You play as this nameless comic book-like character clad in skintight red spandex, with black gloves, a billowing cape, and a strange, bullet or cone-shaped helmet that reminds me of the Rocketeer. Actually, the whole costume, with the absurdly disproportionate upper body to the teeny lower body seems directly influenced by Pixar’s The Incredibles, if not a direct use. The graphics have a very palpable feel to them, your main character putty and clay-like, and the Dark City backdrop where you run feels moody and twisted, a Tim Burton Gotham, perhaps? The whole game just oozes with a comic book sentiment, even the slime crusted roof vents you jump over, and the crazed, masked monsters you kill with one deft uppercut or kick. It’s too bad the music doesn’t hold a candle to the aesthetics, with its cheap, stock rock notes you’d find in a 90′s racing game. I usually turn it off, but be warned: this game needs music, it’s incredibly dull without.

All BloodyRush involves is you – nameless superhero (or villain?!) – dashing across rooftops, jumping over slimed rooftop pipes, sliding under spinning, spiked balls, and killing both small and large monsters. Your character remains static as the screen scrolls by, and you must time your moves correctly, lest you miss your aim and not kill the gargantuan clown monster, or slide too soon and risk getting slashed by the ball of death. Swipe your finger up to jump, swipe it down to slide, and tap high to uppercut, tapping low to kick. The game is one of survival, and you will eventually die, given your limited amount of health, and the lack of any bonuses, med kits, additional weapons, or anything. The pace of the game seems to slowly increase the longer you hold on – of

BLOOOD!!

course, this could just be a trick of the eyes after having been strained, unblinking at the screen for extended periods of time. After a certain point (read: one minute), ledges start appearing that you must jump over, but this doesn’t add much to the difficulty of the game. The game, actually, poses little difficulty, and the only reason it becomes challenging is your fingers start getting clumsy after repeating the same actions over and over and over… and over.

Right, so the game is pretty dull, after 10 minutes (if you can make it that long), but at least it’s bloody… at points. I can understand the appeal of just running, streaking toward your survival; it’s a good concept for a game, and hell, there’s even a movie like that (Run, Lola, Run). But, if you don’t want to bother with some kind of backstory, or some other objectives, then at least add some more interesting characters, or at the very least, different backdrops. Running can remain entertaining for only so long, so I hope in the next update things will either get bloodier, faster, or more complex.

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.

In the spirit of the recently ongoing Olympics, here’s a cute game called Track & Field that will put you in the game, when you can’t partake in the sports, yourself. I like running as much as the next self-professed runner, but I will never be referred to as an Olympian – not in this lifetime – nor will I ever participate in any televised events, with fans cheering in stadiums, while donning those ridiculously skintight shorts that long distance runners use, the wedgie ones barely covering their sinewy muscles.

Ruuunnnnn!!!!

No, I’m content to satisfy my Olympian urges with this game by Playman Sports, where I may select an avatar to participate in one of several events, including the 100m dash, the long jump, the 110m hurdles, the pole vault, and the javelin toss. You may select one of 12 characters as your avatar, the default being a duo of red-headed twins. I took a liking to the rather Germanic looking blonde with green beret, much in the same tough vein as Cammy from Street Fighter II. Oh, how I loved Cammy, in all her muscly, braided hair glory. For my character, I chose the Ukrainian flag, for no particular reason, other than I love saying the Ukraine, with a thick, horribly affected accent. If you don’t like the Ukraine (why wouldn’t you?!), don’t worry, there are plenty of other countries to choose.

Tap the numbers in order to jump better and faster.

After creating your carefully crafted avatar, you may go to the Challenge section as an Amateur, where you may participate in any of the aforementioned events; you must beat each event, and the final tournament, before you can unlock the Pro mode. I have yet to beat the Pro section – it’s quite difficult – but I assume the Survival Mode, as indicated by the tightly clad Eskimo on the main screen, will be unlocked for use as soon as I beat the Pro tournament. Multiplayer is available right away, should you want to take your hurdling, running, jumping and throwing skills to the global universe of Track & Field players, but as my readers know, I’m a lover of the single player. Though, I digress – multiplayer is awesome. Suddenly, instead of just one A.I. opponent, you now have four or five players running alongside you and jumping at different times. It’s pretty cool to watch, and I’m curious why the single player mode doesn’t offer you more opponents.

