What groundbreaking game would you expect to come next from the makers of Scribblenauts? Their answer might surprise you, but in a way, it’s every bit as innovative.

Run Roo Run assigns you a single task: getting a kangaroo from one side of your screen to the other. Along the way, you’ll encounter all sorts of obstacles that must be jumped over, as well as some fun twists to the game mechanics that come along after every set of levels.

But let me back up a bit.

The minimalistic story presented at the outset has Roo, a mother kangaroo, chasing her kidnapped baby Joey across Australia. It sounds pretty heavy for a cute  little platformer, but 5th Cell presents it like a lighthearted Wile E. Coyote cartoon. All that really matters is that you’re a kangaroo hopping your way across the screen. The game has the feel of a side-scroller, but it’s not; the screen never moves. Instead, you simply try to guide Roo across the screen and avoid the traps and obstacles along the way, so every level is a single screen.

The controls are a study in the simplicity of design. Roo will move forward on her own, you just have to tell her to start, and when she needs to jump. Both of these actions are activated with a single tap on the screen. You don’t even have to touch the area of the screen where you want her to jump from or to; a single tap anywhere on the screen will instantly make her jump.

As you advance through the game’s many, many levels, the obstacles multiply and become ever more complex, with different kinds of obstacles, double jumps, elastic materials to spring from to jump further, anti-gravity, and so on. Ultimately, the game comes down how well you can strategically time your jumps. There’s a time clock running every time you start a new screen, and medals are awarded based on how fast you pass that screen; the time is cumulative, though, so each time you restart a screen, it adds to your final time, resulting in a lower score. (An easy cheat for this is to simply restart the screen, which restarts the clock.) There are the usual leaderboards through Game Center, which let you compare scores against your friends.

Progression through the game is marked with a map screen, which shows the line you trace through Australia. Screens are grouped into chapters, each of which includes a few added “extreme” levels, that are just as hard as they sound. There are twenty chapters that come with the game initially, but what gives the game some of its innovation is that once you buy the app, it automatically delivers a new chapter to your device once a week (for ten consecutive weeks) — at no additional cost or effort from you. Downloadable content is certainly nothing new for gaming, but it’s nearly unheard of for arcade or puzzle games, and having it auto-delivered gives Run Roo Run the feel of 5th Cell trying something new — and possibly revolutionary.

Many an iOS puzzler or platformer can be played once or twice, and then forgotten about in favor of something new and different. By design, Run Roo Run has a built-in way of guaranteeing that players will keep returning to the game, and it could herald a whole new way of gaming on portable devices.

Fortunately, it’s fun enough to give you a good reason to keep coming back. It has a high degree of polish and perfectly hits the sweet spot between “easy to play” and “hard to master.”

Numberlys screenshot

It’s magical the way that Moonbot Studios, creators of The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore, imbue brilliant creativity and pure joy into everything they create. I have no idea how they do it, but I hope they never stop. Numberlys is a perfect melding of their glorious animation and the inventive ways they make the reader part of the story.

Imagine the world of Metropolis, if it were inhabited by adorable little round-headed creatures with big, expressive eyes, who know nothing of letters or words. In this invented world, there are only numbers. Numbers are used for everything, including names, objects, and places.

Numberlys screenshot

In this drab but fascinating world, we’re introduced to five characters who grow tired of their humdrum existence and decide that they need something better than numbers to express themselves. It’s a pivotal decision that inspires them to create the first alphabet, an action that will have major ramifications for their world.

Numberlys screenshot

As the app plays, the action switches between silent movie-style “caption cards,” which narrate the Numberlys’ tale, and the animated scenes. You can turn off the curiously Russian-accented voiceover for the narrated segments, should you want to read it for yourself or aloud to someone else. The animated scenes — and Numberlys is probably made up of a good 50-60% CGI animation — are utterly euphoric, on a Pixar level of quality and expressiveness. Our five little heroes are a delightful crew who have a tendency for pratfalls and a talent for creativity. When they go rogue from society and commandeer a massive factory to build their new alphabet, the viewer is invited to join them in their work.

Numberlys screenshot

Using crazy and clever tools of their trade, they bend, twist, hammer, and bounce on huge metal beams until they arrive at the desired shape — actions that you control. A few letters are created in pairs, but for the most part, your objective is to build the entire alphabet, a single letter at a time. You can go through them one by one, or pull down an index menu (an artistic marvel in its own right that’s designed as spinning gears) to select a letter or scene to jump to.

Numberlys screenshot

Moonbot’s insistence on crafting Numberlys in a stylized way works on every level, right down to the grainy, black and white aesthetic. The color red is inserted at opportune moments, representing the things that you can interact with. Numberlys also gives Moonbot an opportunity to playfully change the perspective, switching to portrait view instead of the landscape view that Morris Lessmore used. These little shifts tell me that Moonbot isn’t interested in tying themselves down to one way of doing things, that they love trying new methods, and that they make serving the needs of a story (or an app) among their top priorities, regardless of what those needs may be. The app also comes with a lovely original soundtrack that plays non-stop throughout the story.

Numberlys screenshot

Numberlys is a storybook in structure, even though it feels more like an interactive short film. It beautifully conveys a child-like wonder as each new letter is completed — a thinly veiled reference to Moonbot’s passion for words and storytelling. It’s a passion they do a marvelous job of passing on to their fans.

I did experience one glitch: the app crashed on my first generation iPad every time I reached the mini game for the letter B, no matter how many times I tried to access it. I assume this will be fixed in a future update; Moonbot has been great about updating and patching their apps in the past.

Numberlys screenshot

There simply aren’t enough positive words I can heap upon Numberlys. It’s that good. But thanks to the little guys in the app, we have an infinite supply of letters and words to build and weave together in wonderful ways. Numberlys is a masterpiece that every iDevice owner must have.

5th Cell, the developer behind iOS hit Scribblenauts Remix, is today releasing its next big game. It may even be out by the time you read this. It’s called Run Roo Run, and it’s a bold concept for a puzzle platformer that auto-downloads new levels weekly.

Run Roo Run follows a mother kangaroo named Roo whose baby, Joey, is kidnapped. Roo sets off across Australia to find Joey in Sydney. The adventure unfolds over a number of weeks as new levels are automatically downloaded to continue the game.

Over 420 levels are planned for the game, with ten new levels arriving each week. Every level is made up of a single screen filled with obstacles, with gameplay made up of “one-touch gaming” where you tap the screen to jump across the various obstacles blocking your path. But there are plenty of clever twists thrown in along the way, such as anti-gravity, floating barrels, invisibility, tire swings, and much more.

The 420 game levels include 100 levels at a higher difficulty, called Extreme Mode. Each week, the 10 newest levels will download to players’ iOS devices free of charge; no further purchase is required beyond your first one. It’s unknown how long 5th Cell intends to keep this going, but a quote in their press release for the game mentions supporting the game “for years to come,” so take that as you will.

Run Roo Run will be available later today in the iTunes App Store for $.99 for iPhone and iPod Touch, and $1.99 for iPad. The official trailer is above and screenshots are below. Apple Gazette’s own review of Run Roo Run will be posted in the coming weeks.

I love discovering awesome apps that I haven’t seen or heard anybody else talking about. Here’s a delightful gem that’s part game, part “experience,” and all fun. It’s perfect for kids and adults alike, and I guarantee it’s like nothing else on your iPad.

