Aby Escape [ Free ] is the newest freemium title from BulkyPix and Pixel Ratio, and a 3D spin on the iphone's popular runner genre. Instead of dashing full speed to the left or right sidescroller style, the game plants the camera just behind Aby's back and leaves it to you to guide the terrified raccoon down paths cluttered with rocks, cars, animal herds, beer-bellied hicks who lie in wait until you approach, and other obstacles.

To keep your unstoppable force from running smack-dab into immovable objects, you tilt your phone to weave side to side, swipe your thumb up the screen to jump, and swipe downwards to drop to your knees and pull off a Catwoman-in-Arkham-City slide, minus revealing cleavage. (Yeah, I know. Can't have it all, though.) The core gameplay idea is reminiscent of Temple Run [ Free ], but Aby Escape does a nice job at iterating on the formula with some new ideas and some variety.

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Despite the majority of the gaming world wishing otherwise, Nintendo seems pretty dead-set in not bringing any of their beloved properties to other platforms. Which means, if you’re standing in line at the bank and get a sudden hankering for some Mario Kart, you’re mostly out of luck if you aren’t sporting Nintendo hardware.

However, video games are an iterative pastime, and Mario Kart is far from the only kart racer around. On the iOS platform, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing [ $1.99 ] is widely considered to be the finest answer to Mario Kart currently available, and we’d tend to agree. It pits a cast of Sega characters against each other in the power-sliding, weapon-laden, arcade-style racing we’ve come to expect from a kart racer, and it does it extremely well.

Throw in fantastic course designs, a full single-player campaign and challenge mode, and both local and online multiplayer options and you have a seriously good kart racer, even with the lack of everyone’s favorite plumber.

Over the weekend, Sonic All-Stars Racing got just that much better with its first significant content update since being released in June of last year. The big ticket items in this update are two brand new characters: Shadow the Hedgehog and Knuckles the Echidna. These are two extremely popular characters from the Sonic universe and are a great inclusion here. In addition to the two new characters there is also a brand new track to race on.

The other big feature in this latest update to Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is native video-out support either wirelessly using AirPlay or through an HDMI hookup. I checked out this feature back at GDC and can say that his game in particular scales up to the TV screen extremely well. Finally, iCloud progress saving has been implemented as well as some UI changes including character faces on the mini-map during single player and Game Center avatars for when playing online.

If you’ve got kart fever on-the-go and don’t have a spare copy of Mario Kart handy, Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing should do the trick and is an even better game now thanks to the latest update.

While dwindling on consoles, RPGs of all shapes and sizes are flourishing on mobile devices. There have been some truly creative and unique RPGs released in the past few years, and perhaps none is capable of tugging at your heartstrings and pushing you to fight just one more battle than Game Stew Studio's new iOS game, Tower of Fortune (ToF) [ $0.99 ].

Like Puzzle Quest and Sword & Poker before it, ToF infuses a basic role-playing game with mechanics drawn from a completely different genre entirely—in this case, slot machines.

The premise of ToF is pretty simple. You’re a hero. You’ve a lady to rescue. You need to gather coin, get loot, and defeat evil incarnate. A “game of the year”-winning story, this is not, but the simple framework provides enough context to the game to make it work.

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How many games does it take before you can call a developer a sure bet? Radiangames has been bringing its games to iOS like clockwork lately, and we've been impressed. Super Crossfire HD [ $2.99 ] and Fireball SE [ $1.99 ] are both excellent games that iterate on arcade classics, and the newest entry, Ballistic SE [ $1.99 ], also returns to a popular well: the twin-stick shooter. Like its predecessors, though, it's a thoughtful take on the semi-stale genre. It makes up for familiarity with a heck of a lot of fun.

Ballistic SE has two big things going for it. It has a system of enhancements that let you customize your game every time you play (not unlike the Jetpack Joyride update that just landed), and it has ballistic mode, which is pretty much bullet time. Every time you fill up your ballistic meter, a button is primed. Everything slows down when you hit it: your ship, enemy orbs, even the music. As panic buttons go, it's impressive and stylish.

