games

For a while there it looked like we might not get a Deal of the Week this time around. Thankfully, the clouds finally cleared away and Flight Control emerged from the storm of Marketplace delays. It’s now on sale for $1.99, down from the regular price of $2.99.

Flight Control is the progenitor of the line-drawing genre of casual games. Created in 2009 by Australia-based Firemint (now owned by EA), it became an instant sales phenomenon. The Windows Phone version lags behind the iOS and other versions in terms of features (no HD makeover and only six maps here), but remains a fun and addicting title.

Achievement hunters, prepare for lots of grinding to reach 10,000 planes landed. I’m about 7,000 short on that one… Then again, Harbor Master, another developer’s nautical take on the same concept, has even more grueling Achievements.

Flight Control is on sale for $1.99 for one week only. Pick it up here on the Marketplace.

As you may have noticed by now, this week’s Xbox Live release, TextTwist 2, hasn’t shown up on the Marketplace. Nor has an older game’s price dropped as the Xbox Live Deal of the Week. It’s frustrating for folks like me who want to grab TextTwist and get their spelling on.

A little background info: the Windows Phone Marketplace usually updates during the wee hours of Wednesday morning in the US, though the actual update time is far more erratic than the Xbox 360 Marketplace. I’ve stopped staying up for it. Occasionally – maybe three or four times a year – the mobile Marketplace doesn’t update until later in the day (most recently in September). But it has always updated by Wednesday night, so we shouldn’t have to wait too terribly long for the new game and sale game to appear.

Speaking of the sale game, Microsoft didn’t announce it in advance like they usually do. Rumor has it that Flight Control may be the Deal of the Week, but nobody knows for sure. Keep checking back at WPCentral and we’ll let you know as soon as the Marketplace update goes live!

Update: Flight Control's price has dropped to $1.99 and TextTwist 2 is live. As for the delay, perhaps the snow in Washington mucked things up for our friends at microsoft. Thanks for the comments, everybody!

Windows Phone developers XIMAD Inc. has built up a rather impressive library of Windows Phone games. The company's portfolio includes Pandas vs Ninjas, De-Bugs Pool, Bubble Birds, and Brain Cube. Soon we will see Brain Cube Reloaded available on the Windows Phone Marketplace that will continue where the original version left off.

Brain Cube Reloaded is a puzzle game where you have to navigate your rectangular block through various levels of paths and mazes. Brain Cube Reloaded looks like it will be a challenging game for Windows Phone and we are told it will be available soon.

In the meantime, you can grab the original version of Brain Cube here at the Marketplace. It's a free, ad supported game.

We first caught wind of TextTwist 2 coming to Xbox Live back in August when GameHouse announced multiple Windows Phone projects. The publisher later decided to publish a few of those games as indie titles under their RealNetworks label, but TextTwist 2 has kept its Xbox Live status. And now it’s finally coming out this week.

TextTwist 2 is a word-finding game that plays a lot like Boggle. The game presents a random assortment of letters which players then use to create as many words as possible. Multiple game modes include Unlimited (no time limit), Standard (timed), Daily Word (try to find the longest word possible once daily), and Letter Mania (fill an anagram grid before time runs out).

Achievement hunters/OCD sufferers note that TextTwist 2 has a few Achievements that don’t end in a five or zero. Still, if they’re anything like Collapse!’s Achievements, it shouldn’t be too hard to get all 200 GamerScore in short order.

TextTwist 2 debuts this Wednesday, January 18. We don’t have a price yet, but we’ll update as soon as we know. As for the 100^th Xbox Live game designation, I believe that count includes a few non-game apps and delisted games, but it’s still a nice thought.

Update: It will cost $2.99.

EA Mobile Games has released a video teaser highlighting eleven (if my count is right) gaming titles that will be heading to the Nokia Windows Phones. We first heard about the exclusive partnership during Nokia World and again during the 2012 International Consumer Electronics Show.

The titles spotted in the minute long video include:

• Tiger Woods PGA Tour
• Monopoly
• Spy Mouse
• Yahtzee
• The Game of Life
• Spy Mouse
• Vampire Rush
• Mirrors Edge
• SIMS Medieval
• Parking Mania
• 2 Real Racing
• Picnic Wars.