Windosill is the creation of artist Patrick Smith, an artist who specializes in surrealism and vector-based images. It’s hard to describe exactly what Windosill is, and that’s by design. It’s made to be something you experience in a tactile, visual, and auditory way — not something you read about or talk about. As such, there are no instructions, nothing to read inside the app, no story, and nothing I would call a character. So there’s no speaking, and no music, either.

Instead, Windosill presents you with a delightfully unexpected hybrid experience, where you’re presented with page-after-page of interactive art, a sort of storybook diorama, where strange objects and peculiar creatures exist everywhere you look. There’s a small wooden engine that you guide from one side of the screen to the other. Your aim is to get it to the end of this odd little journey, usually by unlocking a door on the right side of the screen. Doors are unlocked with a tiny white cube, so usually your purpose on each page is to find this cube — or coax one of the creatures into giving it to you.

Touch something on the screen — anything — and it reacts. Absolutely everything in this unique little world is interactive, so you can tap, drag, spin, or stretch anything you see. It gets really interesting when you see how the various things on a particular screen interact with one another. Everything functions with realistic physics and has its own sound effects as well. No detail is overlooked.

You may think, on first brush, that Windosill was made for iPad, since it works so beautifully with the touchscreen controls. The app actually started its life as a Flash-based browser game, yet I can’t imagine a more perfect home for it than the iPad. The only nitpick I can offer is that the $3 price feels a bit steep for what’s an hour-long experience at best. But it’s worth it.

But the best advice I can give is to slow down and enjoy it, anyway. Gamers used to blasting through puzzle games aren’t going to get the best experience from it, because this is an adventure you should take your time with, soak up, and explore with great care. Playful, charming, and inventive, Windosill is a feast for the mind and the senses — a rare treat where every bite should be relished.

Practically all of EA’s mega-selling titles are now on sale for the holidays, including Dead Space, FIFA Soccer 12, Max and the Magic Marker, Trenches II, Trivial Pursuit, Madden NFL 12, The Sims 3, the newly redesigned Tetris for iPhone, Shift 2: Unleashed, Spore Origins, and dozens more. Looks like the only EA games not on sale are the Rock Band titles.

There are over 100 titles in all that are on sale, but EA’s not saying how long they’ll stay that way, so grab ‘em while you can!

Age of Enigma screenshot

There’s something charmingly retro about the new Mac adventure game Age of Enigma. It doesn’t have state-of-the-art graphics or cutting edge game play. What it does have is a great story, terrific puzzles, and an engrossing whole package that’s much greater than the sum of its parts.

Age of Enigma puts you in the shoes of Ashley Reeves, a medium who specializes in helping the dead find peace. As the game begins, Ashley has a horrific nightmare about a house fire. When she wakes, she finds a summons that brings her to the very house from her dream — a mysterious, haunted place that’s home to five spirits who haven’t been able to find rest in the afterlife. Each spirit comes from a different part of the world and historical time period. One by one, Ashley is tasked with earning the spirits’ trust, after which she must venture into the events of their lives to find a way to set right their worst mistakes.

Age of Enigma screenshot

But there’s more happening than just the spirits Ashley must help. The story’s undercurrent is about Ashley herself and her own journey to discover the extent of her abilities and her destiny with a shadowy organization called the Fraternity. Along the way, she meets a guide named Nathan, who appears to be helping to point her in the right directions so she can help each of the lost spirits, but who has a surprising agenda of his own.

The game progresses as you solve its puzzles, which represent a wide variety of mini games. There’s a mosaic tile game, matching games, word puzzles, and much more. And then there are practical puzzles, like finding the key to a room you must enter to continue the game. There are several of these interspersed with the mini game puzzles, and I found the puzzles and story elements to be well balanced.

Age of Enigma screenshot

It’s never frustratingly difficult, but Age of Enigma provides some very satisfying challenges. Most of the puzzles randomize their variables, giving the game some replay value. This actually comes in handy, since you can go straight to any of the 26 mini games and play them again after you defeat the campaign mode. And many of these mini games are worth playing more than once.

Age of Enigma screenshot

The art style used by developer Casual Box adds to the retro feel, falling somewhere between a cartoon and a comic book. But parents should be warned that given the game’s subject matter, it contains some occultish imagery, so it’s probably best to keep the kiddies away. French composers the Cleophas Brothers contribute the haunting original soundtrack (which you can buy from iTunes), and there’s both the standard Adventure mode, there’s also a Casual mode that makes it much easier to solve the puzzles and progress through the game faster, for those more interested in the story than the gaming.

Age of Enigma screenshot

Although this version of the game is for the Mac, an iPad version is currently in the works. (The game began its life a few months ago as a boxed CD-ROM game for PC called Age of Enigma: The Secret of the Sixth Ghost, though Casual Box created it almost entirely on Macs.)

It reminds me of old school point-and-click adventures like Grim Fandango or The Longest Journey. Frankly, I sorely miss those kinds of games, and hope that Age of Enigma will mark their return. It’s not a perfect game, but it’s engrossing and addictive, and adventure lovers will adore it.

Each level starts with disjointed lines like these…

Deceptively simple Blueprint 3D represents an entirely new kind of game: one specifically made for the touchscreen format of the iPad and iPhone, that wouldn’t work on any other kind of device.

The gameplay mechanic behind Blueprint 3D is a little hard to explain verbally, but super easy to understand once you see it in action. The idea behind this puzzler is to form a standard blueprint schematic by manipulating it in 3D space. Turn it, flip it, twist it, anything you can think of. The pieces are stuck in place, but by changing the orientation of the entire blueprint, you can line them up to form a 2D drawing. The clock ticks while you work, so your objective is to put the drawings together as quickly as possible.

Nothing but a touchscreen could make a game like this playable (Microsoft’s Kinect might be able to do it, but players would suffer for not being able to physically touch their screens). Personally, I find it terribly exciting when games like this come along, that take full advantage of the iOS platform. It’s available for iPhone, but the iPad version is where it truly belongs, because the level of detail in the line drawings is easier to make out on the larger screen.

The game is split into categorical packs such as architecture, electronics, military, space, and more, with several dozen puzzles in each. Tackling one puzzle after another, the game moves fast once you get the hang of it (hint: look for similar kinds of lines or shapes that go together, and try to line them up). The kind of instant gratification it provides makes it all the more addictive. It’s not hard to find yourself spending an hour or two, playing the game all the way through in a single setting. Thankfully, developer FDG Entertainment promises more packs in the future (I’m hoping for a Christmas pack). It’s also loaded with achievements, which manage to make even the most mundane aspects of the game fun.

Another area where the game excels is in its construction. It’s the kind of game Steve Jobs would have loved for its attractive, clean design. It’s just phenomenally well made, with enough attention to even the tiniest details to prove that the developer considered this a labor of love. The interface looks like an architect’s drawing desk, while the broken up schematic that you manipulate is smooth and responsive. (You can even alter the speed of its movements in the Settings menu.) The sound effects are great, with a satisfying click for every button and a photo snap when you succeed in setting a blueprint right. It’s a very inviting game environment, and everything just works exactly as it should. I experienced no glitches or crashes in all the time I spent playing.

Blueprint 3D never creates too much of a challenge for the player, but there’s something remarkably gratifying about putting those drawings together. Somehow, it never gets old. Thanks to its triumphant design and perfect interface, and its wildly original gameplay, this is one of the very best time-wasters you’ll find in the App Store.

A couple of days ago we reported about Apple opening the doors of its subscription service to games. Big Fish Games, a Seattle, Washington-based gaming developer, earned the distinction as the first gaming developer to come out with an app and offer a monthly subscription that will give subscribers access to games in Big Fish Games’ lineup.

