With election day quickly approaching in the USA, iPhone developer Super Boise has released a surprisingly fun free trivia game that pits the two major American political parties against each other in real-time online trivia battles. Political Fury: The Knowledge Battle [Free] begins by forcing you to pick sides between Democrats or Republicans. From there, it displays a bar that shows each party's score, with a scale that tips from side to side depending on who is winning more games of trivia.

After tapping play, the game searches for an opponent from the opposite political party, and you duke it out in a five question trivia battle in various categories ranging from geography to current events. Points are awarded per question based on who answers correctly first, and winning a round of trivia awards one point to your party's overall score. What's really cool about Political Fury is how seamless it all is. There's no annoying sign up process, all you do is download the game, choose a party, and you're off. It uses geolocation to figure out what state you're in, and when you're playing someone, you see their state and their current grade. Answering properly increases your grade, and obviously, answering incorrectly decreases it.

If you like trivia or have found yourself caught up in the pre-election drama, download Political Fury right away. With or without all the political mumbo jumbo, it's still really cool to be instantly matched up against another person in online trivia wars.

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Last night Chillingo's WackyLands Boss [99�] hit the App Store, and turned gaming on its head by allowing you to quite literally play as the boss, slaying hordes of innocent knights, archers, wizards, and more leaving nothing but destruction in your wake. To sweeten the deal, you're not stuck with one boring old boss to play as either. Your boss is incredibly customizable with even more customization that unlocks as you play through the game.

Only one control option is included, and every action in the game is performed via tapping or swiping gestures. For instance, holding one side of the screen causes your boss to walk that way, tapping in a direction executes a quick attack, and swiping in a direction performs a slower but more powerful swing. Rolling to evade is accomplished by swiping up on either side of the screen, and picking up in-game objects involves swiping up on your boss.

It all sounds good, but in action, it leaves a little to be desired especially later in the game when precise control of your boss is required. As much as I hate to say it, I almost wish there was a virtual D-Pad and button option. WackyLands Boss reminds me a lot of Samurai: Way of the Warrior [$1.99] in that way too many deaths result from game disagreeing with what you're trying to get your character to do as you wildly tap and swipe trying to stay alive.

Once you do get a hang of the controls, WackyLands Boss is a lot of fun. Gameplay can be a little repetitive at times since you're basically just walking to the right murdering swaths of defenders, but this is greatly defrayed by an experience system. Leveling up unlocks more and more weapons, armors, special abilities, and evolutions for your boss. Using coins that you take from your victims, you can really trick out your boss by buying swords, clubs, shoes, and all kinds of other items that boost your stats. In addition, as you progress through the story you also unlock three simple but fun mini games.

WackyLands Boss is a game that's dripping with charm. Whether you decide to customize your boss to look like a bloodthirsty killer or any number of other silly combinations, it's a great time rampaging through the countryside tossing barrels of poison, eating princesses to regain health, and punching down castles. I'd like to see some more control options, but other than that, this is a beat-em-up that's easy to recommend.

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Tonight Sega released their classic Dreamcast puzzle game, and huge fan favorite, ChuChu Rocket! [$4.99/HD] into the App Store. We had a chance to go hands-on with ChuChu Rocket! at Sega's offices last month and came away excited for the iPhone and iPad version of the game. Sega has taken the entirety of the original ChuChu Rocket! and reworked it for the touch screen, and the results are terrific. While the graphics are essentially the same, the UI actually feels much more natural than that of the Dreamcast. This game seems almost meant for touch screen controls, and whether or not you were a fan of the original Dreamcast release ChuChu Rocket! is a puzzle game that needs to be in your collection.

Starting the game forces you through a very short tutorial explaining how to play ChuChu Rocket! The tutorial is so short because this game is ridiculously easy to play. The core of the gameplay involves placing various arrows around a checkerboard-like playfield and then unleashing your crew of mice who will blindly march forward. The only things that stray them from their path are running into your strategically placed arrows or hitting a wall which will cause them to turn clockwise. Your mice must avoid running into hazards, like holes and cats, on their way to their escape rockets.

Placing arrows simply requires touching a square of the game board and swiping in the direction of the arrow you want. Tapping a placed arrow erases it if you make a mistake. A button in the upper left sets your mice in motion, and tapping that button again speeds up time if you're feeling impatient. And that's pretty much it. The controls are so intuitive and easy to perform that you can focus squarely on solving the fiendishly clever puzzles and frantic multiplayer in ChuChu Rocket!