After you’ve selected your event – say, the long jump – I highly recommend you read through the instructions before participating. The game isn’t obviously intuitive the first time around, so the instructions give some much needed insight into what the orange and green buttons mean. “Buttons?” you may ask. For each event, you power your player forward, to hopeful victory, by tapping the orange buttons to start, and by tapping the green buttons as soon as they appear onscreen, then ending with a calculated press and release of two orange buttons to give your player the final surge of power to propel himself forward to the finish. The more quickly you react and tap to the green buttons, the better your player will perform – whether he’s running, or jumping, or otherwise. The use of the orange buttons can be trickier in some events than others – the pole vault, for example, took Ocie and I countless tries before we finally succeeded in figuring out that the orange buttons must be pushed at one, single moment, otherwise your character will fail miserably, hoisting himself a mere foot or two off the ground before haplessly falling, or just not making it into the air at all. Not exactly the Olympian feat we all admire. I believe it was I, who finally figured that as soon as your player begins moving the pole forward and down, you must then, and only then, press the orange buttons – despite their repeated glaring onscreen – to successfully vault yourself into the air, and over the high beam, to land down on the other side in triumph. Phew! What a workout that was.

Out of all the events, the pole vault and the long jump are the two most frustrating and difficult to master. You challenge different opponents, randomly, for each event, and you must conquer them in three rounds to successfully complete an event. If you’re lousy at the game (a little like me), then at least the game is enjoyable to watch, with its retro-stylized graphics that seem appropriate for a classic Nintendo. I always appreciate anything retro, anyway.

Definitely a fun game to pick up whenever the urge to compete strikes, with Track & Field you don’t have to worry about scraped knees or muddy shorts. Just make your player do all the dirty work and reap the applause, anyway.

Traffic Rush by Donut Games is simple: make sure the cars don’t crash. Okay, easy enough I think, how hard can it be? Boy, did I eat my words. I think my personal best is 72 – 72 cars that passed through the intersection with nary a hitch – and that was after an hour of flicking the cars, zooming them through that intersection of doom, trying to beat my seemingly insurmountable score of 48. Last night, when a conversation with my boyfriend’s parents (let’s call them Trisha and Paul) turned to Buckminster Fuller and his Dymaxion maps, and their flipping through several books trying to find representatives of such, I whipped out my iPhone and started flinging cars through intersections. At one point, a crash I had unforseen happened, shocking me, and I yelped a mix of surprise, frustration, and woe. My boyfriend’s mother immediately whipped her head up from a book:

Trisha: *nervously* What? What is it?

Me: *dejectedly* My car crashed.

(Trisha and Paul exchange confused looks)

Me: It’s a game.

(Trisha and Paul burst into laughter)

Trisha: I thought a f***ing person had died. Or something. With that reaction.

Definitely expect some jumping up and expletives in Traffic Rush because the game is completely engrossing. Played from an aerial perspective, you look down upon a typical intersection with four lanes each way, cars driving in them and, curiously, no traffic lights – or, at least, no one who understands that red means stop and green means go. Or, maybe all these drivers are in a mad rush to get somewhere, disavowing traffic laws as they go; we’ll just assume the slower ones are senior citizens pushing the pedal to the metal at 40 mph. A motley stream of cars make their way onscreen in the form of red, blue, gold and green cars with the occasional truck and motorcycle cutting the monotony. They either zip or put along, and it’s up to you to maintain their speed or fling them to the far corner of the screen, increasing their speed fortuitously. You may also tap on a vehicle to stop it, or slow it down, which definitely comes in handy when the game becomes rife with speeding vehicles. Like a horse in a frightened galloping frenzy, none of these cars have any foresight or sense to stop if a collision is imminent. It doesn’t matter if they’re at breakneck speed or chugging slowly, they’ll crash in slow motion if they can. That’s why you must play the hand of God, moving cars, stopping others, and in haste trying to place priorities and timed schedules on a group of six cars heading toward each other. Should you speed the red truck quickly through the intersection and stop the green car? Or is the green car going fast enough that you can speed it up, while speeding up the car in front of it, and stopping the red truck, all while watching out for the motorcyle speedily making it’s way from the right? You can see how complex things can get.

My strategy is generally to keep things moving at high speeds. It may seem like living on the edge, just flinging cars to the left and right, up and down, but it actually makes for a safer game. Here’s a good analogy: when my dad was preparing for his Motorcycle license test, he had to navigate his motorcylce’s tires between two very narrow parallel lines that waved and zigzagged in seemingly impossible ways. He was hesitant at first, and drove slowly, trying to maintain a balance and tiptoe his way along, but he kept treading over the lines. Finally, in part from frustration, he just winged it, speeding his bike through the lanes, and found it was much easier to maintain a momentum and, I guess you could say, clarity of attention when at a faster speed. True, this does have a lot to do with forward momentum and the lessened effects of gravity, things that definitely do not affect your gameplay here, but whatever. I wanted to tell the story. In short, speed in Traffic Rush lets you rack up more points by quickly sending cars to the other side, and oftentimes, speeding through the intersection gives you more time to focus on other cars. Like I analogized, it’s a balancing act.