But in a sudden turn of events, Apple has pulled out Big Fish Games’ Play Instantly app from the iTunes App Store. The gaming company was surprised by the sudden removal of its app. It has tried to contact Apple to find out the reasons for the removal of the app but no news from that front has been revealed yet. The removal of the app has put a definite damper on Big Fish Games’ plans. The company has heavily advertised their app. It offered $4.99 a month subscription fee that will let users play their premium casual games that number in the “dozens.” It promised to further expand their lineup of titles to several hundreds that will cover not only the iOS platform but also Android and the PC by next year. By this time they will also introduce a higher monthly subscription  fee of $6.99 a month.

Apple’s decision to remove the Play Instantly app is quite puzzling given that Apple, just like any of its subscription service agreements, will get a 30 percent cut on the subscription fees. The high cut that Apple demands has actually led some developers to forego using Apple’s subscription service and just use iOS optimized web services instead. The fact that Big Fish Games still wants to play with Apple is already significant.

Apple knows that there is now a palpable shift in mobile gaming from traditional gaming handhelds to tablets and smartphones like the iPhone or iPad and it is now trying to take advantage of this shift to benefit not just itself but also game developers and consumers.

Apple is now offering game publishers who develop games for Apple’s products an opportunity to charge a monthly subscription fee in exchange for the privilege to check out different kinds of games. According to reports, Big Fish Games was the first game development company that signed up for Apple’s new service. The company, which is based in Seattle, is now developing a handy app that will make accessing the games more easy. It plans to charge $4.99 monthly for subscription for a person’s ability to check out different games, even paid ones without having to pay extra. The plan is to increase the subscription fee to $6.99 monthly as more games are made available to subscribers. The new game package service is similar to Apple’s subscription services for apps. In fact, even Apple’s take is similar – 30 percent of the monthly fee as its own commission.

People who get the subscription will be able to gain access to a lot of games. The good thing about the service is that it gives the person the ability to check out a game without having to actually buy the full version. They can check it out by playing the games. The games are not going to reside in the device but will be streamed to it. Another app is also being developed by Big Fish Games that limit gameplay time to just 30 minutes and will be laden with advertising.

Which version of the app do you think will be more appealing to users?

There’s a relatively new game out on the iTunes store and that’s Battle Nations. From the title description it seemed like a hex based strategy game similar to Advanced Wars or Final Fantasy Tactics. A free download later, I was mistaken.

Battle Nations is a premium quality game for the iOS that combines the incessant grinding we loved and hated with Zynga’s Farmville and adds strategic battle scenarios.

The game’s narrative is played out pretty well with stylized art and witty catch phrases that add subtle humor to a game that’s quite epic for what it is. The game itself consists of two main components — the resources and construction scenario and the battle scenario. You will spend most of your time building homes, gathering resources, planting crops and training soldiers allowing you to expand and explore the region.

As you build your base and explore the horizon, you will encounter hostiles known as “Raiders” that will to infiltrate your own base as well as bases of “friends” in the game. In the early stages you will need to defend a certain Sheriff Colt from Raiders. As you progress, the story actually does get more interesting allowing you to level up and unlock more items for purchase.

Following the Zynga formula, the more advanced unlocks take longer to build and yield more resources yet take a whole chunk of time to refresh. Thankfully, your regular regimen of soldiers don’t take as long to train. You can of course fast forward this to allow your Imperial Army to grow faster, but it will cost you an in-app purchase. You probably figured that out by now.

Battle Nations is definitely one of my iPad must-haves. It’s pretty good. Too good. Too good to the point that you wish that the devs didn’t include the grinding concept and stuck to the strategy element because the game works well that way too. I understand that there’s a business model involved and Z2Live really needs to make a profit first. But after a while I did feel bummed with all the waiting when I would rather have my army out killing Raiders.

[DOWNLOAD BATTLE NATIONS]

W.E.L.D.E.R. screenshot

Combining grammar with strategy, word puzzle fanatics are in for an addictive treat with the terrific W.E.L.D.E.R., from Ayopa Games.

A bit of a steampunk vibe infuses W.E.L.D.E.R.‘s every pixel, with metal welding sounds and visual effects. It puts a number of twists on the usual word-building grid game. The first thing you’ll notice is that there’s no timer. Instead of the motivation of a ticking clock, the game presents you with limited resources that you must use wisely, or game over.

W.E.L.D.E.R. screenshot showing gaps caused by rusted metal tiles

With a minimum of four letters — unlike the usual three from most word games — you can build any word you can think of. The letters disappear, and new ones slide down from the top of the screen to take their place. Every level comes with a prescribed number of words that must be built, in order to advance. You’re also given a certain number of “swaps” (or moves) that you can perform, before you run out and lose the game. You start out with less swaps than the number of words you need to build, but you can earn more swaps by building bigger and better words.

As you might imagine, minimal movement is what you’re after, and the more words you can build with just one swap, the better. Sort of like Scrabble, lettered tiles have colored backgrounds that correspond with how many points they’ll score you; score enough points, and you get more swaps added to your bank. There are also blank wooden tiles that you can use to stand in for any letter — though you don’t get any points for doing so. But things get a lot more interesting when the game starts introducing variant tiles that have properties that change things dramatically.

W.E.L.D.E.R.'s dictionary function

There are tiles that burn red hot, which you can’t swap, but which will move with gravity as tiles beneath them are eliminated. There are the rusted metal tiles, which are like immovable rocks: you can’t swap them, and they don’t move for anything. When these start piling up, it can create some major challenges, particularly when they’re at the top of the screen, because they’ll prevent the columns beneath them from receiving new tiles, creating huge gaps in the board. Then there are the gold and jewel-encrusted tiles, which give you greatly increased points. If you manage to combine any of these tiles in a single word, it multiplies your points dramatically.

There are also special swaps you can earn over time, including the group swap (which is exactly what it sounds like), the reverse swap (do a reversal of up to a entire row or column of tiles), and the jump swap (switches any two swappable tiles on the board, regardless of where they are). These are very limited resources, so again, it takes a strategic mind to know when to use them and when to save them for later.

W.E.L.D.E.R. screenshot showing gold & jeweled tiles

Game Center leaderboards let you see how you stack up against your friends, and there are a huge number of clever achievements that are more thought-out than the seemingly arbitrary achievements you might find in other games, making you feel like you’ve really accomplished something. There’s a nifty dictionary feature that lets you tap on any word you’ve spelled to see what it means, using iOS 5′s built-in dictionary. There’s Twitter and Facebook integration, so you can share your biggest victories with others. And there’s even iCloud capability that transfers your saved games from one iOS device to another.

W.E.L.D.E.R. is a highly polished word puzzle game that gets my highest recommendation. It’s a blast, and I can’t stop playing it!

Scribblenauts Remix screenshot

Giving you the power to conjure anything you can imagine is Scribblenauts Remix, a wildly creative game that’s perfectly suited for iOS.

If you’re unfamiliar with the game, it may surprise you to learn that Scribblenauts Remix is a port of the best parts of two Nintendo DS games: Scribblenauts and Super Scribblenauts. The game takes you through level after level where you’re presented with various challenges. To solve these puzzles, you quite literally use your imagination. Just think up an object or a kind of person that can help you, and when you type in the word, that thing is instantly created in the level. If it’s an object, you can grab it and use it to help you; if it’s a person, they have minds of their own and will immediately set out to solve your problem for you.

