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If you've ever played Spectromancer on PC, you know what you're getting into with Hothead Games' Kard Combat [Free, with in-app unlockables]. Not because it's been ripped off, mind you, but because the co-creator of Kard Combat is Richard Garfield, the man behind Spectromancer and the big daddy of TCGs, Magic: The Gathering.

The thing that sets Kard Combat and its progenitor apart from other card games is the complete lack of deck building. For some, building a carefully constructed deck designed to devastate your opponents is what the genre is all about, but I find it more of a necessary evil. I don't particularly want to spend all my money buying boosters, or spend hours agonizing over whether this card or that card is a better fit for my deck. If you feel the same, you'll find a lot to like here.

For starters, Kard Combat completely eschews the booster pack model. Instead, you earn your cards in the game's substantial single-player mode. There are four mages to take through the campaign, The Tower, each defined by an affinity: Death, Holy, Dominator and Machine. Whichever one you choose, your cards will be randomly chosen from four elements, Fire, Water, Air and Wind, and a fifth that matches your affinity. Each match, your deck is built out of twenty randomly chosen cards picked from those you've unlocked and spread evenly between the five categories.

When you face off against an opponent, you each get a field with six positions to fill. On your turn, you can play one card, which is either a unit that can be placed in one of those six positions, or a spell that affects you, your opponent or his cards directly. Units face off against the cards placed directly across from them. Each card has a mana cost, and you have a pool of mana for each category of card – this mana starts out at random levels and increases by one point each round, barring any cards that modify your mana growth. Both players have a pool of health, and the loser is the one that runs out of health first.

There are two ways to unlock cards. You can play through the Tower, which is free for the first few levels and can be opened up with a $0.99 in-app purchase for each mage (or $2.99 for all four). Each opponent you defeat on your way up the tower gives you a new card or an item. If you'd rather just hop straight into multiplayer fully armed, you can unlock all the cards, mages and items with a one-time purchase of $9.99.

Kard Combat has asynchronous multiplayer through OpenFeint. Strictly speaking, this means you can walk away and take your turns whenever you want to, but most of the community seems to play as though this is a synchronous game. There's nothing to stop you from playing in real time, and with such a fast, strategic game, you'll probably prefer it that way.

That's a lot of technical stuff, but the technical stuff is pretty important here. You know what else is important? The art. The card art in Kard Combat is pretty great, in a moody, gothic sort of way. Unfortunately Hothead has chosen to only let you see it in tiny little boxes to keep the game's file size low. Since the game's interface isn't much to speak of (it's functional, but with an unpleasant 90s-retro-gothic style), and the art is so small, the whole thing is a bit bland to look at. The sound design is also underwhelming, leaving us with a somewhat uninspiring package.

But looks aren't everything, and thankfully Kard Combat makes up for its weak points with a great personality. It's a fun game, and the lack of deck-building means it's easy to get into — even for card game newbies. The single-player campaign has three difficulty modes, so you should be able to find a challenge no matter your skill level, and the multiplayer is both functional and well-balanced. Our forum users are pretty into it, too. Kard Combat has a bright future ahead of it, and Hothead Games has given every indication the plan to keep it growing for a long time to come.

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I remember when I first heard about Elite Beat Agents, and how completely ridiculous the whole concept sounded of me tapping on the screen of my Nintendo DS in time with a song to make my three agents assist people in need via a masterfully choreographed dance. But, if you've played it, you know full well that the game is incredible, and still worth dusting off the ol' DS to play once in a while. I'm hopeful for similar things from Pixel Punch's Rice&Shine.

Rhythm games work well on iOS devices, but I've always found myself quickly getting bored of games that just have you tapping on colored dots without any over-arching goal beyond your high score or any potential unlockables. Rice&Shine adds an additional layer to this in that your rhythmic taps are actually translated to ninja-centric sword fighting. It remains to be seen how much of an effect all this ninja business has on gameplay, but I'm really hoping there's some depth to it beyond eye candy.

Anyway, check out the trailer:

Details are rather vague right now, limited to little more than this trailer and an ambiguous "coming soon." Needless to say, we're going to keep a close eye on this one.

