One of my favorite iOS games in recent years, Crossy Road, has received a Disney tie-in aptly named Disney Crossy Road. It’s out on the App Store today for free, and it features over 100 Disney and Pixar figurines hopping their way through worlds from The Lion King, Toy Story, Inside Out, and more.

It looks like Hipster Whale (creators of the original game) and Disney did a good job in keeping the essence of Crossy Road alive while also enhancing the formula with new gameplay mechanics and world-specific challenges. I’m going to play the game over the weekend – in the meantime, The Verge has a nice behind-the-scenes piece on how the game was created:

Disney Crossy Road goes in a different direction. While the first area is exactly the same as the world from the original game, the rest are all based on different Disney properties and feature new gameplay characteristics to suit them. Some of the changes are just visual — in the Lion King world you’re avoiding charging animals instead of cars — while others are twists on the Crossy Road formula. In the Tangled world you have to avoid barrels falling down a hill, while Inside Out tasks you with collecting colorful memory orbs.

“When I look back after five years, I am most surprised by how such a huge audience was willing to embrace something like Sworcery,” adds Vella. “It’s such a slow, meandering game built to be a music box for Jim’s beautiful soundtrack. You fight shapes, lose health over time, read a book that collects thoughts. You are meant to just stand and look at moody pixel art. All of it seems really damn strange. But millions of people did it. They meandered and fought shapes and stood and looked. They listened to Jim’s music. Thinking about it like that kind of floors me.”

Andrew Webster looks back at five years of one of the seminal indie games for iOS. Sword & Sworcery is still fantastic today – it’s even been updated for iOS 9 – and I can’t wait to see what Superbrothers is working on next.

This week on Remaster, we’re covering all things PlayStation VR. First up Federico and Myke run-through all the news from the GDC presentation, and share their thoughts. Next up Shahid brings us an exclusive interview with Shuhei Yoshida, President of Worlwide Studios at PlayStation. We finish up the episode finding out exactly why Shahid few out to San Francisco for just one night.

This week’s Remaster is a special one. In addition to discussing Sony’s PlayStation VR announcements at GDC, Shahid flew to San Francisco to interview Shuhei Yoshida. It’s a very good discussion, with a lot of useful perspective to understand Sony’s position on VR.

You can listen here.

Craig Grannell, reporting on a Game Center issue that has been around for the past few months:

When iOS 9 hit beta last summer, I heard concerns from developers about Game Center. Never Apple’s most-loved app, it had seemingly fallen into a state of disrepair. In many cases, people were reporting it outright failed to work.

And:

Additionally, some games freeze on start-up, because developers had quite reasonably expected Game Center would at least be functional. This makes for angry users, who can’t directly contact developers through the App Store and therefore leave bad reviews. Developers are now updating their apps to effectively check whether Game Center is broken, flinging up a dialog box accordingly, and at least allowing players access.

I’ve also come across this problem and heard about it from MacStories readers and game developers. There’s a thread on the TouchArcade forums that is over 50 pages long with hundreds of responses. This is bad for everyone – users and developers – and Apple should fix it soon.

Sony:

We’re bringing PS4 Remote Play to Windows PC and Mac. This feature won’t be available to test in the beta, but you can look forward to it soon.

Is it too crazy to start imagining Remote Play on an iPad’s screen?

Andrew Webster, writing on the upcoming game by my friend Sam Rosenthal, who’s collaborating with Ryan Cash and Snowman (makers of Alto’s Adventure):

When he was still a student at the University of Southern California, Sam Rosenthal started working on a game about building a house of cards. It was inspired in part by the Radiohead song “House of Cards,” which Rosenthal felt sounded “like a gentle plea to knock down a structure in favor of something new.” The game let you create structures, then break them down so that you could rebuild them in different ways. Rosenthal wanted the deconstruction and reconstruction to gradually tell a coming of age story about the wistfulness of adolescence, and the way important, sometimes devastating events can impact your life. “The longer the idea sat with me,” he says, “the more it became a lens that I use to see the world.”

After graduation, he worked various industry jobs, designing puzzles for Disney’s mobile hit Where’s My Water? and characters for Activision’s ubiquitous Skylanders series. The idea from school stuck with him, and in his spare time, he continued to tinker with it. A few years later, in 2013, Rosenthal met up with budding game designer Ryan Cash, and the two shared the projects they were working on. Cash had an early version of a snowboarding game, which would go on to become mobile hit Alto’s Adventure. Rosenthal revealed an early version of Where Cards Fall.

No gameplay images or videos yet, but I can already tell this will be worth paying attention to.