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The best iPhone and iPad games this week - Bitcoin Billionaire, and more

Tick, tock, tap, splosh

The best iPhone and iPad games this week - Bitcoin Billionaire, and more

Every week Pocket Gamer offers hands-on impressions of the week's three best new iPhone and iPad games.

Bitcoin Billionaire
By Noodlecake Studios - download now on iPhone and iPad (free)
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Bitcoin Billionaire is a staggeringly pointless free to play confection that sees you tapping the screen to mine bitcoins. The faster you tap, the faster they come.

With your bitcoins you buy investments, which increase the number of bitcoins each tap yields. While you tap the screen, drones fly past carrying gifts of extra bitcoins, and emails arrive containing news, some of it good and some of it bad, but all of it relating to bitcoins.

Sometimes the game offers you a little swap: 30 seconds of banner ads or a video in exchange for, yep, more bitcoins. Bitcoins. Upgrades. Double down. Bitcoins. For the next 30 seconds 30 times as many bitcoins. Look at all those bitcoins! (Bitcoins.)

You can spend real money on hard currency, but the temptation isn't great because the process of mining bitcoins is strangely mesmerising and the goal in any case is simply to have more bitcoins.

Bitcoins.

Briquid Mini
By Gamious - buy on iPhone and iPad (69p / 99c)
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Briquid Mini is a bit like Where's My Water? but made entirely of squares. Each stage is a grid filled with various arrangements of blocks, some water, and a yellow outline indicating where the water needs to go.

Tapping on a block makes it disappear, and tapping on an empty space makes a block appear there. Doing either of these things uses up a move, and you have a limited supply in each stage. The water, being water, flows up, down, left, or right depending on which way you're holding your device.

It's a simple premise that succeeds thanks to a chunky interface and some punishingly difficult puzzles. You could argue that it forces you too soon into the realm of trial and error, but the trial and error is so much fun that it would be churlish to complain.

.NOON.
By Fallen Tree Games - download on iPhone and iPad (free)
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.NOON. is yet another one of those ingenious panic-inducing, finger-tripping, hyper-modern, rock-hard casual games that work so well on touchscreen.

The screen is split into four bands, each of which contains a basic clockface with a single marking and a single hand. The aim is to tap the screen as the hand sweeps past the marking to earn a point.

This gets increasingly difficult as the game meddles with the formula, varying the speeds of the hands and the placements of the markings, making clockfaces appear in duplicate, and so on.

It's infuriatingly difficult (the world record at the time of writing is 96), but the interface is clean and it takes no time at all to restart whenever you die, giving .NOON. all of the requisite characteristics of a serviceable twitch game.

That's what we think. Now tell us what YOU think.
Rob Hearn
Rob Hearn
Having obtained a distinguished education, Rob became Steel Media's managing editor, now he's no longer here though.