I would be ashamed if this was a cheap rip-off stemming from some copycat's attempt to cash in on a popular indie title somewhere but Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective isn't that sort of game. If you had to liken it to a gender-unspecific trophy spouse, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective would be a 6'2" Scandinavian model with a degree in rocket science and a part-time job as a professional comedian. You won't be ashamed to be caught with this one.

The only problem here is that not everyone likes a talker. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective's only real flaw (which is also, paradoxically enough, its strongest quality) is the fact that it is extremely heavy on the narrative. More than half of your time in the game will be spent reading. Sorry guys. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective doesn't come with a voice pack either. If you're the sort who thinks that actions are louder than words, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is probably not for you. (I still recommend giving it a whirl, though.) As for everyone else, why are you still here? Get the game already!

What? No? Fine. I see those raised eyebrows and I'll raise you with a more thorough explanation. Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is the long-anticipated port of an adventure game Capcom developed for the Nintendo DS. The titular character in this eccentric little delight is, as you might have guessed already, sort of dead. Sissel is also sort of awesome for an amnesiac red-suited ghost with a bad haircut.

Unlike most of the recently deceased, he has to navigate between the Land of the Living and the Ghost World. Sissel can also traverse telephone lines, perform minor feats of telekinesis, communicate with certain living beings (we'll get to that in a bit), and go back four minutes in time to avert untimely deaths. (Sadly, that's only applicable for everyone but himself.)

Incidentally, you'll find yourself using that last power a fair bit. The supporting cast is somewhat uniquely skilled at dying repeatedly. At least, one of them is.

Meet Lynne. She's a somewhat bombastic little redhead of a detective, the sole witness to your murder and – according to the helpful desk lamp (yes, a literal desk lamp) you meet in the introductory sequence – the key to deciphering the circumstances behind your posthumous condition. Needless to say, you will spend a lot of time rescuing her only to watch her barrel headlong into yet another humorous tragedy.

Along the way, you will also meet the rest of the highly memorable crew. From an unbelievably adorable if loud-mouthed Pomeranian (To quote our very own Mr. Nicholson, "Just wait until you meet the dog, man!") to a shotgun-wielding assassin (His name is Nearsighted Jeego. He never misses his target if they're in range.) to a slow-witted prison guard who dances when distressed, every entity you encounter in Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is, uh, unique, to say the least. The development team definitely went all the way with the character design here.

(For those of you curious about how well Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective survived the transition to the iOS, I'm happy to say it looks pixel-perfect. While I've never played the original, I've seen the videos and if the videos are any indication of how things were, well, Capcom did you proud.)

Humor-wise, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is about as off-kilter as the menagerie that populates it. Facepalm-inducing moments are in abundance. The actual plotline, on the other hand, is deeper than what the initial twenty minutes might implicate. How so? I can't tell you. Games like Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective are kinda like Fight Club. You don't talk about Fight Club. You don't talk about games like this either. At least, not in the context of the plotline, the actual dialogue and whatnot. Not unless you want to peel away some of the magic. The only thing you're getting out of me on this front is the assurance that when the bleaker moments of the game hit, they will hit hard.

Of course, a good story's not much without decent gameplay. Though marketed as an adventure game, Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective feels more like a puzzler sequestered away in a visual novel. When you're not otherwise thumbing through conversations, you'll be in what the game calls 'Trick Time'.

To make this a little easier to understand, we're going to use an example here. Let's say you're inside a flag and you have to make your way across the room to get something. In order to accomplish this, you're going to have press the 'Ghost' button, switch to the Ghost World, and then draw a line from the flag to, say, a pitcher of water. Sissel will then do the rest. Interacting with objects is just as easy. For example, if you're inside a candle and the words 'burn brighter' are present on your side bar, all you need to do is switch to the Land of the Living and hit the 'Trick' button. Once again, Sissel will take it from there.

The puzzles themselves are a lot more complex and likely to leave you going, 'Wait. So, how am I supposed to use two suits of armor, a set of curtains, a globe and a framed-up sword?'. To complicate matters even further, there is often a time limit associated with these puzzles. Luckily for you (and everyone else in the predicament), Sissel can rewind time as many times as he likes, something that makes Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective nicely balanced between the realms of 'forgiving' and 'why would you do this to me?'.

