The Friday Five: This week's best iPhone games (April 15 2011)
Subs, Goo, Rage, Defense, Life
Welcome back to the Friday Five, a weekly round-up of the best handheld games. As we're still experimenting with the formula, this week we've ditched the likes of PSP and Android in favour of all iPhone, all the time. Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
We've got a lot of time off coming up soon - Easter, a bunch of bank holidays, and some wedding or other - so we need plenty of games to keep us occupied.
The lengthy campaign of World of Goo and endless replay-ability of A.I.R Defense certainly fit the bill, but I'm not sure how long One Single Life will keep your occupied.
World of GooiPhone - £1.79 - 2D Boy
2D Boy's goopy indie puzzler has finally hit the iPhone, as 2D Boy turns the iPad World of Goo into a universal app and releases a separate, cheaper download for iPhone only.
World of Goo sees you building towers and bridges and structures out of stretchy goo balls, to build a safe pathway for your sentient blobs of slime. As the game progress you'll find new types of oozing goo, weird creatures, complicated puzzles, and some seriously tough stages. It's all presented in a gorgeous art style with a brilliant, ambient soundtrack.
Once you've saved a few squirming goo balls you can head to the World of Goo Corporation's mysterious sandbox to start building.
Here, you can turn your liberated slimelets into a hulking great skyscraper of Herculean proportions, and cackle in glee as your towering creation rockets past your friends' feeble attempts at gooey architecture.
Streets of Rage 2iPhone - £1.79 - Sega
This must feel like a royal kick in the goolies: days after Sega stamped down on Bomber Games's mammoth Streets of Rage remake project - an obsessive, eight year project to mash-up all three Streets of Rage titles into one hand-made game - the publisher has gone ahead and released its own Rage remake.
It's definitely not in the same ballpark as Bomber Games's endeavour: what we have here is a Mega Drive port with painfully few options and local Bluetooth multiplayer only. But if you fancy getting your brawl on with this '90s Sega classic, it's a faithful enough port.
Your job, as the creatively named Skate, Axel, Blaze, and Max, is to smash through every bad guy on your path to Mr. X and save Adam, the hero of the first Streets of Rage.
You can punch and kick your way through the street tussles if you fancy, but you'll have better luck picking up a lead pipe, katana sword, golf club, or grenade.
A.I.R DefenseiPhone - 59p - Chillingo
Chillingo's A.I.R Defense mixes up two of the iPhone's top genres: the line-drawing finger fun of Flight Control and the tower defence strategy of Fieldrunners.
To defend your neon green base from attackers you'll need to choose the best vehicles from your arsenal and then send them out to rain destruction by sketching their path with your pinky.
As the screen fills up with an ocean of alien turrets, tanks, and super bosses, you've got to work fast to send out a defensive wave of jets and choppers.
There's a story-driven Campaign mode to go through, and an endless Survival mode to see just how long you can last against a ceaseless wave of alien attackers. Your best score will end up on the app's Game Center leaderboards.
Pirate Subs!!!iPhone and iPad (universal) - 59p - Super Boise
Pirate Subs!!! (their emphasis, definitely not ours) could be best described as Fruit Ninja, but with all the bananas, strawberries, kiwis, and melons replaced with sub-aquatic death ships, piloted by a band of nautical nasties. And instead of slashing them up with a sword, you blow them out of the sea with a nuke.
Admittedly, the comparison to Fruit Ninja is falling apart with every word. But it's all about the raw satisfaction of causing destruction with a swipe and prod of your favourite digit. To wreck subs simply tap them, keep a few juggled in the air, and then slash your pinky across the screen to nuke them into orbit.
This feature-packed app also comes with Game Center support, online multiplayer, a wacky Cheat mode, and it's universal. It's all rather SUBlime! (Kill me).
One Single LifeiPhone - Free - FreshTone Games
In this experimental app, you've got one life. It's a simple parkour-style game that has you timing a gigantic leaps between skyscrapers. But fluff your jump - jump too soon and splat against the side of a building, or jump too late and tumble to the ground - and you'll die, for good.
You can practise every level as many times as you like before doing the real deal, but once your tie-wearing daredevil is stood atop those giant rooftops it's go time. Make the leap and you'll pass, fall to the ground, and it's Game Over. For good.
Lead designer Anthony O'Dempsey says he came up with the idea when he realised that typical games do away with genuine emotions like fear and anxiety because you know that a bungled jump in Super Mario will just send you back to the last checkpoint. What if, O'Dempsey thought, he could make your in-game mortality feel more palpable.
"I wanted to make a game which asks 'Do I have what it takes when it matters most?'," he says.
Well, do you? Let us know how far you got in the comments below.
