It's pretty clear the first time you load up Delusion Studio's House of Mice [99¢] that one of the developers is a big fan of Hanna-Barbera cartoons. It's not just because you're playing as a group of mice hell-bent on destroying a cat, it's also because the game features some of the slickest animation you'll find in a puzzle game.

Unless you've never booted up the App Store in your entire life, you're going to recognize House of Mice right away. It's a one-screen puzzle game that requires you to get from one point to another while grabbing onto three tasty pieces of cheese. The game certainly looks the part of Cut the Rope or its countless iterations, but the gameplay takes a different, albeit familiar approach.

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If you are amongst the millions of iPhone owners who also happen to have PS3's, I've got the perfect app for you. Behold, PSN Status [Free]. This free app will tell you both quickly and easily whether or not PSN is up. Sure, it would have been much more useful last month, but it will be handy to keep around if/when PSN goes down again.

Oh also, on the subject of PSN being down, if you're like me and really only use your PS3 for watching BluRays, don't forget to claim your free games. Even if you weren't really affected by the downtime in any real way, you're still eligible for two free PS3 games and two free PSP games. The selection is surprisingly decent, too.

On a somewhat related note- If you're a proud PS3 console warrior and your pride has taken a substantial hit over the last month as you were the brunt of countless "PSN is down" jokes from your Xbox 360-loving friends, don't forget to also download i360Emu [Free]. It's a shockingly accurate emulator of early Xbox 360's, or, it was, before they changed the power-on animation.

At first glance, Alex Blaj's Firefly Hero [99¢] doesn't look like much, but what it's lacking in graphic variety it makes up for in solid mechanics that might look similar to other iOS puzzle games, but are wholly and completely its own. It's filled with intelligent puzzle design, charm and oftentimes devious screens that take serious thinking to get past.

The basics are pretty simple, you're tasked with making a firefly capture stars. But fireflies aren't the smartest of creatures, in this case, it will make a beeline to whichever light is on, regardless of what obstacle is in the way. "Stupid firefly!" you'll say, but then you'll realize you can get quite a bit of control by toggling between different lights on the screen.

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Swedish indie developer Erik Svedang has recently released a new game named 'Tri Tri Triobelisk' [99¢] for the iPad. I've been following Erik's work for a while, so was totally interested in checking it out. Any discussion of Tri Tri Triobelisk really begins with his earlier game, Shot Shot Shoot [$1.99], so let's examine that first.

In 2010, Erik released Shot Shot Shoot! for the iPad. It's one of those games you may not have heard of, however Frank Lantz (the designer of Drop7 [$4.99]), is quoted as describing it as "the first truly great game for the iPad. Essential."

Erik describes his game as a "Digital board-game" for the iPad; it could also be easily described as a top-down shooter. Two players sit facing each other, on the same iPad and each player has five squares on their side of the board. The goal is to destroy your opponents five squares before they destroy yours. Tapping on one of your squares fires a shot directly towards your opponent, but if you hold your finger down, you can optionally redirect that shot while it's traveling, allowing your bullet to swerve around other bullets or to change targets. This is best illustrated by watching a gameplay video:

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Hey it's Wednesday again, which means after a cursory not-entirely-too-witty introduction I'll explain that developers can set future release dates for their games on the App Store. When they do, they appear in international regions of the App Store when it hits that date in that particular area of the world. This means that all of these games get released in New Zealand first due to their proximity to the international date line, then they slowly become available in Asian markets, then European countries, then the USA at 11:00 PM Eastern time.

Wait, explaining how Wednesdays work was my witty introduction? Man, things are really slipping around here! To make up for it, here's a fabulous list of games to look forward to tonight, in alphabetical order!

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Madfinger has proven in the past that it nail visuals. Take a gander at its last release, Samurai II: Vengeance [$2.99]. The gameplay was incredibly repetitive, but the overall fidelity and rock sold 60 fps framerate were inspiring. It caught eyes on its look factor alone, and I’m thinking the studio is shooting for a similar kind of clamor for its latest game, the just-announced Shadowgun.

Shadowgun is a third-person shooter with a focus on “tactical action.” You’ll play as the grizzled bounty hunter John Slade in the bombed-out, future world of 2350. The task is to find and “hunt down” a geneticist who must have done something vile to warrant having such a large man on his tail.

Wait, perhaps he’s in trouble because he’s playing god in his fortress. Like a cyber Dr. Moreau, this geneticist is breeding mutants, cyborgs and other ‘enhanced’ humanoids.

Is this thing on? The visuals are still clogging your synapses, aren’t they? And with good reason -- this game looks stellar. MADFINGER says its ‘ushering in a new visual standard for handheld gaming,’ after all.