It’s a simple game with a very simple interface, and so I continue to press what has long been my most fervent opinion of iPhone games – the simpler, the better. If the interface is very responsive, the design crisp and pleasing, and the game’s objectives simple, with either secondary objectives/levels, or an adrenaline factor, then that’s a tried-and-true formula. Games like this will always be around because, simply put, they’re idle, guilty pleasures – easy to pick up, easy to put down. Really, what else could we expect from a Swedish designer, Swedish Game Development AB? Scandinavian designs are always crisp and streamlined, so it comes as no surprise their games know how to deliver simple goods. We all have guilty pleasures, so why not indulge in Traffic Rush?

There’s a reason why this app is currently so popular in the iTunes App Store. With 14 games for just $0.99, no wonder everyone is clamoring to download it.

The games aren’t anything exceptional, all of them very simplistic in design, with simple fighting or survival objectives, been-there-done-that gameplay interfaces, and quirky environments to toil in. However, being less than exceptional has nothing to do with their entertainment value. These games are mindless, fun, easy to play, and difficult to conquer. The All-In-1 Gamebox app by Triniti Interactive Limited is perfect for road trips, subway commutes, or when passing the time during your lunch break, or when you simply can’t fathom what else to do with your downtime. I, personally, favor King Fish for its comical big fish eat little fish premise, in a well-presented ocean environment. The crunching sounds are satisfying when munching on your fellow fish food, as is tilting the iPhone this way and that to send your progressively tubbier Clown Fish swimming in all directions.

The latest version of All-In-1 Gamebox contains 14 games, including Climber, Get Rich, Ancient War, Bowman Defense, Jailbreaker, King Fish, iSniper, 1945 Ace Destroyer, Operation iWolf, 2009 Road Master, iUFO Catcher, 3-2-1 Jump!, Bubble Master, and iSign 365. Phew! That’s a long list! While I was immediately attracted to a few right off the bat (King Fish, Operation iWolf), I decided to test them out in chronological order, starting with Climber. The intro clip was dashing, with dark red splashed behind your silhouetted character’s black frame, his white eyes narrowed and his white, Venom-like webbed claw shooting spindles of thread to climb into the bleak abyss above. The game disappointed soon thereafter, with a seemingly impossible aim (to where?) versus incalculable trajectory. I cannot recount how many times I witnessed my character’s plunge to his inevitable death, impaled upon the same, lone spike from a dilapidated building. I lost interest pretty quickly. The second game, Get Rich fared a bit better, the objective at least attainable, if not ridiculously easy. Unfortunately, I tire of games that have me mundanely tilting my iPhone in only two directions, left and right, to move a character and catch falling objects. Yawn. The graphics are laughable, and I can see the premise becoming dull all too fast, particularly with a myriad of levels, 14 or so. No thanks.

The prospects picked up intensely with the third game, Ancient War, a game of warring pygmies protecting their respective totem poles. Like a watered-down version of a strategy game, you pump out troops – made easier by the purchasing price being an ever renewable source of meat – by tapping on their images, and let the bare-bones A.I. take charge for themselves, attacking any enemy foe in sight (this is made easier by the fact your troops only want to go in one direction, right, to the enemy totem pole). Lots of blood is seen as the pygmies bash each other with novelized bludgeon sticks and pelt each other with large rocks, and exploding pygmies are not uncommon in later levels. It’s only too bad strategy in this game boils down to producing little to no troops in the beginning so your meat supply can quickly skyrocket to 1000, and then letting the enemies rush you in the beginning with an onslaught you can usually obliterate with your special firestorm skill from the totem pole. Then, just quickly pump out troops and let the wild rumpus begin. Once again, there are many levels to contend with, so longevity is not an issue, but choppiness is killer when you have an army of pygmies onscreen, making the game seem insufferably long at times. It’s just a giant wave of lag lag lag.

Bowman Defense, too, is more entertaining and effective than the first two, and unlike Ancient War, requires some fine finesse and dexterity. The game, itself, looks really cool, like an episode from Samurai Jack, but as the levels progress, shooting down the oncoming horde of enemies becomes ridiculously challenging, and ultimately frustrating. I always grapple with inverted aiming mechanisms in games, such as this one, where dragging your finger up points the arrow down, and dragging your finger down points the arrow up. When you have to shoot fast, and take trajectory patterns into account, aiming like this is hard. Not to mention, some of the special arrows (which you earn, incrementally, by level) require long reloading times, and oftentimes it’s easy to forget to switch to a more basic arrow, or one with a shorter reload time. Wait too long between shooting bouts and you’ll find your castle invaded by the onslaught.

JailBreaker has the same design as Climber, with the same silhouetted character, it seems. Unlike Climber, this game is far more entertaining, if not a bit jarring anytime your fugitive runs into one of the many sawblades and a big “AHH!” is heard, with an image of him being decapitated with plenty of blood. Okay, so it’s a wee bit upsetting when you die, but other than that it’s gripping, totally gripping. You escape from prison and make your way, jumping and rolling, from a sideways scrolling view, through an expansive field of fatal sawblades and, yes, cardboard boxes. Hey, when you’re running at breakneck speed and you ram into a cardboard box? It ain’t a pretty sight.