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Cavorite [$1.99]  by Cascadia Games is another entry in the puzzle-platformer section of the App Store, only this time, the game takes place on the moon. The story goes like this: Back in 1898, a funky substance named 'Cavorite' was discovered, which could shield against gravity. The professor who discovered it built a spaceship, sprayed it with cavorite and ventured into space, to become the first man on the moon.  Unfortunately, a bunch of green bug-eyed aliens, known as 'Selenites', emerged from underground. They abducted the professor and dragged his spaceship into caverns below the lunar surface.  Luckily, the professor has escaped, but he now must repair his spacecraft, to escape the moon. The game is inspired by the H.G.Wells novel The First Men in the Moon, written in 1901. How's that for retro?

As a platform game, Cavorite has plenty of stationary and moving platforms and conveyer belts to jump between, lava and spike-pits to avoid, lazer beams to block or deactivate, doors to unlock and assorted alien enemies to jump or defeat. There's three varieties of alien to watch out for: 'Guard Selenites' are aggressive and carry spears, 'thieving Selenites' are kleptomaniacs who steal your ships parts if they reach them first, while 'pusher Selenites' move any crates in their path, which may either help or hinder. My favorites are the deadly moon-beetles, which crawl around platforms and inflict instant death if touched.  The enemies can be killed by crushing with crates which turns them into green goop, forcing them into spikes or pushing them into molten lava.

While the title is solid as a platform game, It's the puzzle-solving and level-design where this game really shines. There are crates which must be pushed, dropped or even flown into position, to complete each level.  The professor is armed with a cavorite gun which causes objects or enemies to float.  You can spray cavorite on an object to make it rise, perhaps to activate a button above or to drop on an alien's head once the effects of cavorite wear off. You can also make a crate float, then grab hold of it, to be pulled into the air. Once air-bound, you can maneuver the floating crate (and yourself) left or right. This is a useful way to reach higher platforms, to transport crates to other parts of the screen, to activate buttons or to block lazer beams. The puzzles make you stop and think, as you often need to plan your strategy for completing the level. Things are moving around on the screen, so sometimes you need to act quickly before your exit is blocked or a thieving alien steals a part required to repair your ship.

Cavorite delivers plenty of gameplay in three chapters (63 levels). Each chapter features a different pixel-art landscape and it's own boss battle. Gold or silver stars are awarded for each level, based on time taken. If you get stuck, a level can be skipped after a few unsuccessful attempts. There's even Game Center achievements and an online leader-board for fastest game-completion times–  Screenshot grabbing and tweeting are built in. The developer knows all the puzzles and can beat his own game in 24 minutes and 9 seconds, which is an insane time for hard core gamers to beat. For most of us, the game will provide hours of gameplay, which is probably why the music got stuck in my head, in a good way.

The App Store is a smorgasbord of awesome games, so it's easy to jump from title to title, having a wee taste of each. But a nibble of Cavorite isn't enough, for the puzzles are enticing, without being too difficult, so you'll want to keep playing until you escape the moon. The well-designed puzzles and ability to float objects, all within a physics-based platforming game, with retro pixel-art and a nod to H.G Wells, is a winning combination.

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One of our favorite releases from earlier this year was The Blocks Cometh [99¢] from developer Halfbot. This Flash game to iOS port had you controlling one of several characters who must dodge and stay on top of the endless stream of blocks inexplicably falling from the sky. The goal was to get as high into the air as possible while avoiding getting crushed by a falling block, and each of the 5 available characters had their own unique attributes such as special jumps or weaponry to destroy blocks with.

With its great pixel art, rocking chiptunes, and frantic gameplay, we had no problems recommending The Blocks Cometh in our review from February. As great as the game was though, there were still a few issues. Our major complaint was the difficulty, and it seemed that no matter how large our own Brad Nicholson’s muscles grew, he just couldn’t do very well in the game. There was also a substantial group of people in our forums and elsewhere who were calling for a landscape mode, since playing The Blocks Cometh in portrait was a pretty cramped experience.