While we're on the topic, here's my only other infinitesimally tiny issue with the game. It's too linear. I know, I know. This isn't some sprawling, open-world sandbox of an action-RPG. However, they've done such a superb job at developing the environments that I kind of want to spend some time away from the main storyline. Ahem. If you haven't guessed it already, I think Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective is the bee's knees and with the first two chapters available for free you should definitely give it a shot. Following that, you shouldn't have too difficult a time parting with the cash to unlock the rest of the game.

That certainly isn’t the case with The Hacker [99¢], though, a story-driven faux hacking game from developer Angry Bugs. When I fire it up, my iPhone is transformed into a Glider OS-equipped computer that becomes my gateway into an international tour de hacking which leads me to uncover a devious plot involving my former employer. It’s far from the first game to let you take on the glorified role of a top level hacker, but it executes the idea incredibly well and offers a fantastic level of immersion with a fairly compelling story.

The Hacker starts with you trying to log into the Glider Operating System on your computer, an OS you helped develop as an employee of Glider Corp. You’re notified on the screen that several things failed to install properly, but you finally boot to the desktop. When you try to connect to the ‘net, you’re denied, and then contacted via email by someone who claims to be a former coworker. He is one of a handful of developers, including yourself, who worked on Glider OS and were unceremoniously fired shortly before it was set to launch.

He informs you that he’s discovered a trojan in the Glider OS and suspects that Glider Corp is up to something shady, and since you have experience with the software he recruits you to join him and several other ex-employees in hacking into Glider Corp’s system and getting to the bottom of things. From there you’ll go on to experience several twists and turns as you dig in and discover just what Glider Corp is up to.

The coolest thing about The Hacker is that it hardly ever breaks character in terms of presentation. It tries to simulate a computer you might find from the late 80s with a green monochrome screen and very basic graphics, and it does it very well. There’s rarely a time when navigating through the game that you don’t feel like you’re actually operating a computer (minus the fact that everything is touch enabled, of course). This level of detail is very cool for people who remember when computers looked like that, but a younger generation might not appreciate such a low-fidelity presentation.

The Glider Corp system is spread across 8 servers around the globe, and the way you “hack” in into each one is by completing various types of mini-games. These are mostly just logic puzzles disguised as computer-y things.

For example, one type has you moving little nanomachine bugs onto trigger pads placed on a circuit board in order to “open the ports” into a server. The catch is that all the bugs move at the same time, and you’ll need to use objects on the board to get each one into the proper position to have them all be on their respective pads at the same time. A couple of the hacking games use similar mechanics to the classic Pipe Dream, like creating a path out of sections that will lead power to a set of dead nodes. Outside of the server mini-games, another bit of hacking lies in “decrypting” emails by completing a slightly altered version of a lights out game.

The mini-games aren’t necessarily anything groundbreaking, but they are really fun and can be quite challenging. It makes you feel like you’re doing real work by putting your brain to use and then being rewarded with an unlocked server and a new part of the story. I won’t spoil too much, but there is definitely more beyond the 8th server including some very cool secrets and surprises.

If you finish the initial 8 servers and still want more you can choose from 3 new areas to buy as in-app purchases for 99¢ each. These 3 areas each have 5 new servers to hack into, and completing each area will lead to some periphery story bits and additional secrets. There’s also Game Center achievements and leaderboards for every area as well as an overall leaderboard.

Doing pretty much any kind of hacking will earn you experience, which acts as an in-game currency. You can pay a bit of XP to pass a mini-game if it’s giving you trouble, or buy an assortment of sweet backgrounds for your virtual desktop that feature ASCII artwork. These definitely bring a nostalgic tear to my eye. But the coolest thing you can spend XP on is unlocking arcade games from the G.A.M.E. portal on your desktop. These playable games include takes on familiar genres like snake, brick breakers, shmups, cave flyers, and dodging games. There’s even a hidden platformer game in there too (but you’ll need to find it yourself).

There aren't too many things that I didn't like about The Hacker, but there were a couple of issues that stuck out. There are a ton of spelling mistakes throughout the game, which on the one hand feels a bit sloppy but on the other sort of fits perfectly with a game based around communicating with people over the internet. Our grammar has certainly suffered since the rise of the internet age.

