Regardless, Rubber Knife Throw is a surprisingly fun game, with surprisingly good graphics. Given the simplicity of the game, I would think the developers, NANEV, would sway more in favor of cartoonish, lighthearted graphics, like fellow knife game Knife Toss (you may read the review here), just to keep the game simple, as the setting dictates. Instead, the graphics are fairly top notch, with smooth animations – even the Help screen is impressive, with info pages floating around in a black abyss for you to fiddle around with and bring closer to read. You have the option to select either a “chick” or “dude” to be your assistant affixed to the revolving wheel, and you may choose a difficulty of easy, normal or nightmare. Given the difficult even of easy mode, I have yet to stray onto nightmare grounds.

Your dude assistant, should you choose a male, is clad in skintight leather pants and an accompanying skintight white muscle shirt, his arms akimbo, legs spread eagle, and his eyes staring at you in cool concentration, his lips parted almost in a smile. The chick, or female, is your typical bombshell – blonde, tan, taut and firm, with skintight, breast-enhancing bustier and exposed midriff. She wears black leggings beneath a fluttering miniskirt, and dons these gladiator wedges with zigzagging, yellow laces that look as if they’d be a real pain to put on. The wheel upon which your assistant is affixed is wooden, with some painted details, and plenty of yellow, red, and blue balloons that pop up magically, along with the odd bomb, and ticking clock, which you must disarm and hit for more time, respectively. The wheel changes direction sporadically, and new balloons pop up faster, and in more numbers, each time you clear the board; bombs become more spread out, and eventually become parabombs, a trickier version of the first bombs. Should you ever throw a knife mistakenly on your assistant, or should a bomb explode without your disarming it, a point is taken away for your indiscretion. To counteract these negatives, if you pop balloons in a row, you get combo points which really boost your score. Throwing the knife, itself, is really easy to learn – simple hold down your thumb on the lower right corner of the screen to zoom in, a bullseye appearing to aim with, and then tap with your other thumb on the lower left once your aim is on target.

There’s not much else to this game, so enjoy it for its simplicity, and for its attractive characters. There’s no denying the slight sadism to the game, with its darkly saturated colors, sexualized characters, and brooding music. I almost feel that if I were given a chance to look around the room, away from the room, I would see people laying on needle beds, others stepping upon then, and more leather clad people with whips. Or, in another fantastical light, I would half-expect to see magicians performing strange apothecary rituals, or other circus eccentrics practicing their dangerous, and highly suspect crafts. I always did like the dark side to the circus.

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iPad

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The game opens with a swingy rockabilly number that makes you want to dress in four inch heels, skintight black pants, and pizazz your way around a dimly lit red room, with all the rancorous excitement of a zoot-suit wearing, fedora-donning band, of course. The music conveys well the rush of the game, because all BirdStrike entails is you shooting a bug-eyed blue bird through the sky – flung, at first, from a tightly bound trapeze wire, and then literally skyrocketed up, up and away, into the clouds and beyond, collecting seeds and other points along the way.  The blue bird, with all his unassuming birdie air, is completely willing to put his pea-sized birdie brain into danger, slamming into objects both on the way up and down, and just generally willing to put his life in your hands. I thought his name funny, and in some odd way, fitting for a classic bird who might otherwise be named the cliche Birdie, Petey, or Chickie – his name is Gerald.

When Gerald is launched from the bottom of the screen, you’ll notice a row of red and white striped rockets right above him. As you fling Gerald into the air, he straps on one of these rockets to launch himself quickly up, where the rocket eventually fizzles, and you must make the quick decision to either steer him toward another rocket plugged stationary up there, or steer Gerald as he’s falling down to one of the rockets left below. Steering Gerald is just a matter of tilting your iPhone left and right, and to make matters easier when a rocket fizzles, he flutters stationary for a moment, before pitching his head down and plummeting in a nosedive toward the ground. Gerald, for all aristocratic, dated names, is one daring fellow.

After turning into a flaming, green inferno.

