Any pinball fan reading this post can be no stranger to Gameprom and their quality iOS pinball collections, Pinball HD and War Pinball, and related, standalone tables.�Last summer, the studio partnered with Sony Music Entertainment to add a little rock and roll to the pinball equation in the form of Slayer Pinball Rocks HD [App Store], a fast and furious Slayer-themed table. Gameprom has recently rekindled the Sony relationship to release AC/DC Pinball Rocks HD [App Store], a standalone table that makes you want to scream out, "Angus!"

The first thing you'll notice about AC/DC Pinball Rocks is that it's a pretty ornate table, over the top in a fashion that, I think, well fits the band. Arrayed about the table are various bits of AC/DC stage memorabilia, including the Rock 'N Roll Train, Hell's Bell, the For Those About To Rock cannon, and the Highway to Hell, itself. As you work the table, AC/DC tracks, including "Thunderstruck," "Highway to Hell," and "You Shook Me All Night Long", play along with the action as pyrotechnics blast sparks across your screen.

As far as the table itself, it's quite a different experience from the fast-paced Slayer Pinbal. AC/DC Pinball Rocks features slower-paced ball action than the other rock title and notably lacks the two main bumpers typically found above a table's central set of paddles, leaving the center of the table pretty much wide open. This may seem to be the formula for a bland game of pinball at first, but after playing the game for a short while I realized I was able to be rather more strategic and precise on this table than most others. It's possible, on the AC/DC table, to aim for targets as distant as the far corners, thanks to the ball pacing and the open central area. That's really not something you can do on a typical table and makes for a non-typical game experience. What's more, the sides of the table are nicely busy, with elevators, lightning bumpers, and the mission-lending TNT bundle.

The main reason that the central area of the table is left open is the mini game that takes place there. There are three mini games in all, in fact. On the right side of the screen is a guitar mini-game featuring a small ball pin with paddles, while on the left is a mini-game involving the aforementioned stage cannon. The central area mini-game raises a barrier and challenges you to score in the lower portion of the table, ultimately in a mission to open the Trap Door to Hell.

AC/DC Pinball Rocks features both single- and dual-player modes and offers a variety of camera angles, just like Gameprom's other pinball titles that came before.

AC/DC Pinball Rocks HD is a fun table that definitely feels like Gameprom pinball. I won't call it my favorite of their offerings, but it's certainly worth its space on the iOS devices of any pinball fan out there.

Da Vinci Pinball Update

Another bit of news from Gameprom is a video posted a few weeks back that contains (among other previews) a brief walk-through of the incredible-looking upcoming Da Vinci Pinball table that we previewed back in August.

The Da Vinci table is expected to arrive as a DLC item for the studio's Pinball HD collection. It will be made available soon for both iOS and Mac OS X, and is one we're very anxious to get our hands on. Stay tuned for a close look.

Chair's Infinity Blade [$2.99] hit the App Store late last year and was met with nearly flawless critical reception. We couldn't help but give it five stars in our review, saying "It doesn't get much more 'must-have' than this." We then went on to name-drop Infinity Blade all over our Best iPhone Games category, listing it highly in every buyer's guide, and every other opportunity we could think of to tell people to download it.

At the iPhone 4S press event, Chair announced Infinity Blade 2, and I'm not sure it's possible for another iOS title (aside from a potential Infinity Blade 3) to have this much pre-launch hype. It's well deserved, too. The original was fantastic, and really, all Chair would have needed to do is phone in a sequel with new monsters, new equipment, and maybe even a new setting and we all would have been happy. Instead, what they've done, it take nearly every element of the original and turned it up to eleven.

One of the few criticisms people had of Infinity Blade was the oddly cyclical nature of the game, which wasn't held up by any more than a vague shell of a story involving your entire bloodline serving the single purpose of throwing themselves at the God King. Penny Arcade nailed it in a comic, and Infinity Blade was a much better experience if you didn't focus on just how silly it was that you decided to take up the sword after your father, grand father, great grandfather, great great grandfather and however many "greats" you needed to add to get back to the original knight who foolishly decided to make this your family's purpose.

