Ah, Monkey Island. Just hearing the name of this classic point-and-click adventure makes me already feel all warm and fuzzy inside. If you are amongst the older generation of gamers, I bet you feel the same. And once I tell you that The Secret Of Monkey Island: Special Edition is a great remake that works incredibly well on iPhone and iPad, then you’ll probably stop reading and start downloading this game on the App Store this instant. And in case you are new to the Monkey Island franchise, let me tell you that you’re in for a real treat!

The Secret Of Monkey Island was first released in 1990 and was very well received by both critics and gamers. Considering that this game is over 20 years old, it is amazing how much fun it still is today. If nostalgia is what you’re looking for, I’m pleased to say that you can play through this game in its original glory complete with the original music and user interface. However, the special edition also comes with some new features. If you want to, you can turn on some brand new graphics and fully voiced over dialogues. Personally, I really like the new presentation. It’s modern yet very truthful to the original. What’s really neat is the option to compare the two versions at any time – you just need to swipe across the screen with two fingers and the game instantly changes its look.

In The Secret Of Monkey Island you’ll help a guy named Guybrush Threepwood to become a real, mighty pirate! Problem is, this guy is not exactly what you would imagine when you think of pirates. That’s also the impression that practically all of the characters in the game will have of Guybrush, which will result in some hilarious dialogues. The gameplay consists of talking to people, collecting and combining various items, and using these items in the right places or with the right people. The typical point-and-click affair. In case you get stuck, you can access a built-in help system by shaking your iOS device. Every time you shake it, it will become more specific up to a point where it basically tells you exactly what you need to do next.

You control the game by pushing around a context sensitive pointer on the screen. This might seem a bit awkward at first, but I got used to it after just a few minutes and found it to be an excellent match for a point-and-click adventure. It’s not as straight forward as using a mouse on your PC, but it works well enough to not get in your way of enjoying the game.

The Secret Of Monkey Island: Special Edition is a great version of a game that helped to define a whole genre. Unfortunately, you will have to choose between the iPad [$4.99] and iPhone [$2.99] version. In case you prefer to play your games on the go let me tell you that the game works very well on the smaller iPhone screen.

When I saw the first trailer for Dream:scape about two months ago, I got very excited about it. It looked like Dream:scape was shaping up nicely to become an incredibly atmospheric adventure with great visuals, that are backed up by the Unreal Engine. Now that the game was released today and I have finished the story, I’m happy to say that Dream:scape delivered on these expectations. But unfortunately, a lack of polish and some frustrating moments are holding it back from living up to its full potential.

To begin with, Dream:scape is not so much of a game as it is an interactive story in which you rarely ever need to do something other than walk to the right places. The character you are guiding through the game is lying in some sort of coma and the doctors explain that he has zero brain activity. However, you find yourself waking up in a cornfield where a scarecrow tells you that this is your Dream:scape where you are about to unlock memories of your past. You are given a diary that functions as both a map and an aggregator of information to document the story for you. From then on you will spend your time unlocking the secrets of this man’s past. To do so, you need to find items that will unlock new places and new pieces of the story as you progress. The game lasts for about two or three hours and the excellent storytelling will keep you hooked until you finally know all the secrets.

But like I already mentioned, there are a few things that might frustrate you along the way. To begin with, there’s the map that’s pretty inaccurate. At the beginning of the game I was more concerned with where I was and where all the places are that I need to go than with anything else because I couldn’t make sense out of it. Then there’s an unnecessary amount of backtracking. Sometimes you can only pick up items if you are at the right point in the story – so although you know you will need this item later on, you’ll first have to walk across the whole map, trigger the next part of the story, backtrack across the whole map to get the item and then backtrack again to use it. That’s already frustrating, but the fact that the character walks faster diagonally than forward, which made me spend most of my time running sideways through the game, makes things even worse. The third point that I have to criticize are the controls. While the dual analog stick layout is proven to get the job done pretty well in free roaming 3D games, they sometimes just refused to work for a moment. And the few gesture based action sequences seem to have a problem with gesture recognition: I was only able to solve the last sequence when I tried it with a capacitive pen after I failed 15 times with my finger.

Luckily, Dream:scape shines bright, very bright in one area and that’s its story. The atmosphere is great, the voice-overs are excellent and the storytelling always makes you want to find out what happened next. It really keeps the whole thing going and makes up for a lot of the criticism. Like I said, the game is roughly two, maybe three hours long and you’ll spend quite some time of it wandering around. So I wont go any deeper into the story here as it would pretty much spoil the whole experience.

There’s a lot of criticism in this review, but I felt like I needed to address the game’s shortcomings. However, Dream:scape really delivers big time with its story and atmosphere, and creates an experience that is very outstanding on the App Store. Most of the shortcomings could also be addressed in future updates, which I really hope for. Dream:scape is also Speedbump Studios’ first game, which might explain and excuse some of the quirks it has. Overall, I really enjoyed the experience that Dream:scape has to offer and if you appreciate a good story, you should definitely give it shot. It comes as universal app for $1.99.

S:S&S EP must have been the most anticipated iPad game to date. Now that I have finished it, I have to say it truly deserved every bit of attention that it got. It’s a highly polished and stunning audio visual experience unlike anything else that has been released on the iPad so far – or any other console.

The special thing about it is the way it was developed. S:S&S EP is the result of a collaboration between Jim Guthrie (music), Craig Adams (pixel art) and Capy (development). You can think of it as a progress where art and music were created together to enrich each other and then get implemented in a way it makes fun to play with it. This creates a synergy effect between the single elements of the game that makes the experience much richer than the sum of its parts. It is a very time consuming progress and that’s why it differs quite a bit from the usual approach of game development. The fact that the game was built with and around the music is also the reason for the “EP” suffix.

In its core, S:S&S EP is a point and click adventure with two distinct modes, depending on how you hold your iPad. Most of the time you will play in the horizontal “Sworcery” mode in which you explore the world around you, solve puzzles and interact with other characters. Talking to the characters will give you helpful hints on how to solve the next puzzle and will also shed more and more light on the story. Dialogues are no longer than 140 characters which makes all of them tweetable – and the game let’s you do so with the tap of a button. The puzzles are usually solved by interacting with the environment in certain patterns and were always fun to figure out. Unlike traditional point and click adventures, you won’t have to collect, combine and use items which makes S:S&S EP much more straightforward.

Occasionally, you will encounter a fight that makes it necessary to switch to the vertical “Sword” mode that will bring up a block and attack button. To master the fights you will have to analyze your opponents attack patterns and then react to them with blocking or attacking at the right time. It plays much like the classic “Punch Out!!”. While combat is infrequent, it definitely spices the gameplay up and it will become pretty challenging later on in the game.

But when I think of S:S&S EP I like to think of the gameplay mechanics as just being there to tie everything together. What makes this game so outstanding is the audio visual trip that lies ahead of you. And what a trip it is. When you wander around the world and suddenly Jim Guthrie’s music sets in to accompany Craig Adams’ pixel art it creates a fantastic atmosphere. If you like this kind of immersion into another world, don’t hesitate and get this game. It’s currently available for iPad only with a fair $4.99 price tag. An iPhone version is planned to hit the App Store later this month. And if you can’t get enough of the music, you can grab Jim Guthrie’s new album “Sword & Sworcery LP: The Ballad of the Space Babies” which will be out on April 5th.