Strawdog Studios Set to Release Turbo Duck for iPhone

Today Derby, England based Strawdog Studios announced their first iPhone title, called Turbo Duck.

Strawdog Studios are the makers of the upcoming XBox Live Arcade title Bounce, which we wrote about earlier in an article about 9 XBLA games to watch for, so we can most likely expect Turbo Duck to be a light-hearted and enjoyable game.

Turbo Duck will be Strawdog’s first foray into the iPhone/iPod touch world. In it, players will control Turbo Duck, a duck that can turbo, not surprisingly. The goal is to guide Turbo Duck through a bathtub obstacle course in a race against time.

Of course, Turbo Duck will make use of the iPhone’s unique accelerometer and touch screen controls, allowing players to navigate Turbo Duck into flags, which give you extra time, and around hazards like toy boats and mines, all by tilting and touching the iPhone.

According to the Strawdog press release, Turbo Duck will include:

20 Levels of bath-time fun
Bobbing boats
Submerging (and surfacing) submarines
Exploding mines
Bonus Bread (Ducks like bread!)
and more…..

Overall, Turbo Duck sounds like it is going to be a silly and fun game that is perfect for the iPhone, giving players a light and entertaining game with simple but fun mechanics.

After Turbo Duck is released, iPhone gamers can likely expect more Strawdog games on the Apple hardware. According to Dan Marchant of Strawdog Studios, “The guys in the office think the iPhone is a great piece of technology and a fun platform to develop games on. Turbo Duck is our first dip in the iPhone pool but certainly won’t be our last.”

Turbo Duck will be available in English, French, Italian, German & Spanish for Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. It will be out at the end of March 2009 priced at $1.99 / £1.19/ ¢â€šÂ¬1,59.

Turn Your Mac Touchpad into a Drawing Tablet with the Pogo Sketch

The new Pogo Sketch stylus may turn out to be a low-cost alternative to a professional drawing tablet.

The Pogo Sketch, from Ten One Design, is a new pencil-style stylus for use with all “capacitive touch screens,” as the product’s site explains.

What this means, for those that have no idea what “capacitive” is (e.g., me,) is that it is compatible with the iPhone, iPod Touch, and all Macbooks with multitouch trackpads, such as the Macbook, Macbook Pro, and Macbook Air. This means you can use the soft-tipped Sketch instead of your fingers on the trackpads of these products.

But what is truly interesting about the Sketch is that, according to Ten One Design’s site, the Sketch can be used on a Macbook’s trackpad like a pencil, making it a low-cost alternative to a drawing tablet. This means that users of the Sketch may be able to go about drawing and writing naturally in illustration programs without the need for a costly tablet.

It’s hard to say how well the Sketch performs without using it; a trackpad seems kind of small to simulate the act of drawing, no matter how natural the Sketch feels. But if it does in fact perform as well or close to as well as a full-fledged writing tablet, then the Sketch could make quite an impact on the digital drawing market, discarding with the need to get a bulky and expensive tablet.

Ten One Design also has a couple other selling points for the Sketch. They point out that the Sketch, which simulates a fingertip, can be used with gloves so users don’t have to worry about their hands getting cold when using their iPhone in the winter, and also ensures that users don’t get their iPod Touch all smudgy with their greasy fingers.

But really, these seem like trivialities compared to the possibility of being able to use Adobe Illustrator to draw naturally at a fraction of the cost of buying a Wacom tablet.

The Pogo Sketch costs $14.95 and is available here.

SimCity Released for iPhone

Today EA announced the release of the classic game SimCity for the iPhone and iPod touch.

SimCity, a game of city construction and management, is one of the first significant games made by Will Wright, creator of the imaginative, and highly hyped, Spore. As the name suggests, SimCity was also among the first in the line of “Sim” games, made widely famous by Wright’s game The Sims.

The iPhone and iPod touch version hasn’t been stripped down for this touch-based version, and brings all the features that players would expect in a SimCity game. From the looks of it, SimCity for the iPhone bears many similarities to SimCity 3000, the third game in the series.

There seems to be a trend lately of developers re-releasing old games on portable hardware, and SimCity seems like the perfect choice for this sort of thing. SimCity is an old favourite of mine, even though whenever I play it I always end up with massive debt and a stagnant slum, so the chance to play it on the go is pretty neat. Especially nice are the touch controls, which in my opinion are well-suited for the type of game SimCity is.

SimCity costs $10 and is available at the iPhone app store.