Earlier this month we took a look at the upcoming bullet hell shooter Phoenix from Firi Games. Phoenix claims to be able to push hundreds of bullets onscreen at a time and still run smoothly even on the oldest of Apple iOS devices. Firi recently sent us a work in progress build of the game and after spending some time playing it seems they are well on their way to bringing another solid entry into the shmup genre on the App Store. The preview build we were given is missing some key elements like music, some sound effects, and graphical variety, but the core of the gameplay is in place and it's definitely a lot of fun.

Phoenix is a little bit different from other scrolling shooters in that there aren't set levels. Instead, the entire game is an endless randomly generated level with a difficulty that scales based on how well you are performing. Think of it as the Canabalt [$2.99] of shmups. Controls are of the relative touch variety, meaning you can touch anywhere on the screen to control your ship instead of it always following closely to your fingertip. Defeated enemies will drop upgrades to your main weapon, health packs that repair your ship, temporary shield powerups, and a super weapon of sorts called the Alpha Strike Attack which gives your ship incredibly strong firepower for a limited time.

I was a bit skeptical about the scaling difficulty in Phoenix at first, but in practice it actually seems to work as intended. When you are doing well the game throws bigger and more difficult enemies at you who will fire faster and spray more bullets in your direction. Scoring also scales with the difficulty, which can be seen with a tiny meter next to your score display. As you avoid damage, the meter increases and so do the points you earn for defeating enemies. Due to this, you score doesn't necessarily reflect on how long you survive in the game, but rather how efficiently you can avoid damage. Scores are tracked by an in-game global and regional leaderboard.

So far Phoenix has nailed the groundwork for an interesting take on the bullet hell shmup. Controls work well, and I was easily able to narrowly dodge the multitude of bullets being fired at me while simultaneously dishing out my own offensive onslaught. Visually Phoenix is looking very nice as well, although having only one scrolling background image got a little old. I'm told that this is something being worked on and there should be some more variety in locations in the final release. The leaderboards are also being tweaked, as right now they are somewhat basic and allow multiple entries per user which really clutters things up for such a high score focused game. Phoenix seems really well suited for something like Game Center, but it remains to be seen if the developer has any plans to implement this.

All in all I'm really impressed with what I've played of Phoenix at this point, and if Firi Games can polish up some of the rough edges in the game shooter fans can look forward to some bullet hell action no matter which iOS device they own. Firi had been shooting for a September release, so barring any unforeseen issues cropping up we should be seeing Phoenix arrive in the coming weeks. In the meantime you can follow along with the discussion for Phoenix in our forums, and we'll take a closer look at the game when it hits the App Store.

Back in early July, the classic LucasArts adventure game from the 90's Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck's Revenge was released for the iPhone and iPad. Much more than just a simple port, the entire game features modernized graphics and an interface that has been tailored for touch screen controls. For the purists out there, you can easily switch over to the original 1991 graphics at any time with a two finger swipe, exactly like you can in the iPhone release of the original The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition [$7.99].

Earlier today, LucasArts dropped the price of the iPhone version of Monkey Island 2 from $7.99 all the way down to 99�. Here is an excerpt from our review:

Monkey Island 2 takes place after the events of the first Monkey Island where wannabe pirate Guybrush Threepwood is introduced and meets the cast of characters included in the game as he seeks out the pirate leaders and attempts to prove himself through three challenges. A ghost pirate named LeChuck is thrown in to the mix, along with the beautiful Elaine Marley. Without spoiling too much, the game concludes with romance, root beer, and fireworks. Even though playing the original is by no means required to enjoy the sequel, Monkey Island is filled with great writing, silly characters, funny situations, and often extremely odd solutions to the problems that Guybrush must overcome which is really worth checking out� Especially considering the fantastic job LucasArts did on the iPhone port of the special edition release.

If you aren't familiar with Monkey Island 2, take a look at our extensive review from when the game was released in July. If you are familiar with the game, but haven't been able to part with the $8 to buy it for your iPhone, your patience has paid off and you should definitely pick up Monkey Island 2 Special Edition: LeChuck's Revenge during this limited time 99� sale.

The Final Fantasy Tactics series is on its way to the iPhone, but not as soon as we had hoped. Recently some rumors had been spreading around that Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions would be released on the 15th of this month, which unfortunately has been debunked officially courtesy of the Square Enix Facebook page.

The release date is still to be determined per Square Enix, but as a bit of a consolation prize they did release the above screenshot of the currently in development iPhone game. Being huge Tactics fans, we're more than a little disappointed that we won't be playing the game as soon as we had hoped, but we're definitely going to keep an eye out for more news on the game's development.

If you were around for the arcade craze of the 80's, you no doubt have seen a coin pusher at some point. Basically, a traditional coin pusher is a machine loaded with quarters or whatever tokens the arcade used with a mechanical "broom" that pushes back and forth at the back of the machine. The goal of the game is to drop a quarter in to the machine, and when it gets pushed forward it pushes all the other coins in front of it forward, hopefully resulting in said coins falling to the collection tray below.

Here is a video I found on YouTube of a real coin push machine in action:

While I'm sure there are more games with similar gameplay mechanics on the App Store, the big three seem to be Dungeon & Coin, Coin Push Frenzy, and Coin Dozer. Each have their strengths and weaknesses, but they're all free so you might as well just download them all if you're remotely interested. All of the games work in a similar manner in that you start with an allotment of coins, you drop them in to the game, then you can either wait for your coins to recharge or you can buy more via an in-app purchase.