Just when you think you’ve successfully maneuvered Gerald into the safe, upper reaches of the sky, you encounter a UFO, with green lights and one, extendable, robotic arm, that shoots Gerald with one ZZAPP, turning him into a burning ball of green and yellow flames. But, take no pity on your keen, feathered friend. Gerald takes this as an opportunity to destroy any hindrances on the way down, a bit like an act of revenge – you earn points by colliding the burning Gerald with scaffolding, and other things that he would, in his normal blue-feathered state, bump his head upon. 300 points are earned for each object you destroy, which rewards you more than all the eggs you collect, which are 200 points apiece. The best way to earn points in this game is to steer Gerald clear of any obstacles – the game awards you a whopping 2600 points for a certain chunk of time spent in clean flight.

Oh no!!

Other than the flying around, the rockets, the bumping of Gerald’s head, and his transformation into a ball of fury, there’s not much to this game. If you’re looking for more levels, more action, more complexity, please look elsewhere. Birdstrike is straightforward meaningless, in the best way possible. You launch a bird, you pay attention, avoid obstacles, try to rack up points, and enjoy the highly pleasing graphics and sound effects. It’s silly, frivolous, and giddy wrapped in one blue bird. Didn’t I tell you it was a good way to start the morning?

The game is one of carefully calculated maneuvers, coupled with feline reflexes, a predictive range of sight, and just some general know-how when it comes to pendulum swings and the ensuing momentum and velocity. Sound intriguing? Well, it’s not quite that in depth, but it’s still really engaging, and does employ some of the aforementioned characteristics. The game opens, without warning, to a scene of magma encrusted rocks with gray spheres dotting the screen at random locations, with your ascent ball centered at the bottom. The music is melancholy sci-fi, swimming in a thudding, murky mystery, and getting you lost in the ether – it’s an odd combination with the game’s setting, but somehow works at getting you more engrossed. At first, it might take you awhile (less, though, now that you’re reading this review) before you figure out that your ball takes ascent by latching, by magnetic tractor beam it seems, to the randomly assorted gray balls that hover onscreen. According to the tutorial – a tutorial that actually makes the game easier to understand, unlike most games – these gray balls are mines, currently unarmed. To ascend to the upper echelons of the the magma filled center of earth, and then beyond, you must hoist yourself up with the assistance of these mines, taking care to let go, after building the proper momentum, so you can fling yourself away from any proximity to the mine, to avoid colliding with it. Why? Because once you grapple onto a mine, that particular mine becomes armed, and we all know what happens to an armed mine once touched – KABLOOIE! Should you ever forget that mines are dangerous, the game reminds you by affixing a giant, red, warning target around the mine in use. Yes, I highly recommend not touching any mines, if you can help it, otherwise it’s game over, and start from the bottom again you must. To make matters more difficult, there is more than one kind of mine, because mines that simply explode upon contact, apparently, isn’t interesting enough for both the consumer and developer. No, there are mines that fall once you attach to them, mines that aren’t affected by your grapple, mines, thankfully, that give you a much needed upward boost, and mines, even, that will chase you for a bit after using them. Scary. Power-ups will help you in your route, things like Sticky Ascenders that make your ball stick to the wall, and Ascender Shields that protect you from explosions.

Based on this convoluted description, you may be leery of the game, thinking it too confounding to handle. Well, trust me, it is a difficult game – I have yet to see any scenescape other than the magma fields – but it’s well worth your time, and yes, even frustration. Ascent could very well be the most captivating, simple game I’ve come across, and this is no small feat to accomplish. It has all the addictiveness of Doodle Jump, with just as much difficulty, requiring you to develop a keen awareness of the sensitivity of your every move, your every decision. The movements are fluid, and the physics realistic – depending on the velocity of your ball’s upward projectile, you may find that grappling onto the a faraway mine may result in your ball crashing at the bottom, the downward momentum too much for your stretchy tractor beam to handle, and your weight bearing too much a load on the mine, gravity pulling it down with you (not all of them are statically positioned). It’s a bit like a bungee cord, your tractor beam, so you would be wise to think in terms of relative distance and how it affects your speed. Then again, don’t always rely on using nearby mines because you may just underestimate the speed at which you’re pulled toward them, resulting in a surprising collision and game over. Ascent certainly keeps you on your toes, and that is its most compelling feature.

