Top 10 games to play on your Nokia Lumia Windows Phone

So Nokia finally revealed its first Windows Phone handset, the Lumia 800, to an expectant crowd at the Excel centre in London.

It’s a sleek, good-looking handset, and one that packs some considerable punch with its 1.4GHz CPU. Naturally, it comes with Nokia’s usual high quality Carl Zeiss lens

But we’re not interested in all that “mumbo jumbo” (as one of the presenters on stage put it). What we really want to see is high quality mobile games running on its ClearBlack AMOLED screen.

Handily for us, Windows Phone Marketplace already has quite a few strong titles to pick from. Here’s our guide as to what to get when the phone launches next month.

No doubt you’ve already played this on Symbian, iOS, or trackside at an F1 grand prix, but for those who haven’t Angry Birds is one of the few games out there that can be safely described as a ‘must play’ mobile game - if only to see what on earth the fuss is about.

Not everybody likes the game. Some dislike the randomness, the music, the way the birds chirp with smug satisfaction when they destroy the poor green swine.

But the majority of people seem absolutely (golden) bananas about this simple physics-based sling-'em-up, and the fact that they number in the hundreds of millions probably means you'll enjoy it too.

You know those games where you play an evil-looking squid thing that finds itself trapped inside a dolphin-headed mad scientist’s stomach after an experiment goes wrong? Tentacles is yet another one of those titles - change the record guys!

Joking aside, Tentacles is a strange mixture of reaction-based tapping (in order to attach your various appendages to the internal walls of various organs) and creepy-yet-funny atmosphere that’s absolutely unique among mobile games.

It’s not particularly easy, though, and it gets a little repetitive before the end. But with console-quality presentation and surreal sense of humour, it’s a game that every Windows Phone owner should at least check out.

One of the first truly great exclusives to come out on Windows Phone, this mobile version of the Xbox Live Arcade hit puzzler is as great to play as it is to look at.

Your task is to guide both ilo and his/her brother/sister milo so that they can reunite in the middle of the level. Stopping you is the level itself, with blocks that need to be picked up and replaced, as well as gravity ‘carpets’ (as I like to call them) that can turn the level upside down.

The first world is fairly easy to complete, but some of the latter ones - which came in a free update a few months after the initial release - are devilishly tricky.

Talking of tricky, Jet Car Stunts takes the biscuit when it comes to punishing the player. It doesn’t even start off particularly easy, either, with your jet car having to navigate across a series of floating pieces of track high up in the sky.

Get the speed, direction, or the angle of flight (you can deploy wings) wrong, and it’s restart time. Over and over and over again.

But, like all good titles, the game is never at fault when you mess up - the tight controls, smooth speed, and consistent physics mean that the only person you can blame when your car falls through the clouds is you.

Another Windows Phone-exclusive, The Harvest doesn’t quite live up to its graphical promises of sweet gaming delight but it does still deliver a fairly hefty blow to the action-RPG chops.

Playing out like a mobile Diablo (with a little less emphasis on the loot-hoarding) your plucky bunch of human sci-fi adventurers have to take down an evil bug-alien horde that has invaded (and essentially destroyed) the earth.

It’s stylish and slick - a really good advertisement for the platform in terms of potential when it launched, and still a fairly entertaining, if a little simple, blast in its own right today.

Like Angry Birds, I’d put a fair amount of cash on most people having encountered, or played, Bejeweled and its many variants over the years.

Bejeweled LIVE! really doesn’t shake up, mess with, or even check that the formula is still bubbling.

What it does add on top of the usual match-three gem-swapping is the addition of Xbox Live friends leaderboard (which will get competitive, trust me on that), achievements, and one of the most annoyingly hard to put down mobile games devised.

It’s almost a rule that any Wii game that uses the Wiimote to draw on the screen ends up less precise than the trusty touchscreen, and this holds true when applied to the excellent Max and the Magic Marker.

In this overlooked WiiWare gem you play as the titular Max, forming platforms and solving puzzles by drawing items into the platform world he inhabits.

It’s easy to play, imaginative, and forgiving, making it a great game for the young ‘uns when they’re inevitably drawn to your new Lumia by its rather fetching design.

I know these two aren’t technically the most inspiring choices for a top ten games list, but you have to admit that, as far as mobile games go, Suduko and Minesweeper are quick, simple, and annoyingly good at eating away the spare minute or two.

They’re also not quite the games you remember from the PC/sunday papers, either. The Microsoft first-party double-bill features an XP system, power-ups, Live achievements, and friends’ leaderboards, as well as extra time/combo-based modes that help make things a little more tense.

They’re also both free, so there’s no reason that they shouldn’t be one of the first ports of call for any new Lumia owner.

Hey, look - it’s another Windows Phone-exclusive! While the title does sound awfully like the neon-drenched Pac-Man title that's available on iPhone and Java, the ‘DX’ at the end gives this title away as being the most modern of the Pac-Man remakes.

Indeed, it’s so modern that gone is the usual “navigate maze and collect pills” and in its place comes “navigate through maze, collect pills, and all aboard the ghost train! Toot toot!”.

Okay, so there's no train. But every stage features sleeping ghosts (as well as the usual marauding poltergeists) that wake up as you pass before forming into a neat little line behind the Pac.

Munch a power pill and suddenly that train of spectres turns into a shower of glorious neon-drenched points. Toot toot!

Yet another (yawn) Windows Phone exclusive that you can’t play anywhere else, the excitably titled Hydro Thunder GO! is the latest in the futuristic hover-craft racing series that had previously been only available on consoles.

Each of the craft has its own big massive booster strapped to the back, while the graphics (the water in particular) are ‘leagues’ above other mobile racers.

The fantastic water effects did manage to topple my HTC Mozart on occasions, but that shouldn’t be a problem for the Lumia, which sports a far more impressive 1.4GHz CPU.