Kotaku — a site about video games — has announced that a company called Konami is bringing an application called Metal Gear Solid Touch — which is the imaginatively-titled next instalment of the Metal Gear Solid sequence of games, which I’m told is incredible popular with the type of people who play video games — to the iPhone early next year. This is apparently a good thing, although you’d be hard-pressed to tell from the comments accompanying the linked post. Video game fans seem to whine even more than BlackBerry fanboys. Anyone would think that the iPhone and iPod Touch weren’t held in high esteem by the serious button-mashers. The price has yet to be confirmed, but it’s bound to be high enough to make Chockenberry smile.

• Kotaku

You may remember us telling you a while ago about an iPhone game called Drug Lord — see the video above — which was a location-based drug dealing simulator and which stood absolutely no chance of appearing in the App Stores because, well, it was a drug dealing simulator. It seems the makers have taken this possible draw-back on board, and before recently submitting the finished game to Apple for approval, have changed its name to Underworld.

OK, two points. Firstly, when I hear ‘Underworld’ I instantly think of Kate Beckinsale in a tight leather cat suit. So if I download this game based on its name alone, I’m going to be more than a little disappointed. And secondly, you forgot to remove the drug dealing elements of the game. Seriously, guys, my own game concept, Vivisection — which is like classic battery-powered tweeze-’em-up Operation, only featuring photo-realistic graphics of kittens and puppies — stands a greater chance of getting accepted.

Which is a shame, because I was looking forward to seeing whether Drug Lord Underworld featured any kind of Camden-based ’skunk’ Easter eggs.

• Pocket Gamer
• via Game Politics

We noted last week that the iPhone version of the Cube FPS engine had finally appeared in the App Store. Since then it’s received a minor upgrade — to version 1.2 — which has fixed some of the original release’s problems, brought a speed increase and generally turned it into a far more polished product. We took a quick look at both it and its big brother from the desktop.

The Cube Engine is an open source FPS engine which has been in development for about six years now. Robert Pointon is the man responsible for the iPhone port, as well as maintaining the Mac OS X version. The iPhone port is based on the Cube (not Cube 2) version of the engine, which is a few years old and thus more suited to OpenGL ES and the phone’s limited 3D capabilities. The game was originally submitted to the App Store at the beginning of October and has taken almost seven weeks to appear. In a post to the Cube forum, Pointon revealed that the delay was in part due to the game being ‘too deep’ for Apple to review thoroughly. So was it worth the wait?

In short, yes it was. Sure, the game has a number of shortcomings, but they are mostly all the fault of the iPhone. Even with an old game engine the feeble 3D GPU struggles at times to produce a playable frame rate — although this has seen a marked improvement in the latest version — but as we’ve commented before, the fact that the iPhone can do 3D at all is likely just a unexpected consequence of Apple wanting accelerated graphics on the device for use by Core Animation, rather than their intending it as a gaming platform. But control is probably the game’s biggest problem, which is only to be expected given the lack of proper buttons and D-pad. However, given that the game is being actively supported by a developer who seems to be listening to feedback and appears to really want to improve things, it can only keep on getting better. And at a price of FREE you should definitely ignore the negative reviews in the App Store and take a look at it.

So, having played with the iPhone version, I was curious to take a look at the full Cube engine on OS X. To my eternal shame I have to admit that I hadn’t heard of it before the iPhone version came along. The first point to note is that on the desktop we now have the updated Cube 2 engine. And while this can be used for any game, the main one it is associated with is Sauerbraten — to the point where the two have become synonymous. Now, I should probably point out here and now that I am about the last person you should ask to review a FPS. The site describes Sauerbraten as an old-school shooter in the style of Doom II or Quake, which is fortunate since these are probably the most recent games of the genre I’ve played. So what follows is entirely non-technical and contains absolutely no comparisons to anything released in the last decade.

Sauerbraten is basically a brilliantly fun, no-brain shooter. The graphics are great, if a little dark — which, yeah, I guess is most of the point — and on my 1st generation MacBook Pro (2Ghz, 2Gb, ATI X1600 with 128Mb and probably far too many other apps running in the background) it ran at playable speeds throughout, despite occasionally dropping into teen frames-per-seconds. The whole game is very well packaged, with a few dozen different single player maps available. (I haven’t got a chance to try multiplayer yet.) There was the occasional glitch with the AI, where monsters would get stuck trying to walk around the scenery, but since this gave me more of a chance to shoot them I’m not going to complain. The sound effects are also good — I particularly like the satisfying thunk your bullets make when they strike those little Rhino gits. Even the cheesy metal soundtrack fits perfectly.

So instead of bemoaning the lack of Far Cry for the Mac you could do much worse than check out Sauerbraten. We here at Æ will also be keeping an eye on the in-development Eisenstern RPG which is being built on the same Cube 2 engine and is already showing some promise.

• Cube Engine in the App Store ($FREE)
• The Cube Engine

Hello, Dear Readers. Now, I know what you’re thinking, and you’re perfectly correct. It has been a little quiet around here recently. The truth of the matter is that there’s simply nothing of interest going on in the Appleverse at the moment, so we here at Æ are using this quiet time to catch up on our other outstanding projects. And as the screenshot to the right testifies, it hasn’t been wasted time. Oh, no. Who kicked Perilar’s hand-held backside? Yep, only yours truly.

Now, I’m off to do it all again, but this time as a gnome wizard. If any of you want to do something helpful, you can start praying that Apple does something newsworthy soon.