Well, that and you’re playing as a geodesic ball hurtling through the nether regions of the planet by magnetic fields surrounding mines. That’s pretty compelling, too.

*Lets out primal scream*

GGRRRRRRRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAWWWWRRRRRR!!!

Okay, maybe that’s more of a animal roar, equivalent to me morphing into some hairy creature, with large, glistening fangs, and tearing off my shirt to make way for my expanding, beastly chest. Why the screaming? The panting and pounding of the chest, the wrath? Fly-Flap, a new game by AstalaVista. Trust me when I say those flies can be so pesky.

Of course, frustration isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Frustration can indicate either a ridiculously impossible scenario, or something that proves challenging enough to force you into repeated plays. Fly-Flap falls into the latter category: the game is solidly difficult. It challenges your reaction rate and finger speed by challenging you to kill flies and avoid beetles, at increasingly manic speeds. In some levels spiders appear, to your much-needed aid, and provide you with a means to double your points by slurping down any fly you drag to their mouths. They gobble them down and zip away off screen, but be careful not to tap on the spiders by accident, or you’ll send them falling to the ground, a slight scream escaping from their spider mouths. Their screams, along with the other sounds in this game, are apparently manufactured by the developers, themselves – and by manufactured I mean straight from their mouths. Oh yes, those screams and buzzes, and, yes, even the irksome,

Spiders will eat flies for you and double your points.

snickering, slightly evil and beckoning “mehehehhehehehehe” sound the flies make are all brilliantly contorted from the developer’s vocal chords. I must give them a lot of credit for this because the sounds are all top-notch, if slightly eccentric.

Fly-Flap offers two game modes, Arcade and Campaign, the first of which entertains you silly with more and more flies, at faster and more blinding speeds, and the second of which offers a more structured gameplay, with levels and specific objectives. I preferred Campaign mode right off the bat, on principle alone – levels with explicit directions give me focus, a well-established goal to work toward. And, trust me, the objectives are not easy. Starting off on the second level, you must feed 10 flies to a hungry spider in one minute, while killing other hordes of flies that appear onscreen. In any other game, this would be an easy feat, but in Fly-Flap you have something called a lifemeter that loses life whenever you miss squishing a fly and tap the air, instead. That’s right, you’re actually punished for missing, and the game will end if your lifemeter runs out. Secondly, to actually earn the points you deserve for squishing the flies, you must also tap the point bubbles they release two seconds after the fact. Given the mad speed at which you’ll be squishing flies in this game, it’s not always an easy task to pop all the bubbles – you’re almost guaranteed to lose out on 500 points per round.

Whatever you do, DON'T TOUCH THE BEATLES. Period.

As you progress through the levels, you’re given various aids and bonuses to help you in your quest to rid nature of flies – poison, anti-bug spray (kills a multitude of flies at once), horns (frightens enemies), blinding (makes flies stop), slowdowns (no explanation needed), and more. Beetles are also introduced, and these are bugs you want absolutely nothing to do with. They’re only good for making you lose the game, erupting in a flurry of purple and pink gas that encases surrounding flies, and basically calls the Game Over title to appear. Definitely avoid tapping on these suckers.

Overall, the graphics are good, the sounds amusing, and the gameplay challenging and quirky enough to keep things interesting. I was actually pleasantly surprised at how entertaining the game was, and I will probably return for a few more rounds. I wish the game wasn’t quite so hard – sometimes it’s exceedingly difficult to aim for the flies, and sometimes it feels as if my finger taps aren’t registering – but in a way I relish the near impossibility. Far too many games are quick to play and over in a flash, so why not embrace Fly-Flap’s challenge and enjoy a little bug squishing?

