Stories By Kevin Allan

Space Ninja, one of our favorite top-down shooters, is free for "a couple of hours" this afternoon. If you haven't been able to spare the $1.99, now is the time to act! Just make sure you hurry, because the price will be going back up soon.

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Wild West Guns does exactly one thing, and it does it well: shooting! While we don't think this is one of the best games on the App Store or anything--it's a bit light on content for such accolades--it's plenty entertaining for what it is. Action gamers looking for a solid shootout won't be disappointed here.

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ExZeus has gotten its first update!

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Time Crisis Strike is an on-rails shooter that attempts to bring the fast-paced action of the Time Crisis arcade games (played with a light gun) to the iPhone. As in the arcade version, you don't control the direction or angle of your viewpoint--all the camera work is taken care of for you. You do, however, swap a lot of bullets with soon-to-be-dead terrorists by tapping all over the screen. There's lots of enjoyable gunplay in Time Crisis Strike, but we felt that the brevity of the game didn't match up with its price.

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i Sniper takes an interesting concept and a charmingly flippant attitude and manages to turn it into a completely awful game. We're almost impressed by how badly this game turned out... but then we thought about some of the more creative failures we've played recently, and decided that iSniper doesn't even rate on that scale. Just stay away from it.

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We hated this game. Hated, hated, hated! Hated every second of the experience. We know there are shortcuts to take when you're developing a game--ripping off ideas, poor graphics, etc.-- but we never thought we'd see something this patently terrible on the App Store.

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When you play an especially high quality game, you know immediately. Oftentimes, it's not even obvious to you why you're responding so positively, but the little things you've subconsciously picked up on start becoming clear the more you play. Think of it like driving a luxury car--if you throw a BMW M3 in gear, you might not know the details of the engine or drive train or even the material of the steering wheel... but you can instantly tell that it just feels right.

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Burning Tires 3D is another in a long line of App Store racing games. At this point, most developers seem to know that landscape layout, accelerometer controls and scaling ability of the iDevice makes it ideal to bang out a fast racing game to try to turn a profit.

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The space flying game Zero Chance, one of the more strangely-titled games in recent memory, does a few things right, but gets a lot of other important aspects of the experience wrong.

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We're not sure the games we enjoy playing translate well to a television experience. For instance, the recent TV version of Crossword is epically boring. Similarly, Wheel of Fortune and The Price is Right both lose considerable entertainment value when played alone. Deal or No Deal: Million Dollar Challenge, the official App Store version of the hit game show, turns out to be nowhere near as exciting on the iPhone's screen as it is on TV.

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Monopoly might be a victim of its own success--it's a game invented to make a point about corporate oligarchies, but it's too fun to be serious! Given the breadth of the Monopoly empire, we've been expecting an App Store version for a while.

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Whatever you may think about Animals of Mass Destruction as a game, you have to admit that it's probably the best-titled App you've ever seen.

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We like RPGs, especially ones that remind us of anything Link used to do; we enjoy ridding the world of evil by slaying Orcs and Goblins and all other manner of evil lifeforms. Dungeon & Hero is a classic overhead action RPG in that tradition.

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Fresh on the market, Rebel Onslaught found its first update already. We have used the new ability to continue from the last level reached--which was sorely lacking--and found it useful. The option to toggle firing on and off is rather worthless. We do like the barrel roll move, though. It serves a useful defensive purpose and looks neat. These are the type of things that should have been included in the game from the get-go, and while they weren't enough to bump the game up to a 3, it's a step in the right direction.

1112: Episode 1: Episode 1 is a first-person adventure game with an unusual art-house feel. It doesn't play like most other adventure games we've seen; in fact, if you pressed us, we might call it a "tapping detective game," since you tap around the screen so often.

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We have always thought that racing games peaked with the SNES. That may sound outrageous, but for us, racing games are best when they're simple and arcade style.

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We admit, we were dubious when we purchased Saturday Night Fever: Dance! A dance game? For our iDevice? Would it be accelerometer controlled? What if they tried to make a story out of it? The horror!

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Fastlane has received its first software update. If you haven't picked it up, now's the time.

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During the course of reviewing Ferrari GT: Evolution, we learned more about Enzo Ferrari than we ever really wanted to know. This isn't just an officially licensed product, you see... it's also a huge infomercial for the brand.

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Iron Man is a pretty sweet movie. Not as complex or nuanced as The Dark Knight, or as emotional as Spider-Man, but it was definitely worth seeing. So, as a major studio tie-in to a blockbuster film, Iron Man: Aerial Assault has a pretty lofty standard to adhere to.

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