As revealed back in September, Alec Holowka and Derek Yu’s beautiful underwater metroidvania has just received an iPad release. It’s available on the App Store for $4.99 right now.

Here’s what to expect from the iPad version:

This version of the game has been development in some time, mainly because we wanted to make it the best version of the game yet.

To that end, we employed the generous talents of Andrew Church – the programmer behind the homebrew PSP version of the game. I was impressed that he could get a heavy game like Aquaria running so well on that portable device that I knew he’d be able to squeeze every last ounce of performance out of the iPad1 and iPad2.

Andrew reprogrammed a lot of the lower level parts of the game engine, greatly improved the way the game loads and stores scripts, came up with crazy algorithms to generate polygons for sprites, so that they could be drawn more efficiently… and much more. The game runs at a beautiful, silky smooth 60fps with all the water ripple effects and plant movement on iPad2. On iPad1 the game runs at a solid 30fps without the extra visual effects.

More here.

And here it is in action, looking as pretty as ever:

Any iPad owners out there tempted to give this a try for the first time? Any hardcore fans buying it a second time?

[Blit Blot]