*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?

For those of you who have dabbled beyond the first introductory physics course in college, you may know a thing or two about fluid dynamics, and a particular mathematician by the name of Daniel Bernoulli. The developer, Clever Martian, is coyly clever, indeed, for turning a simple physics-guided game into a reference to Bernoulli’s Principle, which states that “the pressure of a fluid, liquid or gas, decreases as the speed of the fluid increases.” To elucidate, a rise (fall) in pressure in a flowing fluid must always be accompanied by a decrease (increase) in the speed, and conversely, if an increase (decrease) in , the speed of the fluid results in a decrease (increase) in the pressure. This is at the heart of a number of everyday phenomena. As a very trivial example, Bernouilli’s principle is responsible for why a shower curtain sucks inward when the water is first turned on. What happens is the increased water/air velocity inside the curtain (relative to the still air on the other side) causes a drop in pressure. The pressure difference between the outside and inside causes a net force on the shower curtain, sucking it inward. A more useful example is provided by the functioning of a perfume bottle: squeezing the bulb over the fluid creates a low pressure area due to the higher speed of the air, which subsequently draws the fluid up. Within the same fluid, high-speed flow is associated with low pressure, and low-speed flow is associated with high pressure. This phenomenon also applies to the lift produced by the wings of an airpline, i.e. an airfoil. The airfoil is designed so that the air moves more rapidly over its upper surface than its lower surface, thereby decreasing pressure above the airfoil. At the same time, the impact of the air on the lower surface of the airfoil increases the pressure below. This difference between the decreased pressure above and the increased pressure below produces lift; thus, a wing with more curvature on the top surface, has greater lift than a wing with a flat surface. There you have it: a crash course in the day-to-day applications of Bernoulli’s Principle. But, back to the game, shall we?

Watch out for those rotating beams - they really get in your way.

Like a teaser on Bernoulli’s Principle, Bernoulli Ball requires you to move balls with the use of applied pressure – in the game, it takes the form of “touchwaves” from your finger taps that, depending on their proximity to the ball, create different degrees of pressure in the direction of the ball, making the ball move in a certain direction, at a certain speed. Sure, it’s not a perfect recreation of the principle, but I appreciated the tongue-in-cheek reference. The game is really a collection of mini-games, including Chute Me, The Factory, Rollin Ramps, and Ratchet Run, all of which have different layouts or obstacles, but just one objective: get the highest score possible by getting all the balls in the chutes. Chute Me, in a way, is the simplest of the four, with no obstacles other than the beleaguered attempts on your part to apply the right pressure at the right time to shoot your balls into the landing chute, illustrated on the far right side of the screen. Rollin Ramps has two, slowly rotating ramps that hamper your balls’ progress to the chute, and it, along with The Factory and Ratchet Run, employs the use of pressure pumps located at random spots on the screen – these will blow puffs of air at your ball when it slows, giving it new kinetic energy, and of course, madly spiraling it in unforeseen ways.

Really interesting graphics.

The gameplay is a bit rough – you’ll experiment widely with flicks, short touches and light taps, and decide each of these produce mediocre and often unpredictable results, until you discover the hold. The hold is just holding your finger on the screen, and it produces this large, sizzling, yellow pressure point that enlarges to take up a good 1/8 of the screen – it’s like cheating, in a way, because rather than drive yourself mad by finding a happy tapping medium, you just hold your finger down, and slowly herd the balls toward the chute with the subtle, ricocheting pressure. It kind of takes the strategy out of the game, but at the same time, it also makes the game enjoyable enough to play. If you never hold your finger down, then you’ll be stricken with agonizing defeat, watching ball after ball escape your touchwave pressure taps, to fall into the lost ball zone, taking you one step closer to losing the game. Trust me, the game is still challenging when you employ the holding method, because after each round, more balls are introduced into play (the first round releases one ball, second round two balls, and so forth), turning the physics game into more of a juggling act. Also, these strange, autonomous balls called a vabo are released every now and then to your chagrin, bouncing around everywhere and knocking your balls around with their strange, radiation symbol tattooed on their front. Overall, not particularly great, or challenging gameplay in the way I think the developers had in mind – more just challenging from technical issues.