Let me introduce you to my latest addiction, in my cathedral compendium of addictions, mind you, but an addiction nevertheless – Chop Chop Ninja by Gamerizon has surpassed other games in its side-scrolling ilk as my go-to game, one that I can pick up and put down at ease, but one that manages to contain enough of a detailed storyline, and enough main quests and boss characters to distinguish it from simpler games. It’s plucky, almost, with cartoonish, Samurai Jack type illustrations, cutesy cliche Asian music of the harmonic harp type, and a main character who zips and flies around onscreen, to every light brush of your fingertips. To merely say this game is both entertaining and well-made is do it an injustice. The game is, for lack of a better word, stupendous. And, it’s free.

You play as Iro, an aggressive little fellow, despite, seemingly, all bushido code, seeking to rescue his geisha love, in this case, the Emperor’s Daughter, from her ghastly stone-bodied curse (you gotta save the princess if I make a comparison to Mario). To do so, he assists a long, white-bearded wise man in finding the rare ingredients necessary to concoct the “old elixir” to bring her back. He makes up for his small stature with flying kicks of tremendous force, and a frog-like ability to leap and bound like no other mortal creature. The gunmetal gray of his kimono is wrapped snugly to his taut body with blood red sashes, one straight across his forehead, reflecting the very same red rimming his bloodshot eyes. This guy means business, and the way he torpedoes around the screen, bashing samurais left and right as they charge at him, swords drawn, I’m surprised anyone attacks him at all.

The quest is to find three ingredients, starting with the Cloudy Monk Sake, the Leaf of an Ancient Bamboo, and then the Poison of the Royal Scorpion. For each, you must battle enemies like the Kosugi Army in places like The Shadow World. Very cool. Controlling your little ninja is a piece of cake – much like how, I’m sure, he views fighting his opponent horde. There’s no D-Pad to be seen anywhere (*breaths sigh of relief*), and the entire screen acts as a canvas, no visual hindrances of

These guys really like to crowd you in

any kind indicating where you need to touch, where you need to tap, to create certain movements. This controlling style turned out to be more intuitive than I thought it’d be – I thought I’d just be jamming my fingers and thumbs around, completely obscuring my vision at moments of peril. Instead, having the entire screen act as your touch interface just makes… sense. To move your ninja, hold your finger down on the screen in the direction you’d like him to run – e.g. somewhere to the right to run right, somewhere to the left to run left. To jump, tap onscreen where you’d like him to jump. Don’t be fooled – it is a little tricky at first because we’re all used to concrete “finger boundaries”, I suppose you could say, but in this game, you soon learn how to adjust your taps and holds to create the movements you want. Attacking follows the same principles: tap behind an enemy to sling your ninja in a kicking and punching fury toward that opponent; tap a bit upwards of the enemy to result in uppercut combos. It’s all pretty slick and suave, if I may say so myself, utilizing the entire screen as so.

That's right - ninjas have their own rockets.

The one real problem I encountered with this gameplay strategy is that sometimes, when encountering large boxes I’d like to move, it’s ridiculously hard to simply push them to where I want, and not kick them to smithereens. I get it, Ninja guy, you’re pissed. Your lovely dame was taken from you and the whole world is painted red, as far as you’re concerned. But, please, you’re a little kick happy. Save your joints for the ones that fight back. But, as a whole, the game is flawless. It’s fun, the characters are curious and variable, not stagnant and boring; the illustrations are great; the animations are stellar (smooth even, on the 3G); and, the background story piques the curiosity enough with just the right amount of fantasy quirk. If I wanted to challenge the developers with anything, it’d be, “Why isn’t this game longer?”

Like I said, it’s Mario Brothers meets Crouching Tiger. How can you go wrong?

Despite its eccentric title worthy of some 1980s spoof horror film, Speargun Hunter 3D  by Yossi Malki is a deceptively good game. Once you get past the dated-looking intro screen, and the hokey ringtones that accompany any tab selection, the game proves to have decent graphics – at par with DeerHunter 3D and what you’d expect from other hunting games – and a very decent spectrum of sound effects, ranging from your snorkeling tube releasing air bubbles, to the thick, almost soupy kick of your fins, and the trickling echo, the eerie drone that permeates the

Aiming can be tricky - use your fins to catch up with those fishies

ocean below. I took amusement in one comment a user posted on the iTunes Store about how the only thing he heard was, “the sound of my fins and my tank.” *pause* Well, what do you expect? You’re underwater… in the ocean… in skintight rubber. Do you expect there to be sound in space, too? Star Wars is fiction, little fella. On a different note, I was pleasantly surprised at the range of fish exhibited in this game, in particular the attention to detail the developers gave to the Yellowfin Tuna, and the Groupper. Fish aficionados can rest assured that the different fish species are easily identifiable – and, of course, what ocean would be complete without an ominous, great white shark?