In the just released 1.5 update to the game, Halfbot looks to remedy both of these major complaints, while at the same time adding in a whole bunch of other cool things to boot. Addressing the difficulty is the new Casual mode, which features slower moving blocks and the ability to get squished by blocks 3 times before it causes a game over. In addition to Casual mode, there is now an Arcade mode as well which gives you the benefit of the extra lives but the blocks move at regular speed.

The next big feature in this update is the ability to play in landscape mode at any time simply by turning your device. Landscape mode causes the screen to shrink considerably so as not to cut off any of the same area you would have in portrait mode, but it still remains large enough to play easily and there are nice borders on the sides for the virtual buttons to sit. Landscape definitely offers up a way more comfortable way to play the game. If I had to nitpick something it would be that none of the screens outside the actual gameplay are landscape friendly, but this is an extremely minor annoyance.

Another of the big changes is the addition of an in-game store with two 99¢ in-app purchase options. The first will unlock all 8 additional playable characters in the game, which includes the 4 new ones added in this latest update. Every character can be unlocked normally just by achieving certain goals in the game, but if you’re not patient enough for that sort of thing then the option is there to spend a buck and get them all at once.

The second IAP is much more interesting. It’s actually a whole new mode called GameBot which gives you a retro Game Boy inspired version of the game. GameBot can only be played in landscape mode, and the outside edges of the screen are mocked up to look like a classic portable system. Gameplay is essentially the same, though it does have a slightly different feel to it and you aren’t able to choose a character. But something about it is just a lot of fun, especially if you ever owned an old handheld like the Game Boy.

The remainder of the update contains 30 Game Center achievements as well as general bug fixes and optimizations. Also, all 4 of the modes that are in the game now each have their own Game Center leaderboard to climb. If you picked up The Blocks Cometh before but couldn’t hang with playing in portrait mode or thought it was too difficult, you should definitely give the updated version another spin. If you’ve been enjoying The Blocks Cometh since the beginning, then there are plenty of goodies in this latest update to keep you further entertained as well.

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If you're anything like me, you've been wondering, "When in the world is Rocketcat Games going to release something that doesn't rely on a swinging mechanic?" Don't get me wrong, HookChamp, Super QuickHook, and Hook Worlds are all fantastic games, but I doubt I'm alone in looking forward to what Rocketcat would release outside of the hook and swing world. We're getting a first real glimpse at their next game today, Mage Gauntlet, which seems to be a beautifully pixelated homage to the classic action RPG games of yore.

Check out some screenshots:

The real awesomeness is contained inside of the trailer:

Details are a little vague right now, but Mage Gauntlet is built around a "more action, less grinding" quest philosophy centralized around the main character, Lexi. You're looking to become a wizard's apprentice, and your journey starts out with a quest to prove yourself. Equipped with a magical gauntlet, Lexi is able to absorb and launch magical energy. The spell system involves destroying "certain objects" to power-up your gauntlet with a completely randomized spell. You can hold four at a time, and these are accessible through a menu.

There's a full loot and leveling system complete with character customization through three different stats that you can build your character with. 50 levels will be included with release, along with an unlockable additional game mode. More levels and modes are planned after release. Oh, and there's boss fights, loads of different enemies, and lots of secrets and achievements. Scoreboards aren't initially included, but the future game modes I mentioned will introduce them.

Mage Gauntlet will be priced at $2.99, with an initial $1.99 sale. Like other RocketCat games, early buyers will get a pack of hats to customize your character with as well as a in-game pet that follows you around. We'll be following the release of this game closely, and hope to have a full preview in the next couple weeks.

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Com2Us's ultra-Korean Puzzle Family (Free / $1.99) is now available worldwide. It's full of crazy-fun minigames, but to get in on all the fun you're either going to need to pony up some cash, or invest some substantial time playing. Here's the deal: you start out with three of the game's eight minigames available to play. One is unlocked for free, one is unlocked by connecting Puzzle Family to your Facebook account, and one is unlocked by signing into Com2Us's gaming hub. If you want to unlock anything else, it's going to cost you stars. You can earn stars by playing the games (but slowly), or you can pay to get them in larger amounts. Unlocking all eight games is going to take a serious investment of your time, or more than a couple of your hard-earned dollars.