The other problem I encountered was an inconsistent difficulty. The mini-games appropriately get more complex as the game progresses, but at several points no matter where I was in the campaign I ran into puzzles that stumped me for a frustrating amount of time. Then, after finally figuring out the solution, the very next puzzle or two I would beat in a matter of seconds. It could be that’s just how my own particular brain handled certain challenges, but to me the difficulty curve felt kind of choppy.

While at its core The Hacker isn’t much more than a collection of mini-games, the fantastic presentation and little details really pull you in. The story might be a bit cliché, but the way it’s gradually revealed to you as you access each new server compels you to keep hacking away to learn what happens next. Plus, the mini-games and accompanying arcade games are really pretty fun on their own, and can be played over again as many times as you want just for kicks or to earn some extra XP.

Above all else though, The Hacker does a great job at making you feel like a bad ass international hacker, which is what it should really all be about anyway.

Ghost Trick first saw a release on Nintendo DS around a year ago. This isn't its debut on iOS, though. A couple of months after the DS release, Capcom dropped a Universal version of the game on the Japanese App Store. Now, the rest of the world is finally getting to see a version of this port tonight.

And it seems like it's OK from a technical standpoint. In my modest amount of time with it, I haven't seen any port-specific issues like stuttering or flickering. It controls pretty well, too, and caters to your finger just about as well as it did to the stylus.

There's some stuff still bothering me. The assets aren't as high of a resolution as I would like. Also, a good sixth of the screen is covered by a thick layer of UI that, it seems, is simply there to keep the pixel density high. It's weird.

In case you missed out on Ghost Trick, it breaks down like this: Sissel is often charged with reversing people's deaths and he has to use his powers to do so. Each death is like a puzzle, basically, that has you opening doors, spiritually oozing to adjacent objects, and otherwise setting up Rube Goldberg-ian scenarios that'll change that person's fate.

In most cases, you're watching a death, infesting that person's body in order to rewind time, and then actively trying to disrupt that sequence. The solutions to puzzles seem to be mired in weird video game logic, but the saving grace here is that there is a single and true solution to every puzzle. You just gotta find it, you know?

I've been having a blast so far, by the way. This is a pretty thoughtful, if not challenging game with some insane, but fun-to-discover solutions. And while the minutes of overly long exposition is starting to wear me out, I'm digging the characters and the humor. Just wait until you meet dog, man. Wait for it.

We'll definitely continue on with Ghost Trick, and try to give you something much more definitive than this in the near future. This is a free release, though -- the first two chapters, which take about 60 or 70 minutes to complete, are what you'll get with a $0 download, so that should give you a good indication of what you're getting into. Our gut says grab it. Here's some more screens:

We've heard all varieties of the backstory before, and surely this is just another of those, but you can't deny that developer Sulake knows what they're doing. After all, they're behind the Habbo Hotel world, and the ten million monthly visitors there is nothing to shake a stick at.

So how have they applied their expertise to Niko? Well, it's a game with a very simple approach, which seems to be a highly successful formula for other winners in the genre. So if you're into that whole Aves with an anger problem thing, you might like this. Niko is an easy guy to control – you have a set of arrows on the bottom of your screen to move him back and forth and a button with his face to make him jump slingshot style (pull it back, see a trajectory appear, and fire away).

That's it. Nothing fancy. Your job is to navigate a series of 30 levels, the first six of which are free to play. You'll need to pony up $1.99 in order to gain access to the other 24, should you be so inclined.

Level design in Niko actually reminded me directly of retro Sonic titles like Sonic the Hedgehog 2, where you often find yourself flying at exhilarating speed picking up dozens of rings at a time, only to risk the danger of bumping into a beastie you didn't see and losing them all. Niko opts not to include the painful part of this formula, merely letting you use bouncy pads and moving platforms in the air to propel yourself through its worlds.

There are enemies, but they don't really make as much as an appearance until you get a bit further along. It feels like a proper platformer, and while the levels hold challenge, they never feel frustrating to complete, which is one of my gripes with a lot of portable platformers and puzzlers today.