The game is presented through the first person vision of your scuba diving character. Your view is encapsulated by the perimeter of your goggles – as they would when actually scuba diving – and your depth and health are monitored right where your air intake valve would be. To the right are your controls for both kicking your fins for a burst of speed, and to shoot your speargun weapon, when the moment to strike occurs. On the left is your motion control, in the form of a poorly-constructed joystick that proves to be insensitive to touch, unless you precariously center your thumb on the center at all times – a task more difficult than it sounds. The tilting control proves even more difficult to manage – at least the joystick is easy to operate, if a little stubborn at times. Your oxygen is monitored by a yellow tube to the left of your air intake valve. It seems you’re at a constant risk of low supply, or else you have the smallest capacity tank on the market, because you sure

Don't mess with the Great White Shark. Trust me.

do run out of oxygen fast in this game. Be prepared to swim to the surface to resupply, otherwise you’ll be swimming with the fish permanently.

The game is divided up into 10 levels, with different objectives for each. In the free version for Speargun Hunter, only the first three are available, and then the option to upgrade is presented as an option for $0.99. When learning the controls, the first level seems like a huge challenge – learning to aim with the joystick took a few minutes, and even then the fish swim about erratically, as they seem to do in life, making aiming that much more frustrating. To boot, there are sharks, stingrays and other predators floating around, and they’ll eat the fish if you’re not quick enough to spear them first – or, even worse, if your aim is a little off, you may end up spearing them, instead, and then, boy, are you in a world of trouble. Or, should I say, ocean of trouble? If I were physically in the ocean, I’d probably be draining all my oxygen just hyperventilating in anger. Hey, I just solved the mystery of why your character is always low on oxygen.

Despite the slight lagginess (it’s probably better on the 3GS model), Speargun Hunter distracted me enough with its cool, blue jets of light streaming into the depths of the ocean environment, radiating off the shark as it swum past me, its black, expressionless eyes staring out at nothing, and yet everything. If the gameplay were not up to snuff, the game is beautiful enough to keep you returning to it again and again; thankfully, the gameplay is up to snuff, and the challenges posed in each level get progressively more tricky, keeping you at the edge of your fins. If you haven’t strapped on the scuba gear before, you can at least try out this game, and battle a shark head on.

It was only until I started the game that I started to feel a bit calculating about my prematurely positive assessment of the game. Not that it’s a bad game, no, not at all – it certainly is fun to play and the graphics are surprisingly good. It’s just… how do I put this? Boring. It almost seems oxymoronic, doesn’t it? A phenomenon of some kind, to have a war game that manages to be boring, despite having action, or at least, what the game considers to be action. And yet, at the same time, the game isn’t boring at all – it’s just formulaic, a tragedy that befalls many an app in the iTunes Store. After a good 10 minutes of playing Open Fire Gold I vividly recalled a time when I was reading a book on Bedouins for a Senior Seminar. When asked what I thought about the book, I, without hesitation, said it was, “as dry and dusty as the desert, itself.”

The game is straightforward, almost too straightforward to play. There is only one scene, a desert, but I must digress: at least it’s a good one. The textures and colors are all good, and the setting, itself, is hardly boring to behold with hilly dunes in the background and a few, scattered palm trees that bring some vividness to an otherwise dead scene. The enemy tanks, when they appear, are well-illustrated, and animated well, particularly when they explode under your directed missile attacks. I have to ponder, though: whose tanks are these? Funnily enough, they most resemble the M3 Stuart tank (oh yea, the one used by Tank Girl), with their disproportionately small upper turrets, but that’s an obsolete U.S. military creation. Unless forces somewhere in the Middle East adopted the use of this weaponry, who are we fighting in this game? Better question, who are we? I suppose both of these question are irrelevant so long as we’re enjoying blowing up tanks with our missiles and mines, but I can’t help but wonder what the developers had in mind.

