Mobile Games

Barcode Battler vs iPhone

The Barcode Battler was rubbish. Sure, it sounded exciting: turn everyday barcodes into exciting warriors, power-ups and so on, then battle them against others. Brilliant! The reality was somewhat different. The barcodes had to be swiped through a narrow reader, so to even find out what a barcode...

Battle of the match-threes

I beligerantly maintain that Zoo Keeper was, and is, the best game for the Nintendo DS. GameRankings disagrees, but GameRankings is wrong. 193rd? Shove it up your arse, GameRankings. It took a long time for it to make the natural transition to iPhone, but now that it has,...

The App Store’s shades of free

Price is always a favourite subject for mobile games. When they’re cheap, the industry says they’re undervaluing games as a whole; when they’re less cheap – expensive seems like an overstatement – consumers are shocked and appalled. Free is always good though, right? Depends what kind of free....

James Pond in the Deathly Shallows

This can’t have been originally conceived as a James Pond game. I say that not because it bears no resemblance the fondly remembered ’90s platform games, but because one of the three controls puts James Pond into reverse. Now, I realise that some fish can swim backwards. But...

Apps with an agenda

Relatively cheap to develop, with a huge potential audience. Apps present an opportunity for companies other than games publishers to get in on the gaming act – be it for promotion, profit, or fundraising. Is that a good thing? Not universally, of course – see TT3D Game for...

The name’s Pond, James Pond

We hope the following news isn’t a red herring – radically retro videogame character James Pond is making a comeback on the App Store later this month. James Pond in the Deathly Shallows has nothing to do with a particular wizard but instead sees the titular fish ridding...

Superbrothers: Swords & Sworcery EP Micro

Swords & Sworcery was the first iPhone game I had a real expectation of pre-release. Cruel, then, that it was released on iPad first. But hey ho, the anticipation is all part of the enjoyment. And I was happy enough to wait: it looked cool, seemed to have...

Unfashionably late to the iPhone party

There have been some really good science documentaries recently: Wonders of the Universe, with physics megastar (pun intended) Prof Brian Cox; TV’s Ben Miller getting to grips with temperature on Horizon; and BBC Four’s Everything and Nothing. Properly entertaining, and properly mind-bending. It’s fun to stimulate your brain’s...