Infinity Blade 2 feels like it has an actual story, and this time it's told through actual voiceovers. It picks up where the first left off, and you've got the God King's Infinity Blade in your hands, and are off to find "The Worker of Secrets" now that every deathless in the world is interested in taking the Infinity Blade from you. The initial hook involves searching for Saydhi, an information dealer. Thankfully, Saydhi seems to love duels, and offers up prizes for winning. I won't spoil more than that (and this hardly counts as spoilers since it all transpires in the first cut scene) but the way things branch out from there is substantially more interesting than the original even though you'll be doing a similar series of loops through the game.

Combat, the main draw of Infinity Blade seems to be greatly improved. Chair must have either tweaked the combat animations themselves, how the swipe input is handled, or both as it feels like you have an even more direct control link to your character. This shines even further in the new combat options which become available, allowing you to trade your shield to either dual wield or carry a massive two handed weapon.

The three fighting styles feel substantially different, and help greatly in making the game feel not quite as repetitive. With two weapons in hand, you attack much faster and blocking with your shield is replaced with being able to duck. Two handed weapons are much slower, and your defensive abilities are swapped with blocking using the actual weapon itself. It's really cool how it all works out.

The item store is back, and just like the first game you'll be trading your gold for gear at regular intervals. A new gem system allows for higher levels of customization though, and it won't take long before your equipped set of gear has all sorts of slots that you can socket gems into which can do basic things like boost stats all the way up to imbuing your items with various magical properties. If coming across gold in battles is a problem, Infinity Blade 2 offers a similar IAP purchase system to buy more gold if you want. Although, like the original, there's really no reason to and buying gold to get the best items seems to just remove any drive to actually play the game since equipment upgrades play such a big role.

Outside of fights, the gameplay is nearly identical with a world you can explore in an on-rails fashion, panning the camera around and tapping to move to the next location. Hidden items are back, encouraging you to stop to look around on every screen so you don't miss anything. You'll want to, too, because Infinity Blade 2 looks gorgeous. While you might be rewarded with items for doing it, you'll also be taking in the scenery just to marvel at the graphics your iPhone is capable of pumping out.

The rest of the game can easily be summed up with, "It's Infinity Blade, but more." There are more enemy types to fight, more visual effects, more flexibility, more customization, and they managed to do all this while removing how repetitive the original felt after blasting through the game a few times. It's everything I wanted in a sequel, and I can't wait for it to be released.

Infinity Blade 2 will be available on December 1st as a universal app for $6.99. We'll have a full review then, so stay tuned.

Recently, we mentioned that Space Tripper [$3.99] - the iOS version of Astro Tripper - has finally been released by True Axis the makers of the popular game: Jet Car Stunts [$1.99 / Free]. After being released on various other platforms over the past decade, it's finally our turn for an iOS port of this top-down arena-based shoot'em-up, which features a main campaign plus score attack and challenge modes to unlock.

Although I'm happy to recommend this game now, my initial impressions were less favorable. You see, Space Tripper offers tilt controls as the only option for movement, but strangely, it appears no auto-calibration occurs at the start of the game, so the craft was unresponsive to tilts and left sitting like a lame duck. However, after discovering the tilt calibration and tilt-sensitivity options and testing a few different configurations, the craft became very responsive, ducking and weaving around enemies.

The decision to implement only tilt controls will immediately put some players off, but it actually works rather well (after you play with the settings). The developers conducted some trials with touch-based controls early on in their development process, but decided that touch controls obscured the action and weren't responsive enough.

Tilting moves your craft, while tapping the left side of the screen changes weapon and tapping the right side flips the craft around, to face the opposite way. When you flip direction, the craft also slides back a little, which is a subtle movement, but it's often life-saving when you spin to face an enemy that's too close. This game requires careful approaches rather than always rushing in, however there's also time limits for each level, so you need to keep attacking.