As for playing, the only objective is to destroy the onslaught of fairly slow-moving tanks with your missiles, shot with a finger tap from a seemingly unknown location on screen. The fact that the missiles seem to fire from a random location, in relation to where you tap onscreen, can make it a little difficult to aim. The missiles seem to destroy the smaller tanks with only one shot, but the larger tanks, the ones that resemble more an M1 Abrams Tank (yet another U.S. military machine), take two more shots. They do, however, blow up readily from a mine explosion, so make sure you tap with two fingers to place mines about onscreen – they come in handy when brigades of 5 or more tanks show up. Blue and red squares fall from the screen as bonuses, which, when fired upon, give you the ability to shoot faster, and the upgrade to shoot three missiles at once, respectively. If you blow up enough tanks in a short period of time – as indicated by the cursor bar on the upper right of the screen – a robotic turret comes around to help you out in the war zone.

The options are all good, and I like the two upgrades, but after shooting at an endless stream of tanks, trying to prevent any from escaping off the left side of the screen, you can’t help but wonder: is this really it? Not even bigger, badder enemies? No more upgrades? No way to improve your health? There’s just a little bit missing from what could potentially be a riveting game.

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Taken a little early when I hadn't upgraded, but really, it doesn't look much different now than it did at the time of this screenshot.

Let me start off by saying that Dragon Slaying ain’t easy. I suppose that’s to be expected when battling ancient beasts. You’re a single man, equipped with a single, stationary crossbow of mediocre power, that requires a slow, pulling back of the arrow for range, to then release and strike one flying dinosaur at a time. Another man accompanies you, awash perilously on the open waters with his small sailboat, assisting you only in gathering the dead meat of your fallen enemies, to make what I can only imagine to be the toughest meat patties ever. Food is of some value to this game, though of what I know not – I’ve played endless rounds of this game, with food supplies always hovering around 110 – 150, with seemingly no consequence, good or bad, for me. The most important element to this game is most assuredly the upgrading options: your single crossbow can only work so well, even with excellent marksmanship, and dinosaurs that appear in later levels require more arrow strikes to be killed. The first upgrade you’ll want, probably around Level 5 – when the purple, fire-breathing dinosaurs appear – is to increase your arrow’s hit points; of course, you have to save up 3,000 gold to invest in a laboratory first, before upgrading your arrows becomes a viable option. It makes a huge difference, and it’ll give you time to save for other important upgrades, like increasing your castle’s hitpoints, or shooting multiple arrows, perhaps building a forge.

The one, glaring problem with Dinosaur Slayer is that you probably will never see any of the cooler upgrades – things like mage guilds, magical powers, better arrows, and so forth. Generally, anything past the first row of upgrades takes some serious mastery at this game before you can even conceive of saving 20,000 gold. That’s a lot of gold for this game, when you collect a mere 50 gold or so per dinosaur you slay (maybe 10 appear per level). Of course, I imagine killing the boss has the potential to reap great rewards, but I have yet to beat the first boss -

These guys take 3 shots to kill if you haven't upgraded your arrows.

whether it’s the first of many, or the only one I cannot tell, because the bloody beast is so ridiculously difficult, and my castle cannot withstand the fiery punishment, that I lose within a matter of minutes. Glowing orbs appear where you’re supposed to strike with your arrows, but the ones situated near his back require you aiming around his head, which is so large that the arrows usually bounce right off its steely frame. Frustration city.