The game also has a lot of amber. The color is everywhere: menus, interface elements, your ship, explosions, you name it. At the risk of dating myself, I used to play games on a monitor that looked like that; I don't miss it. But there's a method to this monochromatic madness. The amber is safe, your eyes drift over it. Every other color stands out, and those colors universally identify your enemies.

The enemy color coding is important enough that colorblind players might be at a disadvantage. The enemies are just orbs—some come in different sizes, but they all have the same general shape. But if you know what a given color does, you know whether an enemy is flying toward you or moving at random, whether it will dissolve before your guns or stand up to all fire. A firm grasp of the enemy colors is a good shortcut to survival.

Whether you're playing Waves or Challenges, you've gotta survive. Waves pits you against ever-increasing waves of enemies, grinding you down over time. Challenges are a more vicious sort of play, with your choice of five pre-set combos of enemy types designed to take you out in short order. The one thing that can help stave off the inevitable? Your selection of enhancements.

Enhancements pretty much make the game. That's not to say it isn't good otherwise, but throw in enhancements and you essentially have a leveling mechanic that opens up a huge variety of play styles. You can speed up your ship, drop bombs in your wake, alter your shots, or speed up your ballistic meter. You can even pump points into your score multiplier if your confident that you don't need any other boost more. It's a fantastic little system.

Both modes give you access to enhancements, but they differ in how they present them. When playing a challenge you can pick ten enhancements right off the bat, and you'll live or die by your choices from then on. In Waves mode you're given a single enhancement point each time you hit a new level milestone. You power up over time based on your picks.

In practice, Ballistic SE plays out pretty simply. You have two sticks (with customizable positioning). One aims your guns, the other aims your ship. Standard twin-stick stuff. Aside from your ship there are three things on the field: enemies, of course, that come at you in waves, immovable bombs that destroy enemies when you hit them, and starbursts that increase your score multiplier. Deciding when it's best to fly through the bombs is almost as important as learning to avoid and shoot down the enemy orbs. Knowing when to trigger your ballistic meter is another vital skill for long-term survival.

Long-term survival is, in fact, the name of the game. You get extra lives for hitting score milestones, so playing better means living longer and longer. The waves get ridiculous pretty quickly, but there's salvation to be had with checkpoints that unlock after ever-increasing numbers of waves. You can restart from these checkpoints, but there's a catch: the further in you start, the more your score will suffer. If you want to remain competitive on the Game Center leaderboards, you've gotta start from scratch.

None of these things are revolutionary; Ballistic SE doesn't rewrite the twin stick shooter or bring us a brand new perspective on the genre. Instead, it's an incredibly solid, well-balanced game that makes up in entertainment for what it skips in flash. Radiangames is carving out quite the niche on the App Store, and Ballistic SE does it proud.

Do you like tacos? How about star fields, spaceships, and throwback games that trade polygons for pixels and full orchestras for beeps and bleeps that hearken back to the glory days of the Atari 2600? Developer Taco Graveyard serves up generous helpings of those elements and more (even the space tacos) in Omegapixel [ Free ], a fast and furious action game that throws in a fair bit of puzzle solving to keep you on your toes.

The first time you load a mission, Omegapixel might remind you a lot of Geometry Wars [ $0.99 ]. Using a virtual stick, you control a small space rig that zips around the cosmos and battles enemy ships. Unlike Geometry Wars, though, you barrel into enemies kamikaze-style instead of blasting them with lasers. While you're floating like a butterfly and stinging like a battering ram with thrusters, enemies pour onto the screen in greater and greater numbers.