Each level you play gives you the opportunity for multiple ratings, of course, with a total of three stars to earn based on performance and golden disks that are harder to find. A unique addition to replay value is also offered in the form of rewards that can be taken over to Habbo and used there. Badges, trophies, and a special surprise if you rescue all if Niko's friends are all there for the grabbing, so that ought to come in handy if you are already a Habbo member (or are considering becoming one).

Well-made, clever and fun, Niko is definitely a platformer that's worth your attention. If you explore the first six levels for free, and if you find you're hooked, it's pretty cheap to score the rest. Then you can slingshot, jump and fly through the air to your heart's delight.

Hank is a brave rodent, who dreams of being the worlds first "stunt-hamster". He's sealed inside a transparent hamster-ball which must maneuver through each level, collecting three stars before crashing into the finish target. It's part "physics game" and part "puzzler", as you need to determine a safe way through each level.

There's no joystick, buttons or tilting as you don't control Hank's movements directly. Instead, you interact with the surrounding items to make him move. For instance, tapping certain platforms makes them disappear, so if Hank was sitting on that platform, he would fall and roll down a ramp. Or perhaps there's a weight on the platform, which then falls on a see-saw and catapults the daredevil hamster upwards to an awaiting star.

There's spring-loaded boxing gloves, reversible escalators and "hamster-safe bombs", which are just a few of the ways to move the otherwise stationary hamster. But, avoid the fire-pits and electrical fields, or you'll be one charred little critter.

The first chapter is named "The Early Years" but you can also unlock the "Bigger and Better" and "Fairly Badass" chapters by earning stars (making 75 levels in total). A further 18 bonus levels can be unlocked by reaching special golden stars or gifting the game. And there's even a small mini-game hidden away in the credits page, which earns you one of the 23 achievements.

A three-star rating and score is awarded for each level, with high-scores stored via Game Center and Crystal. A separate leaderboard is provided for each chapter, plus an overall leaderboard for total score. To improve your scores, you can gain a "nuts" bonus by collecting all three stars while  also satisfying a specific objective for the level, such as:  "Finish the level traveling at greater than 32 mph", reach a certain height, finish within a certain time, or finish within a limited number of moves. This adds some extra challenge and replay-value.

The level designs are varied and interesting, and ramp up in difficulty as you'd expect with the last chapter requiring more thought than the fairly easy first levels. The difficulty increases because there's more game elements placed on the screen to navigate through.

Whenever I start to tire of Chillingo's constantly expanding range of casual physics-based games, they have a tendency to release another cute and enjoyable game. Somehow they always manage to lure another dollar from my wallet. But frankly, who can resist a few hours entertainment for a single dollar, when it features puzzles, a wide-eyed hamster, and bombs.

You can read our thoughts on this Babylonian Twins reboot in our full review, and you can learn even more about the amazing history behind the game finally being finished and released. To summarize: Babylonian Twins is an excellent game and it's practically a miracle that we're able to finally play it. Suffice to say, if you own an iPad and have even a passing interest in puzzle games or platformers, you should download Babylonian Twins HD while it's still free. For iPhone and iPod touch owners, you should also consider dropping the 99¢ for the small version if you don't have it already.

Cranky is the toughest alligator around and he has worked up an appetite from sabotaging Swampy’s water supply. He eats anything, especially all the rotting and disgusting junk found in the dumps and sewers. Cranky will not eat vegetables however, and now his food is covered with vegetable-like algae. Use the dirty purple water to clean off Cranky’s plate so he can eat!

Disney says that upon IAP unlock, users will get "50 super-challenging puzzles... and enjoy a completely new way to play." Catch that? Looks like these guys are hoping to court you now. Oh! And apparently, the "Cranky's Challenge" part of this content pack is "a game within a game," so, uh, prepare for that.

RoboHero places you in the role of Blue Robo, the last defense for Earth in its fight against an evil robot army. As a last resort, you’re sent to the robot ship in order to infiltrate and destroy all the forces. As you progress through the game’s story mode, you’ll unlock new weapons and face new enemies and obstacles. However, the goal of the game is always to either get to the other side of the level or take out a certain amount of enemies.