Upgrading aside, the game is actually really fun, and I thoroughly enjoy aiming for and killing the dinosaurs. The arrows make a nice thwump noise upon striking their flesh, and the dinosaurs screech before plummeting down to the water, where my trusty companion takes his time wading over to their floating bodies. The multiple arrows ability is super handy, and it’s utterly satisfying seeing two flying beasts go down at the same time. There’s a bit of strategy involved when moving the crossbow up and down (move your finger up and down along the screen), and it takes some adjustment to finally figure out a seamless way of aiming. I can seriously say I will continue playing this game until I defeat the boss dinosaur, this massive creature with beating wings that I must hit in certain spots to injure, and theoretically, eventually kill. Whether I continue playing the game after that is up in the air, but given the way things have been going, I’ll be playing Dinosaur Slayer for a really long time.

Curse you, oh undefeated nemesis!

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In Soul the game starts with a beating heart on a black screen, with the title Soul etched faintly in glowing blue white. A beating heart in a black setting always conjures the most vivid of horror movies for me, so upon the sound of the flatline and the staticky emergence of the game, itself, I was gripped. The background story is vague, scant on those illustrious details inappropriate for most horror games, the only information given that you’re a dead man whose soul is on its path to heaven. It’s the mystery and unknown that keeps us wanting more, isn’t it?

Your dead character was, apparently, short on the good deeds in life because it seems his soul is stuck somewhere in limbo, stuck at the River Styx before the Elysian Fields, the blackness that pervades in between Heaven and Hell – the no man’s land, if you will. To find your way to Heaven, you must navigate the corridors of your once home, now dank and dark, twisted hellishly into some murky underworld rife with frightening monsters that gnash at you from within the darkness in the walls. It’s always the most unsuspecting moment when they strike, their blood red eyes focused intently on you, and deadly growls emitting from deep within their purple throats. Your soul, in the shape of a bright, white glowing orb, must carefully avoid these hellion creatures, and even the walls and floors. Souls are fragile things, shattered, apparently, by the most mundane of worldly objects.

The game maintains its creepy atmosphere with the usual tricks: flickering lights, dim corridors, the humming of elevators and washing machines from a decrepit building, the echoing of footsteps from an unknown source. What really ups the creep factor, though, are the excellent illustrations. Soul has all the grisly panache of a graphic novel, right down to the carefully sketched cracks in the plastered walls, exposing a section of layered brick beneath. The whole game has a sickly, gray pallor to it, tinged with green. The sound effects and the aesthetics, alone, make this game worth the great deal of frustration it is to actually play the game.

I played on Easy Mode (there is also Normal and Nightmare – I fret thinking about anything more difficult than Easy) and it was enough to make my palms sweat, not only in fear, but in rage. Your soul will shatter into a million splinters of light the moment you touch anything – anything at all. You can hold your finger on the screen to see the entire level, which really helps in figuring out the correct pathway -  choose the wrong way, and you’ll most likely run into a dead end, usually with some horrific beast ready to chomp you to bits. Navigating is just a matter of tilting your iPhone this way and that, but the dim lighting sometimes makes it difficult to play this game during broad daylight. I suppose it’s the developer’s secret desire to make this game easier to play at night; too bad half of my brain is screaming FU** THAT. Every now and then your soul runs through ghouls that bear a very similar appearance to Samara from The Ring, which is probably one of the scariest creature/ghouls/peoples to ever have struck horror on the big screen. In a flash of kitschy, gimmicky horror, the whole screen with flash to black with the briefest of subliminal images showing this black-haired, ghoul with gray pallor. Despite the thriller gimmick nature of it all, it works. I jump every time. The scream that accompanies the image helps. Or, is it just me screaming?

I’ve only made it through four levels, but despite my growing frustration, I want to see more of this game. Maybe I’m just drawn to anything dark and morbid, but there’s something a little fascinating about this game. It’s definitely difficult, and it’s definitely creepy, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. Maybe I’m a little stuck in limbo, myself.

BAANZAAII!!!!

These crazy flies are the real killers of Kill the Fly. The Kamikaze fly is but one of the many winged pests you will encounter in this strangely addicting app by Playsteria, an appropriately titled company name, if I may say so myself. Kill the Fly will definitely drive you to hysteria, if in a playfully frenetic way, with its onslaught on flies, bees, and other winged catastrophes waiting to dive toward the pile of poo which you’ve weirdly been enlisted to defend. In FowlPlay we used poo as a weapon – in this game, it’s something to be protected. Hmm, I’m sensing another themed week! I’m sure my boss would love for me to pitch Poop Week on Appstruck.