To add flair to the game, there’s an incentive to shuffle the balls to the chute in the form of bonus points, achieved through arranging the balls by order of color when collecting them (doubles score for the round), or by pressuring them into the chute while they’re in the “long shot” zone, which multiplies their individual worth by 5. Each ball is normally worth one point, but when you put balls of the same color in the chute together? Then you increase their worth by a power of 2 for each ball in the group – for example, for four green balls, the first ball is worth one point, the second two points, the third four, and the fourth is worth eight. For every 250 points you earn, you receive a reserve ball – reserve balls are usually in the negatives for me because every time you lose an in-game ball to the lost ball zone, you lose a reserve ball. Tally up -5 reserve balls and the game is over. If you end the game when you have a positive amount, however, then you receive 25 bonus points multiplied by the ball count. Phew! Really, try not to pay too much attention to the point earning in this game – just play around and get a feel for yourself.

The gameplay is interesting enough, but what really pulled my interest to Bernoulli Ball (aside from it complementary nature to the song Hotel) is its unique design. It’s designed somewhat like an erratic, neon Pinball machine, with lighted arrows and moving spindles, pocket holes and levers – but, at the same time, it’s wholly unlike a pinball machine. It’s resplendent in dark, but glowing colors, and an almost amorphous flow, like a doodle someone would trace on their binder paper during a particularly boring lecture. Claw-like nooks and crannies jut out of nowhere, and yet the chutes, where they open and end, have a symmetry to them in relation to the rest of the playing field design. I’ll give credit where it’s due – it’s a very cool design, if a little unfinished feeling.

We have some promo codes today for this game, so I encourage you to check this one out.

Promotion Codes:

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*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.

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.

Promotion Codes:

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*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.

It doesn’t start off that way. Super Juicy is actually quite fun; of course, as my readers know, all I need is a simple game, with a few bubbles, popping, some good sound effects, and I’m sold. Super Juicy definitely has the right formula in the works, with catchy music, a good design, and a classic block-breaking premise with a contemporary twist that dissolves away hours of time in one session. The first few levels are great – pop bubbles of either blue, green, red or yellow in groups of three or more (the more the better for your score), and watch as your points rack up to promote you to the next level. Each level exposes a new aspect of gameplay for you, in the form of successive combos for an eventual “super juicy” bonus score, bombs that explode all the bubbles of one color, fruit encased in bubbles for extra points (banana, strawberry, cherry), and a few other things that make the game more challenging, like these bubbles that grow exponentially in size, crowding the play space, and subtracting seriously lofty points from you should you actually touch it when not connected in a chain of three.

The way Berzerker Games laid out the game is near perfect: Super Juicy is easy to pick up, easy to become addicted to, excellently paced, and each level presents the player with something new, a characteristic I definitely cannot attribute to most games, for the

Definitely harder than it looks

iPhone or otherwise. Normally, games such as these lack any true strategy, and simply become a game of how quickly you can scurry your fingers across the screen, wildly popping whatever immediate pack of three you see – it’s the lazy man’s way to skirt around the game’s rules, without any repurcussions. It may improve your recognition skills and reflexes, but it doesn’t exactly cater to strategic reasoning. I wouldn’t say Super Juicy has any immediate strategy either, but it has the addition of a really slick physics engine that lets the bubbles bounce about on screen, colliding with other bubbles, and breaking former chains to – trust me – your ever growing chagrin. This ever-changing, malleable environment adds an element of confusion to the game, keeping you on your reflex toes, and, even better, should you attempt to pop a chain of red bubbles only to discover they split a nanosecond before you touch the screen, the game awards you with a very unhappy -20 points or more. Trust me, you’ll be careful about where you let your fingers tap in no time, so you can just throw that non-thinking, finger scrambling tactic out the door.

My problem with Super Juicy is actually not a problem at all, just a problem I have with projecting my own frustration. I was having a grand ol’ time, popping things here and there, getting awesome combo scores, enjoying the new obstacles, the increasing difficulty with each coming level. Then Level 10 happened. Oh, Level 10, how you make my blood pressure rise, like those slowly growing, but ominous bubbles in your game. In case it isn’t immediately obvious, I have yet to beat Level 10, and given the way my heart thuds in my chest, I’m probably too overstimulated to

Demerits for touching at the wrong time.

pick up the game again any time soon. Level 10 introduces these steel hexagon blockades – mysteriously referred to as “bubbles” alongside the usual, water-formed ones – that can only be destroyed by bombs. Okay, straightforward enough – tap a bomb when it comes along, and let the damage be wreaked. It’s not that easy in practice, for a few reasons. First, these bombs come with number markers, meaning they may only be activated when connected to a minimum of, say, four bubbles of the same color. Otherwise, the bomb will just drop away from the screen, or worse, demerit points. While you wait for the bomb to be of use, the game decides during this level that the speed at which the bubbles cascade on screen will increase threefold, with bubbles falling in a myriad waterfall of green, yellow, blue, red. It doesn’t help that any incorrect tap you make increases a bubble’s size, and demerits points, further distancing you from the minimum points you need before advancing to the next level. Meanwhile, all these blockade bubbles are collecting at the bottom of the screen, giving less leeway for you to wait for more bubbles to connect. It’s a troubling situation.