King Fish adds some much needed lightheartedness to the games thus far, with its Clown fish skirting around eating all the smaller fish, while avoiding the larger ones. In later levels you encounter sharks and other scary adversaries, but munching on sea creatures proves to be a surprisingly addicting pastime. You’d think it’d be dull, just aiming for the small fries, but something about the ocean sounds, the crackling of morsels as you swallow them whole, and avoiding bigger fish is just so swimmingly fun.

“I am a sniper. The prey which I stare at can never escape… ” Back to the gruesome, we are. With terrorists and ransom money on the table, in iSniper it’s time for you and your sniper rifle to put things right. I actually really enjoyed this game; but, then again, I’ve always liked sniper games. Maybe I was meant to be an assassin, who knows. Tapping on an enemy target puts your perspective through the sniper scope, and you must take into account your character’s breath to properly aim, which you do by tilting your iPhone around. The enemies reappear every so often, and they will shoot at you, so make sure you target the more hostile ones first.

1945 Ace Destroyer is another warring game where you must destroy the enemy ships by your lone self, with hip, bouncing music in tune with your bombs dropping. It’s a great game – just fly and shoot. The flying mechanism entails tilting your iPhone from side to side, up and down, to navigate your plane, with the illusion of 360 degrees being your playing field (you can turn infinitely to the right or left). Levels progress as you shoot planes down and earn points, with larger bomber planes coming into play in later levels, and submarines appearing below that you must torpedo. There’s a learning curve to the shooting – it’s hard, at first, trying to shoot even two enemy planes down at a time. Thank god for the infinite ammo supply. The difficulty in aiming may be too frustrating for some, but once you get the hang of it, it’s very fun. Besides, who doesn’t like flying war planes?

Fast forward to 2011 (wait, isn’t that just over a year from now?), where in Operation iWolf, the world has become a chaos land stricken by the terrorist group with the irony-laden name of HEAVEN, and you, Lt. Cobra, are a part of the Global Anti-Terrorism Organization known as GATO, to dispel these Heavenites. Of course, being a part of super top-secret GATO, you have no name, no record – you simply do not exist. After being briefed on your initial mission (carry a fire reconnaissance mission in enemy territory, identify enemy personnel and facilities, engage enemy at will), you jump headfirst into the flames. And, I mean you really jump headfirst. For a highly classified and well-trained GATO troop, you sure don’t know how to take cover. The game starts off with a bang – too much of a bang – with you standing up straight, uncontrollably scanning from left to right at a snail’s pace, with dozens of enemies shooting at you. It’s unclear whether you’re encased in some futuristic, protective suit, with helmet and titanium shell, or if you’re just a complete idiot, standing within 5 feet of your enemies with your face crammed completely in your scope. I’m going with the latter. To add insult to injury, the aiming mechanism requires you to drag your finger to move the cursor, only there’s a huge, huge lag time between where your finger is and when the cursor will actually make it there. Seems like GATO needs to upgrade its training requirements.

My aggravation didn’t lessen with the next game, Road Master 2000. It’s a better game, for sure – more responsive, better graphically, more fun and gripping, in general – but it’s hard to get anywhere in the game. It resembles a less hip-looking Racer by Tatem Games (Racer is a far better game), only this game has a brief, unnecessary background story as to why you’re speeding down the freeway illegally. Unlike in Racer, where you drag your finger to navigate the car, in Road Master you tilt the iPhone – a clever interface that effectively mimics, as well as it can, the use of a steering wheel. After crashing into too many cars, the sides of the freeway, and roadwork blockades, you’ll most likely be tilting your iPhone more aggressively – into the wall. Keep at it, though, it’s not the most entertaining of the bunch, but it’s nice to have a racing car game in the mix.

When I saw the opening screen to iUFO Catcher, with its cutesy, Harajuku style puppies and clouds and rainbows, I jerked my head back in surprise, my eyes squinting from the blinding estrogen. With bubbly music to keep your head bouncing happily from side to side, the objective is to grab animals from moving platforms with your metal crane, much like those stuffed animal emporiums you find in arcade game places. At first you have two small puppies, one a generic hound with floppy ears, the other resembling a Cardigan Welsh Corgi, and each is worth 50 points. As you rack up the points, larger animals appear : a giant West Highland White Terrier it looks to be (despite they being very tiny terriers), pigs, a gray and a blue Siberian Husky, and more. Anytime the crane misses and hits the platform, your time shortens down. Trust me, you’ll be missing a lot. It seems like it’d be a fun game, just catching items as they move, but I was surprisingly bored. Plus, the name doesn’t make sense. Maybe all the bright colors and happy creatures and noises just saturated my senses.