Scribblenauts Remix screenshot

It’s sort of the ultimate sandbox game, because it has a vocabulary of thousands of available words, and when you add adjectives to the mix, you’re presented with hundreds of thousands of possibilities. For example, if you’re presented with a house that’s on fire, you can write the word “fireman” and one will appear to put out the fire for you. But you’ll get different results if you write “angry fireman” or “lazy fireman,” for example. You can call up anything from vehicles to buildings and monsters, and more. Just about any adjective you can think of will change the nature of your creation, so feel free to experiments with descriptors like colors, moods, “giant/tiny,” “cold/hot,” and anything else you can think of. There are also special items like potions, which will fundamentally alter your creations after they’ve been created.

Scribblenauts Remix screenshot

One thing that always amazed me about the original game is how they crammed such a huge dictionary of available words/objects into a game made for a system as small as the DS. The second game magnified this enormously, yet the full dictionary appears to have survived the transition to iOS. That said, I thought up several words that the dictionary didn’t recognize. (Though to be fair, I work with words for a living.)

Most of the fun of the game boils down to conjuring multiple things up and seeing what happens when they interact. The game wisely comes with a “playground” mode on the main menu, where you’re set free from the puzzles to create anything you want. Don’t like what you’ve made? There are no penalties to drag anything you want into the trashcan in the top right corner of the screen. If you ever get stuck, there are always hints available to spark your imagination.

Scribblenauts Remix screenshot

The levels feel as though they were designed specifically to train you in how to play the game, by showing you the possibilities of what you can do. 50 puzzle levels may sound like a lot, but it goes by remarkably fast, and it pales in comparison to the original game’s 220 levels. Still, Remix costs a fraction of what the DS game sold for, so I guess you get what you pay for. But I found myself hungry for more when it was done. I have no idea if developer 5th Cell has any plans to add more content during the game’s life cycle, but it would be most welcome if so. As it is, it feels like a very abbreviated version of the original.

I created this little homage to Back to the Future Part II in the sandbox mode

In the DS games, you could type out your words of choice or you could write them out by hand, using the DS’ stylus, and the game was capable of reading your writing (well, more or less). With the iPhone and iPad’s touchscreen capabilities, I was surprised to find that handwriting isn’t supported in Remix. Especially on the iPad, where you have plenty of room to write with your finger, it could have worked quite well. But maybe some sacrifices had to be made to keep the app to a decent download size.

At once both overflowing with possibilities and over far too soon, Scribblenauts Remix is nonetheless a blast to play and works so well on iOS, you might think it was made specifically for this platform.

Like its namesake game, Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots is a simple game with a simple objective, yet wickedly addictive gameplay that will have you slice and dicing for hours, thanks to a terrific new mode of play.

Fruit Ninja is, of course, the enormously successful portable game that gives you the simplistic-sounding goal of slicing virtual fruit with your finger as it’s tossed into the air from somewhere off-screen to the bottom. What gives it staying power are the bombs that are randomly tossed with the fruit, which you must avoid or game over. The bombs turn the whole thing into an exercise in reflex control — not only must you be quick, you must be discerning as well.

DreamWorks’ Puss in Boots may not seem like the most obvious property for a tie-in, until you remember that Puss is a master swordsman. His character adds very little to the game beyond a few victory-inspired voice-overs and some fun variants on the blades you’ll use. Those blades include Puss’ standard sword, four claws, a “guitar” blade that looks like the neck of a guitar, a “magic beans” blade (based on a story point from the movie), and inexplicably, a rocket blade. (Maybe this makes sense if you’ve seen the movie; I have not.) You can unlock the differing blades and some Puss-themed backgrounds by achieving feats throughout the game. But these variants are purely aesthetic, changing nothing about the gameplay.

What really sets Puss in Boots‘ flavor of Fruit Ninja apart is the “Challenge” mode, a new gauntlet-style series of mini games that each present unique twists on the Fruit Ninja formula. In one small round after another, you’re charged with slicing up all that fruit while avoiding bombs — but in new and unusual ways. There are challenges with sets of shuttered windows that fly open, and you have to quickly slice the fruit behind them, but not the bombs (of course). There’s the challenge with the gigantic, solo bomb bouncing around and obscuring much of the window, while regular-sized fruit bounce behind it; you can guess what the objective is there. Or maybe you’ll have to slice up specific types of fruit on a conveyor while frantically avoiding the bombs that intermittently appear alongside them.

The classic game mode is well represented, too, with fine-tuned controls and nicely randomized targets. There are the expected leaderboards and whatnot online components, but nothing resembling a multiplayer mode. The faithful will be happy to hear that tomatoes have finally been added to the mix.

Fruit Ninja: Puss in Boots might not offer quite enough difference from the original game for longtime players, but it’s the best reason yet for newbies to jump on the fruit-slicing bandwagon.

Alternate Reality: The City

Made for: iPhone & iPad, $.99
Originally released: 1985, for Apple II, Atari, Commodore 64, & MS-DOS

Another World

Made for: iPhone & iPad, $4.99
Originally released: 1991, for Amiga & Atari ST

Beneath a Steel Sky

Made for: iPhone, $2.99
Originally released: 1985, for Amiga & DOS

Bounder

Made for: iPhone ($.99) & iPad ($2.99)
Originally released: 1985, for Commodore 64
Released for iOS under a new title, Bounder’s World.

Bundesliga Manager

Made for: iPhone & iPad, $.99
Originally released: 1989, for Amiga, Atari, Commodore 64, & PC

Death Rally

Made for: iPhone & iPad, $.99
Originally released: 1996, for DOS

Defender of the Crown

Made for: iPhone & iPad, $2.99
Originally released: 1986, for Amiga

Doom

Made for: iPhone & iPad, $4.99
Originally released: 1993, for DOS

Driver

Made for: iPhone, $2.99
Originally released: 1999, for PlayStation 1

Duke Nukem 3D

Made for: iPhone & iPad, $.99
Originally released: 1996, for DOS

Final Fantasy I, II, & III

Made for: FFI: iPhone, $8.99 | FFII: iPhone, $8.99, | FFIII: iPhone ($15.99) & iPad ($16.99)
Originally released: 1987, for NES (first game)

Final Fight

Made for: iPhone, $2.99
Originally released: 1989, for Arcade

Gobliiins & Gobliins 2

Made for: G1: iPhone, $2.99 | G2: iPhone, $2.99
Originally released: 1991, for Amiga, Atari ST, PC, & Mac (first game)

Llamatron

Made for: iPhone & iPad, $1.99
Originally released: 1991, for Atari ST
Released under a new title, Minotron 2112.

The Manhole

Made for: iPhone, $1.99
Originally released: 1988, for Mac & PC

Myst & Riven

Made for: Myst: iPhone, $4.99 | Riven: iPhone, $4.99
Originally released: 1991, for Mac (first game)

The Oregon Trail

Made for: iPhone & iPad, $1.99
Originally released: 1978, for Apple II*

Prince of Persia (Retro)

Made for: iPhone & iPad, $.99
Originally released: 1989, for Apple II

R-Type

Made for: iPhone, $.99
Originally released: 1987, for Arcade

Rogue

Made for: iPhone, Free
Originally released: 1980, for Unix

Secret of Mana

Made for: iPhone, $8.99
Originally released: 1993, for SNES

The Secret of Monkey Island

Made for: iPhone ($2.99) & iPad ($4.99)
Originally released: 1990, for DOS
The sequel, Monkey Island 2, is also available for iOS.

