In case you've been busy spending the holidays with friends and family, or just cross-country skiing to the North Pole, here's our recap of last week's epic, five-part series on the 50 best iOS games of 2011. How many do you own? #50: Temple Run In 2011, independent developers Imangi Studios had their biggest hit yet: The endless running game Temple Run. A cross between Canabalt and Raiders of the Lost Ark, in Temple Run you have to make split-second decisions and quick button presses to try to survive. The combinations of simple swipes and tilt controls, plus Temple Run's freemium pricing and stylish 3D graphics, made it one of the year's best high-score survival games. Our Bottom Line: Now is your chance to be Indiana Jones. #49: Tapper World Tour After nearly 30 years, the Tapper license awoke from a drunken stupor to revel in the App Store. Tapper World Read More

...Drivin' actually came out at the end of 2010, but it received a major update in early 2011 that made it the Must Have game it is today. The gamepl... Read More

DJ Green Lantern ain't got nothing on DJ Funky White Boy... DJing as an activity is just something that I have never truly been able to wrap my brain around.  Just because you can successfully mix two or more pieces of music together simultaneously without it sounding like a garbled piece of garbage, that suddenly qualifies you as a musician?  Some would just call that glorified trial and error in front of an audience!  Trust me, I have heard my fair share of horrible DJs in my day, so when I heard there was going to be a new DJ game on the iOS, it would be safe to assume that I was fairly skeptical. Fortunately this skepticism was quickly washed away when I heard that the newly released DJ Rivals was from Booyah Inc., which are the brains behind last year’s hit, MyTown.  The game attempts to combine RPG mechanics Read More

Earlier this week, social game company Booyah (whom we've spoken with before) released its latest game for iOS, called Nightclub City: DJ Rivals. Booyah first found huge success with an iOS social game called MyTown, and then went over to Facebook to create Nightclub City, a social app about sharing music among friends. Now the company is back on iOS with DJ Rivals, and early indications are that it's going to be popular: it's already garnered over 10,000 downloads in just over a day. Last week at GDC 2011, I spoke with Booyah's Brian Cho about the game and the plan behind it, and he told me that Booyah is "taking the best parts of MyTown and the learning that we had on Nightclub City," and combining those into both a persistent social game, as well as an arcade-style music game to play inside of it. He showed me the app Read More

As much as I’ve been enjoying telling the world where I am, what I’m doing, and how delicious the food is where I’m at through Foursquare, Facebook Places, or Booyah!’s MyTown, I always felt something else could be done with my check-ins. What if you can make a game out of check-ins? That’s exactly what Booyah! set out to do when it began working on its next project, DJ Rivals. DJ Rivals is a mix between a check-in app and a music rhythm game where you take your customized character to various locations within your town, or any other town you can think of in the US, to take on DJ Drones that have infiltrated the location. Once you clear the location of drones, you’ll earn the right to become that location’s House DJ which allows you to collect money from that location even while you’re away. Not only can you Read More