The weapons shoot left or right, so you need to move alongside an enemy to attack, but there's no fire button as your selected weapon fires automatically, non-stop. Your ship is equipped with two weapons: red and blue. The blue lazer fires a direct forwards-facing beam, while the red weapon fires a three pronged blast, covering a wider range. When you collect a red or blue power-up, the weapon of that color is leveled-up, so you could potentially have a very strong red weapon, but a weak blue one, or vice versa.� These level-ups are definitely worth grabbing, as the extra fire-power is helpful for destroying enemies, but importantly, it also looks cool.

Whereas many shoot'em-ups are set in a rectangular play-field, Star Tripper uses various different shaped arenas, with 3D features like ramps which you can jump off. You can't fly beyond the arena, but your enemies can enter from outside, shooting at you even before you can get to them. To keep track of their position, you constantly refer to a handy radar, which shows the position of all enemies on the level. The green enemy blips on the radar turn red when they become aggressive and accelerate towards you, which helps prioritize your targets.

There are four unique worlds, each with their own graphics, enemies and objective. Sometimes it's all about shooting down enemies, but other times you're destroying generators or knocking down pillars (while also blasting enemies!). The enemies are nicely varied, including tanks, helicopters, heat-seeking missile turrets and even swarms of insects, fizz wheels and killer-worms.� Plus there are big boss fights to reward your efforts. Like a massive yellow spider that crawls and jumps, a big fat tank or a massive one-eyed sea creature. You need to find and exploit each bosses weak-spots to take it out.

When your three ships are destroyed, you're presented with two options � either stop playing and record your score, or continue playing but forfeit your score from the high-score rankings.� At first, this seemed like a great feature, as it allows less competent players to continue their game without being forced to restart from the very beginning. However, the continue option only gives one additional life at a time - which is sometimes lost within 30 seconds. This forces you to frequently re-choose continue. It would be better if "continue" granted another set of three lives.

There's three levels of difficulty: Normal, Hard and Hardest. Although one member of our discussion forums joked the levels should be named: "Hard, Yeah right� and LOLWUT".� Fortunately, there's some cheats built into the game (as described in the App Store game description). The cheat menu offers unlimited lives and/or invulnerability and the ability to skip levels. The unlimited lives option is great, as it's still a challenge to complete the levels, but you can keep re-trying and your weapon power-up's don't reset when you die. As soon as you enable a cheat, all leaderboards, achievements, game mode unlocking and progress saving are disabled until game over, or you quit. This means legit players can still aim for ranks on the Game Center or OpenFeint leaderboards, without worrying about competing against "cheats".

Star Tripper is a fast-paced, nice-looking and challenging game which will appeal to any hard-core shoot-em-up fans, but anyone can progress through the levels to try the boss fights thanks to the "continue" option and cheat modes. It's taken several years for this game to reach our iOS devices, so perhaps we'll end up seeing Space Tripper 2, sometime around 2018!

It's a good time to be a word game fan. Every few weeks a new genre standout arrives, ready to tide you over until the next big hit. Now App Store superstar Zach Gage (Unify [$1.99/Free], Bit Pilot [99�], Halcyon [$1.99]) has thrown his hat into the word game ring with SpellTower [$1.99] . Those of us who fit in the Venn diagram intersection of iPad owners and word game fans benefit -- SpellTower is elegant, clever and fun.

Not that it's entirely unique. We've all played any number of games that make use of SpellTower's main mechanic. Presented with a grid of letters, you spot a word and trace a path through its letters to select it. You can trace in any direction, loop diagonally back on your path, and make words of any length past two. And if that were all there was to it, this would be a yawn and a skip. But it's not.

SpellTower isn't bogged down with complicated rules or conditional abilities. The tutorial is only a handful of screens expressing a handful of simple rules. You can make a word as long as it's in the game's dictionary and it's at least three letters long. Words that are five letters or longer clear letters all around them. You can't make the same word twice, and if a letter has a number on it, it needs to be used in a word of at least that length. Finally, uncommon letters like Z, J, Q and X clear their rows if they're used in a word.

Those rules will carry you through SpellTower's four game modes, which change up how the board is presented. Tower mode gives you 150 letters to earn the best score you can. Puzzle mode adds a row to the board each time you make a word, and if any column hits the top your game will end. Extreme Puzzle mode follows the same rules, but requires longer words faster and more often. Rush mode adds new rows over time, putting you on the clock.