Spectre

Made for: iPhone & iPad, $.99
Originally released: 1991, for Mac

The 7th Guest

Made for: iPhone ($2.99) & iPad ($5.99)
Originally released: 1993, for DOS

Sid Meier’s Pirates!

Made for: iPad, $4.99
Originally released: 1987, for Commodore 64

SimCity

Made for: iPhone ($.99) & iPad ($6.99)
Originally released: 1989, for Amiga & Mac

Street Fighter II

Made for: iPhone, $3.99
Originally released: 1991, for Arcade

Uridium

Made for: iPhone & iPad, $.99
Originally released: 1986, for Commodore 64

Worms & Worms 2

Made for: W1: iPhone ($.99) & iPad ($4.99) | W2: iPhone & iPad ($4.99)
Originally released: 1995, for Amiga (first game)
The spinoff game Worms Crazy Golf is also available in the App Store.

X-Men

Made for: iPhone & iPad, $.99
Originally released: 1992, for Arcade

Classic computer gamers will also want to check out the Commodore 64 app and the Atari’s Greatest Hits app. Among the retro games known to be currently in development for iOS are Battle Chess, The 11th Hour, Glider, Grand Theft Auto III, and the Marathon trilogy.

*The Oregon Trail was originally created in 1971 as an educational tool for schools in Minnesota. The first published version was made for a CDC Cyber computer. The Apple II version listed here was the first version of the game to be mass produced and sold to the public.

Every year we try to find ways to spook our friends and this time I cracked it with HauntedFace Lite and ZombieBooth Lite for the iPhone. Yeah sadly no universal version yet but it works fine on the iPad. The app is similar to Photo Booth effects but turns your face into a horrendous mistake of creation.

Here’s a sample I created for my friends.

HauntedFace
The Lite version of HauntedFace has a randomized ghost effect that changes every so often or when you tap on the screen. The accompanying sounds are rather disturbing — in fact when watching this in a really dark room, alone, I still get slightly disturbed. I really must warn you — the sequences can be rather disturbing.

HauntedFace Lite [Download Now]

ZombieBooth
ZombieBooth Lite gives you two choices for transforming you into an infected human. Unlike HauntedFace, you can interact with your own mug but touching various places on screen to lead the zombie to try to bite you.

ZombieBooth Lite [Download Now]

Both ZombieBooth and HauntedFace allow you to record a transformation sequence but it is only limited to 18 seconds (that’s where the paid version comes in). Still, that’s a lot of time to spook your friends. To create your transformation you’ll need a fairly well lit photo taken with your camera or a photo loaded from another album. What actually works is taking photos of other photos: the app will ask you to determine where the eyes and mouth are to make the transformations more realistic.

After recording a sequence (leave a few seconds with no transformation so your friends will be caught off guard), you can upload the video onto Facebook or Youtube or simply keep them in your iOS gallery to show with your friends.

TIP: If you do plan to upload your video to YouTube, you may want to send your friends a link rather than have it embedded as YouTube doesn’t always preview with the first few seconds of your film. This will definitely spoil the surprise as an embedded link will give away the surprise with a preview in the middle of the transformation.

I sat down to try out Riot Rings for the first time, intending to play for fifteen or twenty minutes. Two hours and dozens of levels later, I knew that Cervo Media was onto something special with their clever little action puzzler.

Riot Rings bears some similarities to Zuma and Luxor, with balls that must be fired to match at least three colored balls on the board, and thereby make them disappear. But Riot Rings brings enough twists to the formula to make its own mark.

The silly backstory claims that animals have escaped from zoos all over the world, and your job is to return them to their captured states. You do this by matching at least three animals — which are shaped like balls, of course — making them disappear from the screen and return to the zoo where they belong. To fire a ball at the track, just tap the spot on the track where you want the ball to land. What makes Riot Rings different is that, instead of levels that simply change the shapes of their tracks between levels, each level is so different it’s practically a completely different game. With more than one hundred levels to play through, the game’s imagination and variation seems to never end.

Every level brings some new challenge, some new wrinkle in its basic gameplay, which goes something like this. In the center of the screen is a catapult that you fire with a tap. The tracks are usually circular or oval in shape, but vary wildly, and often change shape as you’re playing. As you progress through the game, you’ll be challenged with multiple tracks, overlapping tracks, tracks that skip or spurt, clouds that obscure the top-down view, boulders that block part of your range of fire, and loads more. In most levels, new animals come flying in to add to the complications, and they can add up fast. That’s bad, because if so many animals are on a single track that the circle closes, you lose.

There are other challenges too, like giant bees that fly slowly in and try to destroy the catapult; it takes a lot of animal/balls to destroy bees, so you’ll find yourself tapping those bees like crazy until they finally die. Fortunately, the game helps you out with special weapons that appear now and then to give you an advantage. You might see a hypodermic needle that you can pick up and then throw at an animal track, making it slow down or even stop moving altogether. Or there might be food of some kind, which you can pick up and throw, causing a large number of animals to break free from the track and go off to chase it.

In addition to the campaign, there’s a Free Play mode, which lets you revisit any particular level and replay it to try for a higher score; and a Zen Mode, which keeps the game going infinitely, and tasks you with surviving as long as possible. These three modes give the game a high replay value.

If you’re ready for a new puzzle obsession, give Riot Rings a try. You won’t be disappointed. It’s better than Angry Birds!

[Editor's note: this review is based on the iOS version of Riot Rings, but there's also a Mac version available.]

Let's Create Pottery: Inbox

Part creative tool, part game, Let’s Create Pottery is a sublime, fascinating app for iPad and iPhone that simulates the art of pottery creation.

From molding and casting to painting and selling, Let’s Create Pottery takes you through every step that professional potters use to create art. The process is streamlined, of course, but the app definitely gives you a good sense of what it’s like to work with clay.

The crux of the game is the app’s first stage, where you start with a small lump of clay and spin & mold it. There’s an in-app Inbox that’s part of the game, where you are sent orders from customers around the world of increasing difficulty. Each order includes a photo of the kind of piece the customer wants, and your job is to mold and paint your work to resemble the photo as closely as you can.

Let's Create Pottery: Spinning Wheel

The pottery wheel spins on its own; your job is to massage it into shape. Slide your finger along it upwards, and it gets taller. Push in, and it contracts. Pull out and it expands. Pottery is an art of subtlety, and the app smartly conveys the sense of delicacy and finesse required to work a lifeless piece of clay into something beautiful. It can be a painstaking process, which might frustrate some iOS players, but I appreciated the realism. Ultimately this part of the app is basically about matching shapes, but there are stars beneath the photo that indicate how you’re doing at achieving the right shape (and paint job). The stars track your progress as-it-happens, so as you mold your clay, you’ll see more stars added when you get closer to the desired piece. The stars disappear when you’re getting it wrong.

Let's Create Pottery: Firing

Once you’re happy with your creation, you send it directly to firing, where you watch it sit in a furnace for an abbreviated hardening session. After a few seconds, your piece is good and hard, and you can take it out and view it. Spin it to appreciate it from all angles. The imperfections and micro-cracks on the surface are nicely done and realistic in appearance. From here, you select colors, paint brushes, or other decorations to add to the piece, and again, you’re given a star meter to show how close you are to getting it right.