So if you're someone who wants to pay for a game upfront and have it all available to you, give this one a pass. But let me just say one thing first: Puzzle Family is really, really fun. Most of the minigames are takes on matching games, but they're interesting takes. If you can resist the siren song of IAP, you can easily get by with the three unlocked games in the free version and have a lot of fun while slowly working towards unlocking the rest of the content.

Flick and Fly, the included game, is a match-3 style game where you flick grumpy-faced blocks into each other to make and clear matches. They'll slide until they hit something, so setting up combos takes some (quick) thought. Hide and Seek also has you matching faces, but these ones are two-sided. Tap them to flip them around and swap their colors to make matches. In Shanghai Pop you'll match pairs of blocks, but they have to either be touching or be free on one side.

If you choose to spend your stars on more games, you can unlock the following:

• Order the Order, which gives you a three-symbol pattern to find in the field.
• Who's Next, which has you locate three different colors of critters in ever-increasing numerical order.
• Boing Boing, which is pretty much Puzzle Bobble.
• Copy Copycat, a flipping puzzle that needs you tap squares to flip those around them and match a specific pattern.
• Tap on Time, a timing game about tapping the right square at the right moment.

They're all wrapped in Puzzle Family's colorful, haywire style, with lots of cute and completely ridiculous imagery. And they're also very fun. You're on a tight timer in all the games, with either time or HP running down whenever you stop making matches or miss your timing, so they always feel frantic. In a pinch you can use a skill, which gives you a little more HP or time, but be warned – in the free version of the game, you can only earn them back by viewing ads, and in the paid version you can earn them back at a rate of 10 per day.

That's the main difference between the paid and free versions of Puzzle Family, by the way: ads. There aren't any in the paid version. You also get 3000 stars to start with, so you can unlock a couple more games. If you like the game, I'd recommend going for the paid version sooner than later, since your progress doesn't seem to carry over – it's a better deal than buying the stars in the shop.

The metagame aspects of Puzzle Family are a little lacking. There is no Game Center integration, just Facebook leaderboards. The urge to earn stars helps offset the lack, though – a high score is nice, but earning a ton of stars is much more satisfying. Even once you've unlocked all the minigames, you can use your stars to buy dress-up items for your stick-figure avatar, and those items give you more HP, higher scores and such. Your scores also feed into an experience system, of sorts – each "level" moves your little Puzzle Family to a new home. They start off living in the gutters, so there's nowhere to go but up.

I can see why Puzzle Family is so popular: there's lots to see and do, I'm always stimulated, and the stars do a great job of hitting the "reward" switch in my brain. So far our forum users are loving it too. I do wish the game were less mercenary in its approach, but if you pay, you're paying for a collection of very fun games. Few of them would stand on their own, but all eight together make an argument that's hard to resist.

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Ant Raid [$2.99] isn't a knockoff of Nintendo's Pikmin. I want to get that out of the way up front. It has a few things in common with Pikmin, sure, and it does a pretty good job of scratching that itch while Nintendo takes its sweet time bringing out the next sequel, but the game stands well on its own.

So now that we've covered what Ant Raid isn't, I probably ought to tell you what it is: a real-time strategy game that forgoes micromanagement for simple tap-and-target style gameplay. Your units are the titular ants, who circle around your base. Tap and hold to select a group of them, and then tap a target to send them off after it. Sometimes that target is a resource like pine needles or berries, other times it's an enemy — a mutated snail or bee that's coming to destroy your base. Once they dispatch their foes or gather their resources the ants return to base, ready for new orders.

The controls keep the targeting system simple, but Ant Raid also requires some strategy. Enemy units come in three colors, and each gives you energy toward special abilities. When you gather enough blue energy, you can make your ants immortal for a time. Red makes them super fast, and if you can trigger red and blue at the same time, you get gold ants that are both speedy and immortal. Green energy is a special case – it unleashes divine power, letting you interfere directly by tapping on enemy units to smite them and dragging resources to the base to gather them. A large part of the game's challenge lies in deciding when to unleash these powers, and in maintaining enough energy to keep them going.