If I can’t hack it past Level 10, then I am definitely not cut out for Chaos Mode, which just rains bubbles down, in an impossible scenario. I do, however, really enjoy the Bonus mode, where all you do is pop the bubbles that appear onscreen, coming from different angles to increase the challenge. I could play this mode all day, just drooling in my chair. Arction Mode brings less time to the table, making the game more intense and condensed than the usual Classic Mode. Classic Mode is by far the most interesting and complex to play, so I continue to peck away at Level 10 in the hopes I will see the levels thereafter. My frustrations, and inadequacies are my own, so don’t interpret this as a non-recommendation. If anything, I saw download it now. It’s an excellent addition to any player’s usual gaming repertoire.

Promotion Codes:

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*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.

Back in 2005 this amazing game called Guitar Hero rocked (pun, intended) the world with its curious originality despite it being so smack-on-the-forehead obvious. Everyone loves music, and idolizes celebrities even more, so why not put two and two together

The beautiful but simple design - not to mention ease of play (unless you play on Difficult - if so, I bow down to you)

and make a game of it? If Dance Dance Revolution and Rock Band are any indication, this gaming genre has lasting appeal, and shows little signs of slowing down. Kings of Leon Revenge is the latest from Tapulous – the supreme master of the tapping game domain – that capitalizes on this genre’s popularity. We reviewed  Tap Tap Revenge 2 on Appstruck awhile ago, both with glowing reviews, so we were excited to venture into Tapulous’ recent advent into musician-specific gaming. Kings of Leon Revenge follows ColdPlay Revenge, Lady Gaga Revenge, and a few others that entail a tapping game that feverishly adheres to music only by that specific artist. It’s a great way to become familiar with an artist, and it allows you cheap access to their music, wrapped into the bubble of a game.

The beauty of Kings of Leon Revenge lies in its streamlined play and aesthetic power. The game is simple, efficient, but beautifully designed: fuzzy, glowing lights of a brown and yellow earthiness permeate the game while a background image of the band is shadowed, ever so subtly, by the  semi-transparent orbs that fluidly steam toward the screen’s bottom, to explode upon your tap with an outward radiating halo. The game is such a pleasure to play because it runs so smoothly, with a slight lag only apparent momentarily on the 3G model when awarded combo points. The movements are so fluid it’s easy to get in that zone, where only you and the game and the music exist, in some halo of concentration and pattern-recognition. As I said with Bejeweled 2, there’s something to be said for games that cater to the human mind’s instinct to seek out patterns and adhere to them. Kings of Leon Revenge, along with other games of the same ilk, engrosses the user with a continual stream of orbs that you must tap at the exact right moment, much like striking the correct note when playing an instrument. The most I can play is on Medium Mode – Difficult really kicks me in the rear, big time. I’m privy to using my thumbs, but I know I’ll need to insert another finger, possibly rearrange my tactic, employing the use of index, middle, and ring finger instead of just my two, clunky thumbs. The screen shakes a bit in correction if you fail to hit a note, and awards you with combo and multiplier points when you remain error-free. You essentially beat along to the music, giving you the feeling that you’re playing along to the song, which as any music lover knows, is absolute heaven.

Much like its predecessors, Kings of Leon Revenge may be played on your own in Career mode, or with others in Battle Mode through a wifi connection. I prefer Concert Mode, unlocking more challenging songs, and downloading more songs to the default repertoire. I have yet to buy any songs from the option to do so through iTunes, but I love the fact that it’s there – people would definitely be more tempted to delve deeper into an artist’s music if they become familiar through playing a game. I, myself, had never heard of Kings of Leon before this game, despite recognizing a song here and there from the radio, and I can solidly say that after playing this game, I enjoy several of their songs. I may not buy them from the iTunes store just yet, but I certainly have them reserved on the sidelines for, say, future roadtrips or traveling when music is utterly mandatory. In particular, I like Love True Way, one of their lesser known songs, that exhibits more of a bluegrass meets early 80′s The Eagles vibe to it. Who would have guessed?

