Available on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

In the interest of full disclosure, this app was created by IAR's very own Lorraine Rylance who recently reviewed Capture Them! I didn't know she was involved in app development when she came onboard but, since Astrolotease just recently got approved by Apple, Lorraine asked me for my thoughts on her work.

Astrolotease is basically a slot machine game where you have to tap each reel as it spins and hopefully match the sign, symbol, and the.. uh... appropriate quote. Luckily everything is color coded so even if you're like me and know next to nothing about astrological signs it's still possible to come out a winner.

Available on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

I have to admit I was kind of expecting Bag It! to suck pretty hard... I mean, bagging groceries doesn't sound like too much fun, right? Wrong! This is a surprisingly fun and engaging puzzle game where your job is to arrange groceries in a bag with different goals in mind depending on the game mode you're playing.

The default game mode's goal is to fit everything into an empty bag without breaking anything and it's decent, but Rampage and Puzzle modes are really where Bag It! earns its stripes.

If you've tried to come to IAR recently via Microsoft's wonderful Internet Explorer browser but were met with the classic message "a script on this page is causing Internet Explorer to run slowly"... it's finally fixed!!

Apparently IE didn't like a Facebook plugin I was using even though Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera all thought it was just super.

Available on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

Here's something you don't see everyday... a kickass physics-based game that manages to be comically cute while making a statement about U.S. immigration laws at the same time! I'm not making this up... Owlchemy Labs openly tells their tale of the origins of Smuggle Truckwhich apparently morphed into Snuggle Truck when Apple frowned on the idea of a game where you haul illegal immigrants around in the back of a rusted out pickup truck.

The far more politically correct Snuggle Truck features stuffed animals as cargo and, whether or not the immigration messages hits home with you, this is a really cool game!

Available on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

For all you folks in the U.S. of A., Turkey Day is about a week away! I seriously didn't try to make that rhyme on purpose, but it totally did.

So you think you can cook up a Thanksgiving feast? No? But your family expects you to do it anyway? Chow Thanksgiving Dinner Coach might save your holiday! Most "recipe" apps do nothing but regurgitate what you'd find in two seconds of Googling, but Chow goes much further by attempting to hold your hand through the entire process of cooking up a predetermined yet very "traditional" Thanksgiving menu that includes turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, green beans, gravy, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and they also throw in some brandy-apple punch!

Available on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

Rubik's Race is a puzzle game that's every bit as frustrating as the original Rubik's Cube, except this time you can't "solve" it by peeling the stickers off and rearranging them! If you're too young to know what a Rubik's Cube is... well, sorry! We old folks sometimes speak in code that can only be understood with the help of Wikipedia.

This puzzle game feels very familiar, not because of the Rubik's name, but because it reminds me of those old number-sliding games where you have to put the digits in sequence (sorry once again for the ancient reference). Rubik's Race has several game modes and powerups that make it way cooler than just sliding squares around, but the general idea is to move colored squares to match a pattern in as few moves as possible.

I have to admit, I was pretty skeptical of Video Star before I tried it out, but when I finally found time to play around with it my kids and I ended up having a blast. In fact, I shot a music video of Radiohead's epic song "Creep" starring my fighting cock that I have stuffed and on display in my office (yes, he was the loser), but I regrettably deleted the video by mistake. Sorry folks, I was really excited about showing you all a YouTube video of my cock.

Here is how it works. First, you simply select a song from your iPod library and then record yourself or a friend lip synching the song and then start fooling around with all the special effects. There are literally hundreds of different special effects that can be applied during a recording session including special color filters (Tron, Night Vision, X-Ray, Blueprint, Cartoon, Chalkboard, Light Tunnel, Sketch), panel modifications (Multi-Panel, Mirror Image, Kaleidoscope), camera speed (Stop Motion, Blur, Strobe Light) and frames (Metal Frame, Grunge Frame, Emo Frame). Not only are there far too many preset special effects to list, but Video Star also lets you mix and match different special effects to create your own customized effect. How about a multi-panel, bug eyed, stop motion effect? There's an app for that.

Available on iPhone & iPod Touch

Go Up! is one of those "easy to learn, difficult to master" games. It kind of reminds me of PapiJump... the object is to climb as high as you can, and the higher you climb the higher your score gets. The difference with Go Up! is that you have to press and hold to build up jump power, and release when you want to launch your little jumper into the air.

When you choose to release is critical because you may or may not want to bounce yourself off the wall, and if you release too early you may not have enough power to make it to a platform above.

Available on iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad

I don't know why... but for some reason I like investigating quirky little apps like this one. Jane Stickies is basically a photo captioner that offers six different female cartoon heads that serve as the source for your speech bubbles. Now why would you want a random cartoon lady to narrate your photos? Beats me! But that's what Jane Stickies does.

Available on iPhone & iPod Touch

There are plenty of photo apps that let you get artsy with your pics by isolating patches of color, but most of them cost money! Color Splurge is free and it's a pretty decent tool if your only goal is to do the black-and-white-and-color thing.

If you take a look at the Awkward Family Photo below, you can see how Color Splurge works... it turns your photo black and white, and then you simply paint the color back in. There's also an option to do the opposite (start with color and then paint it out), and the Colorize function lets you paint in monochrome.