Nostalgia is powerful. Also, stupid. No matter how faithful a re-release is to its source material, it'll never conjure the meaningful experiences that made you fall in love with the original in the first place. Context is the worst of bugbears.

I have no deep connection to Remedy Entertainment's top-down racer Death Rally, and I consider this a good thing. I can't feel bitter about new design choices that replace the old ones; I can't stomp around about wholesale exclusions; and I can't whine about a lack of spirit. I'm not chasing the dragon looking for that original, glorious high.

Instead, I can just enjoy my extended look at the title, which plays like it was indeed created in 1996. The catch is that it holds up in the iOS arena.

At its heart, Death Rally is a top-down shooter featuring cars. Sure, there are laps, tracks, opponents, and a finish line: racing game trimmings. But the game, perhaps to its own detriment, only dishes out meaningful rewards for violence, for doing things like blowing up other cars or boxes in the road.

It's a weird pretense, the racing, because it's also the weakest part of the preview build I've been playing. The AI is programmed in an obvious way: two cars are faster than you, no matter what, while the rest of the pack is glacially slow or average speed. This puts you in the position of needing to kill the two pack leaders at the beginning of the race to win because, otherwise, they'll just zoom ahead of you never to be caught up with. I've had many a race so far that consisted of, basically, just me going around a track three times after dismissing the slower cars. The fast cars tend to be so fast that they even left the camera's field of view.

Also, the racing is just a matter of turning your car around turns without getting caught on geometry. There's no nuance, no drifting, no power sliding, no split-second decisions.

But � and this is a big, tone-shifting kind of but � your car has guns. Shooting is a breeze and the weapons you'll receive dish out the kind of satisfying damage you'd expect. Enemies will dish it out, too, so you have to be weary of your position and then prepare to best exploit a given situation, which makes for some interesting strategies. I, for example, often don't take off on the starting line, just so I can more easily tackle the cars while they're in a pile in front of me.

For starters, your car is equipped with a basic, auto-firing machine gun. As you play, you can unlock a rocket launcher, mines, a shotgun, and a Gatling gun. Additionally, you can level up all of these weapons, as well as speed, armor, and handling attributes on your car, by earning points in races.

These EXP-based systems feel familiar, but the grip is ever real: Death Rally does a great job at making you want to do just one more race for just one more upgrade. This, married with the action it endorses, makes for some entertaining play.

I think where Death Rally excels is in its personality. It's got a mid-90s, southern developer beer-infused and grungy kind of vibe. It celebrates its violence and features many a brown tone, fire, broken objects, dingy environments and attitude, just like, say, Duke Nukem, a character who also appears in the game as an opponent.

I'm not sure if the racing issues are going to be hammered out by release. But these aren't deal breakers � the shooting feels good, the action can be tight if you play your cards right, the transitions to the next race are snappy, and the upgrades will have their way with you. Death Rally is also pretty imaginative as far as iOS titles go, which I think goes a long way in keeping someone engrossed and entertained.

I may not have an emotional connection with the 1996 version of Death Rally, but I don't want one. I wouldn't have been able to enjoy the game as much as I have with the retro baggage in tow, I'm sure. And, yeah, Death Rally might have some core problems with the racing, but everything else appears to be solid. I'll be keeping my eyes on this one and we'll definitely be talking about this one again when the full release rolls around.

Back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, January of 2011, we awarded Dungeon Raid [$2.99] a stunning five stars in our review. I argued that we needed to embed a .JPEG of Eli doing a thumbs-up into the editorial as well, but those plans fell through. The point I'm making here is that Dungeon Raid is super awesome, and the new note I want to make with this post is that it's going to get even better. A big update is being submitted.

What's in this magical update? Well, according to a forum post by the devs, version 1.3 of Dungeon Raid will boast ten additional character classes, ten new skills, and five new monsters. "Lord Gek" on our forums elaborated on what's being added in a later post. Races will, essentially, add in an advantage versus drawback element. Each race has a special bonus, but is also weak to a specific enemy type, so there's an obvious strategic piece being added to the core game here, a perfect addition for those seeking more challenge.

As for the items, well, here's what Gek had to say about the new "Arrows" variant. The picture he's referencing is on the left:

"[Arrows] are essentially a new sword symbol variant with the special power of jumping over a space to keep the chain going," he wrote. "If the player linked that arrow on the far left under Mr. Tosser they could continue the chain OVER the potion located NE of the arrow to link to the sword right under the sparkling dude.

"These arrows are spawned naturally with the Ranger class (5% any sword added to the grid will show up as an arrow) or all of the current swords in grid can be converted to arrows via one of the new skills," he said.

Cool stuff, right? And there are more updates on the way, though in smaller, much more manageable forms. Frequent updates are always better than less frequent mega updates, right? Right!

One of the (many) cool things about PAX East is that it hasn't been entirely overrun by iOS-related things like GDC and WWDC. I'm not saying that's a bad thing by any means, but it is nice getting a chance to see what the rest of the industry is up to. Anyway, when the Mac App Store launched, we did some barebones coverage of some Mac games, and a few sales. We also made some suggestions that the Mac App Store could serve as a glimpse in to what could potentially be coming to the iOS App Store.

As it stands, that still hasn't really happened, but what has been curious to watch is how popular iOS apps trickle out to other App Stores. The App Store in this particular instance of note is Intel's initiative called "AppUp". Originally targeted at netbooks, AppUp is home to apps that basically run on almost any Windows-based PC with plans for supporting the MeeGo tablet platform.

It would be easy to write this off as yet another clone of the App Store, but consider this: AppUp likely has the absolute largest pool of potential customers out there. The apps they're selling are targeted at the meager system specifications of your typical netbook, which means most of them will also likely run on any reasonably recent PC. Also, they've managed to meet the benchmark of a legit App Store by offering Angry Birds as well and it's hard to deny the power of Intel as a company when it comes to shaping the world of computing.

I'm not sure where AppUp will go, but I have to admit I do find the whole thing oddly intriguing. If you're on a PC, give the client a download and check it out. I can't wait to see how all of these different markets settle out in the next 5-10 years and what effect they have on the App Store. AppUp seems to have a significant advantage due to the sheer number of capable hardware out there, Intel just has to make people aware of the service.