Lately I've been playing a free iOS card game from Square Enix called
Guardian Cross. It's more or less a social game, with the main draws being that it's designed by the guy who created the Active Time Battle system and that the cards have nice art.
Like many card games, the actual gameplay lies in the deckbuilding, but
Guardian Cross takes it one step further by completely automating battles. Its card-collecting system is also rather odd; instead of buying booster packs, you earn tickets for hunting grounds, where you capture monsters by shooting them with a sniper rifle (which apparently turns them into cards).
The game itself is okay enough, but suffers from a worse version of the Pokémon multiplayer problem, where some cards just aren't viable for competitive play. This is made worse by the ability to pay Real Money for access to a special course where you'll only find rare monsters (which do appear in the normal course, but far less often, of course).
Anyway, if anyone wants to try out the game, it's iOS-only right now, but it's free, and if you use the invite code AV24795 while the launch promo is still going, you get a free
Final Fantasy XI Mandragora card.
In other news,
REFLEC BEAT plus (iOS port of a pretty fun touch-based Konami arcade rhythm game) had an update last month that changed which devices it's compatible with. It was iPad-only when it launched, but it can now be played on any current iOS device, which fortunately includes my iPod touch.
The game itself is
mad fun. Rather than trying to explain it, here's a video of the arcade version (minus fingers):
Note that only the bottom half is a human player in this video, but the game does have a versus mode (which isn't available on my device at the moment, but will probably be added as a local Wi-Fi option like in
jubeat plus) for two humans.
Unlike
jubeat plus,
REFLEC BEAT plus is very playable on a smaller screen, without any real gameplay or vision issues. Unfortunately, very much like
jubeat plus,
REFLEC BEAT plus is very expensive if you want to play a large variety of songs, and unlike
jubeat plus, there isn't an English version of
REFLEC BEAT plus, so you need a Japanese credit card to purchase song packs (the game itself is free and includes three songs, but requires a Japanese Apple ID, which is also free but can take a bit of effort to set up) or some jailbreak stuff to get it for free (oddly, from Konami's own servers).