This week’s Friday Game has no grand theme. I’ve moved house and, stuck without the internet for a while, I’ve ended up playing a few of the games I recklessly bought for my iPhone in the good old days when I had all the wifi I could possibly want. What follows, then, is a fairly random selection of iTunes treats, old and new: the only thing they have in common is that it took the removal of the bounteous other distractions of the App Store to make me actually try them out.
This week’s Friday Game has no grand theme. I’ve moved house and, stuck without the internet for a while, I’ve ended up playing a few of the games I recklessly bought for my iPhone in the good old days when I had all the wifi I could possibly want. What follows, then, is a fairly random selection of iTunes treats, old and new: the only thing they have in common is that it took the removal of the bounteous other distractions of the App Store to make me actually try them out.
Soosiz
Touch Foo
Soosiz has been around for a while, but it still hasn’t really been bettered. Behind the rather anonymous art is a very playable take on what Super Mario Galaxy might be like if it was steamrollered flat. The levels are filled with floating platforms and hanging globes to jump between and, as with Nintendo’s classic, there’s lots of fun to be had purely from the gravity-bending act of trekking all the way to the edge of something, and then continuing to walk down along its underside. Enemies and collectables are entirely forgettable, and the game tends to meander slightly as its assault courses get increasingly lengthy, but the sheer pleasure of movement makes Soosiz better than 90 per cent of other iPhone platformers.
Baseball Superstars 2010
Gamevil
Gamevil’s probably best known for its surprisingly in-depth iPhone Zelda homage Zenonia, but Baseball Superstars 2010 is considerably more charming. As a blend of baseball sim and light RPG, this was always going to appeal to a certain kind of weirdo pretty strongly – I like to think Robert Coover spends his lengthier bus rides merrily tapping away at it – but the mixture of punchy sports game and gentle stat-tweaking is actually a pretty accessible kind of fun even if you don’t spend your weekends in the company of many-sided dice and imaginary out-fielders. As with Zenonia, the art-style is so sugary I actually found myself weeping Fizzy Lances while playing, but Baseball Superstars’ heart is filled with cold hard numbers, and that’s what really counts.
The Times Spelling Bee
Times Newspapers
I like a spelling bee as much as the next man – actually, I have a horrible feeling I might like a spelling bee even more than the next man – but The Times runs into a serious credibility problem the first time it says that it wants you to spell "poor" and then won’t accept "pour". Sure – shore? - there’s a Word Help button for such grey areas, but by that point I’d noticed that the game’s dictionary of choice was Collins rather than the infinitely more authoritative Chambers, and the whole thing started to feel like a NewsCorp pyramid scheme. A shame, really, as there’s a strange thrill to be had listening to an extremely posh voice in your ear endlessly reeling off nonsense lists like: "Pumpkin. Racist. Frolic."
Passwords
Seamonster
Passwords isn’t a game, but I really wish it was, as its interface is incredibly pleasing for reasons I can’t quite fathom. A free tool for generating, um, passwords, a slider along the top of the screen allows you to set the complexity level, while a little speech bubble below fills up with randomly generated alphanumeric clusters for you to select from. What I really like is the little mascot in the bottom half of the screen, who looks a bit like a kinder version of the underwater menaces mentioned in The Kraken Wakes because he grins if you poke him in the belly.
Denki Blocks!
Denki
It’s Denki Blocks! but for the iPhone, which means it’s already a steal, even at £2.99. But while Denki has done a lovely job bringing its classic spatial puzzler across to the iTunes store, the real reason you should buy this is to increase the chances of the beleaguered developer’s new game, Quarrel, seeing the light of day. A cross between Scrabble and Risk originally destined for XBLA, Quarrel seems to be in semi-permanent turnaround at the moment, and while you should never really buy one game because you want to play another, if one of the games is Denki Blocks! I’m willing to bend the rules a little bit.
[header image courtesy of Mazenl77]