You’ll accomplish this by planning each move for Blue Robo 15 turns in advance. Every turn, movement, shot, and even weapon change counts as a turn. Once you’ve planned everything out, you hit the start button and your robo executes its actions while the surrounding environment (and enemy baddies) executes theirs. There’s a lot of timing, predicting, and planning involved with each set of turns, much more than I think most players are used to.

The game is also quite unforgiving with planning turns – mistiming a turn or shot can spell doom for that entire set of turns (or even worse, put you in a position to get destroyed). Also, you have to plan out 15 turns; if you try and start the round sooner, your robo will simply stand still for those turns you don't plan anything, effectively wasting precious moves.

RoboHero’s biggest strength is also its potentially biggest weakness. When all is said and done, this game is hard. You better have some pretty damn good timing and analytical skills if you want to completely finish this game by collecting all the level stars (three stars for each of the thirty missions).

Each level lets you earn up to three stars by accomplishing three different criteria. You can earn a star by collecting all the stars in a level, by keeping your health above a certain threshold, and by passing the level under a certain amount of turns (every individual action counts as a ‘turn’). Normally, I can do well enough to earn one of those at any one time, and if I tried pretty hard, I could probably handle both the health and collectible stars.

However, if you want to land all three, you’re going to have to do a lot of work analyzing your moves, the movements of your enemies, and creating the most streamlined route that takes out only the necessary enemies and gets you where you need to go without coming to harm. It’s an exercise in patience and planning that I rarely see in games these days.

It’s important to note that the difficulty is mostly restricted toward earning stars. In the case of simply wanting to pass a level, RoboHero is a little more forgiving, especially since Blue Robo has the ability to glimpse the future movement of the surrounding enemies and environment. However, you only have a limited amount of foresight, and it doesn’t really make it any easier to time some movement.

Regardless, later levels will still test both your reactive and puzzle solving senses. Annoyances such as the fact that you have to start over if you die make the later levels more annoying to complete (especially considering the latter half of the levels will take some time to actually run through and complete).

In addition to the Story Mode, RoboHero also features an Arena Mode and Multiplayer. I found Arena Mode far more enjoyable than the story mode, as you’re simply tossed into a small level with a bunch of other computer opponents with the sole purpose of kicking the crap out of everyone else. It’s very reminiscent of Bomberman and I think RoboHero does a great job capturing that frenetic feel in a turn based game.

Multiplayer is restricted to pass and play, which I think loses a lot of the excitement that might have occurred with Bluetooth or Wifi modes (asynchronous might have been interesting as well).  Thankfully, online multiplayer is supposedly on the horizon.

If you’re on the fence as to whether a game such a RoboHero is for you, here’s some good news: The game’s first ten levels (as well as Multiplayer and Arena) are offered for free, with IAP covering the other 20 story levels. In this regard, I suggest picking it up if you’re even remotely interested. Its slow, turn-based gameplay is a much different take than most tank games I’ve played on iOS, and it’s bound to turn some heads, but only for pretty hardcore puzzle or strategy fans.

Greedy Penguins is a bird-centric physics puzzler (what a concept!) that revolves around you finding ways to get incredibly stressed-out fish in the mouths of the correspondingly-colored penguins. You tap the fish to drop it from its hook and get it rolling, then through a combination of timing and obstacle-clearing, get it to the right-colored penguin. Once your penguin is successfully fed, he coughs up ice cream, which you tap to feed each level’s companion and get bonus points when completing the level, garnering a one, two, or three-fish rating.

The concept isn’t new, but the execution feels good. I found myself really enjoying this game, as much for the cute graphics and theme as for the well-designed puzzles. While the earlier puzzles seem easy (don’t they always?), once I really got going it became quite challenging to make sure I got the fish moving in order to clear obstacles. I found myself failing some levels multiple times. Since each level is short, I didn’t mind too much, but it did remind me of how bad my timing is (I still get night terrors regarding the Cave of Wonders level from Aladdin for the Sega Genesis).

Another challenge, though one not personally experienced, is that the colors chosen for each penguin and their food make the game exceptionally trying for color blind people. As mentioned in the forum thread, those who can’t see colors will have a heck of a time getting through this game. If you’re persistent and don’t mind some trial-and-error, you might still enjoy it, but as a person who had enough trouble being able to clearly see everything, I would probably recommend skipping it until a color blind option is added.