Regardless of whether or not you enjoy Kings of Leon as a band, the Revenge game is highly, highly addicting, as are all of Tapulous’ other games. It’s brilliant design, flow, and presentation are what make iPhones games such a pleasure to play.

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.”

I’m talking about Pop Cap Game’s Bejeweled 2, of course. Or, even just Bejeweled. But, for the purposes of this review, I will be talking about the sequel in this acclaimed game – a game that many online players have idled away hours of their time in unproductivity, swapping and destroying gems, in some haze of OCD. Come to think of it, what is it about block-breaking games that hold our fascination so much? Does it just feed into the mindless, anal retentive qualities in all of us, making us pair like objects, and seeing them destroyed, then having a new stack fall into place, in some nonstop continuum of the same thing? It’s like peeling a giant stack of potatoes, or, as my boyfriend’s mom likes to say, it’s similar to knitting. Maybe there’s something inherently soothing to anything mechanical and orderly, giving the otherwise untapped mind a job, something menial and contrived to focus our energy. When playing Bejeweled 2, I feel like the intelligent, but otherwise neurotic Border Collie, who when given ample hours on end with nothing to do, finds himself staring at a dripping faucet, watching each drop fall in slow motion with the most rapt, inert attention. Actually, that’s a fairly accurate analogy for what playing Bejeweled 2 is like – a dripping faucet.

Perhaps, that’s where the sheer brilliance of Bejeweled 2 lies (and, I don’t just mean the jewels). I, for one, cannot put this game down. I probably wasted played a good one to two hours each day this week before I realized I had already done this before on the computer, in 2004. Oh, Bejeweled, how your witchery tricks me again and again. There’s no question Bejeweled 2 is an addictive game, and the legions of fans out there contributing to its success, both online and off, is a testament to the game’s lasting greatness. And, it’s just so darn simple to play.

The game of Bejeweled 2 is played on an 8×8 board, with some stratospheric background of the most spectacular origins, set somewhere on a distant planet, or in some fantasy dimension. The music, too, plays off this eccentric, futuristic, day-glo feel by featuring synthesized glam rock beats that would feel right at home in Blade Runner, or in a David Bowie music video. I really like the music – I pretend I’m in an anime, and with the bright colors, space atmosphere and beats, it’s hard not to feel that way. To boot, anytime you beat a level, a wormhole appears, resplendent in pastels and neons, to take you to the next level. Beating the levels is easy, at first, since the jewels on the playing field are easily matched up into pairs of 3 and siphoned away, for more jewels to take their place. The rules are short: swap one jewel with another adjacaent, and only when swapping lets you form a row of three (the game won’t let you move, otherwise). That’s it! If your swap forms a row of four jewels, then that jewel type will form a power gem, worth more points; if your row contains 5 jewels, then you’ll create a hypercube, which is the badass of all the jewels, earning you mondo points and explosions all around. You’ll make plenty more power gems than hypercubes, so take advantage of the former. The power gem not only earns you more points, it destroys the surrounding gems in a 2-block radius, leaving more room for new jewels to take place. It’s hard to beat the hypercube, though; when it’s formed, whichever jewel you choose to swap it with – let’s say a blue gem – then all the jewels of that kind on the board will be destroyed, in some cool, chain lightning effect. If you play in Action mode, this happens fairly often, given the set-up Bejeweled gives you. In Classic and Endless, it’s much more infrequent (Endless is the same as Classic Mode, only there’s no maximum amount of moves per level).

At the end of the day, all I can really say about Bejeweled 2 is… well, I can’t really think of anything to say. I’m completely dumbfounded and blinded and speechless. In fact, I think I need another look at the game, right now. Don’t worry, I’ll get back to you.

*dashes for iPhone*

Omer Vinik, the developer of Kid’z Maze, wanted to design a game that could “help kids develop hand-eye coordination, fine motor skills and counting abilities”; from this hub of brainstorming, he concocted the idea for a labyrinth game designed specially for kids, because apparently, labyrinth games are for adults only. Now, this is my own personal anecdote, and I don’t tout to be especially brilliant, or spatially advanced, but I played with my wooden labyrinth board from as young as 4 years of age. It’s true, I may not have been able at first, with my fumbling fingers and newfound sense of orientation, to play a ball through to the very end with finesse, but that doesn’t mean the game didn’t grab my attention or adequately challenge my motor skills. Actually, a more challenging game, with consequences and the chance at failure, may have made success more sweet in the end, than a game that offers no risks other than following a straight path to the end.

