Here are a few releases that have snuck by us over the past few weeks that are worth considering. Each game has its fans and both the gameplay video and forum threads are linked so you can dig deeper.

Chuck Norris arrives on the iPhone with an over-the-top side scrolling shooter. The controls aren't great, and the game reminds us of an old school side shooter, but Chuck Norris fans seem to be enjoying it. It's only $0.99 and you can join the discussion thread for more impressions.

App Store Link: Chuck Norris: Bring on the Pain!, $0.99

Demolition fans may enjoy IUGO's latest physics puzzler in which you place your quota of dynamic to see if you can level each building. There are 60 levels in all drawn in chalkboard style. The game is available for $1.99, comes with online leaderboards and new levels coming in the next update. Join the discussion.

App Store Link: Implode, $1.99

Fans of Matmi's beautifully styled Monster Pinball will be happy to see their latest pinball creation: Snowy's Christmas Pinball. The game is set across 3 distinct interconnected tables with various mini-goals per table. The game is a little early for the Christmas season and is available for $1.99. Join the forum discussion here.

App Store Link: Snowy's Christmas Pinball, $1.99

The folks over at winandmac.com recently had the opportunity to sit down with a few people from Apple and have a look at a number of upcoming iPhone games and apps.  Among them are two titles we've recently had a look at in "upcoming" posts: THQ's Star Wars: Trench Run and Skies of Glory from SGN.

Have a look at the gameplay videos they were able to capture of these upcoming titles.

• Star Wars: Trench Run

Use the Force to overthrow the evil Galactic Empire as they attempt to destroy the small Rebel base on Yavins jungle moon.

As part of the Rebel Alliances Red Squadron you dogfight with TIE Fighters above the Death Stars surface before heading into a trench where you are inundated by cannon fire. Dodge obstacles, and stay out of Darth Vaders sights as he tries to gun you down before you have the chance to fire your proton torpedoes into a thermal exhaust port the size of a womp rat. If successful, a direct hit will cause a chain reaction that destroys the Death Star, thus saving the Rebel base from impending doom.

• Skies of Glory

Skies of Glory is an aerial combat game much like F.A.S.T. but set in World War II with various terrains including mountains, deserts, and sea which are said to showcase the classic views of WWII air combat. The game will support both local Wi-Fi battles as well as online battles around the world.

Also demonstrated was the upcoming Harry Potter: Spells, a game that turns your iPhone into a magic wand and allows for real-time player-to-player duels utilizing 14 spells, each summoned by its own particular hand gesture.  The hands-on video of this one can be seen here.

The Settlers is a real time strategy (RTS) gaming series that has evolved quite a bit over the past two decades. Gameloft’s The Settlers as a standalone game brings a slightly different take on RTS to the iPhone/iPod Touch platform that for the most part delivers, but also bringing a few frustrations along the way including the omission of a freeplay mode. Ultimately, The Settlers is a solid experience and good introduction for newcomers to the series.

As with any typical RTS game, the objective is to build a community, establishing a means of income, develop a powerful military, and expand territories. The Settlers, however, is less about tactical micromanagement and more about strategic planning. In many ways, The Settlers is a game focused on urban planning where the placement and construction of buildings play heavily in your success. Unlike many of today’s RTS games, direct control of individual or groups of units is limited. You literally establish a virtual society where your vision will set it down the path to success or failure. This premise alone makes The Settlers worth considering especially for newcomers to the series.

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While I could go absolutely crazy with Baha Men references here, I'll spare our readers and instead just cut to the chase– The Canadian and Australian beta period of ngmoco's virtual pet game TouchPets Dogs [App Store] is finally over. Much like Eliminate [App Store], TouchPets is a free to download game, but your play time is limited along with the advancement of your dog.

Your dog in TouchPets is powered by virtual dog food, which you can either buy or just wait for your in-game dog food bowl to slowly recharge on its own just like energy in Eliminate. The main difference is, while you can play Eliminate all day long if you wanted to without earning credits, your dog in TouchPets actually goes to sleep when it runs out of food. Feeding your dog increases its energy meter, which then is depleted as you play with it.