But, I’ve got some doubts about these shots. The perspective shown is pulled a little too far and to the right to be of any use to the player. Also, there’s a certain sharpness that I have yet to see in any iPad or iPhone game. Madfinger tells us that it, as we’re guessing, didn't pull these images directly from the target device. However, it also says that these are indeed indicative of what you’ll see on your platform.

We’ve followed up for more clarification.

Regardless, we’ll be keeping our eyes on Shadowgun -- as a whole, that is -- and will probably give you some impressions down the line.

No price or release date (other than a '2011' window) has been announced at the moment.

Minecraft for mobile phones is coming to Android first as an Xperia Play exclusive, the game’s developer Mojang confirmed to us in a brief e-mail exchange this morning.

This news comes on the heels of a rash of E3 invitations-turned-blog-posts. Yesterday, Play creator Sony Ericcson blasted out a digital invitation to a June 7 mixer to several members of the enthusiast games press. The invite was adorned with Minecraft art and, as if that didn’t do the trick, also referenced a well-known explosive enemy in the game.

With the surprise blown, Mojang is now able to confirm the project, which is formally called Minecraft - Pocket Edition. As you’d assume, it will have controls fitted to the Play’s touch pads, buttons, and d-pad, and will feature changes specific to the hardware and the, perhaps, less attentive audience.

“When playing on smart phones you will have a different screen size compared to PC, different hardware, different attention spans and thus the game needs to be customized to fit the mobile specifications,” a representative told us.

If you know Minecraft, you know Mojang doesn’t kid around with updates. The PC hit is updated a lot with the occasional game-changing overhaul, as well as standard tweaks, enhancements, and bug fixes. Mojang suggests this will be the case with Pocket Edition, too.

“The development process will follow the one we have for PC, release early and update frequently,” the same representative told us.

Apparently, more will be revealed about Pocket Edition during E3. As of right now, we still don’t know its price, release window, or possible cross-platform functionalities. If you read between Mojang's lines about this version of the game, however, the latter seems highly unlikely.

One thing we’d love to know is if Pocket Edition is a PlayStation Suite joint. If it is, then it's possible that this version of the game will work on the NGP as well as other Android 2.3 , PlayStation-certified devices. As reported eons ago, Sony plans to keep a hardware-neutral stance with the Suite platform, so cross-platform play is possible provided that Sony's device requirements are met.

We're not sure what this means for the iOS version of Minecraft in the short term. The studio still refers to this version as an actual project, but if this exclusive has a long-ish tail, you'll be waiting for awhile obviously. Will development slow or stop in the meanwhile? We'll ask.

The Xperia Play is available for purchase tomorrow in the US for $199 with a two year contract. I'm guessing that Mojang will be counting the days until this agreement is over if the desire for the Play's games is as poor in the US as it has been in the UK, Canada, Ireland, and Spain. Mid-month reports from sales in these regions indicate that under or around 1,000 units of each of the five PSOne classic exclusives have been purchased. That's not... good, to say the least.

Then again, Minecraft is a big deal. Perhaps it can push the platform? We'll see.

In-game image from the latest PC build of Minecraft.

Yesterday, the Mac and iOS worlds were surprised by the release of The Heist [$0.99], a puzzle game by tap tap tap that promotes the team's MacHeist bundles of discounted software goodies. After a few moments of panic while people worried that MacHeist had given up on its Mac bundles and moved on to iOS giveaways (they haven't, a new MacHeist bundle is still coming), I started to dig into the game.

What I found is a fun puzzle game that can be approached in two different ways. As we mentioned in our coverage of the announcement, The Heist includes a special PC/Mac software giveaway from MacHeist. You can certainly look at it as a cheap promotional game with a free reward at the end. And that's a selling point, but it's really not the best way to approach this game. The merits of the reward (which I'd rather not spoil, though I'm sure it will be discussed in the comments) are being debated, with some folks disappointed it isn't cooler/newer/more valuable. To this I say that The Heist isn't just about the destination; the journey is plenty of fun too.

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Drop whatever you’re doing and head over to the App Store to download Super Stickman Golf [Link] which is currently free. Super Stickman Golf is a physics puzzle game wrapped in the veil of a golfing game. Gameplay involves choosing the trajectory of each shot as try to land your ball in the hole in a minimum amount of tries. With 29 nine-hole courses to play and plenty of ball types that grant special abilities, Super Stickman Golf is one of the most robust, challenging, and fun experiences in the App Store.

