Developing a spiritual successor to one of the most reviled licensed games in history might not be the best way to generate positive results, if ShaqDown is any indication. Like the laughable Shaq Fu before it, which transformed eccentric NBA star Shaquille O'Neal into a hand-to-hand fighter during the early days of his career, ShaqDown again turns the now-retired hoops legend into a violent warrior, this time tasked with pummeling zombies. And much like the game that inspired it, Shaq Fu is an occasionally amusing but mostly irritating experience.

Cut the Rope remains one of the most popular and best-loved App Store titles more than two years after its release, with ZeptoLab's sensational physics-based puzzler racking up more than 100 million downloads across platforms in the process. Expectations are unsurprisingly high for the studio's first totally new release since, but much as Pudding Monsters employs a similar aesthetic and trial-and-error approach to gameplay, these gelatinous blobs deliver their own solidly enticing experience.

It's staggering to think that Hundreds began life on anything other than a capacitive interface, but this multitouch magnum opus has unexpected origins as a mouse-based web game. Granted, the ball-expanding puzzler has been revised and refined significantly since that inauspicious debut, resulting in an experience that is perfectly centered around the touch of a finger. Brought to the App Store by a dream team of indie designers, including those behind favorites like Canabalt and Gasketball, Hundreds is one of the smartest and most satisfying touch-based games I've ever played, particularly on an iPad.

Budgets tend to get a little tight during and immediately after the holiday season. Income gets dumped into gifts, change clangs into buckets for charity, and the essentials get stretched a little thinner than usual while you slowly refill your coffers. There is no time when coupons, rebates, and savings are more welcome. Ibotta offers shoppers a new way to save some cash for buying what they normally would in select stores, assuming it's featured on the app's virtual shelves.