What initially seems like a very simple virtual pet game quickly turns in to a surprisingly elaborate dog training roleplaying game of sorts where you need to constantly be raising your dog's attributes to rank up as a dog trainer and caretaker. As you level up, more items will be purchable at the pet store using the in-game puppy bucks currency which is earned by keeping your dog happy. There are also career paths for your dog to embark on such as becoming a crime fighter or a rescue dog along with silly careers such as a scientist or a politician.

Each step in your career requires items from the pet store you need to buy along with other requirements like trainer rank, dog happiness level, and some career missions even require you to bring another dog along, which brings us to the social aspect of the game. Since the game leans to heavily on Plus+, TouchPets must be constantly connected to the internet to play.

At any time during the game you can look through your Plus+ friends and invite their dog to come play with yours. The dogs then form relationships and can become friends, get angry with each other, or even fall in love. Every milestone in game is saved online and can be shared on Facebook, and your dog (as well as your activities with friends' dogs) are constantly synchronized with ngmoco's servers.

This allows you to do things like invite a friend's dog over and feed them. When your friend loads up the game, it grabs the latest snapshot of their dog saved on the TouchPets servers, and their recently fed dog will be have a full energy meter in their game. The social aspect of TouchPets is surprisingly fun, and the crazy dog relationships, scuffles, and love triangles that form have been endlessly amusing.

You can train your dog to do tricks, and if you're a good enough trainer (and have enough puppy bucks) you can even own multiple dogs. There's tons to do in TouchPets, and you could just play the game utilizing the free food you get throughout the day. Doing so, however, only allows you to play sporadically for a few minutes at a time, but otherwise there is no limit on how much you can advance your dog. If you're patient enough you could have a house full of dogs with multiple completed career paths without paying for anything.

The other way to play the game involves buying the different packs of virtual dog food which are currently priced between 99¢ and $29.99. Keep in mind though, the game seems to be designed more towards playing the game a little bit every day. While you could, for example, buy the $30 pack, and power your way through the game in few days, I'm not sure you'd have much left to enjoy. I've been playing TouchPets since the start of the Canadian beta, and without paying for anything I've ranked up significantly along with progressing nicely down the scientist career path by just playing a little bit each day.

TouchPets Dogs is definitely one of the best virtual pet games I've played, largely in part due to how much it utilizes Plus+ for building relationships between dogs. It adds a completely unexpected level of depth and complexity to the game that will likely keep me playing it for quite some time. I might eventually buy some food, but I've been happy with the amount of play time I'm getting with my free food allotment each day. Since the game is free, there really isn't much reason to not give it a spin. Further impressions and play dates are being coordinated in the official discussion thread in our forums.

App Store Link: TouchPets Dogs, Free

In Karnival, [App Store] you play as a boy with the arm of a goat who decides to take his talents on the road by starting his own carnival that travels the country offering rides, fortune tellers, snack booths, and 30 different included oddities and attractions that are slowly unlocked as you play the game.

Karnival features gameplay that will be instantly familiar to anyone who has played any of the Tycoon series of games such as RollerCoaster Tycoon, Zoo Tycoon, or many others. In the game you have control over every aspect of your carnival from what rides go where to ticket prices to even keeping your attractions in good repair. You have to intelligently build your carnival to maximize karma, fame, and money earned while (hopefully) keeping your taxes and payroll low enough to turn a profit each day.

Karnival has an intuitive touch based interface to handle all the different carnival management functions, and features a tutorial which does an excellent job at explaining all the ins and outs of running a successful carnival. While the controls and interface do their job well, there were definitely times where I wished I was playing this game with a keyboard and mouse.

If there's any down side to Karnival it's that once you progress in the game a bit, you could drive yourself crazy with the micromanagement of your different attractions. Like other Tycoon-like games, you can mostly let your carnival run itself, or endlessly tweak your business to maximize profits and other stat gains.

Overall Karnival is a game that is a lot of fun wth a surprising amount of depth. The art style and music give the game an atmosphere that's exactly what you would expect of a freaky carnival. With both a story mode that has you traveling across the country as well as a basic sandbox mode, Karnival should keep Tycoon fanatics busy for quite some time.