Even better than the single-player offering in Super Stickman Golf is the fantastic real-time online multiplayer that was added to the game this past April. We covered this new online mode pretty extensively, and found it to be insane amounts of fun. The goal is to be the first to land your ball in the cup, and since up to 4 players can play at once you get to see your opponents efforts as you play. Things get frantic as you try to get your ball in the cup with everybody else breathing down your neck.

With the game going free, the online component is only bound to get even better as more people are playing. It’s never really been an issue finding a match anyway, but it should be easier to get full 4 player random matches with an increase in the player pool.

As an interesting aside, about 30 editors from various gaming publications have gathered for pre-E3 events down in Los Angeles, and Super Stickman Golf has been the subject of furious multiplayer battles amongst them. I can’t even count all of the tweets I’ve seen from people at these events who are loving Super Stickman Golf, and I'd expect we'll hear more about the game during coverage of E3 next month. At any rate, it's pretty cool to see an iOS title become the talk of the town at what is the biggest event in the entire game industry.

Be sure to grab Super Stickman Golf while it’s free, as it’s an easy recommendation at its regular $2.99 price point and is a total no-brainer for free.

Say, have you heard about this whole “planking” business? I’ve just become aware of it in the past few weeks myself, but planking is the latest ridiculous thing that is sweeping the internet. It involves lying face down on an object, stiff as a board with your arms at your sides, like a plank, and then being photographed in the act. The stranger the location you perform your plank, the better. For example here is some folks planking in a tree, or some Apple employees planking inside of an Apple Retail store. But be careful, you don’t want to end up like the man who fell to his death planking on a seventh story balcony railing.

So yeah, planking. Maybe I’m just getting old, but I totally don’t see the appeal. Thousands of other people do see the appeal, however, and if you yourself are a planker you’ll soon be able to get your plank on while on the go in the upcoming game Plank’d. Not being a fan of the whole planking phenomenon, I wasn’t immediately interested in having a game version. But after actually trying the game, I’ve found that it’s completely absurd and actually a ton of fun.

You can try out the game for yourself on the Plank’d website for free, just make sure you have the Unity browser plug-in installed. Basically, you get to control one of three characters using an awkward physics system as you try to lie flat on practically any object you can see. This includes cars, street signs, mail boxes, old ladies, and more. You earn points based on how well you hold your plank, and can string multiple planks together for combos. It’s the sort of thing that’s so strange that I can’t help but like it.

Plank’d is only available as a web version currently, but an iOS version is coming “very soon” according to developer N3V Games. There’s a thread in our forums for discussing Plank’d, and we’ll keep an eye out for this one to hit the App Store soon.

Last year, ThinkGeek may have outdone themselves on April Fools' day by announcing the iCade, a miniature, upright arcade cabinet complete with joystick, buttons, and a coin slot. You just slip your iPad into it and -- wham -- it's game time! It was well done joke, but it got a huge response from readers and that got the awesome folks at ThinkGeek thinking. And before long, we heard the epic news that the net's best geek-toy vendor was teaming up with ION Audio to bring that little box of goodness to market -- for real -- and with Atari as a games partner. (Like they did with their 2007 8-bit Tie. Those guys are unstoppable.)

Yesterday, after leaping to pre-order and waiting a long and anxious month, the iCade was delivered unto my door. Readers that follow us on Twitter might have seen the informal and rapid unboxing and assembly photos I took along my hopeful journey to arcade bliss. So, now that I've spent some real time with the unit -- was it worth the wait and the $99?

The iCade comes packaged unassembled. The box contains the main control unit, two side panels, a back panel, a handy flip-up top panel with instructions printed on the inside face, a lovely red joystick knob, screws, batteries, and a set of instructions. Getting the unit together with the help of the illustrated assembly sheet is about 5 to 10 minutes' work. Once assembled, the first thing you'll notice is that the iCade is heaver than you might have imagined. The unit's panels appear to be vinyl-coated particle board, which accounts for much of the weight. The control unit is housed in a plastic shell and the sides of the cabinet are nicely illustrated. The assembled cabinet has a very solid feel with an impressive overall fit and finish. The weight of the unit combined with four rubber foot pads keep it from budging while the joystick and buttons are being manhandled.

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In late April, we took a look at Prose With Bros [$1.99 / Free] and were totally impressed by the incredibly unique idea behind the game. Evil Laugh Games successfully turned magnetic poetry into an asynchronous online multiplayer game, complete with players judging the best phrases put together by players.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on which side of the fence you're on, the game quickly turned into non-stop sexual euphemisms. Initially, they were amusing, but quickly grew fairly tiring for me as everyone I played with seemed to attempt to string together nonsensical nastiness. Will an injection of 300 new words to the game solve this problem? It's hard to say, but it seems worth updating regardless.