Let's Create Pottery: Painting

When you’re satisfied with your finished work of art, you can sell it at auction. A simulated auction screen lets you watch the dollar amount grow as your work fetches a particular sum. That amount is then added to your available funds, which you can spend at the in-app “store” (it’s not a real store; no real-world money required) to acquire new materials and paint colors and whatnot for future pieces. If your work is a customer order, instead of auction you can choose to simply fulfill the order. If the customer likes what they receive, you’ll get a nice little payment via your Inbox.

Let's Create Pottery: Auction

The game portion continues to progress this way with ever-harder pieces for you to create, essentially teaching you the basics (and eventually the complexities) of pottery-making while adding enough objectives to make it not feel like a tedious tutorial. It also gives you a bit of a “sandbox” feel in that you’re free to take orders or sell your work at auction. I often found that if I wasn’t pleased with how an order had turned out, I’d sell it at auction instead, and then try again at fulfilling the order.

Beyond the game, Let’s Create Pottery can also be used as a terrific simulator for creating pottery, and its subtleties ensure that no two pieces ever turn out quite the same. iDreams, the app’s developer, has created a thriving fan community where talented potters are constantly posting their latest pieces for others to see, and there are some genuinely amazing pieces there. You’re invited to add your own work to the gallery through a quick tap inside the app.

Let's Create Pottery: Community Website

I never experienced any crashes with the app, but I did have one odd issue. Occasionally, as my pottery was spinning or when I was painting my creation, the app would respond about a good centimeter below the spot where I touched the screen. So instead of placing a painted stripe exactly where I wanted it, or shaping the clay in the place where I touched the screen, it would happen below that spot. It appears to be an odd glitch, and as I said, it only happens infrequently.

There are some nifty graphical effects and sound used throughout the game. For example, molding is always done in an outdoor setting, and you’ll hear birds chirping and other sounds of nature while that wheel is turning. Your device’s gyroscope and accelerometer are put to fun use as well, causing the screen’s background to shift whenever you move your device. Hold it up and turn to your left, and the background will react, as if you’re looking through a portal. It’s wholly unnecessary to the app, but undeniably cool.

Your enjoyment of Let’s Create Pottery will entirely depend on how much patience and appreciation you have for the artform. It’s not in any way what most players think of as a traditional “game,” but it is a very rewarding experience for would-be artists. I daresay there are even some things you’ll learn from the app that you could take with you in the real world, should you pursue learning to be a real potter.

Jetpack Joyride

From the creators of Fruit Ninja comes this non-traditional side-scroller. There’s just one level to master in Jetpack Joyride, but that’s okay, because the point isn’t to move through level after level, it’s to keep upgrading your character and equipment.

The controls couldn’t be simpler: just touch the screen to move your on-screen, jetpack wearing character (who goes by the name of Barry Steakfries — no joke) vertically up, or let go to descend as he speeds non-stop to the right. There are countless other games in the App Store that feature this kind of control scheme and character movement, but Jetpack Joyride has fine tuned the feel of it until it’s just right.

Jetpack Joyride

But there’s a twist. (Isn’t there always?) Your jetpack is more than a mere conveyance. When you fly up over the evil scientists who built your lethal jetpack, and who run about fleeing from your rampage, the fire it produces turns to gunfire, shooting straight down at your hapless victims below. Obstacles are everywhere; one strike and you’re out. Round over. Complicating things further, the jetpack builds speed the longer you use it, making the game ever-harder to master.

Jetpack Joyride

You’ll want to collect the floating coins along the way, and look for the special slot machine coins that you redeem at the end of each round in the in-game slot machine to pick up rewards. Some of these will shoot you along further in this round (even though you’re dead) while others can be used in your next round. There’s also a built-in store called “The Stash” where you can use the coins you’ve collected to buy better stuff.

Jetpack Joyride

Power-ups are easy to grab; like everything else, you simply fly into them. They instantly replace your jetpack with much more powerful vehicles, which include a flying dragon, a teleporter, a gravity inverter, a metal stomping suit with killer feet, and more. Developer Halfbrick has already added a set of new upgrades and promise more in the future, at no cost. These clever power boosts change the entire dynamic of the game, providing a welcome change of pace from the jetpack, but they only last as long as you can avoid obstacles. The longer you play, the bigger and better upgrades, achievements, and rewards you’ll unlock. There are even numerous versions of the titular jetpack that you’ll eventually acquire as you get better at the game, which do a lot more than just fire bullets (I’m not spoiling the surprises here).

On first pass, Jetpack Joyride seems like an incredibly simplistic exercise. But the more you play at it, the deeper you’ll find its rewards go. Halfbrick has scored again with another game every bit as addictive and fun to play as Fruit Ninja.

Bumpy Road

Deceptively simple but hard to master, Bumpy Road might just be the perfect cure to every kind of “few minutes of boredom.”

Bumpy Road is a physics-based platformer, where your goal is to send a cute little family car on a road trip. But this is no ordinary road — it’s made up of narrow vertical slats, which you can manipulate. Which is good, since you have no direct control over the car whatsoever.

Bumpy Road

You play by tapping anywhere on the screen, to make the titular road raise in height. A little hump is created (see the screenshots) according to where you touch the screen. The screen scrolls by at a pre-set rate and the car keeps up with it, so your job is to help the car collect as many items along the way as possible and make sure it doesn’t fall into danger. You’re really controlling the road instead of the car, and it takes some time to get your brain to make this rather radical shift.

Bumpy Road

Using this control scheme, there are a few different things you can do. Tapping the screen directly beneath the car will cause it to hop. Tapping in front of or behind the car will create an incline that will speed up or slow down the car. Using these tools, you can get the car to hop up to floating platforms, or jump over obstacles like water holes. Clearing obstacles can be tricky, because you have to build up enough speed to keep moving forward once you jump. There are also unique objects like platforms which will speed you up, or springs to bounce you up really high.

Bumpy Road

The game offers two primary game modes: “Sunday Trip,” which gives you a short track with a finish line to make it to; and “Evergreen Ride,” a test to see how long you can last against a never-ending track. Sunday Trip comes in three difficulty settings, while Evergreen Ride recently got a free update that gave players two kinds of roads to choose from  – along with loads of new platforms, backgrounds, level segments, and more. All of these items appear to be generated randomly by the game, ensuring that you’ll never play the same way twice. The random element keeps things from getting too repetitive, though I found the game to still have too little variety to engage me for more than 20 or 30 minutes at a stretch.

Bumpy Road

There’s also a “Memory Lane” section, which compiles all of the memories of the family traveling in the car. It gives the game a hint of a story, while remaining entirely optional to those who’d rather just play. The game has its own cute, original soundtrack, Game Center achievements, and it’s available for both iPhone and iPad.

Bumpy Road is a perfect little casual game for those brief snatches of time when you’re waiting at the doctor’s office or getting the oil changed. It’s beautifully made, and will keep you challenged if you have the patience to keep playing. It requires not so much a learning curve as a shift in thinking, but those who make it will find that this clever change in how you play is its own reward.

Kona's Crate | title screen

Kona’s Crate is one quirky little puzzler. The game has you controlling a floating platform that carries a simple wooden crate. Your job is to maneuver the crate up and down and between obstacles to deliver it Chief Kona.

The catch? The crate isn’t locked down to the platform.

Kona's Crate | If this view is available on the level title screen, why isn't it the default view?

The controls couldn’t be simpler. The underside of the platform has thrusters on both the left and right sides; tap the left side of the screen to use the left thruster, and the right side to use the right thruster. There are no virtual buttons or accelerometer tilting; you play the entire game by tapping either side of the screen or both.

Kona's Crate | Get used to seeing the crate fall off the platform. You'll be seeing it A LOT.