Without any serious resource management or unit building, Ant Raid runs the risk of being a smidge too casual, but despite the lack of any hardcore RTS features it manages to stay challenging. Keeping your ants alive is goal number one. Each enemy has its own pattern of ant-murder: snails knock out all attacking ants when they die, while beetles flip on top of ants and need a second wave of attackers to polish them off. You'll need to keep enough ants alive to revive their fellows and take out the enemy. With large swarms constantly rushing your base, you need to think on your fingertips to ensure all the enemies are engaged but none have a chance of obliterating your army. If you can't move quickly, your base will get slammed.

These skills will be put to the test across Ant Raid's 104 levels. Story mode takes up the first 60 of those levels, and faces you with the task of curing the vicious insects of their pesticide-induced mania. Once you complete story mode, you unlock 40 challenge levels across 4 levels of difficulty. You can replay all of the levels to try to get 3-star rankings. There are also 4 endless survival levels that unlock as you progress through story mode. These have a clever twist: the number of ants you have available in each of them corresponds to the number of stars you earn in story mode.

Aside from a less-than-inspiring story and mediocre cutscene design, I like nearly everything Ant Raid offers up. The game benefits from being built specifically for iPad, and takes advantage of the screen real estate. The levels look great, the controls are solid and very rarely frustrating, and there is a ton of content (including 47 Game Center achievements and 5 leaderboards). Some of the goals in later story mode levels get repetitive – build flags in every level, then collect berries, then build flags, then collect berries – but the ramped-up difficulty kept me interested despite the repetition.

Ant Raid might be a little light for the serious RTS crowd — its focus is on frantic action far more than management or organization. For anyone who wants some strategy in their action games, though, it's a perfect fit.

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Adding color to a black and white world isn't exactly a new concept in games, but Kaia Games' Color Bandits [99¢ / HD] attempts to add that layer to a side scrolling shooter with a resemblance to Contra in terms of gameplay, but not in challenge.

As far as story and setting is concerned, Color Bandits keeps it as simple as possible. An evil steam punk boss has stolen color from the world and you, a cat with a gun, needs to reintroduce color by blowing up robots. To do so, you'll travel across six different stages each broken up into three different levels, but the levels aren't levels in a traditional sense, they're just checkpoints scattered throughout each linear stage.

Control wise, you control the forward and reverse of you character with a slider on the left and the shooting direction with a right analog stick. The screen moves automatically to push you toward the right.

From there, enemies pop up and attack you in a wide variety of ways. For the most part, you'll spend your time dodging and shooting and for the bulk of the game, it's not a difficult affair. You can shoot somewhat randomly and you'll usually survive the onslaught. By the last couple of levels, you'll feel an actual challenge coming up, but it ends up being a little too late. Along the way, you'll get weapon power-ups, but you only get a small portion of bullets and most of the weapons feel similar to one another.

You can cruise through the main campaign in under an hour, but getting three stars on each level is a lot more complicated. The combo system is a bit unusual in that you rack up combos by shooting enemies, but the second one dies, the combo meter starts counting down. You don't lose the whole combo if you miss a shot, but it counts down quickly enough you'll get frustrated more enemies aren't the screen. By stringing together the combo kills you'll multiply the score of each kill and the higher the score, the more stars you'll get at the end of the level.

Once you get about halfway through, you'll unlock a survival mode, which is the same core game but the screen doesn't move to the right. The mode is all about high scores, which can be shared and compared on Crystal and Game Center.

Visually, Color Bandits has a hand-drawn aesthetic to it. The character and enemy designs look great and are tinged with a steam punk aesthetic without being overwhelming. As you improve your score and get more stars, the background starts to fill in with color. While they're relatively static, the backgrounds are well done and the transition from black and white into color is subtle, but works well.

The foundation of Color Bandits is a casual take on a Contra-style shooter but since you can't jump, the game can't ever get as complicated as Contra. It tries to make it up by bombarded you with enemies in the end, but it's going to be too little too late for a lot of players. That said, Color Bandits might be a better high-score game than it is a shooter.