The game has a nice enough look to it, and is set up as labyrinth games usually are: poised from an aerial perspective, with the user moving the ball by tilting the iPhone in different directions. Only, in this game, in some attempt to add educational value for children, there are numbers along the maze path that are read aloud as the ball collides with them. Nothing truly of interest happens when the collision happens, other than the number increases in size, growing more pixelated the larger it becomes, until it just fades away, along with the voice narrating. Curiously, rather than add more interesting elements to the game, itself, like secondary objectives, or misleading paths (you know, like in a maze?), the developer instead offers the option to customize the gameboard, by switching tile or path colors, or even the ball color. I highly doubt most kids would find this interesting or fun, being able to use a red or blue ball, against the equally boring background palettes of fine grain light wood, versus large-grain dark wood. Zzzzzzz, put me to sleep.

But, this isn’t to say that Kid’z Maze is completely without merit. I truly think the developer had his heart in the right place with this concept, and if he just tweaked a few things, I’m sure the game could be a success. There are already two, incredibly successful Labyrinth games for the iPhone, so in order for his game to appeal to a large audience, particularly a very young one, he should think about adding some colorful and quirky elements, something more lighthearted and original than the stock audio clip of kids cheering, which I’ve heard in a wide range of kids apps. The idea isn’t nearly unique enough to make it in the App Store, and the idea that kids cannot handle – emotionally, mentally, or physically – the challenge of a regular Labyrinth game, is laughable.

Promotion Codes:

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*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.

Every so often I come across a game that I can see myself playing over and over again. Or one, at least, that’s clever and quirky enough to wedge itself into my usual game rotation; given my obsessiveness over games, this is hardly a trifle characteristic. Bad Apples by Metaversal Studios is one such game that’s caught my eye in a good way. In a manner similar to games like Bookworm, Virus Laboratory, and Bejeweled, the objective of Bad Apples is to stack different types of objects atop and adjacent to one another, gathering them in likeness, until a gathering of three or more is created to earn you points. In the case of Bad Apples, the objects to be toyed with are fruit, including blueberries, pineapples, what look to be cherry tomatoes, and, what else? Bad apples.

To win in this game, you must pair together groups of three or more of like fruits – once they pair up, they’ll be juiced, as shown in your gradually increasing collective of juice to the right of the screen. Like any good, fresh squeezed fruit, the juice is bright and cheery looking, just glowing of vitamins and nutrients to make your hair and skin glow (gee, I’m not a juicer at all). In a humorous twist, much like Virus Laboratory, the fruits each wear an expression that gives them a faint, individual character. The pineapple, boasting a heritage from the tropics where he, no doubt, laid in the sun all day working on his glorious tan, dons a blindingly white smile that gives away his excess of bravado and self-confidence. The cherry tomato is squat and bug-eyed, with a goofy smile, a good example of any toy version of its larger fruit. The blueberry, meanwhile, with his frazzled lips and wide-eyed countenance is probably suffering from indigestion, a common side effect of too much Vitamin C. The last characters, the bad apples, are the worst kind of fruit – the spoiling kind, with a fuzzy, green hat of mold, and a foul penchant for making other, nearby fruit go bad and giving you an upset stomach. Nobody likes the bad apples. In this game, they just get in the way of other fruit gathering together, and if bad apples form a trio, then they’ll juice together and you’ll have rotten juice. Thankfully, you can get rid of them with the crusher fruits – which look like the spiky jackfruit, the largest of all fruits, and probably the strongest if they could muscle their way around – who crush any fruit beneath them, friend or foe.

Crushing bad apples earns you +40 points each time, so destroying them is definitely a positive strategy. Otherwise, pairs of three to four of good fruits earn you somewhere in the +120-140 range, which clearly helps you rack up points efficiently. Special fruit characters will appear that correspond to each fruit – blueberry, pineapple, cherry tomato – and when paired with their kin, they will also juice other kin onscreen in one giant whammy of a juicing spree, earning you tons of points. Depending on how well you do each level, you can also earn rewards, which have delightfully clever names that wouldn’t sound out of place at a smoothie or raw bar: fruit salad (to get it, group one of each of the three powerups – special fruit characters – in a single turn), the full bushel, easy as apple pie, fresh squeezed, king of the juice, and more. I rather liked how they threw in Tequila Sunrise, just for kicks. Pesticide is a really helpful award, which you can get by killing five worms using crushers or powerups. There’s really no need to elaborate on the Pesticide – it’s pretty self-explanatory. And, don’t worry about the worms until you upgrade to the full version – they don’t exist in the free version.