And hey, if weird sexual euphemisms with anonymous strangers on the Internet is your cup of tea, you just got 300 new pieces of innuendo ammo!

If you're not a Mac user, you likely have never heard of MacHeist, which is really too bad because it's one of the coolest ways to get a bucket full of software on the cheap. The gist of the whole MacHeist promotion is somewhat similar to the various Humble Indie Bundles or Steam bundles, but with a unique twist involving all sorts of puzzles, generally set in a high tech almost hacker-ish safe cracking theme. Like most bundles, there's usually one or two really awesome pieces of software that make it totally worthwhile, then a handful of other stuff that you've never heard of that actually turns out to be pretty useful.

The Heist [99¢] is MacHeist's first foray into the App Store. This 99¢ game comes with 60 different puzzles to solve amongst four different types of puzzles. These puzzles all involve familiar mechanics, with three hinging on sliding blocks around in different ways and a fourth that's a strangely abstract version of sudoku. Solving the puzzles disarms a vault's defense system, allowing you to get to the prize inside.

But what's the prize? Well, since the game came out mere moments ago I haven't had a chance to completely beat it yet. However, I've been told that players who successfully complete the game will be rewarded with a Steam code for a PC/Mac game with a value substantially higher than the 99¢ purchase price of The Heist. We'll have a full review up shortly, but in the meantime, this seems like a ridiculously cool idea for a game. Just the included puzzles easily seem worth the price, and the promise of an actual prize with real-world value on it rewarded for completing the game is just icing on the cake.

Also, I'm not about to spoil it, but The Heist comes with a really cool feature to add some immersion into the game that I can't believe got past the Apple approval process. You'll know what I'm talking about when it happens.

Yesterday, we asked what was up with Knights: Spiral Island. It was a promising FPS headed to PC with potential spin-offs set to hit handheld devices like, say, the iPhone and iPod Touch. Game creator Playground State had attempted to fund the development of Spiral Islands via the might of Kickstarter's Internet crowd sourcing, but when the studio failed to gather the capital it desired, we thought the project was in trouble.

I’m still not sure about how well the studio fares post-funding failure, but I do know this: an iOS spin-off title based in the Knights universe is still in the works right now. It’s just a week old, yet the final build projected to hit in about five weeks. It'll be using the UDK.

“... as of the past [seven] days, we have been developing an iOS-specific version of the game Knights called Jump Knight Missions,” studio co-founder and lead artist Barry Collins confirmed to us via an e-mail response to our original inquiry about the project.

Collins shot us a slice of the Jump Knight Missions design document. Jump Knight is an objective-based FPS that combines conventional genre action to “touch tasks,” a phrase that describes the little things you’ll be doing when you’re not killing dudes or exploring the world.

According to the document, about half the game will be composed of these tasks ranging from ‘defuse the mine,’ to ‘hand food to the soldier,’ to “give a high-five” to a soldier who “killed 20 zombies and saved 30 women and children.” The other half is action.

You’ll get points for accomplishing these minor objectives and even more if you can do it without flaw or within a set time limit. Each Mission will have around ten of these tasks, with the first and second missions sharing over that amount.

I’m told that a lot of progress has been made within this super short time frame. I get the sense that the first two missions are very close, or already, content complete. And here’s the cool thing about them: they’ll be set in totally different places, which makes me think that the team isn’t ready to drop the bite-sized, one-style-or-place-per-content-chunk idea that made Spiral Islands so appealing in the first place.

Considering that the project is a mere week old, I wouldn’t be surprised if anything that you’ve read changes in the coming days before final release. We’ll be keeping in contact and watching development from our desk chairs, though, so stay tuned.

Developer HotGen Ltd is getting set to release a new action puzzle game into the App Store called To-Fu: The Trials of Chi. In it, you play as a little cube of tofu that can stretch and get flung across the screen. You can stick to certain surfaces and bounce off of others, and you’ll use this to make your way to the end of the 100 included levels in the game. To-Fu: The Trials of Chi is a game that is best explained by its trailer:

There is something about a piece of tofu doing kung fu that totally brings a smile to my face, and the visuals in To-Fu look really charming. The stretching and flinging mechanic looks like a nice fit for the touch screen as well. Of course, it remains to be seen how well the game plays, but we’ll be finding that out very soon as To-Fu: The Trials of Chi is set to launch this Thursday at an introductory price of 99¢. It will be available for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad and have support for Retina Display devices. Game Center support will follow shortly in an update.

We’ll be taking a look at To-Fu: The Trials of Chi when it releases, and in the meantime you can check out the upcoming thread in our forums for game discussion.