This may seem a little odd, given that I’ve just been rubbishing the idea of the iPhone as a gaming platform, but I’m going to start reviewing a few iPhone games anyway. First up is Glacon by Phil Hassey of Imitation Pickles. The game has been around on the Mac for a good long while, and on the iPhone for a couple of months. I’m choosing it because I could never get on with the control on the desktop version, no matter how much I wanted to, but on the iPhone they’re just about perfect.

Glacon is a brilliantly simple real-time strategy game. You take over planets by throwing ships at them, and these planets then produce more ships over time, at a rate proportional to how large they are. The desktop version had an awkward mouse-driven interface, which required a left click to select a planet — with modifiers to select multiple at once — followed by a right click to despatch your fleet. Add in the use of the scroll wheel to alter how many ships you sent at once, and play really began to suffer, especially if you were trying to use the trackpad on a laptop.

The touch controls on the iPhone version, by comparison, are beautifully intuitive and seem so right than you don’t really need to read the instructions. Tap one of your planets to add it to the selected group, and touch it again to remove it. Then, tapping a neutral or enemy planet send your fleet off. Galcon on the iPhone is the fast, addictive fun I always wanted to find the desktop version to be.

Desktop Galcon costs $19.95 and can be tried before you buy, although everything apart from the ‘classic’ mode is locked up. iPhone Galcon costs $4.99 (£2.99) and is also available in a Lite version — where again you’ll find everything apart from classic missing.

• Glacon on the Desktop
• Galcon Lite in the App Store
• Galcon in the App Store

When my favourite internet video games pundtrix — Katherine Fletcher, who I’ve embedded above — reviewed World of Goo for ChannelFlip Games, I thought — among a great many other unprintable things — “oh, great, another cool title which the Mac will never see.” Well, thanks to Macenstein, I now know that’s no longer the case.

World of Goo is a puzzler in the same vein as Lemmings. I could try to explain the game play here, but won’t bother. For one thing, it’ll waste valuable time we could all spend actually playing it. For an idea of what you’re in for, watch the video above. And then hit the link below to try it yourself. There’s a demo available, and the full title costs a paltry $20. So what are you waiting for?

• World of Goo
• via Macenstein
• ChannelFlip TV

Ah, RPGs. A rite of passage for so many nerds. Funny dice, funnier character names, and enough obscure statistics to make even an econometrician dizzy. Of course, I belonged to that group of super-nerdy nerds who couldn’t even muster a band of friends to table-top game with, meaning it was just me versus the computer, shut away up in my bedroom for hours on end. Oh, happy days.

Now Mark Damon Hughes has brought a little of that solitary magic to the iPhone in the form of Perilar, a classic turn-based RPG in the style of the early Ultima games. (Presumably Mark had to take on this responsibility because Lord British is too preoccupied with strapping himself to an old Soyuz, in an attempt to free himself from the crushing burden of too much money.) The seals on the Temple of Darkness have been broken and powerful monsters have flooded the Kingdom. So what are you waiting for? Grab your favourite bec do corbin and start levelling up.

Perilar costs £2.99 (or $4.99) and is available from the App Store now. The original Java version is still available free for OS X.

• Perilar in the App Store
• OS X Java version
• via Touch Arcade

Mike Lee — Delicious Monster and Tapulous alumni and number one monkey lover — is set to make a triumphant return to the iPhone with puzzle game Puzzllotto. The Madagascar-themed game is described as an exploration puzzler in the spirit of Mac classics Zork and Myst. Most excitingly, 10% of the proceeds from App Store sales of the game will go to the Madagascar Fauna Group.

Mike has assembled a great team to help with the project: graphics are by IconFactory’s David Lanham, while the soundtrack is courtesy of Dr. Douglas Quin, sound designer for recent hit Spore.

Puzzllotto is set to cost $4.99 on its release in a few weeks time. We’ll bring you a review just as soon as it’s out.

• Puzzllotto
• United Lemur
• United Lemur on Twitter
• via MacWorld

I love scrapbooking. I have shelves and shelves of scrapbooks filled with all the interesting things which have caught my eye in newspapers and magazines. In many ways, scrapbooking is like blogging for the real world. Only no-one ever looks at my scrapbooks but all of you read my blogs!

I was initially a little bit disappointed to find out that Scrapbook Paige by Aisle 5 Games is not a proper scrapbook app. But then I discovered that it was a really fun hidden object games, so everything turned out all right. (And it’s got a really clever name too, because the main character is called Paige but scrapbooks also have pages in them!) Search for the missing pieces among tables of objects — they make my crafts room look tidy! — solve riddles to find which pieces you’re looking for, or match the objects to their outlines. There’s something here for everyone. You can choose to play against the clock or not, depending on how competitive you feel. Watch the great video to see what amazing fun you’re going to have.

Scrapbook Paige costs $19.95.

• Scrapbook Paige

As anyone who knows me will tell you, I simply love handmade things. Handmade clothes and handmade cakes and handmade birthday cards and of course handmade games.

Rooms: The Main Building by Hand Made Games (see!) is a fiendish puzzle game. You have to guide the hero towards the exit by sliding pieces around the game board, and it just keeps getting more and more difficult as you go along. The graphics are beautiful and the challenge is enough to keep you coming back time after time.

Rooms: The Main Building costs $19.95 and there’s a free demo for you to download and try.

• Rooms: The Main Building