The other thing that I personally didn’t like was the in-app purchase option. I’m generally of the conservative “in-app purchase?! Not in my paid app!” mindset (I am a bit of an old person, after all), and my thoughts on Greedy Penguins are no different. Simply beating every level in a world isn’t enough to unlock the next set of levels. In order to unlock the second and third igloos (worlds of 12 puzzles each), you need to have either collected thirty fish (out of only thirty-six) or pay 99¢.

The game also encourages you to waste time in levels by tapping the penguins and their companions to make them do “funny animations,” making it unlikely that you’ll get a perfect score of three fish on your first try. Crafty, no? I don’t know about you, but I don’t really like replaying levels of games just to gain points (or fish) in order to unlock content that I feel entitled to, having already purchased the app.

All things considered, Greedy Penguins is a well-crafted – though hardly groundbreaking – puzzle game. It's fun and extremely well-executed, with enough challenging puzzles to keep you occupied. If you've got a dollar or two burning a hole in your pocket, I'd definitely recommend giving it a spin, especially since it's Universal. If not, well, you can always get your penguin fix from this video!

Finger twister isn't new, but Fingle is a finger twister game with one purpose: flirtation. A cheesy soundtrack, suggestive backdrops and more than a few double entendres might be enough, but Fingle doesn't settle for enough. Your fingers will stroke hers, or his. You'll make terribly lewd gestures at one another. Fingle takes its premise all the way.

Here's how you play the game: there are squares, and there are boxes, and the two must meet. Some are yellow, some are white. Your fingers rest on one set, hers on another. And then you do as you're told.

At first this is simple. Drag a box here, hold it there. Your fingers might brush up against one another. Then things heat up. One player finds himself stroking his hand over the other's. It gets pretty steamy.

Sort of, anyhow. There are a few rules you have to follow to get the full effect. You can't really play solo, for, um, obvious reasons, and you need to use one hand each. Two hands is easier, but it's a lot less fun. Stick to those rules, and one of you will basically end up in the other's lap before long if you want to pull off some of the moves.

So you can see why you don't want to play with a stranger, or your Grandma. You might also not want to play for too long. While Fingle starts out very flirty, it actually gets pretty hard over time. If one of you has small hands, long fingernails or sweaty palms, you might find it a bit out of your league. Nothing kills the mood quite so much as frustrated failure.

There are over 50 levels to work through, so as long as you know your limit you'll be fine. If you're actually playing to tease, work through the first level pack or two. It starts out slightly subtle and gets suggestive quickly. If you're playing for a challenge, something that's totally possible, work your way through all the rest. Fingle is missing a lot of the traditional game structures we're used to -- scores, points, achievements and the like -- but it's certainly a good time for two people who are comfortable with a little touching. The design that has gone into this game is truly charming, so it's hard to say no.

In all seriousness, you need to know your audience if you're going to play. You can definitely go at it platonically for a laugh, but first be sure you both know where you stand. And you could certainly make someone extremely uncomfortable if you're not at the point where cheesy 70s-style music, suggestive sound effects and light touching is okay. Fingle is the sort of game that could start out funny and end up sexy, or start out cold and end up with a slap to the face. Judge carefully, and stop by our discussion thread to let us know how it goes - just keep it work safe, tiger.

We've got some other related news. Hogrocket tells us that its just released a free-to-play version of the title that packs in 15 levels from the get-go. After that, users are asked to pay for additional level content. Read our glowing review and give this a spin -- this is a neat puzzle title with tons of interesting choices and characters.

Today the first update has hit for Triple Town, which mostly focuses on fixing bugs. Things like broken Game Center achievements, the inability to restart games sometimes, and tons of other quirks that come with a version 1.0 release have now been taken care of. The update description also goes on to say that there are several other known bugs that are currently in the process of being hunted down and fixed, one of which includes a problem with turns regenerating after exiting the app.

You see, Triple Town is a freemium game. It comes with a set amount of “moves” for free, and the ability to purchase in-game coins for real money which will let you buy more moves when you run out. Alternately, these moves are supposed to slowly regenerate while you aren’t playing the game, giving you a way to continue playing for free if you had the patience.