The video doesn't show much of each title but just enough to spark your interest. Nokia is due to have over twenty titles for an exclusive period available for their Lumia Windows Phones. It will be interesting to see what the remaining titles will be.

source: YouTube; Thanks, pedenske, for the tip!

Update: Additional upcoming titles from EA Games include:

• FIFA 12
• Madden 12
• NBA Jam
• Dead Space
• Bejeweled 2
• Connect 4
• Risk
• Trivial Pursuit
• Bop It!

We've got an all out discussion on these titles over in the forums that you can find here.

In our Let’s Golf 2 review, we praised the game’s smooth 3D graphics and wealth of content. Unfortunately, it suffered from two broken Achievements, and nobody likes those. Gameloft had a great chance to fix them with this week’s title update. Did they succeed?

Let’s Golf 2 version 1.3 update (listed as version 1.2 in-game)

• ‘Junior Golfer’ Achievement now attainable on fresh installs

Let’s look at that. The ‘Junior Golfer’ Achievement is for finishing your first mission in Career Mode – i.e. completing a single event. It can now be obtained, but existing players will need to reinstall the game and lose all of their progress. Anyone who hasn’t unlocked ‘Wise One’ for maxing out a character will probably want to hold off on the reinstall. If only the developers had considered everyone who already bought the game when instituting the fix…

Even worse, the ‘Secret Code Achievement remains unobtainable. In the iOS version, players have to enter a special code in the name entry screen in order to unlock the ninth character. The Windows Phone version has no name entry screen, so the Achievement is just a big, baffling error on the part of the developers and Microsoft certification team.

Let’s Golf 2 is a fantastic golf game mired only by Achievement problems. The version 1.3 update (skipping versions 1.1 and 1.2 even though it contains only a single minor fix) is a step in the right direction, but it fails to make everything right. Perhaps Gameloft will issue another update (version 1.6?) in the future.

Let’s Golf 2 costs $4.99 and there is a free trial. Pick it up here on the Marketplace.

Now that Bug Village has launched, we can finally examine the freemium game’s PDLC in detail. The vast majority of the game’s PDLC is associated with coins, though players can also buy acorns if they prefer not to wait for the in-game harvesting process. Everyone receives 10 free coins upon starting the game. Unfortunately, the tutorial strong-arms you into using one or two coins unless you’re content to leave the game running while the first house and piles are built. Thus most players will end up with 8 coins to spend once the tutorial ends.

Coins are good for two things: speeding up tasks and buying premium items. See, tasks like building houses and farming resources take time to complete. The times start at 15 minutes and stretch into the hours from there; thankfully players are usually given a choice of three different lengths of time when harvesting items. The longer you harvest, the more Acorns and XP you’ll earn. But if you’d like to skip out on the waiting and instantly complete a building or task, it will cost one more coins, depending on the time involved.

As for premium items, they include buildings, decorations, food, piles, and flowers. All of these things look different from the non-premium versions, and some offer greater benefits. For instance, premium buildings produce extra insects compared to regular buildings, which would have to be upgraded in order to achieve the same effect. Premium decorations are purely aesthetic, though they do contribute toward the Achievement for placing 50 decorations. Premium piles and flowers produce greater rewards than low-end versions, but are surpassed by high end flowers and acorns. Premium piles and flowers have much lower level requirements though, so they may be worth buying early on in the game (especially the Wonder Crocus).

Bug Village – the first freemium Xbox Live game (smartphone or otherwise) – is now available. What’s a freemium game? That means everyone gets the full game for free. But the developers at Glu Mobile also offer some premium content (PDLC) for dedicated players to buy. The PDLC here (Coins) allows you to build special structures and/or speed up the time it takes your bug minions to complete tasks. It’s completely optional and you can earn the full 200 GamerScore without spending a dime, so no worries!

Bug Village is also the first city-building game on Windows Phone. As mentioned, you’ll be recruiting an army of hard-working insects and expanding your village as you see fit. With detailed 3D graphics and the aforementioned Achievements, Bug Village is a game every Windows Phone owner should try. See our developer interview for more details.

Aspiring entomologists/architects can find Bug Village here on the Marketplace.