I-play Bowling

With all pretence of due respect to the sport of bowling, it's pretty simplistic. There's no strategy to speak of, just a knack - a flick of the wrist to perfect - and then a groove you need to get into. It took a major technical innovation to make bowling really work as a video game, and that was the Wii.

With I-play Bowling, I-play is attempting to emulate this success to some extent. How? Well, the game supports accelerometer control, such as you might find in handsets like the iPhone – which uses the technology to such good effect in its Super Monkey Ball demo – and Sony Ericsson's K850i and W910i.

On one of these devices, you can throw the ball by doing the same thing with your handset (although if you let it go at the end of the swing, you'll experience regret). You just put your bowler in position at the top of the lane with '4' and '6', press '5' to start the bowl, and then swing your whole arm to send the little ball-shaped clump of pixels barrelling towards the virtual pins.

The magic doesn't end there, though. To swerve the ball once it's rolling, you tilt your handset gently left or right. We've tried it out on a W910i, and it works surprisingly well.

It won't make you forget your Wii, and it's probably not the most practical control method for the environments conventionally associated with mobile gaming – the bus and the bog – but it's neat all the same.

Now, back down to earth. On the handsets that the vast majority of us are confined to, I-play Bowling is a far more ordinary affair, and it's up against Gameloft's Midnight Bowling 2. If you turn the accelerometer control off, or don't have it in the first place, I-play's game comes off the worst of the two.

Which isn't to say it's bad, or even that it's not good. The controls, for a start, are more or less the same. To take a bowl, you first place your bowler and press '5'. Then, a directional line swings left and right, and you have to stop it in the correct place by pressing '5' again, whereupon the ball leaves your hand. Finally, once it's in motion, you press '4' and '6' to determine the direction and force of the swerve.

In practical terms, what this means is that with each bowl you have two bites of the cherry. If you stop the directional line in the wrong place, you can salvage it with swerve. There may be some other advantage to swinging the ball around and hitting the pins at an angle, like real bowlers do, but several hours with I-play Bowling hasn't enabled me to see what it is.

It's a slick control method and easy to pick up. Before long – and we're talking seconds – you'll be racking up improbable scores in excess of 200. No matter how many strikes you get, however, wiping a rank of pins from the screen stays satisfying.

From the start, you can customise your character's appearance in a range of ways. Oddly, the basic avatar is neither male nor female, and can look like either depending on the attributes you choose to apply. Want a bald head and eye shadow? Want lipstick, flowing locks, and man's broad shoulders and flat chest? I'm not here to judge.

The graphics in the bowling alley are fairly solid, if unspectacular. The lane is fully 3D, and pinions left and right against the horizon when you move your bowler. The pins themselves are less impressive, overlapping and floating like paper cut-outs from the overhead view, but they belong to a credible physics engine. If a pin is left standing, you don't feel cheated.

Where I-play Bowling really falls short of its competition is in the single-player Tournament mode. There are three levels – Bronze, Silver, and Gold – and each involves bowling a frame against one of nine cartoon competitors.

As you make your way through, you'll earn a whole range of trophies for events such as making your first strike, winning each cup, scoring more than 200, and accomplishing certain feats like beating Angel by more than 100 and beating Boa Ling in the Gold Cup. You don't need to earn these trophies to proceed however, and all except the most rabid completist is likely to ignore them.

Disappointingly, there's no multiplayer, which is all the more surprising since a pass-the-handset mode would have been trivially easy to implement. Lacklustre elements like this and the uneventful Tournament mode aren't fatal to your enjoyment of I-play Bowling, but they do undermine it.

Without an accelerometer then, I-play Bowling is nothing special. Unfortunately, that's exactly what most of us are: without an accelerometer. If you do have a handset with one, and you want to see how it can be put to good use as a gaming tool, this game is certainly worth checking out. Otherwise, you might be better looking elsewhere.