iPhone Round Up 1
Videogames - Reviews
Written by Murphy Simmonds   
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 11:14


We're doing an abnormal games review section in honour of our recently acquired iPhone. A bleeding-edge, trend-setting website like RollZeroreally ought to have got to grips with the iPhone a little earlier, but quite frankly it hasn't been a proper gaming platform for long. It took a while for everyone - and that includes developers - to work out that the stupid and rubbish mobile phone gaming of old was not the same as iPhone gaming. Apple's wonderbrick is pretty powerful, has a lovely in interface and, most importantly, iTunes is absolutely teeming with free or very cheap games. Tens of thousands of them, including plenty of absolute corkers that cost as little as 59p.

59p! When were games ever 59p? Take that, recession. You might as well, you've already taken our car.

So, some top iPhone picks. First up is Sally's Spa (59p) a violent and bloody thrill ride through the gritty process of running your own beauty spa. It's a time management game: people enter, you usher them through the various sections they ask for (shower, facemask, massage, nails, that kind of thing) at a quick enough pace to stop anyone getting annoyed. You progress through the levels, upgrading your spa as you go - you get to buy a tea machine at one point, but it's not really worth it. Anyway, the game's stupidly addictive. It'd cost you £25 if you could get it on the DS, plus you'd never buy it because it's about running a health spa.

Zen Bound (£2.99) is a bit of a soaraway success. It's a lovely calming experience involving wooden shapes, which you twist and rotate in an attempt to wrap them up in a limited amount of ribbon. Once you've wrapped enough of the surface, you get to move on to another wooden shape. It sounds terrible, but it's great - incredibly tactile and just the right kind of fiddly.

Flight Control (59p) shows a top-down, single-screen view of an airfield. Planes and helicopters of varying speeds and colours fly in from the edges and you touch them and drag a path to the landing strip or helipad of the right colour. It gets gradually busier and more hectic, eventually and inevitably resulting in a crash, which means game over. It's bitesized, elegantly simple and highly enjoyable.

We also love Drop7 (£1.79) a block-dropping puzzler very loosely reminiscent of colour-matching classic Columns. It's hard to describe: pieces number 1-7 drop from the top and disappear when they end up in a line (vertical or horizontal) which has the same number of blocks as their face value. Drop a 6-block on a five-high column and the 6-block will disappear. See? Makes no sense at all. Still, you understand it after a couple of goes and once you do, you'll lose hours.

Just four games. Damn. We need single word reviews to cover all the decent iPhone stuff. Very compactly, we also like word-finding PopCap classic Bookworm (£2.99), the tilt-controlled and Breakout inspired GloBall (59p), cannon-firing physics puzzler Ragdoll Blast (£1.19), condensed real-time-strategy Galcon (£1.79) and stupid nonsense game Enviro-Bear 2010 (59p).


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