One other alternative is to just buy unlimited moves with a flat in-app purchase fee of $6.99, and with all the troubles going on with the regenerating turns Spry Fox wants to entice you to go for the unlimited option by reducing its price down to $3.99. After getting hooked on Triple Town myself, I had no qualms dropping the $6.99 for unlimited play, but others have felt like it was a bit on the high side for the kind of game it is.

If you’re one of those who felt the price was high, the $3.99 price is a lot easier to swallow, especially for a game packed with such fantastic gameplay. Plus, the maintenance update makes it a much more solid game all around, and I’m sure we’ll be seeing plenty of more updates to Triple Town in the future as well.

You know how Dungeon Raid [$0.99] took the match-3 thing and made it completely soul-consuming? That's exactly what TripleTown does. But for those of us not into gaming in our browsers or on our e-book readers, it's brand spanking new, something Dungeon Raid hasn't been for a while.

So here's the scoop. Triple Town is a pretty straightforward matching game with cutesy art and simple tap controls. It's all about matching things in groups of at least three, a rather familiar task. Instead of clearing the board, you're building it up. If you play haphazardly, making every match you can, you won't get far.

That's because everything in Triple Town can be upgraded. You're given a six by six grid partly filled with randomly generated terrain. You draw random tiles to work with - a chunk of grass, let's say. Plant it, and then plant two more beside it to make a bush. Put three bushes together to grow a tree. Three trees together builds a hut, and three huts makes a house. Each combination gives you a little breathing room, but you can't outright clear anything off the board until you match up the very top tier.

When you put down the last piece of a triad the upgrade forms out of that piece's position. It's incredibly easy to end up putting your trees all over town if you're not careful, and not so simple to actually build them together. If you want to do well you're going to have to plan a few steps ahead and be ready to improvise. Occasionally you'll luck out and draw a crystal, which acts as a wildcard, or a bot which can clear a space. You can also switch out one piece for safekeeping, which can save your city-building career if you use it well.

Then there are the bears. You have to murder the bears. Don't be fooled by their cute little faces - they're jerks and they'll fill up your town if you don't deal with them. You can kill them by trapping them, and they leave a gravestone behind. Three gravestones makes a church. Three churches makes a bigger church. Yeah. Suddenly you're dealing with two separate upgrade paths all getting in the way of each other.

Since the grid you're playing on is pretty tiny, mistakes don't take long to come back and haunt you. The goal is to earn more and more points to upgrade your settlement to a camp, a town, a city, a megalopolis and several steps in between. Each milestone is a Game Center achievement, so let's just say I don't have many achievements yet. It's easy to keep getting better, though. Every failure yields a lesson, and once you've got the system down it's just a matter of putting it into action.

There's only one problem: eventually the free ride runs out, and when it does, it hurts. Triple Town gives you a limited number of turns to work with - enough for a lot of free play, enough to get you hooked. After that, you can buy 200 more turns with coins. You earn more coins each time you finish a game, but it's not really a sustainable practice. So you're probably going to need to shell out. You can either buy coins for cheap and keep going 200 turns at a time, or you can splurge to unlock unlimited turns at a painful rate - $6.99 in the US store.

I won't argue that's not a lot to pay for a simple little game like Triple Town, given the App Store economy. But the game offers such a generous amount of free play that it's worth getting even if you're not interested in putting any cash on the table. Of course, you'll need to rely on your willpower at that point, which might be a heavy burden to bear.

Sure, Triple Town is just another matching game, but it's deep and surprisingly strategic. You've got to plan your moves out in advance while dealing with random draws and turns ticking down. You've got to balance spending your coins on the exact tile you need with earning enough each game to keep you going. It's challenging enough to keep your brain working and simple enough to dig in those one-more-game hooks. So why not give it a look? The first hit is always free.

Puzzlejuice starts with falling puzzle-blocks, just like Tetris. You can rotate each falling block by tapping the screen or drag it left or right. A ghost image of the block shows where it will end up at the bottom. When you're happy with the position of the block, you can swipe it downwards to speed up its descent. And the idea is to form a solid row. That should all sound fairly familiar for anyone who knows Tetris, but that's just the start of this game.