In a similarly bright fashion, 3-2-1 Jump has a cutesy character jumping around in a splendidly bright background of clouds and grassy platforms, clouds, and floating creatures that pose a threat to you. It’s like a cheap version of Doodle Jump, with an eerie wail of terror when you plunge to your death, breaking up the sunshine scheme is one fatal instant. To instantly lighten up the mood again, the game distracts from the morbid picture of your character dead, facedown on split ground, with the juxtaposition of convivial “Hallelujah!” music. There’s not much to say about the game, other than if you liked Doodle Jump, then, well, you’ll just stick with Doodle Jump.

The opening screen to Bubble Master really intrigued me. The stark, cobalt blue background with a dark, fairy tale depiction of the Kremlin has an artistic edge to it, and the levels have a paper theater feel, with an ink-sketched cityscape, and a paper doll girl as your main character. It’s actually quite lovely, and just taking it in was satisfying enough. The bubbles you must burst in the game have a crinkled glow to them, standing apart from the rest of the game in a good way, and you must blow them up into small bubbles with the zigzag line you shoot vertically at them. Too bad you can only shoot in one direction, as this is the one pitfall of the game. It’s pretty challenging, and the pretty setting coupled with this make for a good game.

iSign 365, lastly, is a fortune-telling game that tells you of fortune, health, romance, or career after you shake the Chinese fortune sticks. With a Chinese metal seal that rotates and clacks, the app is very pretty to look at, and the various symbols peppered throughout, and drawings of cranes, landscapes and more, even if your fortunes don’t pan out, at least it looks better than your average fortune app.

That’s why it tickled me so to see we had an App Review Request for a game called Bar Rush by Intersog Game Studio – you’re the bartender, and you must quickly fill your customer’s order before chaos erupts. Right, I know, it’s quite the leap from home brewed apple cider – with quilts and cinnamon sticks, warm breaths and kittens – to the wanton satyriasis of a darkly lit and lively bar, but alcohol connects with alcohol, and hard cider has definitely been experiencing a resurgence in popularity among the younger denizens of our society. Just like the Lemon Drop became popular among upper class Manhattan women from vixenish Samantha Jones downing them in Sex and the City, and how Sideways forever correlated California Chardonnays with having too much “post malo-lactic fermentation” (that rich, buttery taste the French, for some reason, snub their noses at in their white wines – “Oh those Americans, they must overdo everything!”), alcoholic beverage trends come and go.

Bar Rush reminds me more of the movie Cocktails, with a brash, boyishly young Tom Cruise whirling and twirling drinks over his head and behind his back, which was usually donning some horrific, geometrically patterned shirt popular in the 80s. The main screen shows the bar’s entrance, people and lights inside, with the name Bar Rush offset and lit in that slightly tacky but appropriately hazy halogen yellow that just screams sex and booze and seen above most bar entrances in the 80s, and now coming back in some retro fashion in various cool spots in New York. Music and people clanging around adds to the scene. I was ready to see people in leather and caked black makeup, but the game actually took a disappointing turn with an extremely dorky manager in suit and tie, with an 8 year old boy’s haircut – at least I detected a bit of smarminess in his oversized suit and forced smile. To add insult, a giant glowing disco ball hangs in the center of the screen, flashing blue lights around this shockingly bright club, like some pop teenager’s idea of a dance scene. Black leather and caked makeup is out – tight, revealing shirts, golden hoops, and kittenish, flirty heels are in. The game’s intro is saved by a formidable-looking mentor with sideburns who manages to make an outfit of red vest and puffy white sleeves look enviable and intimidating, who shows you the ropes in pouring drinks.

After the brief tutorial, your manager starts you off with the easy stuff – beer, wine and non-alcoholic beverages – to prove your worth. At this stage, it’s actually pretty soothing being a bartender. Some lovely ladies and cool guys in shades ask you for beers and lite beers (I’ll try not to say anything about the game’s tendency to make only the women ask for Lite Beers) and an occasional iced juice. Pouring the drinks has such a satisfying sound that after awhile, it becomes second nature to tap the wine glass, pour the white wine and drag it to the customer, then place the dirty glass in the sink. Each of these procedures is timed, and you’re tipped more the quicker you do your duties, but in the beginning, all this is a cakewalk, and you feel like the best bartender in the world. After achieving the rank of Mixologist, I added rum and vodka drinks to my serving repertoire. Here, I experienced the first Dr. Jekyll appearance from my normally nonplussed, dorky manager, as he angrily reprimanded me for being a statue behind the bar and letting a dirty glass sit for too long. Suddenly, it’s a little rough being a bartender, hearing customers sigh dramatically, get angry and leave, or tip less. Want a little spit in your vodka? I thought so.