The trick is that the controls are the most hair trigger I’ve ever seen in an iOS game. You not only have to move the crate, you have to keep it balanced atop the platform, and it’s a lot harder than it sounds. You play through 60 levels across 3 stages, and just as you’d expect, the levels become more difficult the further you go. You’ll also unlock more levels as you go, working up to the full 60. (IndiePub, the publisher, promises additional levels to be added regularly at no additional charge.) Eventually, additional obstacles are added for you to make your way around, like steam vents that will blow the crate off your platform and TNT-filled crates that explode at slightest touch.

Kona's Crate | Chief Kona does a happy dance when you succeed

Before a level begins, you’re presented with a title screen that displays some basic details about the level and shows you what it looks like. This is one design element that didn’t make sense to me. You can use pinch or single-finger dragging to get a good look at the level, which is handy, but it always starts with a close-up on your starting point. It always helps to pinch-to-zoom out to an overview of the entire map, so you know what to expect. So why didn’t the devs start these title screens with the far more helpful level overview? It’s a small thing, but with the levels coming so quickly one after another, it becomes very tedious to have to zoom out every single time.

Kona's Crate | Enter the steam vents

Complete a level fast and you’ll earn a higher score. You’ll also get extra points for not touching any of the walls along the path. Speaking of the levels, I got a very “retro platformer” vibe from playing Kona’s Crate, even though it puts the iOS platform’s touchscreen controls to good use. The level design made me think of classic titles like Commander Keen.

Kona's Crate | Magic cubes like the one at right will unlock your path

It’s the incredible physics of the crate and the platform that make Kona’s Crate both engaging and infuriating. The slightest tap against a wall can upset your balance, and it’s all but impossible to recover your crate after losing it. You’ll find yourself hitting the Level Restart button (in the top right corner) a lot. Like, every few seconds, even. I only succeeded when I moved the crate very slowly, and controlled the platform with short, quick bursts from the thrusters. I always got low scores for not going fast, but I didn’t possess enough finesse with the controls to play any other way. The players who will excel at Kona’s Gate are the ones who can master that finesse.

Some of the game’s challenges are so frustratingly hard, you might develop a mild case of masochism from playing it. Because darn if it isn’t impossible to put down.

The Coding Monkeys’ implementation of the German-style board game Carcassonne for iPad (and iPhone) is absolutely beautiful. The game was designed with a deeply respectful attention to detail, with every last feature that fans could hope for — and then some.

In Carcassonne, in case you don’t know, the object of the game is to claim territories, roads, and castles, with the winner determined by who claims the most. What makes the game unique is that instead of playing on a pre-defined game board, you create the board — and therefore the territories to be claimed — as you go. The game pieces are the tiles that make up the board. Each player places one tile per turn, and then has the option of staking a claim to whatever field, road, or castle is begun with that tile. The game makes this easy by highlighting the spots available where your current tile will fit, and then showing you your options for claim-staking.

You only get points for completed territories, so naturally, strategy comes into play, since other players aren’t going to willingly help you win points. Since there are only a certain number of each kind of tile, it’s possible to use your tiles to block another player, for example, but that usually means sacrificing a tile that you could be putting toward your own points. If this is all too much to get your head around, fear not: there’s a fantastic tutorial built in to the game, featuring a charming voice actor who explains the ins and outs as you go.

The iOS version of Carcassonne automates everything about the game, and gives you tons of options for customization. Pick A.I. opponents that match your own skill level, or choose an opponent who’s better than you for a real challenge. You can also play multiplayer games via Game Center (with built-in chat), or local multiplayer, where you pass your iPad around. Both game types allow for up to five players. The online game is playable as turn-based, with push notifications to let you know when it’s your turn. There’s also a solitaire mode where no other players are involved at all, and the object of the game is to keep laying tiles until you run out.

Everything about the presentation is a class act, from the lush wood textures to the relaxing, classical/old world folk music that plays softly in the background. The game board is pinch-to-zoom enabled, making it very easy to get a look at the entire layout (which can be rather sprawling by the end), or move in close for nice, detailed look at things.

This is a fairly new release, but expansion packs are already in the works which will match the real-life expansions that board game players will be familiar with. I played a dozen or so games in preparation for this review, and experienced no crashes or glitches of any kind.

Carcassonne is just phenomenally well made, and it’s the best reason yet for board gamers to ditch the cardboard and buy an iPad. Highest recommendation.

Before I met my wife, I was unfamiliar with German board games. I’d never heard of Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne. But once she introduced me to them, I was hooked. The intelligent design and mechanics of these clever games made instant sense, and I wondered why I’d never heard of them before.

Ticket to Ride isn’t technically a German board game, but it’s German-style, and will probably remind fans of Catan. Because instead of roads and resources, you’re trying to acquire railroads and routes. The game unfolds on a large board depicting the United States and dozens of railroad tracks that stretch between various major cities. You pick from available routes between those cities, where you attempt to grab the entire railroad line in between. All of the variables are handled with color-coded cards, which help you acquire the equally color-coded rail lines. Winning is designated as the player who owns the most railroads and routes when the game ends.

Like all good video games based on board games, Ticket to Ride automates its gameplay mechanics beautifully. The cards are dealt, rail lines are claimed, and routes are proffered entirely by the computer, leading to a fast-paced experience that simply isn’t possible with the board game. The iPad game allows for anywhere between two and five players at a single game, and gives you the option to play locally against built-in A.I., or online against real-life opponents (who are matched randomly via Game Center or the game developer’s own login system). It is a bit of a bummer that there’s no local multiplayer, but it’s easy to see how this would be difficult to make work on a handheld device.

Everything about the game design is splendid, recreating the turn-of-the-century charms of the board game with great attention to detail. The colors pop, the board and cards are reproduced faithfully, and the interface is neatly organized. There’s a built-in video tutorial that does a very good job of explaining how the game is played, and there’s even a tutorial mode that will hold your hand, guiding you through your first time playing. I’ll admit it did take me a good ten or fifteen minutes to grasp the basics of how the game is played, but that’s pretty normal for German-style board games. And once I got it, it stuck. I haven’t had to refer back to the tutorials after that initial encounter. So don’t let the learning curve stand in your way.

My only complaint about the game’s design is a quirk of the menus. A helpful character shows up on each menu screen to give the game added flavor and personality, explaining what your options are on that screen. But once you’ve heard what they have to say, it would be nice to not have to hear it again and again and again every single time you return to that menu screen. Hopefully this little oversight will be addressed in a future update.

Add-ons to the game are available to purchase in-app, which will expand your available railways or even open up entirely new game boards for you to play on. Every time you play, it’s a randomly generated experience, and with so many variables, the outcome is always different. It makes for remarkably addictive fun, so much so that despite a few very minor drawbacks, I still give Ticket to Ride my highest recommendation. It’s one of the most enjoyable iPad games I’ve ever played.

World of Goo is an iOS port of a downloadable PC/Mac game that’s also available as a WiiWare title. With loads of levels to play through full of relaxing, brain-bending fun, World of Goo represents something wholly unique for iOS devices. You play by picking up individual goo balls and using them to solve the game’s creative puzzles. Goo comes in many varieties; there are single-use goo balls, reusable goo balls, goo balls that are flammable, digital goo balls, and more.

Goo balls stick to each other, you see, creating flexible tendrils of goo between them. By moving the balls around the screen, you can build all sorts of geometric shapes that will help you solve the puzzles. Ragdoll physics are employed as well, adding an extra challenge; suspended goo ball structures will reach their breaking point and snap if their weight exceeds their sticking power.