Even looking at Color Bandits as just a high-score game, it's hard for it not to feel stale toward the end. The experience doesn't change throughout the levels, which for a game this short isn't necessarily a big deal, but it would have been nice if things were mixed up a little throughout. Even still, the high-score nature of the experience makes it an enjoyable experience for anyone who has that part of their brain take over when a score is in place. The controls are precise and work terrifically, even if the campaign isn't particularly amazing, the survival mode is well executed.

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It was back in February that we first learned about the guerilla porting project of Bungie’s classic Mac first-person shooter trilogy Marathon [Free] to the iPad. Lone wolf coder Daniel Blezek had taken it upon himself to take these games, which were by this time a part of the open source community, and adapt them for the touch screen. But, there were still questions about certain aspects of the open source licensing and whether or not things would jive with Apple’s App Store distribution methods. Silence about the Marathon iPad project in the months that followed hinted that it indeed might have hit a permanent roadblock.

Then just a couple of weeks ago, Bungie posted an interview on their blog with Daniel Blezek talking about the project. It turns out that they had caught wind of Daniel’s planned port and were stoked on it, and decided to officially get behind it. A refreshing turn of events considering some of the unfortunate turnouts of other fan projects like the Streets of Rage Remake or various awesome looking Sonic the Hedgehog games over the years.

If you’re a fan of Bungie or the Halo series then it may not be surprising that Marathon has launched on July 7th, or otherwise known as Bungie Day. As had already been announced, the game launched for free and comes with the complete first game in the Marathon trilogy, which contains 9 chapters and 27 levels. I'd like to believe that the remaining two games Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon Infinity will appear on the App Store in similar fashion sometime down the line, though there aren't any concrete details on this just yet.

The catch to the game being free, if you can even call it a catch, is that the whole game is in a standard texture resolution. Should you feel so inclined, you can download a high resolution texture pack as a $3.99 in-app purchase. The improved visuals admittedly do look nice, but they don’t look that much better than what comes in the game initially. Of course, I wouldn’t blame you one bit if you felt like throwing the four bucks at the game just to support such a great project, and received the slight visual upgrade in return as an added bonus.

Another interesting in-app purchase is the ability to buy a Master Chief mode for 99¢. What this means is that options for unlocking all weapons, infinite ammo, invincibility, and instant shields are all available in the pause menu at any time, as well as the ability to select any stage and save anywhere during play. The game saves your state when you exit with the home button, but actual game progress is normally only saved at specific checkpoints in each level.

All of these cheats may sound like they’d suck the fun out of the game, and for some people that would be true. But Marathon is a hard game, and its retro gameplay hasn’t aged entirely well. Whereas a game like Doom is more of a straight up blast-a-thon, Marathon contains many (sometimes) confusing puzzles and even relies on some light platforming elements that can be pretty challenging. The option of buying some cheats for a buck is actually a welcome one if you’re just looking to experience the game again with minimal frustration.

The game itself plays pretty well on the iPad’s touch screen. A virtual stick on the left controls your movement and swiping anywhere on the screen controls your aim. Buttons in the lower right control firing and switching weapons, though you can toggle an option to fire by tapping anywhere on the screen too. Opening doors and toggling switches lies right below the virtual stick, as does access to an overhead map. There’s not the fully customizable controls seen in other FPS games, but what’s here works pretty well.

If you like old-school first-person shooters like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D, then you should feel right at home with Marathon. It’s nothing groundbreaking as far as iOS first-person shooters go, but it’s a solid port of a classic game. Marathon tells an interesting story via the computer terminals spread throughout the game, and has a great moody atmosphere. Whether you’re new to the series or an old-school Mac gamer looking for a nostalgia fix, Marathon is an easy recommendation for free and is definitely worth considering the IAP upgrades for the total experience. You can drop your own opinions of Marathon in our forums, and we'll keep an eye out for news on the release of the remainder of the trilogy.

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Holy cow, spending Monday fully engrossed in 4th of July festivities, Wednesday snuck up on me by surprise. But really, what surprise is better than a ton of new games being released?