After passing this phase, though, my manager said, “The last time I saw moves like that was in the movie Cocktail.” Go figure. Liqueurs and whiskey are then added, and from then on, the game becomes a giant, mad dash in making drinks. Mistakes will happen and more yelling will be heard, but it’s all thrilling and quite fun. After awhile, it became instinct to reach for the highball glass when someone ordered a juice drink or carbonated beverage with ice, and to reach for the rock glass when someone wanted a rum cocktail. I would multitask, grabbing dirty glasses and putting them in the sink while mixing someone’s gin and tonic. While I wish the game was a bit more interactive – say, actually pouring drinks rather than tapping the gin or whiskey or tequila – it’s hard enough in its present state, and at least when making martinis you get to shake your iPhone in a miming motion. I don’t exactly frequent bars that often, and I’m definitely not a mixology expert, so reaching for the schnapps, the gin, the grenadine, was quite the pressing matter in ignorance. I found myself double tapping the customer frequently so I could remember what ingredients to use, and in what order. Sometimes I would choose the wrong glass and have to put it back. What’s worse, if you screw up someone’s drink, that’s it for your life as a bartender. You’re back to square one. I happily mixed a nice glass of Dragon’s Breath only to accidentally put ice in it. The women pffftted at me, walked away, and my job security, health insurance, was kaput.

Bar Rush will test your speed, wits and skill, as you race to satisfy the thirsty patrons in this time-management simulation with stimulation. Mix, shake, pour and serve all orders before the clock runs out, and in the process learn the recipes to dozens of classic cocktails – maybe not in the right amounts, and making lacking in one or two ingredients (Dragon’s Breath has firewater, which this game does not), but you get the picture. The bar music should better reflect a bar scene, even a disco scene, because the current music in the game is hokey at best, seemingly decided upon at the last minute when the developer realized, “Oops, I forgot to put in music.” My complaints are relatively insignificant, however, as Bar Rush is very, very fun, and definitely provides an original premise. Perhaps, just not for the kids.

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.

Most of us can’t claim similar abilities, nor should we ever want to, but there are plenty of times when hunger hits like a throat-constricting, sucker punch to the gut, complete with salivation and water grumbles echoing from deep within that aching abdomen. In the game iChowdown by ZENUXLAB, your character, aptly named Mr. Dumb, takes his unfortunate name to heart when hunger hits with unexpected force and he sees a restaurant advertising an all-you-can-eat $5.00 buffet, instant relief and chops licking success etching his mind. As anyone without the word “dumb” attached to their name may agree, a $5.00 all-you-can-eat buffet just screams food-poisoning, past expiration, indigestion, diarrhea and a whole host of other ills that generally will lead, yes, to instant gratification, but also an instant run to the bathroom.

Mr. Dumb and his crony make quite a pair. After parking the car, the app has a shot of them walking to the buffet, their Beavis and Butthead illustration and animation style only adding to their lack of appeal. Mr. Dumb has messy brown sideburns, and wears a backwards red baseball cap and a baggy yellow t-shirt hiding what may be his unsightly beer belly despite his gangly, smallish frame. He has squinty eyes, and a yellow, snaggletoothed countenance, pimples, a double chin, and possibly the most blank expression of any video game character I’ve come across. His friend is a spiky blonde and possibly part of an 80′s biker gang, complete with studded black, intimidating, leather uniform.

Obviously, Mr. Dumb is hungry. He wants to be fed. When in the diner, you must tap the “call chef” button to order items off the menu, dragging foods with your finger to the table slots below. The chef, a black woman with cerebral palsy, says “okay” in a high-pitched metallic voice when your order is up, otherwise you may open the Menu tab to see which of your ordered items are available for you to chow down on. To eat, drag the food to Mr. Dumb’s open mouth and then, with your finger, open and shut his mouth rapidly to chew, then swallow (swallowing has you trace patterns with your finger and then possibly pop soda bubbles if he needs some coke to wash down his throat). Initially, the available food options are a sandwich, a hamburger, and a slice of cheesecake. You may select up to four of these foods at a time, and it may be in any combination – but, keep in mind that some foods are worth more points than others, and some may lead to a greater possibility of rejection. Rejection, you ask? Mr. Dumb can only handle so much food at once – feed him more than his gullet can handle and he starts regurgitating half-eaten food in his mouth, and it becomes your job to shove the food back into his mouth so he may start chewing and swallowing again. Hey, you have to get the biggest bang for your buck, right? Mr. Dumb is a smart one.

iChowdown as two objectives per round. The main goal is simply to pass the level by feeding Mr. Dumb enough food points (the first level is only 20 hunger points, and this increases quite a bit with each level), but you can also earn bonus points by completing missions detailed on the Goal Screen. The first level, for example, gives you 5 bonus points if Mr. Dumb overeats more than once, eats more than one steak, or eats more than two sandwiches. Bonus points aren’t a necessity, but then do allow you to purchase new food items at the shop. Foods like buffalo wings and roast chickens require 40-50 bonus points, and as you migrate your hunger to Asia, and later Europe, other regional foods like sushi and boiled octopus become available. Expect to see a lot of green and food-flecked vomit if you want to earn major bonus points.

