Somehow, at some point, it became public yet-still-unofficial knowledge that Criterion Games' Burnout Crash was coming to the iPad. It's official now. In a new blog post, publisher EA has confirmed that the top-down racer is headed to our favorite tablet in 2011. It's also coming to the iPhone and iPod touch, too, during the same "holiday" release window. Neat!

We haven't seen this version in action yet, but the features EA is noting makes it appears as if it'll stick pretty close to its XBLA and PSN source material:

Use intuitive taps and swipes to steer vehicles, trigger explosions, and rack up ridiculous scores across three game modes, 18 traffic junctions, and six unique locations. In addition to a rocking 80s soundtrack featuring Vanilla Ice and Gloria Estefan, you can look forward to Autolog support to connect, compare, and compete with friends and rivals.

Basically, Crash is a critically middling top-down version of pre-Paradise�Burnout's uber-popular crash mode. Like vehicular pinball, you wreck your tiny car into traffic and hope to pull off various multipliers and chain effects with explosions. We think it'll actually be better on touch devices, but we'll have to wait to see.

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Yesterday , TouchArcade attended EA's Naughty or Nice game event in New York and got some hands-on time with a host of new titles on the way to the App Store from EA, Chillingo, and PopCap Games. We'll be sharing details on these titles across several posts, but first up is the new one from PopCap, Popcorn Dragon.

Popcorn Dragon is a fun little game full of the cute and also the whimsy. It puts you in touch control of Ignatius Flamb�, a little dragon with big dreams. Ignatius is something of a cinephile and, as such, he flies about 10 different levels, each themed with different classic movie backdrops � there's westerns, sci-fi, mysteries and more. Along the way, Ignatius must ch0w-down on as much popcorn as possible by using his fiery breath to pop the hale of corn kernels that float across the gamescreen. The more popcorn he eats, the longer his tail becomes. Sadly, various baddies seek to thwart Ignatius' popcorn popping progress, so the player must be on the lookout for vultures, velociraptors, luchadores and the like. Luckily, Ignatius' fiery breath can singe more than just popcorn, and that long tale is good for a few whacks at the baddies.

While flying and popping and eating and whacking, movie tickets can be collected to buy Ignatius stylish outfits to wear to the cinema. Strong play earns experience points and achievements, and various power-ups can be unlocked to crank up the face fire.

Popcorn Dragon has that clean, colorful, charming aesthetic we've come to expect from PopCap and will be available for both the iPhone and iPad sometime in November at an as-yet undisclosed price.

Madfinger Games is continuing to tinker with Shadowgun [$4.99] after its shaky late September debut on the App Store. For starters, the game is cheaper. For a limited time, you can grab it at $4.99 instead of its usual upper tier price tag of $7.99. It's also less buggy. An initial patch run has sealed up its iPad 2 crashing issues, the Driller bug in the fourth level, and 'optimized' memory on lower-end devices.

These things combined present an interesting value proposition for anyone who read our review of the original build and remain on the fence. While we loved its technology, we weren't too big on its level design or a handful of its mechanics.

Here's a snippet:

If Madfinger can fix the crashing and save-game deletion issues with a patch, they're still left with a repetitive, but lovely looking shooter. There are hints of true quality in the boss fights and some minor sections of the campaign, but the majority relies on a simple, corridor design that's hard to find engaging for very long.

We've seen Madfinger say that it's continuing to work on the game post-release and that's great news. Its also still planning for an Android release later this month. We've been told that the Android iteration will support anything with a Tegra chip in it, so make sure you've got the right hardware for the job if you want in.

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