Hudson Soft to Release 3 Titles for iPod Touch and iPhone

Posted by Eric March on June 17, 2008 at 6:47 pm

If you don’t know who Hudson Soft is, and especially if you don’t recognize that iconic bumble bee on sight, you’re either new or you’re not a gamer. Most of you will probably remember them as the creators of venerable yet ageless Bomberman series of games, which they created initially for the Nintendo Famicom (NES) way back in 1985. They’ve never left the scene, and Og bless ‘em for it, because now they’re bursting onto the iPhone and iPod Touch scene with 3 titles planned for release through the App Store.

They kick it off with the obvious choice: Bomberman. Come on — can you think of a platform that doesn’t have Bomberman or one of its many, many imitations on it? Of course not. Bomberman is as inevitable as Pac Man or Tetris or Snake. If a platform is capable of playing it, someone will eventually write one of these games for it. So it goes here — though it’s the one and only original making its debut here in the form of Bomberman Touch: The Legend of Mystic Tomb. Bomberman Touch will make full use of the iPod Touch and iPhone’s features, utilizing both the accelerometer and multitouch interface for full control over the action. It’s hard to say exactly which activity will control what aspect of the game, but it looks like tilt for movement, left-hand thumb flick for something else (kicking bombs?) and right hand taps for button functions (presumably placing bombs.)

Second in their forthcoming stable is a casual game/toy called Aqua Forest. Hudson have licensed Prometech’s OctaveEngine™ Casual particle physics engine and created what is essentially a combination of the Sand app and a simplified version of iPhysics, only with the added goodness of particle physics for simulation of water, fire, steam, etc. It is made more interesting on the iPod Touch and iPhone by utilizing the accelerometer to shift gravity and the touchscreen to draw objects and such. I’ve played with the OctaveEngine&trad; Casual on Windows, which is a subset of the much more robust (and power-hungry) OctaveEngine™, and it’s a pretty decent little particle physics engine, though it does get bogged down pretty quickly when you get too many of the little suckers on the screen at once. Aqua Forest will feature both a free-form sandbox mode as well as a puzzle mode containing puzzles designed with (and solved by) the various tools you have at your disposal, so it should be interesting. See the video below for a demonstration running on a real iPod Touch to get a brief taste of what this one will be all about.

Finally, Hudson are jumping on the number puzzle bandwagon and releasing their own flavour of Sudoku. Not much to say about this one, really, as I’m sure everyone knows what Sudoku is by now.

There’s no word on pricing yet, and I can only assume that these will be available through the App Store on or around launch day. Until then, check out the gallery and video below for some sneak peeks.

[Show as slideshow]

(via Apple iPhone School)

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