Whoa, it's Wednesday and I can't believe it's already November. I guess the upside of the year racing to a close is that we won't have to wait too much longer to see what iOS developers do this holiday season. Total EA domination seems like the safe bet, although the best thing about the App Store is that anything can happen.

Anyway, this week works like every other week. All of these games should be available for download in the US App Store at 11:00 PM Eastern, or potentially much earlier depending on how east you are of the good ol' US of A.

Aquaria for iPad, $4.99 - Forum Thread - If there's an award out there for indie games, chances are Aquaria has won it. This action adventure game is entirely underwater, and involves lots of exploring, boss fights, and seahorses.

Chicken Rescue, 99� - Forum Thread - Help the mother chicken rescue her chicks across 24 different levels. Your chicken is even upgradeable in a variety of different ways.

Cosmic Cab, 99� - Forum Thread - This seems to be the crazy combination of Crazy Taxi and a tube racer, which sounds A-OK to me.

DynaStunts, $2.99 - Forum Thread - I always seem to enjoy these types of motorcycle games, and I'm really digging both the wicked air you seem to be able to get off jumps and the bright art style of this one.

Monster Burner, $2.99 - Forum Thread - Gameplay looks a little simplistic, but roasting monsters just by touching them seems like a pretty appealing concept.

Poker Pals, $1.99 / Free - Forum Thread - Words With Friends meets Sword & Poker? I'm totally in, I never was that great at Scrabble anyway.

Sad Robot, Free - Forum Thread - A cute big-pixel tilt-based game plays similar to most in that you avoid bad things while pick up good things. The game is free, and initial impressions in the forums mention IAP feels very optional.

The Moogies, $2.99 - Forum Thread - This kid-centric game introduces The Moogies, a set of nine unique characters that Chillingo hopes 2-6 year olds will love.

Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls, Free + $9.99 IAP Unlock - Forum Thread - Well they've certainly got the whole epic setting down that seems to be required for any RPG, and the whole free + IAP unlock seems like an appealing way to sell these kind of games.

Dungeon Defenders: Second Wave (see what Trendy did there) will be released as a free update to the iOS versions of Dungeon Defenders: First Wave [$2.99] tomorrow, the developer has told us via an e-mail release. According to Trendy, Second Wave addresses "many of the issues" from the first game, including the horrendously cluttered UI and clunky menus that kept us from enjoying its first try at an iOS port of its downloadable game.

In addition to these improvements, Second Wave will see "performance improvements," and a player-versus-player content package called "Arena." If you pop out your eyeglasses, you'll be able to see some of these tweaks and adds in its newly-released trailer.

In case you didn't know, Dungeon Defenders is now available on Xbox Live Arcade and as a PC release on Steam. These versions are particularly good according to media types, so you might want to consider checking those out if you're into the game's hack-and-slash meets tower defense action.

Working in the iOS industry since the beginning has filled my head with all sorts of factoids that might not immediately seem that useful, but I'd be a beast on Jeopardy, assuming they ever had a "Random Mobile Gaming Trivia" column. One of these many tidbits I've soaked up is that before today there was no "games" category in the South Korean App Store.

Previously, the South Korean government had a very tight approval process that worked similar to a more strict version of the ESRB. Only, while getting rated by the ESRB in the USA is fairly optional, getting government approval was required. This caused a whole lot of friction with Apple, a company who historically hasn't had that great of a record of compromise. Instead of working with the South Korean government, they just shrugged and axed the game category all together.

Some developers skirted this restriction by releasing their games under the "Entertainment" heading, but this was always highly frowned upon by Apple. But, where there's a will there's a way, and these restrictions just caused diehard South Korean iOS gamers to pick up international iTunes gift cards and make their purchases on whatever non-Korean marketplace was the most convenient for them.

Thankfully, pressure from all sides of the mobile gaming market finally lead to the powers that be in South Korean easing up their restriction and finally allowing for games on the App Store. This change should massively benefit iOS developers, as South Korea not only has an incredibly strong gaming culture, but some ridiculously good gamers. (You'll likely know this first hand if you've ever attempted to play a StarCraft game online.) …And now all those people can buy iOS games just as easily as we can.