The game has received strongly positive feedback in our discussion thread, and the developers have chimed in with tips and answers to questions.

App Store Link: Karnival, $5.99

We finally got our hands on the demo version of Ace Combat Xi that was shown at the Tokyo Game show last month. The early impressions from this build were positive, and after seeing it first hand, I can confirm all the great things that were said about the game.

Overall, it just looks and feels like an Ace Combat game. They did a surprisingly good job at capturing the essence of the console games, and the tilt controls work great. This development version of the game lacks any kind of sensitivity configuration, so there were times where I felt like I was tilting the phone a little too much, but other than that flying a jet in Ace Combat Xi is a ton of fun.

In the right hand corner of the screen are a series of buttons to fire your various weapons and switch targets, the bottom left side of the screen controls your throttle. The rest of the screen is framed in a somewhat cluttered but really cool looking heads up display showing other information like the location of enemies and how many there are left.

This version of the game is very limited, but even as a brief demo, the overall experience of the Ace Combat console games is absolutely thriving on the iPhone. The constant radio chatter, the great texturing of the ground and sky and the sound of your afterburners rumbling all come together to create one of those "Wow, this is running on an iPhone?" moments.

For increased immersion, you can switch in to first person view and fly your plane using nothing but the HUD. I found this to be a little disorienting, but your visibility is definitely improved without your jet taking up the bottom third of the screen.

[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version ]

Namco hopes to release Ace Combat Xi this winter and we will continue to post preview information as it's revealed and while this version of the game is little more than a mid-development preview, it is remarkably impressive.

Yesterday I made it out to the Freeverse offices and sat down with their development teams to look at their lineup of upcoming games. The title closest to completion was Warpgate, which we have previewed in the past. I played through the first few tutorial missions, and the game has grown substantially from the initial screenshots we saw so long ago.

The concept of the game has stayed essentially the same since our preview, but since then Freeverse has added a tremendous amount of content and graphical effects. Each system that you can land on has their own economy which is in constant flux, along with a series of procedurally generated random missions that will allow you to play the game forever without running out of things to do.

In the graphical department, normal mapping has been added to every object in game. Normal mapping is a rendering technique used to fake shadows and lighting on objects to create much more detailed graphics while still maintaining a low enough polygon count to be rendered at a high framerate. (Wikipedia has an excellent article on the specifics of normal mapping, including an image that does a great job of illustrating what it can do.)

There have been other games for the iPhone that have used normal mapping, but all of these games have been sold as "3GS-Only" games. Warpgate is anticipated to be the first game for the platform that scales these graphical effects based on the device you're playing it on.

If you're playing on an iPhone 3GS, normal mapping will be enabled and you'll be able to see canyons and crags in planets along with the different details of the ships and warpgates. But, if you're playing on a previous-generation device, the game will gracefully degrade back to standard textured 3D models. If in the future you upgrade to a newer device, all of the graphical features you didn't have access to are instantly enabled without needing to buy a "enhanced" version of the game.

Here is a video provided by Freeverse illustrating the difference in graphical quality between devices:

[ Full HD version | Low Bandwidth version | Quicktime Movie]

Warpgate is still in development and Freeverse is hopeful to have it on the App Store in time for the holiday season. We've been playing different builds of the game over Warpgate's development, and the game seems to be rapidly progressing. Look forward to a more detailed preview and review of the game here as its release approaches.

Dark Nebula is described as a "skill-based action game" which we previewed back in August. The game is brought to us in part by Anders Hejdenberg, the lead designer of Battlefield 2: Modern Combat.

Dark Nebula is a tilt-controlled ball roller, but one that adopts an action/arcade vibe rather than the more tedious precision work found in many others. In fact, it feels so different, I'd hesitate to put it in the same genre. The game proceeds across 10 levels of action-packed gaming. Each level is very well designed with a variety of obstacles introduced along the way. Your tasks include the avoiding of spikes, triggering switches, avoiding laser fire, and more. And despite no calibration options, the game's controls seemed perfect.

