taken to bring the fun and the intricacies of the game to the iOS platform.

In the game of Jenga, you pick pieces out of a column of blocks and place them on the top of the stack. Picking the right blocks at the right time and deciding where to place them is the key to winning. In this version, you pick a block by tapping on it once — there will then be white (clear to pull out) or red (stuck — hard to pull out) markers on the piece. You then tap and drag the direction you want to pull the piece out — from the side, end, etc. Once the piece is out, you place it on the top of the stack. Easy, right? Well, there’s a lot more to the game than that, but that’s how it’s played.

NaturalMotion have added an Arcade Mode to the game, something that would have been really tough to do in a real-world version. The Arcade Mode is sort of a match-3 Jenga. You get extra points by pulling out blocks of the same color and placing them in full levels at the top of the stack. The more you match, the more points you get.

Care has been taken to bring back the traditional social aspects of Jenga to a traditionally single player device. There’s both pass and play and network play available. And, of course, Game Center integration. They are also working on other possible game play modes to make it even more social.

One thing is for sure, there are some real nerds at NaturalMotion Games, and that’s a really great thing. The attention to detail and the amazing reality of their games just blows me away. Bringing that passion for realism to Jenga, a game we all know and love, is awesome. Look for Jenga in the App Store soon.

[ NaturalMotion Games Forms; Jenga for iOS Announced is a post from 148Apps ]