When you form a solid row of blocks across the playing area, instead of disappearing, the blocks turn into letters. And to make the letters disappear, you must draw a line across adjoining letter-blocks, to spell a word in eight directions, like Boggle. If your word is long enough, the surrounding blocks are also destroyed. So now you're multitasking between managing falling blocks and finding words.

The falling blocks are comprised of different colors. Whenever you match-up three or more blocks of the same color, those blocks can be tapped so they convert into letters. So now you're managing falling blocks, matching and tapping colors and also finding words, which is enough to keep your brain challenged and fully entertained (especially if you're a male, because apparently we're not great at multitasking).

A series of objectives are provided as well, which can be completed across multiple games. For example, you might need to spell a six letter word, use two power-ups simultaneously or activate 3+ rows at once. By satisfying these objectives, you can unlock power-ups, like "The Kabomb!" (explodes blocks), "Driller" (falling blocks carve through everything they touch) or "Twister" (scrambles the blocks). You can choose up to three power-ups to carry.

There are two game modes, Zen and Core. In Zen Mode the blocks don't drop, but you only get 90 seconds to play. In Core Mode you play until the blocks reach the top of the screen. Core Mode has two difficulty levels, with the harder levels requiring longer words to explode surrounding blocks, but offering three times the points. Basically, the longer your words, the bigger the width of your explosion, which all helps your Game Center score.

I tried this universal game on the iPad and iPod touch, both of which played well, although the music spluttered at times on my 4th generation iPod. There's a "picture-in-picture" mode for the smaller screen devices, which shows a zoomed in image of what's under your finger. On the iPad that mode is unnecessary, but on the smaller screen it's useful for seeing the words you're swiping, or un-swiping.

Puzzlejuice may not be totally original, as it combines three common App Store genres, but putting them together into one game was a stroke of genius. It's a real breath of fresh air with loads of frantic gameplay, style and humor. As an added bonus, Puzzlejuice is currently on sale for 99¢ due to being featured by Apple, and at that bargain price (or its original price of $2.99, for that matter) it's a strong recommendation for puzzle and word game fans.

You might have heard of this one already. It has seen a couple of releases across other platforms, including Kindle and Facebook. The latter one should give you an idea of what to expect, actually. This is a free-to-play game with "social" game hooks, much like any other title on the social networking site. Where it departs is that it seems to feed off its best players in a particularly non-aggressive way. On iOS, you can just play and not worry. At least, that's been my experience with it so far.

Your usual game goes something like this: each grid-based instance is a new, fairly unremarkable world that you need to fill by matching three alike items. Match three grasses to assemble a bush, and then match those bushes to make trees. The catch is that you'll be given these tools at random and you can only "store" on piece at a time. Also, you can't move any of the game's pieces around; you can only put items down next to pre-existing items, which introduces turn-based thinking.

There's more to it. After some bush laying, you'll run across your first bear, which is a piece that you need to isolate around other pieces in order to kill it. Line up three dead bears, and you get a building. (I don't understand it, either.)

Higher-level play involves doing all of this and using its currency functionality, which allows you to buy more moves on a single board -- and if you're just OK at the game, you won't really be running to the well -- and buying pieces that you need. The IAP will let you buy more coins or turns for real-life dough.

Triple Town has created a bit of buzz on our boards and ... some grumbling, too. The game's lead designer is chiming in on the IAP specifically, revealing that it has been balanced to limit even hypothetical millionaires from slaughtering the high score boards.

"... In general a more skilled player will always get a better scores than a less skilled player, even if someone buys every item in the store," he writes. "Triple Town often seems like a simple game on the surface, but there is an immense amount of depth and strategy..."

"To make things even more fair, there are only a limited number of items in the store. Even if you were a millionaire, the best that would get you is the ability to play more often but you wouldn't be able to buy your way to a high score."

He adds that he sees a lot of "expert" dudes who never buy items, but he also sees people who buy more stuff because they like the game. I haven't felt pressured to buy anything yet, so if your IAP alarm went off, go ahead and relax.

Triple Town is free, so give it a try. It's a solid match-3 with a cool new element that I think anyone with an itch for this kind of puzzle game will dig. We'll have a review ready soon. Also, those bears! So cute.