Each of the 10 levels are primarily vertical scrolling scenes with distinct start and end points. Your ball has a single shield that can be replenished along the way. Get hit with your shield down or fall off the level and you have to restart at the beginning of the level poriton you are died on. If you lose all your lives, you can restart at the beginning of any level you've unlocked. There are 10 levels in all.

In fact, it seems the developers have gone to special trouble to avoid user frustration in the game. For example, if you get killed by a laser shot or spinning spikes, these elements actually slow down so it's easier to get through on your next life. The result is a game that you will enjoy immensely to the end, though one that will end relatively quickly.

Dark Nebula is billed at offering an hour's play time to make it through the entire game. If you are particularly coordinated, you will be able to make it through in a significantly shorter amount of time, though going back to get gold stars on each level do offer a legitimate amount of replay value.

Overall, Dark Nebula offers a very fun, action-arcade experience that we loved every second of. The game's rather short length, however, is a legitimate point of concern, but at only $0.99 and high quality of the overall experience, we still recommend it.

App Store Link: Dark Nebula, $0.99

2XL Games' much anticipated ATV game was released into the App Store tonight for $7.99.

The game represents 2XL's followup title to the technically impressive 2XL Supercross and seems to share the same graphics engine. Beyond moving to ATV's, however, 2XL has added a lot of content to this new title, including freestyle levels, career mode, local multiplayer, online leaderboards and more.

The game offers tilt controls with a large number of customizable settings, though the default controls seemed to work reasonably well on our first few spins around the track.

The game shares the same impressive graphics seen in the original 2XL Supercross and are well demonstrated in this hands-on video provided by the developers.

Superficially, the biggest addition to the game is a full career mode that was conspicuously absent from their freshman iPhone release. 2XL ATV Offroad offers 16 ATV Supercross and Outdoor Nationals tracks and 2 Freestyle levels, and 3 levels of difficulty.

We'll be able to spend some more time with the title now that it's been released. Early adopters can share their impressions in our forums.

App Store Link: 2XL ATV Offroad, $7.99

Bolt Creative's Pocket God [App Store] has had a seemingly permanent spot on the top lists of both overall paid apps and paid games since its release nearly a year ago. As a pioneer of episodic content updates, the "Good Will Haunting" update marks the 26th addition to the original game.

The free "Good Will Haunting" update introduces the Pygmy Ghost:

If a Pygmy dies in the graveyard, it will reappear as a ghost and float around. You can direct the ghost and have it mess with the other live Pygmies. You can do possession, scare a Pygmy to death, pickup a Pygmy and fly away, phase through the ground and pull a pygmy into the ghost dimension, and even do a banshee scream that bursts the eardrums of all the Pygmies listening. You can make all 6 Pygmies into ghosts if you want and to get rid of them, you just send them into the light (ala Poltergeist).

This update also marks the beginning of a new era of in-app customization via optional downloadable content (DLC) packs. For 99¢ in the latest update you can customize the look of the T-Rex on the island with various skins, hats, and even tattoos. Developer Dave Castelnuovo hopes to ideally include one additional DLC pack alongside each free update to the app, provided it doesn't slow down the release of said update. The reason to include these optional paid upgrades is, of course, to fund future development of Pocket God, but as a result, the latest version requires OS 3.0 or higher.

If you've never heard of Pocket God before, the premise is simple– You play as a god watching over a small tribe of pygmies. The amount of interaction you have with these characters and their environment is insane, and you can do everything from flick one of your guys in to a volcano, bury them alive and turn them in to zombies, as well as play little mini-games inspired by Doodle Jump [99¢] and Harbor Master [99¢ / Free].

Pocket God's army of fans is a phenomenon that many developers have attempted to duplicate. The amount of spinoff sites and communities all because of this one iPhone game is absolutely mind boggling. I admit I don't really get it myself, but the number of people who are in love with Pocket God borders on unbelievable. If you've never played the game before, it's worth picking up, especially since with 26 updates under its belt it will likely take you a very long time to discover all the different things that can be done.

App Store Link: Pocket God, 99¢