Poop Week or no poop week, Kill the Fly means protecting a pile of it, and using your fingers to smash any attempts by the flies to dive toward it, in pleasurable insanity. The game begins oddly, with cheery music of the pop diva variety, one that would belong in a casino lounge alongside men in drag a la the Birdcage – or, just a terrible commercial talking about how such and such pharmaceutical can change your life. I always focus on the musical elements in games, because good music can give extra thrust to

Hordes, upon hordes of flies - oh, and a bumblebee

a game, make it more enjoyable. This music is just so far wayward from the premise of this game, that it actually works. It’s just as kooky as the kooky bug illustrations – which, I might add, resemble cutesy stickers I could buy from Japantown at Kinokinuya Bookstore – and just as kooky as the funny, very human-sounding buzzz and eeerroooo noises the bugs make. The whole look of the game is very cutesy and Asian in some of the motifs, and in some of the sayings by “wise master” Xou Han like, “Water has never been as good as ground to smash flies.” Yes, yes, this is very true, given ground is solid and hard and water is, well, water. Thank you, oh wise one.

Why is it that squishing bugs in games is so much more satisfying than in life? Well, for one, squishing real flies involves a slight shriek from most people, followed by a slow peeling back of the swatter, or, god forbid, your thumb, accompanied by a stretched out “eeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwww.” Besides, when swatting a fly in life there is no splat, no squish, no sound of any kind other than the moan that escapes your lips. In this game, the squash sounds slightly curdled, rippling with blood and entrails (though there are none, only a blood splatter), along with a low, barely detectable crunch to round out a proper effect. It’s all so squishy and awesome, darting your fingers across the screen, tapping and squishing to your heart’s content. The housefly is of no concern, really – they buzz around in weird configurations, like those gnats that forever remain on the square trail they zip over your chair, and they usually never head toward the poo. They just know it’s there, somewhere. Their real purpose is to distract you in hordes while other, more impetuous insects make their appearance. The Kamikaze fly and the Fast fly are the two you really have to watch out for. Both make a straight beeline to the poo, with no other objective than to land, eat, and take away points from you. The Kamikaze yells BANZAI! and explodes like a bomb when you squish him; that is, if you can squish him, he’s a fast bugger, that one. The Fast fly is notable for his blue color and his varying sounds of eeeerrooooo, thhpptpppttt, nnnneeeeeeeeeerrrrr, and so forth. It’s pretty amusing, and he’s pretty easy to squish if you’re paying attention. The other two insects you see are the big, cumbersome large fly and bumblebee. Both sort of saunter around, just getting in the way with their large, thwap thwap sounds, and taking four or more hits until they finally perish beneath your thumb. They’re mostly annoying, though kind of pretty, physically.

Oh Xou Han, you never fail to disappoint.

You start the game in Paolo’s garden, and make your way through four rounds of that before gaining access to other levels. In Save the Crap mode, you protect the poo in one of three difficulty settings – Easy, Normal, Nightmare – whereas in Massacre Mode you just try to kill as many bugs as possible, dragging them this way and that, making sure combos and blood are an everlasting staple of the playing field. I prefer Save the Crap Mode, because mindless killing, while fun, doesn’t quite hold a candle to the poop game. In the poop game, the farther along in levels you get, the more obstacles and saving graces appear to add dimension to the game. Cacti, broken nails and glass, for example, wreak havoc on your thumbs when squishing plants, leaving blood fingerprints with your every tap and negatively impacting your score. Other obstacles appear in the form of water, sewer holes, and other purported “soft surfaces” that prevent you from squishing a bug in that setting. Tools of the bug-killing trade take the form of a large fly swatter, bug spray and more whenever things get too fly-ridden. In Nightmare mode, you’ll be using these a lot, because the ever-present swarm on screen will be driving you to hysteria in no time.

In the end, there’s really only one sentence I can recommend in advice. As wise master Xou Han says, with the gravest of sageness, “KILL THEM ALL.”