The App Stork: Introducing Arrr! Pirates V.S. Aliens, Taxi Jam, GeoRain...

If this week’s haul isn’t a compelling reason to start paying very close attention to the iPhone and iPod touch developer news section of our forums, then maybe you ought to just give up on iPhone gaming altogether. The standard of the titles picked out by the App Stork this week is particularly high and, as ever, the prices are typically rock bottom.

But it’s not just Joe and Jane public that stand to benefit from our forums. If you're a developer, particularly one struggling to get its game noticed, our forums should be your next visit. Why? Because we actively canvass it for games to cover, whether that be for review, for our videos section, for news, or here on the App Stork.

Links to YouTube, company websites and iTunes are all very much permitted and welcomed, so if it’s a platform for free plugging you are looking for, your search has officially come to an end.

If anyone tries out any of the games posted in our forums, it would be fantastic if you could drop a post or two to let the developers know what you think. They are making them for you, after all.

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Arrr! Pirates V.S. Aliens - Red Knight Learning Systems

As far as titles for games go, Arrr! Pirates V.S. Aliens belongs in the drawer marked ‘Genius’. The game, which is an on-rails gallery shooter, has you manning the cannon of a pirate ship in order to swashbuckle the gooey green stuffing out of a swarm of invading extra terrestrials.

The pseudo 3D visuals are extremely impressive and all the humour you would expect of a title called Arrr! Pirates V.S. Aliens is very much aboard. The price of £0.59 is almost an insult to such a polished and accomplished looking title, so unless your brain has been liquidised by evil beings from another planet, you have no excuse for not giving this a try.

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Taxi Jam - Nerve Media It might be unfair to compare Taxi Jam to Flight Control, but there are definitely shades of Firemint’s classic title apparent in Nerv Media’s most recent iPhone effort. That’s not to say that the game is unoriginal - far from it. Taxi Jam lets the player control the number of vehicles on the screen, where balancing progression against the ever increasing street obstacles is the main challenge.

It looks great, too, with three cities to master, each with its own unique set of obstacles and taxi designs. The game isn’t out yet, but Nerv Media’s website has an assuring ‘Coming Soon’ banner, so keep an eye out on the App Store (and our forums) to find out when Taxi Jam is set to pick up its first fare.

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GeoRain - PR2 Studio Nothing like a bit of speedy object recognition to put your most simple cognitive powers through their paces. GeoRain challenges you to place coloured shapes in the correct corner of the screen in as little time as possible. It’s probably a bit more complicated than it sounds, due to the inclusion of the mysterious sounding good and bad Geos, but the video below is proof enough of the challenge involved.

There’s a unique multiplayer mode called Scoreloop, where you can challenge anyone on the online score board, but you can also build buddy lists and organise less impersonal multiplayer games. Again, what is there to hold you back here when you only need to give up £0.59 for the pleasure of satisfying your curiosity?

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More iPhone games from the forum

Drums Challenge
Shuffled
Awesome Mind Teaser
DownToZero