Five Stars: This week's best iPhone and iPad games

Welcome back to Five Stars, a weekly feature that digs deep into the App Store mine to find five interesting, essential, or highly recommended titles from the last seven days.

The world is back to normal, it seems.

With E3 over and WWDC finished, our staff are back from the New World, and have been regaling the rest of us with tales of PlayStation Vitas and Steve Jobs's turtleneck.

But enough of that - we need new iPhone games to play while anxiously waiting for Wimbledon to start, and to distract us during all those boring first-round matches.

Addictive puzzlers and five-minute time wasters are the order of the day, so here are five to investigate.

Zoo Keeper DX Touch Edition
Universal - £1.19 - Kiteretsu

The iPhone is the perfect spot for puzzlers. In a world of 3D racers on 3DS and high-def adventures on Vita, it can be hard to justify the £40 pricetag on the latest Tetris remake.

But falling, twisting, sliding block puzzlers - from Peggle to Denki Blocks - find perfect homes as pocket money apps on iOS.

Take Zoo Keeper DX Touch Edition, the debilitatingly-addictive match-three animal-face-slider. It was great on DS, but at a few quid on iPhone it's damn near essential.

The goal of the game is to create vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines of three (or more) of the same animal faces. Those include boxy hippos, monkeys, lions, crocodiles, pandas, giraffes, and elephants.

Get enough points and you'll beat the stage. Your reward? Getting chewed out by some cigar-waggling zoo manager. The big jerk.

Note: This game currently has a nasty bug on iPhone 4 and the fourth generation iPod touch. It's fine on older devices and iPad, and a patch is presumably on the way.

Skipping Stone
iPhone - 59p - Gamevil

This casual mobile classic comes from the cellphone days of yore - when playing games on your phone meant fiddling about with Jave, sending texts to numbers from the back pages of magazines, and discovering the game didn't support your phone's unique screen resolution.

Now, you can relive the one-button classic on your iPhone, with Gamevil's one-tap remake.

You've got to finger the screen each time your anthropomorphic pebble hits the sea, hopefully allowing him to defy the laws of nature and hydroplane for hundreds of metres. Your best distances will appear on Game Center leaderboards.

It's not just your own ropey reflexes and wonky sense of rhythm you'll have to contend with, of course: all sorts of troublesome marine life will make your life hell as you try and avoid octopuses and fish.

This is the defining casual game - the masterful mobile game that the likes of your Canabalt and your Tiny Wings were inspired by. It might not be as deep or sophisticated as those modern-day versions, but its purity lends itself to dangerous compulsiveness.

Just one more go, yeah?

Flick Golf Extreme!
iPhone - £1.79 - Full Fat

Full Fat's first-person putter Flick Golf! is back, and now it's 100 per cent more extreme. Essentially, that means the neatly mown golf courses have been ditched in favour of cascading waterfalls, military aircraft carriers, helicopter pads, and rooftop swimming pools.

The aim of the game is the same, though, Jane. You're greeted with a golf ball and a hole, and you use your finger to flick that dimpled white sphere towards the pin. From the tee, you'll need to contend with hazards (this time they're helicopters instead of bunkers) and the wind.

It's a bit like Flick Kick Football, but with a slightly smaller ball. Which means Flick Golf Extreme! is a simple idea with lots of depth hidden below the surface, lending itself to compulsive play and a Bronze Award for the original.

While this out-of-bounds sequel might be about as "extreme" as a dog wearing sunglasses, we'll settle for any new courses we can get.

iQuarterback 2: Pocket Edition
iPhone - Free - FuzzyCube Software

How about that big game last night, eh? Boy, that man sure grabbed that eggball off the other guy and scored lots of touchdown points, didn't he?

Gee, I guess we'll see that team at the Superb Bowl!

We're huge NFL fans at Pocket Gamer, as you can tell, so this free ball-tossing mini-game suits us perfectly. In iQuarterback 2, you'll be flinging the pigskin at targets to flex your muscles, improve your accuracy, and beat the clock.

If you do well, you'll earn fame points - currency that can be spent on zany items like a giant Panda head, a cowboy hat, an air hockey stadium, and a water melon replacement for the old pigskin.

It's free, so if you like gridiron, give it a go. If you don't, second and down(load) it, anyway.

Tic Toc brings all the fun of the BBC's smash hit Japanese remake Hole in the Wall to iPhone. Well, everything except Anton du Beke. Probably for the best, really.

Anyway, you've got to contort Tic Toc's body into awkward shapes to pass through gaps in an ever-approaching series of walls. You manipulate the blue hero's limbs by grabbing hold of his hands and feet and dragging them about the touchscreen.

That's not all, mind: you'll also have to fend off obstacles, including laser beams, giant crab claws, and falling space rocks. And you've got to do all this while wearing your PJs.

Unless you unlock more costumes, that is. Perform well, and you can ditch your striped jammies for creative new togs like a pair of lederhosen or a tuxedo.