Battlefield 3: Aftershock is MIA from the iOS App Store due to a lack of quality. IGN got a hold of a communique from EA, in which the publisher stated it is committed to delivering quality mobile entertainment and, therefore, decided to remove the game.

An EA spokesperson said the company is "currently re-evaluating the app" in response to the consumer feedback. Sounds like the 2.5 star rated app, which suffered complaints about its controls and multiplayer, may not return to the app arena any time soon.

Dejobaan's AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! for the Awesome drops into the iOS App Store next week as AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! (Force = Mass x Acceleration). The game will launch on March 1 as a $2.99 universal app. Meaning, you pay once and play it on your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad.

Having had some hands-on time with the mobile version recently, the iPad experience can be particularly intense. The tilt controls are super intuitive -- since you're falling and trying to avoid buildings -- and I found myself tilting my head to avoid scraping against buildings. The size of the screen and focus on the experience started making everything else around me fade away.

For a less intense, but still enjoyable game, the iPhone version feels like guiding an object through space instead of yourself.

A new Assassin's Creed mobile game will launch in December of this year for English and Japanese audiences. The title is being developed by Ubisoft and GREE. In the same breath, GREE is teaming up with Gameloft on Gang Domination, which will be available on various smartphone devices this coming June.

So, what's GREE? Beyond being a company with way too much money, it's a mobile publisher/platform that's huge in Japan and is moving into the global marketplace, launching the GREE Platform in the second quarter of 2012. The company bought mobile social network OpenFeint last year and has offices in Tokyo, San Francisco, London, Beijing, Sao Paulo and Dubai. The company states: "GREE will continue to aggressively expand worldwide."

"GREE will continue to focus on building relationships with third party game developers and publishers as it moves towards releasing its new platform."

So, if GREE wasn't on your radar before, it appears to be a company you're going to be hearing about a lot in the near future.

Continue Reading

---

What's your game called and what's it about?

Tyson Anderson: Our game is Catball Eats It All. From a story standpoint, it's about a voracious little furball that eats everything in sight, and... that's it! Short and sweet. From a gameplay perspective, it's an action-puzzle game based around navigating and optimizing paths through levels and mastering responsive play controls.

As a graffiti artist, how did NoseGo get involved with Broken Compass?

Matt Anderson: We all met through a mutual friend Jeff, who is now our very talented producer. Yis Goodwin -- aka NoseGo -- had expressed a desire to make a game featuring his work, and Tyson and I have been working in games for a while. Jeff, in true producer-ly fashion, put the people together, and the magic was there. We clicked, and our visions, both as creators and as a business, quickly solidified.

Continue Reading

The Simpsons are going to your phone! Again! Cnet reports that EA is planning to release a free-to-play Simpsons game called The Simpsons: Tapped Out. The free iOS game focuses on rebuilding Springfield after Homer blows it up. Unlockable characters (voiced by the show's actors) will give you quests as you work on your version of the city.

Of course, your progress will be limited every day, unless you purchase virtual currency, in the denomination of "donuts." You'll also be able to find them in town.

Tapped Out is due on iOS in the next few weeks. An Android version will follow a few months later.

Well, this is definitely the craziest thing to happen in wrestling games in quite some time -- and wrestling is a sport built entirely on human insanity. WWF WrestleFest, the classic arcade game by Technos, has been updated for release on iOS by THQ. The new "WWE Wrestlefest" has smoother graphics and an updated roster of wrestlers (a rostler, if you will) including John Cena and Randy Orton, alongside old-school wrestlers like the late "Macho Man" Randy Savage. It's also been modernized with "an extensive downloadable content program."

The app is available in a free "Lite" version and a $2.99 "Premium" version for iPhone, and both "Lite" and paid for iPad.

THQ also plans to release this new WrestleFest on XBLA, PSN, Android, and PC, sometime in 2012. So we hope the new version is good.

Continue Reading

The A MAZE. Indie Games Award 2012, held during the Deutsche Gamestage in Berlin from April 26 to 27, is now taking submissions and will award one single indie game the "Most Amazing Indie Game" title, which would be a pretty awesome thing to put on your resume. The winner is selected by a "high-profile international jury" to be revealed in March, and will receive €5000 ($6,599) and a suitably "amazing trophy."

Submissions are open to anyone and everyone, for a fee of €45 ($59) through March 30, with finalists announced in mid-April. This is just a hunch, but now might be the time to build that rat-maze game you were thinking of at 2 a.m. that one night -- the one with the makeup-testing and cancer-treatment levels. Again, just a hunch.

It seems everyone's got a Kickstarter nowadays. Double Fine just surpassed $2 million, inXile is going to use Kickstarter to reboot a classic and now the Idle Thumbs video game podcast is using the site to finance its future.

The interesting thing about this Kickstarter campaign, however, is that it includes an exclusive game called Thirty Flights of Loving by Blendo Games. It's a sequel to the one-man indie development studio's previous effort, Gravity Bone, a spy-based affair blending adventure and first-person shooting elements. Thirty Flights of Loving will be given to all backers who drop $30 or more down.

If you want to throw down more cash, Vincent Perea and Graham Annable, the artists behind The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom and Puzzle Agent, respectively, will toss in some of their doodlings. So hurry up and help the crew finance their -- oh, they already hit their goal? Okay then, head on over if you want to pay for some stuff you want.

Still wandering aimlessly around Tamriel, trying to remember where you left your giant pile of buckets? Get out your phone and get some help. Publisher Prima Games just released an official Skyrim map app, beating the fanmade Dragon Shout to the punch.

The app comes with a world map and 9 capital city maps for free, with other detailed locations available through in-app purchases. You can drop pins on points of interest (say, Bucket Stack Alpha) and zoom in 3200%.

While we're a bit shocked that portions of the Skyrim map are behind a paywall in an app that is nothing but maps of that one game, we must concede the point that Skyrim is irresponsibly huge.

Finally, we have a concrete reason for the eternal delay of Half-Life 2 Episode 3: Valve head Gabe Newell is more interested in wearable computing. OK, that's not directly why Valve hasn't announced a new Half-Life title, but wearable computing and hardware development are definitely something Valve is interested in, Newell told Penny Arcade Report.

Wearable computers -- think Star Trek communication badges, wrist-bound touchscreens or SixthSense -- are seeing a resurgence, and Valve is doing its own research into how they might function as gaming devices. Wearable computers now are "way higher resolution, way lighter weight, much better battery life," and Valve is doing its own research into this technology through biometrics, and is excited to see where it goes, Newell said.

"So we're thinking of trying to figure out how to do the equivalent of the [Team Fortress] incremental approach in software design and try to figure out how would you get something similar to that in the hardware space as well," he said. If Valve were to produce hardware, it would be something easy to iterate so customers don't have to buy 10 million devices, Newell said. Of course, that's if.

"Well, if we have to sell hardware we will," Newell said. "We have no reason to believe we're any good at it; it's more we think that we need to continue to have innovation and if the only way to get these kind of projects started is by us going and developing and selling the hardware directly then that's what we'll do."

No company is safe from irrelevance, as far as Newell sees it, and even Microsoft and Sony can suffer the same fate as Atari and Commodore if they continue to create closed systems and don't innovate. "As soon as Valve stops doing interesting, innovative work we're gonna be left behind," Newell stated, unfortunately missing the "left for dead" pun opportunity.