Enemy ships come in several varieties—some that make a beeline for you, others that converge on the pixel. On one stage, I flew around smashing into red ships that targeted the Omegapixel while blue pyramids followed my space vessel in tireless pursuit. Suddenly a vertical yellow line came sliding across the screen like a barcode scanner laser. If the line touched the pixel, I lost a life. Ignoring the red destroyers and blue pyramids for the moment, I flew to the far side of the yellow wall and tapped the lower right corner of the screen, which instantly swaps your location with the Omegapixel's and vice versa. Teleporting put the pixel safely on the far side of the wall, but right in range of the red ships I'd let live to deal with the wall.

The key to victory lies in shielding the pixel from its enemies, while using it to shield you from yours. To get rid of the blue pyramids that zero in on my ship's location, I had to lure them into the pixel's fiery maw by either putting the pixel in between me and them, or waiting for them to draw close enough to touch before teleporting, which dumped the pixel right where I'd been drifting a second before. Easier said than done, especially with bouncers knocking the pixel every which way, red ships spiraling toward it, new purple walls that harmed me instead of the pixel sliding into view, and asteroids that, while harmless, distract you by stealing your attention away from real threats.

It's stressful, but the kind of stress that leaves your senses crackling from adrenaline. Cobbling together a plan and pulling it off in a matter of moments never failed to invite a thrill of accomplishment. The game almost becomes more of a twitchy puzzler on later levels, forcing you to remain aware of the pixel's location at all times and pull each enemy type from your memory log the moment it comes into view so you can react to the new threat appropriately.

As you play, you'll collect credits you can use to deck out your ship: explosive teleports, extra armor plating, defense mechanisms for the Omegapixel, a line of energy that flares between you and the pixel when you teleport, incinerating anything it touches. You can earn credits the old-fashioned way by clearing Story and Arcade missions, picking up credit packs that randomly appear during play, or just drop real money on IAP credit packs and splurge on upgrades.

Like all games that control with virtual sticks, Omegapixel's controls suffers from minor virtual-stick touchiness, but my fried reflexes cost me more missions than occasionally spot controls. Other than said spottiness and grating music (the sound effects are the right kind of bleepy retro, but the soundtrack, which you can disable, sounds like an 8-bit game that froze right in the middle of a high chord) Omegapixel is a ton of fun, and especially shouldn't be missed at its current price of free.

I'll be honest, I'm wary of any games I download onto my phone these days that promise any sort of physics-based fun. I'm burned out on that scene, plain and simple. However, I do like cats, as you may know from my past reviews, and I like the idea of forcibly launching a cat out of a cannon (in safety gear, of course, folks). So I caved for Cannon Cat [ Free ], and I admit, now I'm really glad I did.

Cannon Cat has a flimsy premise, as most iPhone games do -- something about skyfish being imprisoned in bubbles by a guy named the Evil Emu. I think that it's cute fluff, but I didn't pay it much mind before I jumped headlong into the game. We're not here for deep stories, after all - I came here to put a cat in a cannon and rocket him across the skyline. I mean, who doesn't want to do that?

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The folks at Halfbrick had been teasing their much ballyhooed Gadget update for Jetpack Joyride [ Free ]for the past couple of months, and just last week it finally landed in the App Store. And it was awesome. However, Halfbrick must have still had some gas left in the tank after that massive update because over the weekend they released yet another update for Jetpack Joyride, this time adding support for the Retina Display of the new iPad. Check out some screens from the newest build (click to enlarge):

In addition to the graphics upgrade on the new iPad, the visuals have also been improved for the previous generation iPads as well as the iPhone 4. Loading times have also been improved across the board as well as a whole bunch of minor tweaks and fixes. I was really impressed with the Gadget update that hit for Jetpack Joyride last week, and with this latest Retina Display update the entire package has really been fully fleshed out.

Late last week Capcom surprised everybody by announcing an iOS port of their classic arcade fighter Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 [ $4.99 ]. In all honesty, I suspect this was a cleverly timed release to casually tie in with 'The Avengers' movie coming out next week, but whatever the motivation I’m not complaining. Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is one of the most beloved fighting games in history, and prior to the downloadable rerelease on XBL and PSN in 2009 it could be kind of a difficult game to play unless you owned the Dreamcast or the somewhat rare PS2 or Xbox versions.