The two sandwiches objective from the first level is pretty easy since loading two sandwiches at a time in Mr. Dumb’s mouth is no problem. Try to load two hamburgers and you’re in for vomit city, unless you roll up your sleeves and cram that amylase saturated beef back into his throat. Make sure you slap him silly until he regains consciousness – can’t miss any more valuable time to shove more and more food into his mouth. Hamburgers come with a spicy sauce, apparently, because his mouth and eyes alight in flames, which you must douse out by touching the bouncing red lights with your finger.

Gross, with insipid graphics, and hokey diner music that has just a hint of malice, iChowdown is not for those with a weak stomach. Despite such offensiveness and foul entertainment, it is, nevertheless, a fun game. I’ll give ZENUXLABS kudos for making an original and incredibly interactive game, even if it’s one I won’t add to my favorites file. Fans of Beavis and Butthead may enjoy the game’s style, and succeeding to the next round, especially once you reach Asia, makes for challenging play. However, with the constant chewing, the constant choking and needing to cram food back into Mr. Dumb, the swallowing – it all becomes very repetitive, very quickly, without the mindless, trance-like addiction apparent in other games like Balloon Drop Hollywood. Besides, it really kills your appetite.

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Well, needless to say, I didn’t get a tattoo that day, and I probably never will, but at least I can pretend to ink people’s skin with this cool iPhone game called Tattoo Mania by Handy Games. In this game you’re the owner of a Tattoo Shop – aptly called Tattoo Mania – that grows more popular by the second, often with customers waiting impatiently to get inked while you methodically tattoo someone else. The main screen shows the store front of Tattoo Mania in a dark, dusky setting with a Harley perched to the right and a stereo pulsating with generic hard rock music and that high-pitched, whining guitar so eponymous to the genre. To tattoo your customers, a brief shot of the tattoos location will be shown – sometimes this includes a fair close-up of abundantly illustrated breasts – and then the tattoo will be presented up close and personal for you to start zipping your finger around, smudging a line of color into the pre-traced tattoo outline. The colors change automatically if the tattoo is multi-colored, from green to red to grey-blue and black and sometimes pink or purple, and large red welts will appear wherever you strike the skin outside the prescribed tattoo path, leading to cries of pain and “ouch!” and “are you crazy???” from your customers. Throughout all this, of course, you listen blaringly to rock music from what I think the game calls “PAN radio.” Try not to injure your customers too much or you may find yourself fired and unemployed – it’s hard to find a good tattoo artist these days. To keep tabs on their pain threshold, a fire illustration on the left will fill with red, brimming to the top when your customer just can’t take any more of that buzzing, incessant needle. And, to make matters more difficult, some customers have a lower pain tolerance than others – this one woman wouldn’t stop shaking and screaming when I tatted her breasts. I’m a woman, I get it, they’re sensitive, so stop screaming and let me do my job!

To the right you’ll see a line-up of waiting customers, with impatient ones glowing red, indifferent ones yellow, and content to wait ones bright green. At any time you may swap out your customer for a raging red one, so you don’t risk losing a customer and, potentially, your job. I try to swap for the customers with more dollar bills by their moniker, because that’s more dough for my mojo. Keep the $1000+ price tag customers happy instead of out the door, and just politely seat the $200 rose job for later. It soon becomes apparent, however, that there are too many customers to handle, with several desperate “Swap me!” customers threatening to leave, and tattooing everyone successfully becomes a juggling game of musical chair proportions. After awhile, I found I wasn’t paying as close detail to the tattoos as before, just sliding my finger haphazardly around with quick up and down, left to right movements, before I switched to someone else and spent the same five seconds on him. If this is what being a tattoo artist means, quickly bumping out ink in some flesh assembly line, then maybe I don’t want to be a tattoo “artist” any more.

While fun and nice to look at, Tattoo Mania does get repetitive, and the only challenge is dealing with an exponentially growing horde of customers. $3.99 is a bit expensive for relatively no challenges other than the sweat you get from swapping customers. Every now and then you get a larger than average tattoo, requiring you to scroll around the screen with the controller on the bottom left, but that’s usually not a big deal. I wish there were some additional challenges, like speed rounds where you earn bonus points for finishing a tattoo as quickly as possible, or a customization mode, where you make your own tattoo and color it the way you want. It’d be great if the game had a character model for your player, and as collateral for working your arse off in the parlor, you’re awarded different tattoos as you progress in the game. You could upgrade your tattoo gun (mechanism, thing, what are they called?) into a quicker one, with the caveat being it’s more painful, or you could purchase a gun with more color options, so new clientele would come in. The game just needs a bit of color to add depth and dimension – and I’m not asking for much, just the depth of a tattoo.