Anyway, this week works like all previous weeks on the App Store. Developers can set specific future release dates for their games, and since the App Store is a global market broken up into regions, things are released incrementally. Thanks to New Zealand's proximity to the International Date Line, their App Store gets updated with new releases first. These releases then propagate out to the rest of the world until finally reaching the US App Store at 11:00 PM Eastern.

Here's an alphabetical listing of things coming out tonight that has caught our eye. Since there's been some confusion, keep in mind the screenshots come before the game link and description:

Block Breaker 3 Unlimited, 99¢ / HD – Forum Thread – I imagine the creation of this game involving a brain storming session where Gameloft just threw every idea everyone shouted for things that could be in a block breaking game onto a whiteboard… Then used that whiteboard as the feature list. There's tons of power-ups, multi-screen levels, boss battles, and so much more.

Deathsmiles, $4.99 / Lite – Forum ThreadIf bullet hell bullet curtain games are your cup of tea, there's no finer purveyor of said games on the App Store than Cave. Deathsmiles is of the horizontal variety, and instead of a traditional lives system has a "life point" system where you won't always be penalized by death depending on what you run into.

Finger Shoes, 99¢ / HD – Forum Thread – The object of this game seems to be fairly simple, you just walk with your fingers through the game world, tapping on all the star tiles as you go.

Flick Golf Extreme HD, $4.99 – Forum Thread – Joining the existing iPhone-specific version of Flick Golf Extreme [$2.99] comes its HD counterpart. We liked the original Flick Golf, and thought the Extreme redo was just as much fun. If you've been holding out for an iPad-specific version, now is your chance.

Jules – Unboxing the World, 99¢ – Forum Thread – This game has been available for the iPad for quite some time, and is only now getting re-released on the iPhone. Gameplay is a little on the simple side, and hinges entirely on you rolling Jules around smashing boxes. The graphics look great on the iPad, and tilt-based games always seem to work well on the iPhone.

Magnetic Baby, 99¢ / HD – Forum Thread – Magnetic Baby appears to be the love child of both Soosiz [$1.99] and Tiny Wings [99¢] and I'm totally OK with that. I've become a total sucker for colorful physics-centric games, and look forward to giving this one a try.

Ninjammin Beat-Jitsu, 99¢ – Forum Thread – This insane looking game is a hybrid between an action platformer and a rhythm game. Oh, and it takes place in a dystopian future and it's universal. What more do you need?

One Man Army, 99¢ – Forum Thread – It's a little hard to categorize this game, as it includes elements from shooters, tower defense, and castle defense. Regardless, you're a one man army and from your pile of sandbags you mow down seemingly endless waves of enemies.

Puzzle Family, Free / Star Pack – Forum Thread – This free to play collection of puzzle games has a delightfully weird trailer, and tons of things to unlock both between the 8 unlockable games and the 20 unlockable family members. (Each with their own outfits and things to unlock.) The entirely optional "Star Pack" gives you a head start with a bundle of stars to go hog wild unlocking things.

Swords and Soldiers, $2.99 / HD – Forum Thread – I'm all for these kinds of castle battle games, especially when they have art this good. (Seriously, check out the trailer.) This game is high up on our list of things to check out tonight.

The King of Fighters-i, $7.99 – Forum Thread – Many days of my youth were dedicated to arguing in support of either Street Fighter and/or King of Fighters compared to other fighting games, and now finally both franchises are available on the App Store. Sadly, with the recent release of SF4: Volt and the implementation of online Street Fighter multiplayer, King of Fighters has some catching up to do.

Torture Bunny, 99¢ / HD – Forum Thread – In the early days of the App Store, ragdoll punishment games were shockingly popular. I'll be interested to see how Torture Bunny does, as admittedly being able to design your own torture chambers does sound intriguing.

We Are Hungry, Free – Forum Thread – This free game seems to be a very simple take on line drawing. It's unclear how entertaining it will be for adults, but I could see something like this going over great with kids… That is, if you trust your child with your iPhone and/or iPad.

Westward 2 for iPad, $2.99 – This sequel to the original Westward [$2.99] is (at this point) exclusive to the iPad and features similar realtime strategy centric gameplay as you settle your home in the west. Think of it as a much more complicated version of Oregon Trail.

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