The free version is enough to keep me entertained, with three levels of difficulty, an arcade and puzzle mode  (exactly like the puzzle mode in Virus Laboratory), but I really would like to battle worms that rot apples (oh no!), so I’ll probably be upgrading to the full version soon. I recommend you to check it out today.

I suppose that’s why when I came across Knife Toss by Crawl Space Games, I was pretty intent on trying it out. Okay, I can see how admitting glee over throwing knives at a clown strapped to a spinning wheel is a wee bit morbid, maybe even worrisome, but don’t worry, I’m not laughing quietly to myself and then sitting in corners rocking back and forth, slowly, and ironically, morphing into a clown, myself. It’s definitely not bowling, this game. Actually, from the standpoint of a game, Knife Toss is quite good. Upon opening the game, some quintessential circus music is heard – that melodious mix of mischief, mystery, kookiness and a tinge of malice that brings to mind elephants, clowns, dimly-lit tents, fire breathing, roaring lions, strange men on stilts, freak shows, and yes, even knife tossing. A wheel spins in each round, painted in a spiral of red and orange, and affixed to the center, with his ankles and wrists bound to the wooden slab, is a clown, bedecked in an outfit and style reminiscent of the Joker. His hair isn’t green, but is blue, and pronged like a balding man’s, and his larger than average red shoes and blue, striped, ruffled attire just scream clown – I half expect to see him gripping a cigar between those tar yellowed teeth of his. There are three levels of difficulty – Easy, Medium, Hard – and to achieve the latter two, you must first defeat up to Round 15 in easy mode, and up to Round 20 in medium mode, respectively. That doesn’t seem too hard, but wow, it sure is.

The first level left me a bit cocky – Oh, it’s this slow? Please. – but I soon realized after each subsequent round, the wheel spins just a bit faster, and the time allotted for you to pop all the balloon shortens down significantly. By Round 8 you’re looking at roughly 30 seconds to pop 10 balloons, which is made more difficult by the quickly rotating wheel. The clown continues to smile maniacally at you, his face frozen, perhaps, in sheer terror at having knives chucked at him – in this case, by a total amateur. Throwing the knives is easy – tilt the iPhone around to move the cursor, and when it lands on a balloon, tap anywhere on screen to chuck a knife. A whirling sound effect is heard of the knife slicing through the air and a nice pop is heard when a balloon is properly struck, and you are allotted 50 points. Continue popping balloons in succession, and you’ll garner extra points per successful streak (i.e. 5 balloons in a row, earn +5 points). But, be careful – the clown, like anyone, doesn’t appreciate having knives land on his precious, fleshy parts, and he’ll emit an OUCH! and later, low, dying moans.

Watch out for his head!

Eventually, strike him too many times and you’ll land him in the hospital and it’ll be Game Over. Generally, I had no problem in keeping my cursor on the wooden wheel, but those more prone to wild tilts and turns may find themselves aiming off the spinning wheel, and on one of the side items, shown in the form of a crudely stenciled metal tab. Some of these are good, like the one that earns you double points (score!), or that one that increases your time (show as a clock with an arrow pointing up) but some, like the rabbit, increase the wheel’s spin speed, so watch – aim for only a select few.

The one problem with these extra features is it’s nearly impossible to focus on them with the increased difficulty and decreased time. Sure, you can try aiming for the tab the gives you extra time, but your cursor is so damn slow, you may just end up missing it. The slowness of the cursor helps when aiming, but when it comes to dragging it across screen to aim for a tab that will earn you more points or time, it’s pretty inefficient. But, it doesn’t damper the game at all – you’ll be far too immersed in throwing knives to care about small demerits like that. That, coupled with the hokey music and deflating balloons after every other round or so, makes for a very fun and amusing game. I never thought a clown game could be so fun.

Promotion Codes:

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*When using the promotion code to download for free, it’s on a first-come, first-served basis. Out of courtesy, please leave a comment below mentioning you’ve used the promotion code.