The game is broken down into chapters, each of which has a dozen or so levels. In each level, there’s a pipe through which the goo balls can exit, and your goal is to help them reach it. This often involves bridging great divides or building wobbly towers. The further you get into the game, the more creative and diverse the levels become, and I’m not ashamed to say that there were some I simply couldn’t figure out. The solutions are often elegant and simple, but require a bit of a cognitive leap to figure out. Fortunately, you always have the option to skip any level if you don’t want to do it. Complete or skip a level, and you instantly unlock the next one.

The game’s soundtrack is an odd mishmash of world music and a sort of “classic Western movie” vibe. I’m sure many will dig it, but it was so repetitive it got on my nerves. And it represents a surprising oversight: 2d Boy didn’t see fit to include any basic options or settings, so there’s no way to turn off the music without also turning off the game’s clever sound effects — and the only way to do this is to mute your entire iDevice.

You can move the game level around by dragging the screen, and pinch-to-zoom on iPhone and iPod Touch. There’s a mysterious “Sign Painter” in every level who leaves behind helpful signs to guide your efforts. There’s also a bonus meta game that’s only playable when you gain enough goo balls through the main levels.

What surprised me most about World of Goo is just how novel each new level is. There’s so much variety that it sometimes feels like you’re playing lots of different games in one. $4.99 may seem a little pricey for an iOS game, but World of Goo really is one of the best and most original gaming experiences that the App Store has to offer. It’s hard to believe the game started its life on other platforms, because it seems so perfectly tailored for this one.

Just arriving in the App Store today is the latest title from Launching Pad Games, an iPhone game called Mighty Fin. Mighty Fin is an ocean-based side-scroller that has you directing a small, orange fish on his “Round the World Tour” vacation.

Fin, it seems, bought his vacation package from “Shady Sal,” a less-than-reputable dealer whose vacation hotspots turn out to be very hazardous locations to a small fish’s health. Everything from spiky rocks to bigger wildlife stands between Fin and his good time, and he needs your help to make it through the game’s eight levels. Along the way, he’ll also encounter all manner of beneficial items to collect and points to rack up.

What makes Mighty Fin unique is its unusual control scheme. Fin’s a rather buoyant little guy who bobs along in the water, but needs help knowing when to dive or leap out of the water. With obstacles to duck and targets to acquire, there’s an awful lot of rollercoastering up and down. There’s only one control required: to make Fin dive, you touch the screen. To make him rise, you let go of the screen. Dive him deep and then let go, and he’ll jump way up high, right out of the water.

Fin’s a fast swimmer, so the scenery scrolls by quickly, forcing you to make split second decisions about the path he should take, and often there’s more than one right decision. But run into any sort of dangerous obstacle and the level’s over instantly. Bubbles equal points, so you must aim for those as much as you can. You learn pretty quick that the game has a sort of rhythm that must be followed in order to win; the touch control is surprisingly refined, so learning the feel of it is key to your success.

Aside from bubbles, you’ll also find extras dotting the landscape, such as extra hats/outfits for Fin to wear. These accessories have no impact on gameplay, but they add to the little guy’s personality, and there are quite a lot of them. Collecting them all gives you a small sense of satisfaction. Mighty Fin is Game Center enabled, so there are all the usual leaderboards and whatnot.

The only quibble I have with the game is that there are only 8 short levels to play through, which seems awfully small. It compensates for this by adding a randomizing algorithm that supposedly gives you a different experience each time. My experience with the game was that these differences are very small, seemingly rotating between just two or three variations. Still, at least it’s something, and after you make your way through a level the first time, it’s unlocked so that you can play it again to your heart’s content, along with an “endless” mode that goes on for as long as you can survive it.

One last thing: I was surprised to notice that playing this iPhone game at 2x size on my iPad still looked remarkably good. I’ve never seen “retina display” graphics that didn’t become jagged when magnified on the iPad’s screen — until now.

Mighty Fin is a solid value for its bargain price. Don’t let its simplistic controls fool you; it’s not an easy game to master, and should prove plenty challenging for any kind of gamer.

Remedy Entertainment is best known as the creator of the genre-busting, story-driven shooters Max Payne and Alan Wake, but before those characters were born, Remedy published a racing-and-shooting classic that’s largely unknown by today’s gamers. But fifteen years after the release of the original PC game, Death Rally is back and better than ever.

There’s a minor attempt at a story at the game’s outset (it even features graphic novel-style imagery, a la Max Payne), but it’s minuscule to the point of irrelevancy. All that matters is that you get to race cars and shoot guns at the same time. It’s every guy’s testosterone-fueled dream come to virtual life. Death Rally pits you in an unending series of illegal street races, where your goal is to not just win, but to destroy as many of your competitors along the way as you can. (Though you don’t have to destroy any to win.)

Controls are simple, using those dreaded virtual buttons, yet here their implementation is among the least frustrating I’ve encountered. There’s a virtual thumb stick on one side, and a weapon trigger button on the other. You can reconfigure their placement and even substitute arrows for the thumb stick, as you wish.

The game unfolds in a progressive fashion, yet it’s entirely open-ended, presenting you with a list of available races that you can play through at your own pace and comfort level. You’ll start out with “Beginner” races available, but the more you play, the harder the available races become. There are “open” races that you can play as much as you want, and there are “challenge” races, where the stakes (and rewards) are higher. Races last just a few minutes each, so it’s quick and easy to jump from one to the next. You’ll gain access to better and more advanced vehicles as you go along, as well as better weapons and various upgrades. Money is required to purchase these items, and you’ll both find some placed at random along the race routes, as well as win money based on your performance in a race.

There are monetary bonuses given for how many cars you destroy along the way, whether or not you defeat each race’s designated “boss” car, bonuses you find on the track, and more. For an additional $.99 in-app purchase, you get access to bigger rewards after each race, allowing you to advance and collect better gear faster. Even the way the game qualifies this — with an underground power broker offering you this special deal like a drug dealer in a back room — acknowledges that what you’re buying is essentially a cheat. There’s something kind of appropriate to an “illegal street racing” game about being able to buy black market goods, but it still feels unfair to those who don’t want to spend that dollar. On the other hand, you can max out your resources just fine without the cheat. It just takes a little longer.

What I love most about the game is that it’s not simply an iOS port; it’s a remake completely built from the ground up to take full advantage of the platform’s capabilities. For example, in the “garage,” aka the vehicle selection tab, when you cycle through the available cars, you can swipe to rotate the car, examining it from any angle. It’s just one of several cool little features that Remedy didn’t have to throw in, but that’s how thoughtful they were in building this app.

Another nicety is that Remedy is actively producing updates and expansions, introducing new cars, weapons, and race tracks on a regular basis — all free. The graphics are terrific — leaps and bounds above the original PC game — and are even optimized to look especially sweet on an iPad 2, running at 60 frames per second. You can pretty much play any way you want — race honest and true, winning by skill alone, or mow down every opponent in your way, playing as dirty as you like. There are no penalties or consequences for either style, so go at it however you like.

Remedy promises that a multiplayer mode is on the way in another free update, along with plenty more of everything else. It’s hard to imagine a racing game for iPhone or iPad that looks better or is more fun to play than Death Rally. It’s both a loving tribute to a classic game gone by, and a top-tier racing game for today’s players on-the-go. It offers incredible value for its bargain price tag, and it’s not to be missed.