I can sum up Racer is a single sentence composed almost entirely of onomatopoeia.

VRROOOM vroom vroom SCREEECH! CRUNCH! BURN.

A crash-filled and fast-paced racing game, Racer by Tatem Games is all at once fun, addictive, extraordinarily frustrating, and always startling. Zipping along a 6 lane freeway at speeds cops lagging in their ticket quota lust after, you speed your car in a death race against yourself, abruptly squealing past minivans, convertibles, and the odd what looks to be a Lamborghini, all the time narrowly escaping the inevitable crash and burn. Even after playing the game for a solid hour, I still found myself jumping in shock whenever I collided – rear-ended, rather – with a car that suddenly jettisoned onscreen, on an inevitable crash course toward my once fearless car.

Driving your car is simple enough, requiring you to move it simply with a drag of your finger – whichever finger you choose is your choice, but after considerable experimentation I found my longer middle finger to work the best, it less obstructed visually by its other finger brethren. The default car color is a Lite Green, a color I more accurately describe as Kermit the Frog green, “lite” being more of a key lime, or faded, summery limestone, but you may change this on the Settings screen to Deep Sea, Pearl Sky, Hot Red, Orange, or Silk White (poor orange is the only one without an adjective further defining its luster). On the Settings page you may also turn off the sound effects (why? this option always puzzles me in games without in-game music, since you can easily turn your phone to silent – it’s not like you’ll miss a phone call since the screen you’re using to play the game is the very same one that receives phone calls), turn vibration on (default it’s off, but it’s kind of fun, and even more jarring, to feel the phone vibrate each time you hurtle into another car at breakneck speeds), flip the screen (this has absolutely no purpose except to confuse), and change the units from Kilometers to Miles (which I opted to do, since I’m an American and think in Miles). And for the absolute mad, you have the option of changing the difficulty from Normal to Hard – as if Normal isn’t already excrutiatingly hard – which they amusingly indicate by a handicap symbol speeding fast, like Hard is just another handicap for the elite. Trust me, Hard is hard and unless you have the reaction speed of a fly, stick to Normal.

Your score is recorded in the upper right – if you achieve anything above 10,000 I truly commend you – along with the number of lives remaining (mine tends to read zero), and your distance in miles or kilometers along with the current level are pictured on the upper left. Teeny tiny writing elsewhere on the screen indicates where you may access the Game Menu should you want a quick reprieve from the highway hell course, but you’re more likely to crash before fumbling your giant fingers onto those tiny words.

It’s too bad Racer doesn’t delineate from its freeway environment and dazzle you with off-road racing or perhaps even a two-lane highway, just something to shake up the scenery a bit. Granted, the game is so quick-paced you probably won’t notice the stagnant environment, especially with the vibration option jolting you awake with every life lost, but maybe some extra playing bits to the game would make it more engaging, maybe hitting minivans full of kids loses points, and slamming into a car side on earns more points than the accidental rear-end collision. There are countless perks Tatem Games could have added to the game, but they decided to stick with a streamlined racing game, where the only goal is to speed and not crash. With all the other racing games out there including bizarre sub-levels and extra objectives, this is almost a breath of fresh air. Or it could simply be the stale rank from a moth-filled closet not opened since 1980.

In either case, Racer is highly entertaining, and the strange dichotomy of being simultaneously jarring and monotonous proves a useful companion on the subway and when festering as a passenger during those long car commutes. I’d rather spend the $0.99 on Racer than a few coins extra for that black coffee I know won’t keep me half as awake, and who doesn’t like all those vroom vroom noises and squealing tires?

HexSet is an app by developer Klogia Inc. that brings the premise of Connect Four to the iPhone. It’s easy enough to explain. The game is set up exactly as the original Connect Four, only now the game stand is clad in a chic slate grey, not unlike some modern art piece popular in loft apartments of the 80s, and the pieces are red and blue. I could do without the bleak, textured grey background – a livelier color would brighten the game: how about green? Blue? Pink, even. Something!).

The objective is the same: connect four in a row, either vertically, horizontally or diagonally before your opponent does. Scores are recorded in the upper left for you, and the upper right for the computer, continuing on ad infinitum until you become ad nauseum. Your default playing color is blue, but you may switch it up to red should you feel the need, and to switch it up even more, you may change the difficulty level from 1 – baby steps – to 5 – really battling a computer now. The default setting for playing is a random allotment for who goes first, but you may adjust this to you always playing first, always playing second, and switching back and forth between games. If you overdose on battling the fail-safe computer logarithm with level 5 difficulty, then opt for two player mode and play with a friend – one, hopefully, less talented at HexSet than you.

While the background may be in some serious need of visual counseling, some much needed drapery and accents, HexSet is entertaining enough to play again and again for $1.99. It’s simple and straightforward, and sometimes that’s all you need in a game. Especially a classic game.