To celebrate the occasion, South Korean gaming giant Com2uS has reduced the price of all of their games to 99�. Head on over to their iTunes listing and take a look, due to the global nature of App Store pricing, you don't even need to be South Korean to take advantage of this sale. Also, since it seems like iOS developers are always anxious for any reason to drop their prices of their games, it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to keep an eye on the game sales section of AppShopper to snag anything worthwhile as this news spreads and the South Korean App Store sees a flood of new customers.

This always happens! We've been hitting spacebar all morning, but didn't see this next-level move coming. Indie developer Mode 7 has announced plans to bring its deceptively clever simultaneous turn-based strategy game, Frozen Synapse, to the iPad in 2012. It hit the PC and Mac earlier this year to oodles of well deserved media praise.

No worries if you're unfamiliar with the title. It's an isometric, team-versus-team strategy game that plays similarly to an X-COM. It's hook is its simulation mechanic that allows players to see how their tactical moves will fare against each other. The catch is that you're free to change up your moves in-between these phases. All your careful planning and tweaking can nightmarishly go heads up whenever you hit "end turn."

"Despite my lumpen, sausage-like digits, I am particularly excited about Frozen Synapse coming to the iPad," Mode 7 Joint Managing Director Paul Taylor said in a statement. "I look forward to flicking my little green men around the place with wanton abandon."

Mode 7 says Frozen Synapse is currently enterting into a beta state on the iPad and final details, including price and firm release, will be announced next year. You can bet your right hand that we'll be going hands-on and speaking with the development team before release, so expect some news in the coming weeks. In the meantime, get comfy with this launch trailer of the computer version of the title.

Long time readers of TouchArcade might remember the announcement of an iOS port of Space Tripper, a horizontal shoot 'em up from PomPom Games released for PC and Mac way back in 2001 and rereleased in HD as Astro Tripper in 2009. The port was to be handled by True Axis, the Australian developer of Jet Car Stunts [$1.99/Lite], and the project officially began in June of 2008, before the official iOS App Store had even launched. We first caught wind of Space Tripper coming to iOS in December of that year, with a planned release of "early 2009." Boy, how plans can change.

True Axis was comprised of just two members, and as development on Jet Car Stunts hit its stride during 2009, it didn't leave a ton of time to work on Space Tripper, and progress on the title lagged. After Jet Car Stunts' release in November of 2009, the hope was that Space Tripper would be finished up shortly thereafter, and that following December is when True Axis officially debuted the game in our forums, still optimistic that it was coming soon.

But the development gods just didn't want to give True Axis a break on Space Tripper. They were striving for perfection with the performance of the game on iOS hardware, and every time they seemed to be getting the game behaving exactly how they wanted a new iOS update would come along and totally throw a wrench in the build, setting their progress back several steps and delaying the game even further.

(Images from mid-2010 build of Space Tripper)

Development of Space Tripper continued on alongside update work for Jet Car Stunts, as well as early groundwork for a Jet Car Stunts 2. We caught up with True Axis at E3 2010 and got the lowdown on what was happening with the Jet Car Stunts franchise as well as got our hands on a playable demo of Space Tripper, which we though looked and played quite well. At this time, True Axis was hoping the release of Space Tripper would be the following month, in July. Again, this did not come to pass.

Following this, Space Tripper pretty much slipped off the radar. Occasionally, somebody would as about its status in our forums and one of the members of True Axis would pop in and say that they were still toiling away, but had run into some sort of new problem that was causing yet another delay. It almost seemed like Space Tripper was perpetually just "a month or two" away, but something would always come along to muck things up. This is exactly what the term "development hell" was coined for.

Fast forward to February of this year, and a bombshell was dropped. One half of True Axis and the main programmer behind the Space Tripper port for the past two and a half years, Andy Coates, decided to retire from the game development business after 25 years. Well, not get out of game making altogether, but move on to do his own thing. This meant that the other half of the team, Luke Ryan, would have to jump in and pick up where Andy had left off, which I'm sure was no easy task. He did just that though, and somehow remained optimistic that Space Tripper would still eventually see the light of day.