When you take a game like a coin pusher machine and compact it down to the iPhone, quite a bit is lost in translation. Coin pushing machines invoke the same emotion as gambling in that you could just be one coin away from starting a massive coin avalanche, or in the case of the video above, making a $5 bill drop in to the collection tray. This feeling is extremely difficult to duplicate with an iPhone game especially since all the prizes are virtual, and feel entirely meaningless in comparison.

Because of this, I really don't recommend buying more coins in any of the games. Only having five coins left and strategically dropping them to try to get more is a lot more fun than I originally thought it would be, and having to wait to get more coins really makes you think about how you're going to use the existing coins you have more. In comparison, once I bought a bucket full of coins as an in-app purchase for a couple bucks, I just started spamming them everywhere because I had so many. Managing a limited pool of coins is just much more fun.

Dungeons and Coins, Free An odd conglomeration of a coin push machine and light RPG elements. You battle monsters by pushing coins of the edge, and unlike the other two games, you're not limited by the amount of coins you can chuck in at once-- often resulting in hilarious coin explosions as the physics engine tries to figure out what to do.

Coin Push Frenzy, Free Packed with the best graphics and physics of the three, Coin Push Frenzy has a bunch of different power-ups, collectable prizes, and additional unlockable coin pusher machines. Currently there seems to be some bugs that effect coin generation, but Freeverse is aware of the issue and an update is on the way but in the meantime putting your device to sleep and waking it back up again should make coins appear.

Coin Dozer, Free Downloaded over 2.5 million times, Coin Dozer has been somewhat of a sensation in Asian App Store markets. With gameplay very similar to Coin Push Frenzy, I like that you can actually see what prizes are coming up instead of just spawning mysterious chests or boxes like the other two games.

I've been enjoying all three of these games much more than I thought I would when I first caught wind of them. Like all freemium games, they're designed to be played randomly throughout the day, and it's fun loading up the various games, dropping a few coins, and seeing what you get. If you remember staring at real coin push machines in the 80's with wide eyes, dropping pocket full of coins and getting nothing but a few coins back, definitely give these games a try.

Interactive fiction on the App Store has definitely surprised me not only with how well it works on the family of iDevices, but how much I've enjoyed the titles I've read. In the past we've posted a large roundup of the three big series including Gamebook Adventures, Fighting Fantasy, and Sorcery!. More recently we've covered the Choice of Adventure series which are much more similar to R. A. Montgomery's Choose Your Own Adventure books that were incredibly popular in the past.

Book 3 of the Gamebook Adventures series was just released, and both of the previous books also were updated to fully support the Retina Display of the new iPod touch and iPhone 4. In addition, in celebration of the new addition to the series all of the books have been put on sale. Reading the books in order isn't required to enjoy them, but you might as well start at the beginning because they're all worth checking out if interactive fiction is your cup of tea.

Gamebook Adventures 1: An Assassin in Orlandes, $2.99 Set within Orlandes City, nobles are being systematically murdered by a ruthless assassin no-one seems able to catch. Finding yourself thrust in the middle of a large conspiracy, you must make decisions that may put yourself and one other most precious to you in great danger. Can you locate the Assassin in Orlandes before it is too late?

Gamebook Adventures 2: The Siege of the Necromancer, $2.99 Set in the coastal town of Myr, you have returned home after a long Summer in the mines of Durath Tor to find your hometown besieged by strange creatures. A dark presence has taken over the town and you are the only one who can rid the stronghold of Erid Buul, the mysterious new Lord and his ghastly cohorts.

Gamebook Adventures 3: Slaves of Rema, $2.99 Cruelly taken from your homeland of Orlandes, you find yourself in a far off land at the mercy of a gladiatorial arena. Somehow trying to find a way to escape overseas, can you also unravel a potentially dangerous mystery that puts two nations on the brink of war?

Over the weekend quite a few people have been coming to the realization that Game Center only seems to allow for 500 friends. Per TiPb and a few tweets, once you reach 500 total friends in Game Center the only way to add more friends is to delete an existing friend. While I suspect this won't be an issue for close to 99% of the people who use Game Center, our 4.1 update post, Project-79's absolutely fantastic thread listing all Game Center games, and the actual Game Center usename thread are packed with people trading friend requests.

If you've been going hog wild adding anyone and everyone, you might want to slow down so you don't need to go through your friends list purging people when you've got other people to add later. It's hard to say if Apple will ever increase this limit or not, as it was likely put in place to reduce lag while using Game Center. In comparison, both OpenFeint and Plus+ don't seem to have any kind of limitation on the amount of friends you have, but having massive friends lists in both services has caused problems for me in the past in some games.

Gameloft recently released another episode of their series of podcasts, which like most of their podcasts includes some new tidbits about upcoming games. It also includes quite a bit of Real Golf 2011 [$6.99], so if you're not interested in that feel free to skip to about 2:30 in the video.

Last week we posted about Modern Combat 2: Black Pegasus, and this podcast includes a brief clip of the incredibly corny trailer along with some additional details. Aside from refining the original controls, they're also packing in a gyro control option. There are going to be 3 playable characters across 12 battlefields and players will have access to 15 different weapons which can be tweaked with various accessories. They're also calling it the "most complete multiplayer FPS on the App Store."

In addition, Gameloft also teased an upcoming developer diary of Dungeon Hunter 2 and revealed a new space shooter called Star Battalion which looks a lot like the upcoming Galaxy on Fire 2 by Fish Labs. One incredibly intriguing component of Star Battalion is the inclusion of online coop gameplay, since really, coop play makes everything more fun.

We'll keep an eye out for more information on these games, but historically by the time Gameloft starts showing games off like this, their release isn't too far off.