The bulk of the content in ChuChu Rocket! is the 100 levels in Puzzle mode. There is no time limit in these levels, and the goal is simply to get all of your mice safely to the rockets. This mode starts out easy enough, but quickly ramps up in difficulty as some of the later levels had me nearly pulling my hair out trying to find the correct positions to place each arrow. It's a good kind of difficulty though, one that urges you to keep trying until you've figured out the solution to a puzzle you are stuck on.

Then there is Challenge mode which features 25 timed levels that each have a specific task to complete. These can be things like directing a certain number of mice to the rocket before time runs out, or even going against the very nature of the game and running them all into a cat as quickly as possible to be eaten. The Challenge levels are a nice diversion from the typical gameplay found in Puzzle mode, and the best time for each level is saved with your total time for completing all levels being tracked through Game Center leaderboards.

Likely the thing that will keep you coming back to ChuChu Rocket! long after you've completed the rest of the game is the phenomenal multiplayer mode. Unfortunately there is no online multiplayer as was first announced, but the local and same-device multiplayer modes are crazy amounts of fun if you have friends to play the game with. The multiplayer gives each player their own rocket and up to three arrows to place. You're constantly trying to direct a stream of mice into your own rocket, while trying to direct cats into your opponents' rockets. Random events will trigger to mix up the action like switching the position of everyone's rockets or releasing a mega stream of mice into the game.

Multiplayer is a blast as everyone is simultaneously trying to screw each other over, and the lead changes hands suddenly and often. It supports up to 4 players over local WiFi, and if you have the iPad version you can play with up to 4 players all on the same screen. If you don't happen to have any friends around, you can set up to 3 AI bots to play with on any of the 24 multiplayer maps. Nothing can top talking smack to your buddies while playing in the same room, but the option for bots is pretty comparable and lets you take advantage of this mode even if you're solo.

I can't really think of too much that I don't like about ChuChu Rocket! It can be pretty difficult at times, but there's no real penalty for retrying levels that you get stuck on and it's really satisfying to finally nail it when you do. The graphics aren't Retina Display ready, but the game still looks quite sharp on 4th�generation devices and it actually suits the retro nature of the game. The lack of online multiplayer is a disappointment, especially since Game Center is already integrated for leaderboards and achievements, but hopefully this can be added down the line. It will take quite a while before you're able to complete all of the Puzzle and Challenge levels, and the multiplayer mode could conceivably last you the rest of eternity. ChuChu Rocket! is just one of the best puzzle games around, much as it was 10 years ago on the Dreamcast, and with the new touch interface it actually succeeds at being the definitive version to own.

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Halfbrick Studios' Age of Zombies [$2.99] is a dual stick shooter that started its life as a PSP Mini all the way back in February. Starring the same Barry Steakfries and similar to Monster Dash [99�], Age of Zombies doesn't really bring anything that incredibly new or exciting to the table, but that doesn't make it any less fun.

It's a little hard to review dual stick shooters, because like so many other crowded genres on the App Store, they all play very similar. Age of Zombies features the standard set of on-screen controls that work great, a variety of weapon power-ups, and even grenades to toss when things get hairy. Gameplay consists of what you would expect out of a dual stick shooter. You run Barry around, shoot everything that moves, and do everything you can to survive.

Halfbrick mixes things up a bit by changing the way health is handled in the game, as instead of a single hit resulting in death, Age of Zombies plays more like a modern first person shooter. As you take damage, the edges of the screen get red. If you're able to blast yourself a clearing and get away from whatever is chomping on you, your health regenerates and you're back to slaughtering everything in your path. I actually like this quite a bit because you only die when you're completely overwhelmed instead of biting the dust when you make a stupid mistake.

Terrain is very important in Age of Zombies, with levels having multiple paths you can run around avoiding and channeling enemies in to the spray of your shotgun or the splash of your grenade. Also, the number of enemies that can be on-screen at once is crazy. Seeing how long you can survive running away from everything, only to turn around and start lobbing grenades is a ton of fun.

The story mode is filled with swearing, toilet humor, and time traveling. In all, Barry will visit five different areas starting with battling prehistoric cave men zombies all the way up to the terrible zombies of the future. Each setting plays similarly, but it's nice to mix things up. Bosses also appear in game, but they don't really have any unique properties to them and instead just seem to serve as massive bullet sponges before finally falling over. The reward for playing through the single player is a survival mode for each time period, complete with online leaderboards using both Game Center and OpenFeint.

Sure, there are a ton of dual stick shooters on the App Store, but there's only one starring Barry Steakfries. If you have room for one more on your device, Age of Zombies is an excellent pick. Game Center support and the fact that Age of Zombies is launching as a universal app makes this bloodbath even easier to swallow. The only question left is what kind of trouble will Barry Steakfries find himself in next?

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