5 best iphone games
Let’s face it: mobile phone games, by and large, suck. Who wants to shell out seven bucks for a crappy, dumbed down version of Tony Hawk or Call Of Duty that you play by pushing number buttons on your cellphone’s keypad? That’s not fun. That’s never been fun.
Enter the iPhone. Apple’s little touchscreen wunderkind isn’t content to simply be a slick Web surfing tool, media player and, yes, even a telephone. Along with its cousin the iPod Touch, it’s tiptoeing into the territory ruled by the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP, offering cheap – and sometimes free – handheld games that put most mobile phone games to shame.
To get you started, here are five great iPhone games that you need to get your mitts on.
Hero of Sparta (Gameloft, $9.99)
Whether you call it a shameless ripoff or a loving homage, Hero Of Sparta is essentially God Of War for the iPhone. It’s a 3-D action-adventure game that has you scampering around ancient Greece, stabbing giant scorpions and minotaurs and legions of other beasties while acquiring new and more ferocious ways of dispatching your enemies.
While the visuals can’t hold a candle to God Of War: Chains Of Olympus for the PSP, it’s still a polished little hack-and-slasher and has surprisingly solid controls, with a “virtual joystick” on the touchscreen to guide King Argos around the world. Combat is good, manic fun and even the cinematic cutscenes are surprisingly well done.
Jelly Car (Timothy FitzRandolph, free)
If $10 is a great price for a good game, then what do you call a game that’s fun and inventive and absolutely free? You call it Jelly Car, that’s what. Your goal is to get your squishy, crudely drawn auto from each level’s start point to the exit in as little time as possible, traversing all kinds of gelatinous obstacles.
Pressing the right side of the screen accelerates while touching left side brakes, and tapping the car turns it into a monster truck for a short time. The gooey, quivery physics require a steady hand and lots of patience, but there are a variety of different levels to tackle. And did we mention it’s free?
Rolando (ngmoco, $9.99)
Another iPhone game that borrows heavily from a popular handheld title, Rolando owes a debt to the the whimsical PSP game Loco Roco. Although you could argue it’s not only superior to the (much pricier) game that inspired it, but it’s better suited to the iPhone than any other game you can buy.
Rolando challenges you to save the cheery, roly-poly residents of Rolandoland, tilting the iPhone from side to side to make them roll and swiping them with your finger to make them jump. The game world’s 36 levels are chock full of colourful environments, nifty physics-based puzzles and a gentle sense of humour, and even the music is fantastic.
Fieldrunners (Subatomic Studios, $4.99)
If you’ve played any of the dozens of games that fall into the popular “tower defense” genre, you know the idea behind Fieldrunners. A bunch of little dudes enter from the left side of the screen and make a beeline for the exit on the right side, and your job is to stop them in their tracks by building gun turrets, sticky goo canons, rocket launchers and even lightning blasters.
Although it has intuitive controls and snazzy visuals, Fieldrunners doesn’t offer much that we haven’t seen before in games like Desktop Tower Defense or PixelJunk Monsters. And yet I’ve spent hours designing complex turret mazes to maximize the amount of time I can pound away at miniature soldiers, giants, helicopters and robot tank things. Hey, technically it’s work.
Dizzy Bee (Howard N. Hunley, $2.99)
Be careful where you play Dizzy Bee; this one requires you to twist and turn your iPhone like a steering wheel in a car gone out of control, and more than once I’ve almost dropped the thing. But the game is cute, charming and surprisingly challenging, especially if you try to achieve a gold medal ranking on each of its 40 levels.
The idea is to tilt your iPhone to and fro to guide the titular spinny insect around maze-like worlds, picking up his pals and leading them to safety while avoiding bad guys. Dizzy Bee is slick as heck with lots of nice little touches, like a post-level summary screen that rotates so that it’s right side up no matter which way you’re holding your iPhone. Until you drop it and it breaks, resulting in the ultimate game over.
Labels: iphone apps, iphone games
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