With that said it’s fairly mind blowing then that today you can download the entire original game onto a device that fits snugly in your pocket (or to your iPad if you’d rather, since the game is Universal, though it’s extra snug trying to jam that in your pocket). The iOS version of Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is really cool for what it is, basically a cheap nostalgic trip, but it’s plagued with several major problems that drag the experience down, making it feel more like a novelty rather than another solid iOS fighter.

The major sticking points in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 are that it’s difficult to control compared to the other top iOS fighters, the 12 year old visuals have not aged gracefully, and the overall performance leaves a lot to be desired. However, the virtual control setup that Capcom has come up with for the game is pretty clever, and just having a classic like Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 in my pocket is worth putting up with its shortcomings. It’s just a shame because with a little more care I think this port could have been a whole lot better.

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One of my personal favorite games of 2011 was the quirky slot machine-meets-role-playing game King Cashing [$1.99 / Free ]. The slot machine battle system was a really different kind of idea that turned out to work great in practice, and the character leveling and upgradeable items drew you in to continue forging on through the campaign. We totally enjoyed King Cashing in our review, and about a month later a big update hit that added new weapons and a new kind of battle, making the whole game just that much better.

Yesterday the second major update hit for King Cashing, this one even bigger than the first. It adds an entire new Survival campaign where you face off against a string of enemies while utilizing the same pool of spin cherries. You can earn a small portion of cherries back by each time you defeat one of these enemies, but you can’t go back and replay levels to grind so efficient play is crucial if you’re going to last until the end of the campaign. It’s quite challenging and a great twist on the normal gameplay found in the original campaign mode.

Speaking of the original campaign this update also brings 3 new battles against “protected” bosses who are covered with shields which must be broken away before inflicting damage on the enemy itself. There’s 3 new weapons too, one for each class member, as well as some new bonus types and a myriad of other tweaks and fixes. The new Survival mode adds a great new way to experience King Cashing, and the other new goodies are all welcome additions as well. If you haven’t checked out King Cashing yet there’s a lite version to try and the full version is currently on sale for 99¢ to celebrate this new update.

I’m sure there are a lot of folks out there that took a quick glance at Millipede Creative’s Bullistic Unleashed [$0.99] and just kept moving. After all, the screenshots are filled with crude humor, the trailer a repository for irreverence, and there’s more lewd imagery and graphic violence than you can shake a stick at. However, if you look past all the window dressing, you’ll quickly discover that Bullistic Unleashed is an excellent game that combines several different genres successfully.

Bullistic puts you in the role of a bunch of cocky bulls that decide to demolish a shopping mall as well as all its inhabitants. You’ll accomplish this through 20 different levels, each with their own obstacles and layouts (including the now literal bull in a china shop). Cause enough damage in a level, and you’ll unlock the next. You’ll also unlock seven different bulls available for use by collecting hidden coins in each level. Each bull has their own special moves and physics attributes.

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The highly anticipated update to Jetpack Joyride [ Free ] which Halfbrick has been teasing us with since we first checked it out at GDC has finally gone live in the App Store. Version 1.3 brings the major new addition of Gadgets to good ol’ Barry Steakries’ arsenal. There are 15 Gadgets in all which are unlocked with coins in The Stash area of the game. You can assign up to 2 different Gadgets to Barry at a time, and each one brings with it a special ability.

For example, the “Air Barrys” Gadget gives Barry a pair of sneakers that let him immediately jump into the middle of the screen, rather than waiting for the jetpack to slowly raise him to the same point. Or the Missile Jammer which will cause the missiles that target you from offscreen to come at you wobbly and slow. Or the X-ray Specs, which lets you see ahead of time what vehicle is waiting for you in the icon, as demonstrated in this latest teaser trailer.