It sounds as though only Rush mode puts any pressure on you, but this is one of the tensest word games I've played. Tower mode can be played casually, certainly. You can just accept that you'll find a number of words, and then you'll hit the "done" button and wipe your hands of it. But can you just leave towers of letters standing there, unused? It's beyond me, so each move I make is a balancing act between finding good, high-scoring words, and ensuring I don't leave too many orphaned letters behind. At least you don't need to worry about making mistakes -- there's no penalty for words that don't work.

In Puzzle and Extreme Puzzle, though, this tension is ratcheted up to the nth degree. Since every move you make adds a new row to the board, you have to consider your moves very, very carefully. Almost inevitably you'll be stuck with one or more towers of single, orphaned letters, and as those add up it gets harder and harder to make a move that won't end your game prematurely. These modes aren't to be played quickly.

Rush mode, on the other hand, must be played at top speed. Except, of course, you still need to weigh the potential of your moves to leave those orphaned towers. But this is a cathartic mode after playing Puzzle for too long. It's tense, yes, but not every move has the potential to be fatal.

These four modes offer a variety of satisfying play styles, and it sounds like Zach Gage has plans for more to come. Also coming are Game Center achievements. Leaderboards are already in, but there's a need for achievements to mark things like fully clearing the board in Tower mode. If I ever pull it off, I'm going to want to be able to smugly show off my word superiority. A few other little touches could help the game, like a more obvious way to end Tower mode and a score breakdown.

But SpellTower is already a complete package, brought together by Gage's trademark use of cheerful colors, simple patterns and elegant typography. It's a shame that it's only for iPad owners for now, but if you can pick it up, you should. And if you have ideas for other modes you'd like to see, you can share them with the developer in our discussion thread. Assuming you can find the words, that is.

Namco Bandai is getting into the gorging spirit of Thanksgiving Day here in the US and encouraging gamers to gorge on new games for their iOS devices with a week long Thanksgiving sale. There's a staggering amount of games listed on sale, so surely something to pique anyone's interest.

Personally, I'm quite partial to Pac-Man Championship Edition, Puzzle Quest 2, and Time Crisis 2nd Strike. Oh, and Splatterhouse. Yeah I said it. Sure, it takes a brutally difficult arcade game and makes it that much more difficult with the addition of virtual controls, but I'm just a sucker for nostalgia.

• Ace Combat Xi Skies of Incursion, $4.99 ? $0.99
• Buccaneer Blitz, (Universal) $2.99 ? $0.99
• Dig Dug Remix, $2.99 ? $0.99
• Fossil Feast, (Universal) $1.99 ? $0.99
• Galaga Remix, $2.99 ? $0.99
• House of Glass, (iPad Only) Free+ $4.99IAP ? $2.99IAP
• Isaac Newton's Gravity HD, (iPad Only) Free+ $4.99IAP ? $2.99IAP
• Isaac Newton's Gravity, $2.99 ? $0.99
• Lost in Time: The Clockwork Tower, (iPad Only) Free+ $4.99IAP ? $2.99IAP
• Mappy by Namco, $1.99 ? $0.99
• Mishap, $4.99 ? $2.99
• Mishap for iPad, (iPad Only) $4.99 ? $2.99
• PAC-MAN CHAMPIONSHIP EDITION, $4.99 ? $0.99
• PAC-CHOMP, (Universal) $1.99 ? $0.99
• PAC-MAN REMIX, $2.99 ? $0.99
• PAC'N-JUMP, (Universal) $1.99 ? $0.99
• Pool Pro Online 3, $1.99 ? $0.99
• Pool Pro Online 3 for iPad, (iPad Only) $1.99 ? $0.99
• Puzzle Quest 2, (Universal) $4.99 ? $2.99
• RALLY-X Rumble, (Universal) $1.99 ? $0.99
• Ridge Racer Accelerated, $6.99 ? $1.99
• Sky Gamblers: Rise of Glory, (Universal) $4.99 ? $2.99
• SPLATTERHOUSE, $2.99 ? $0.99
• Time Crisis Strike, $2.99 ? $0.99
• Time Crisis 2nd Strike, $6.99 ? $1.99

I noticed that not every sale seems to be active yet in the App Store as of this writing, so it's probably a good idea to double check the pricing before blindly mashing the purchase button. If a price hasn't dropped yet for you, just give it a bit and check back. You've got all the way until Monday the 28th to take advantage of these sales.

