We have good news for all fans of the game: thanks to all the help from the jailbroken beta-testing community, we are now ready for the release of the game!

On the 8th of April we are submitting Underworld: SweetDeal to the AppStore. Let’s hope this time approval goes smoothly.

For those who aren’t familiar with the whole thing, what’s Underworld? It’s the unique location based massively multiplayer online game simulating trade on the global black market. Using GPS inside your iPhone / iPod Touch you discover a parallel world of dirty trade, cruel rivals and merciless loan sharks. Your job is to find good deals everywhere you travel in your real life and earn big buck by moving merchandise around.

Now to the less exciting part. Despite what we have said before, the news kicked in that we have to shut down our beta version for jailbroken devices. So be it. After all, Underworld is MMO — more players means more fun, right? Beta accounts will be moved to the SweetDeal, where you can continue your struggle to the Cream of the Crop.

Finally, version 1.1 has arrived. Here is what we’ve got for you:

• Dynamic local economy — supply&demand situation in your area will change from time to time
• Player-to-player messaging & public shouts
• Map improvements — you can see drug labs & junkies in your neighborhood thus make considered business decisions
• Tiled game world structure, allowing dealers to interact even on the distance
• Human alike bots don’t exist anymore — everyone you could encounter in the game is either a druglab, a junkie or another real dealer like you
• Lots of interface improvements & minor bug fixes

No worries, all your character data will migrate to the new version (only few hours of your activity will be lost).

Now go to Cydia and download the update. To do that, open Manage section, find UW:DrugLords from the list of installed apps, then tap Modify, Update and wait until it loads.

If you experience troubles updating the game, try installing all the essential Cydia updates first or removing the game completely and installing it from scratch again.

Game help we’ve promised some time ago is on it’s way!

Ask questions or tell us what you think about the new version here in comments or in twitter, we like it too

If you are an Underworld addict, you might have noticed a few server outages lately.

Sorry for that, but there is a good reason — we are preparing the launch of UW 1.1. Yes, the one we’ve been advertising since February. Finally, expecting to push it live next week.

All your characher progress will happily survive the update, the only thing you will have to do is to download a new version from Cydia. You will get a message in the game when it happens.

There still some outages might happen during this weekend, follow us in twitter to be in touch.

It’s been two hot weeks since Underworld has been first presented to the beta testers community. The time was pretty exciting for us, and there are reasons for that

First of all, the game world’s population is now over 4,000 real players and growing, which is even more than we’ve anticipated for the beta testing period (sorry folks if you’ve noticed some network related delays - the world got overcrowded, and we wanted to give everyone a chance to play).

Secondly, we’ve received a hundreds of feature suggestions and some real useful feedback, which we wanted so much in our effort to improve the game. Thank you all for that and please don’t stop!

It is clear for us now that the concept and the execution of UW were taken very well, and it’s time to make the game even better.

Which brings us to the next point of this topic: game client update (1.0.1) was just pushed to Cydia. Changelog:

• fix: installation errors on some devices
• fix: random crashes on the first run on some devices
• fix: map screen crashes
• feature: map screen usability&speed improved
• feature: new game start (Profile->Edit->New Game)
• bonus feature - Jailbreakers’ Special - true commodity names

Go to Cydia’s “Changes” tab, the brand new shiny UNDERWORLD update will be waiting for you there.

Enjoy and don’t forget to let us know how did it go for you

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We are going to put more light on our nearest roadmap soon. Stay tuned.

It’s been almost two months since Underworld was submitted to the AppStore for review. With thousands of other applications being reviewed, we still have no idea when the UW going to be reviewed.

Whilst we are all holding our breath, we have decided it’s time to start polishing the game beta, which is, of course, impossible without real players. So, if you are a Cydia user, you are welcome to check out Underworld right away!

Repository URL: http://a-steroids.com/cydia/

Enjoy and don’t forget to invite your friends (the more players you have around, the more fun you get :)) We are looking forward to hearing your comments, reports and ideas. It’s possible to submit a comment from within the game.

P.S. We know, there is still a lot of people who want to play the game badly but don’t have Cydia. Well, this beta release for Cydia Jailbreakers’ community doesn’t change our plan to become available in AppStore soon.
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UPDATE. If you had troubles entering a nickname at the game start, check again, should be ok now.