As you can tell, these new Gadgets can dramatically change how you play the game, and if you thought you’d had your fill of Jetpack Joyride before there’s now a bunch of new items to unlock and use to reinvigorate you. There’s also new Game Center achievements and new mission types that tie into the use of the new Gadgets. And of course Jetpack Joyride is free to download and play, so if you somehow still haven’t gotten on board yet then what are you waiting for?

Earlier this month, Foursaken Media dropped their latest iOS title Sky Gnomes [ $0.99 ] into the App Store and we thought it was pretty great in our review. You play as a gnome hurtling straight down through the sky riding a homemade rocket collecting snowflakes, coins and items in an effort to reach a landing zone as quickly as possible.

While that’s an awesome enough premise on its own, what pushed Sky Gnomes to the next level was its fantastic daily tournaments that matched you against the ghost runs of like-skilled players in competition for the best race time. Throw in a ton of upgradeable items to trick out your rocket and Sky Gnomes came together to be one of my favorite recent releases.

Today, Foursaken is sweetening the pot with the first of many planned content updates for Sky Gnomes. The big addition in this update is two brand new characters to play as: Girly the female racer and Skinny the uh, skinny racer. Each come with their own set of unique stats for their rocket, offering a change of pace from the original racer Gnomey. These new racers don’t come cheap though, as each one will set you back 10,000 coins.

Speaking of coins, this update also lowers the costs of all first tier upgrades and trinkets for your rocket, making it easier and quicker for new players to start customizing their machine. There are also a myriad of tweaks and bug fixes, as well as an empty menu screen that serves as a teaser for another major addition coming to Sky Gnomes: 1 vs 1 battles. More new characters are also in the works for future updates.

If you haven’t checked out Sky Gnomes yet, now might be the time as today’s update adds even more cool features to an already great package, with more new stuff already on the horizon.

It's hard to look at On The Wind [$1.99] and not think, 'Hey! That reminds me of Flower except without the third dimension'. Like thatgamecompany's award-winning title, On The Wind will have you guiding plant-based material (you'll be herding leaves as opposed to flower petals here) through a scenic landscape.

However, where Flower was intended to evoke positive emotions and to be your standard 'challenging' title, On The Wind will have demand a little more from your Infinity Blade-honed reflexes.

Because you are defined by the leaves you collect as you progress through the seasons, you must always ensure that there's a steady supply within the immediate vicinity of your fingertip. Should you find yourself bereft of them, the game ends and you'll be forced to restart.

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This past February I was very pleasantly surprised with the quirky title The Hacker [Free], a story-driven collection of puzzle mini-games that put you in the role as a member of an international computer hacking ring. The storyline itself was interesting if not a bit cliche, and the mini-games that served as the “hacking” in the game were both clever and challenging.

But where The Hacker really won me over in our review was in its level of immersion and attention to detail. It did a fantastic job of making you feel like you’re really the protagonist programmer in the story who must utilize an 80s-era computer and unravel an evil plot surrounding your former employer, the sinister Glider Corporation. It's really an entertaining little escape from reality.

Currently, you can grab all this hackery goodness for the very affordable price of zero dollars. You should get at least a few solid hours of entertainment from the main campaign, not to mention the inclusion of fictional arcade games that are “emulated” on your system and come equipped with Game Center integration. Additional content packs are available as IAP if you crave more puzzle solving, but aren't necessary to enjoy the main story.

The Hacker is a surprisingly fun experience that feels right at home on iOS, and everybody should make sure to check it out while it’s free.

Let's face it, kids: If you are going to become a giant, fire-breathing monster and take over a city by way of stomping on it, you want to do it right. In style. So if I play a videogame that puts me in the role of said monster, I have one rule -- I want to have fun. Glorious, building stomping, people eating fun.

That's why the original Rampage was such a bounding success. When I saw screens of Monster Takedown [$0.99], I thought I was looking at the same kind of thing. You get to be a big octopus or monster with too many eyeballs or whatever and fend off flying helicopters and incoming bombs. The art looked crisp and cute, and I thought if the gameplay hit the mark, we could have a winner on our hands here. Could. Maybe.

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