Again, development continued as Luke tinkered away at the Space Tripper code, though things were moving even more slowly now since he had jumped into a project that wasn't entirely his to begin with. Recently, Andy decided to devote some of his free time to his former company and jump back into Space Tripper and get the title finished up once and for all. Since then, things seem to be chugging along quite well with Space Tripper, and despite the newest monkey wrenches that were iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S, it looks like the game will finally see a release sometime this month. True Axis has recorded a new video showing off Space Tripper on iOS, and it looks simply fantastic:

Now, don't get me wrong, with everything that Space Tripper has gone through over the past three and a half years, I won't actually feel comfortable until the final release is on my device and there is a real, working iTunes link for the game. Whatever the digital equivalent of holding a physical box for a game in a retail store is, that's what I need before the doubt will fully fade from my mind. However, seeing this new awesome video and reading along with the developer comments in the upcoming thread in our forums has me feeling that this might actually, maybe, possibly be it. Finally. At long last.

Hopefully we'll get our grubby hands on Space Tripper sometime this month to evaluate how well a ten year old game with a three year iOS development cycle translates to the iOS platform, including the iPad as it's set to be a Universal app. Once that's finally out of the way, then we can begin bugging True Axis about Jet Car Stunts 2...

There's something dodgy about Ninja Pong's [99� / HD] premise. You're telling me that professional ninjas would jump a huge gap onto a tiny platform that has to be manually controlled? And that they'd do it wearing any number of silly hats? I just don't buy it.

You might want to, though. Silly and simple as it might be, Ninja Pong is a fun bit of arcade play that boasts a surprisingly in-depth list of upgrades. Save ninjas, earn shinies, buy things that let you save more ninjas. Sound good?

As master of the platform, you control life and death for your tiny ninja buddies. They need to get from the building or cliff on the left of the screen to its fellow on the right, and you control the only bridge for the gap between. It's one-sided Pong and you control the paddle, dragging it back and forth along the bottom of the screen to bounce ninjas and dodge bombs.

The army of ninjas absolutely refuses to go easy on you. They jump at different speeds, for different distances. When night falls, they all jump at once. It's madness. Some of them jump like jerks, floating in place and falling unpredictable. And all the while, the platform on the right is shelling you with bombs and flaming arrows. It's super hectic, but quite fun.

Powerups can make things a bit easier, but you need to catch them. Do so and you might find your paddle extended, or the ninjas slowed, or a precious life restored. Coins also fall and need collecting if you want to buy yourself something nice.

"Something nice," in this case, is a selection from a list of cosmetic (and adorable) hats for your ninjas, upgrades to your powerups and paddles, and a few things that change the gameplay pretty substantially. Three of the items you can unlock add tapping mechanics to the game, and let you tap the screen in a variety of ways to speed your ninjas up, make them worth more points and destroy bombs.

These modifications (and many of the other unlockables) can absolutely affect your final score, and since you can purchase coins with IAP as well as earning them in game big spenders can give themselves a serious advantage.

Alien Worm has come up with a clever way around that: separate Game Center leaderboards for playing with or without shop items. There's also a leaderboard for the folks who are really into grinding or spending money -- access to the Ninja Diamond League leaderboard is only available to those who pony up 2000 coins, about two dollars or a couple hours worth. It's an interesting strategy for dealing with IAP abuse in a game that's all about earning the highest scores.

There are two ways to play Ninja Pong: Arcade mode and Endless mode. Endless gives you six lives to play with. You can play as long as you want, but let six ninjas die without replenishing your lives and you're toast. Arcade puts you on a 60 second timer during which you'll need to try to earn the highest possible score.

Several factors affect your score. Saving ninjas is good, of course, and saving them in streaks is even better. You can grab multiplier powerups and score powerups. Whipping ninjas to the other side earns you a bonus, as does saving special ninjas and destroying bombs. And most of these things have achievements associated with them, too. At the end of each successful attempt (bombs give you a "game over" without a high score), you also earn bonuses based on meeting milestones.

There's enough going on that it feels like you can improve in any number of ways. If you can get good enough to avoid dropping any ninjas, you'll do well. Do that while collecting all the powerups and you'll be even better off. But even if you don't manage to improve your score, you'll earn coins toward buying the next tempting item in the shop. It's a compelling formula.

Ninja Pong is a simple game. But like many arcade classics, it inspires a desire to improve that will keep it entertaining long after you've seen all it has to offer. If you're the grinding sort, the checklist of an item shop will also prove motivating for quite some time. The simplest games on my phone are the ones I keep coming back to, and I think Ninja Pong will end up on that list in the long run. So check it out, and pop by our discussion thread to let us know what you think.