Also, prepare yourself for the likely onslaught of other Thanksgiving Day related sales during this week and into the coming weekend.

Raccoon Rising [99�] from Romper Games is a delightful game about a sleepy raccoon trying to survive when his forest is invaded by an army of robots and their deforestation machinery. After watching the trailer (below), you might expect an endless-vertical jumping game, as it resembles NinJump [Free/HD]. But, it's actually more like a vertical platform game, because you're not constantly jumping and can find places to stop and plan your approach upwards, through the obstacles. Also, it's level based, so you're not always restarting from the very beginning.

The little raccoon's simple story is told through comic-strip cut-scenes as he journeys through four worlds, including a temple, Tanuki forest, a ship called the 'Salty Sprocket' and finally, a city. Each world features different graphics, music, enemies and obstacles, but the goal is always to progress upwards until you reach a gate, which shuts behind you.

Each time you reach a gate you're given a three-star rating for your performance on that section and a checkpoint is saved as a re-spawn point when you die. There's over seventy gates (sections) in total and as you unlock them in the main story, they become available in Time Trial mode. Each section may only require a few jumps to pass through, but it typically takes multiple attempts to determine and execute your route. However, because there's only a short distance between gates, dying and re-trying isn't the end of the world.

The gameplay controls are simple and effective. Just� tap anywhere to make your coon jump in that direction, or hold down your finger for a power-jump, which enters slow-mo mode for targeting and smashing obstacles with flying kicks. If you're jumping upwards, a second tap sends your raccoon leaping to the side of the screen, depending which side you tap. The real challenge is to time and aim your jumps well, as you often need to land in tight spaces, wedged between two death-causing obstacles, which may both be moving. However, the pause button (which is a slider) is not always that responsive and sometimes stops working altogether, meaning it must be closed form the iOS task bar.

The robots have deployed a range of machinery, so as you journey upwards you'll face spikes, tree-crushers, band-saws and cannons. There's punching cushions which repel you, hovering platforms, gun powder-barrels to explode and helicopter drones to jump on for a quick ride upwards. And once you reach the end of a world, there's a boss fight waiting for you.

The 3D art and animation by Pixelnauts is appealing. In particular, the special effects - such as timber or the coon flying straight at the screen - look great. And the little raccoon character, with his blackened raccoon-eyes and wagging bushy tail, gives this game a feel-good atmosphere. However, although the end-of-world bosses were satisfying to reach, they don't look quite as vibrant or visually appealing and the comic images also fall a bit flat. The initial loading times for worlds are also a little longer than most games, but there's no such delays between stages (gates).

There are credit-card chips ("credits") to collect within each world, because you "may need them in future". If you click on the credits icon on the main menu it says "coming soon". It's a little unusual to ask players to collect in-game currency which has no current function, but trust me, the credits will be used for something cool in a future release: - but that's still a secret, so we can't share it yet. But we can confirm that the developers are keen to expand this game further.

Romper Games have fixes coming for a couple of technical issues: There's a glitch whereby the third level (Ship) doesn't always unlock when you reach it. I replayed the final stage of world two and it unlocked successfully, however another user in our discussion thread have had the same issue, but replaying it hasn't helped. Crashes have been reported for older 1g / 2g devices. The developers are participating in our forum discussions so they're aware of these two issues. They may release reduced graphical assets for older devices and are working on a fix to resolve the level unlocking glitch.

Racoon Rising is a neat variant on jumping games, which I'm throughly enjoying despite the jumping genre being so saturated. The combination of vertical platformer and jumping game works a treat. And the core graphics, varied worlds and short re-playabe levels make this game easy to recommend, but if you've got a 1g / 2g device, you may prefer to wait for the update.