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.