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The iPhone platform, with its integrated app store and low barrier to entry development program, can be a boon for independent game developers. Many small or one man operations have found great success creating fantastic games that break the mold and offer something gamers are not use to. It reminds me of the halcyon days of shareware/freeware when DOS and Apple games where written by people in their homes and became huge hits by word of mouth. Osmos, by Hemisphere Games, certainly looks to be one of those underground hits with its particular blend of contemplative game play that mixes arcade action with puzzle solving to give a new spin on familiar game mechanics.

The question is: can Osmos really capture the action loving gamers with such a slow paced game? Lets take a look at the game to see what makes this game of cellular life and death such a provocative experience.

Osmos's recipe is one part space physics and two parts micro biology. Now don't let that those words scare you into thinking you are stepping into your high school science class. In Osmos you control a single cell organism they call a Mote. Your mote must survive by absorbing smaller motes around you. This absorption causes your mote to increase in size. This is all fine and good, but there are larger motes that are also absorbing smaller motes and one of those might be you if you are not careful.

To make things even worse, moving your mote around the screen requires you to fire off a tiny piece of yourself. This is fine for slow careful movements, but if you become to aggressive with your control of your mote, you will find yourself shrinking fast. This is mainly why Osmos is such a slow paced game. Careful movements are almost always the more prudent move, while hasty actions will land you on a collision course with a larger mote.

Beyond these basics, Osmos throws a variety of different motes your way, which gives you eight different game types to add variety. Some of these are sentient and will either run or chase your. Others have their own gravity and must be used to catapult yourself across the level. All of this is wrapped in ambient sounds that, as the opening screen states, sound "best with headphones."

My general impression of this game reminds me a lot of games like Zen Bound, where half the fun is the experience of the game as much as playing it. The campaign is very short and serves mainly as a primmer for playing the arcade modes, which are randomized each time you play them. It would love to see more game types in time, but the game as is ranks among the best in quality and style. Do yourself a favor. Sit down in a quiet room, put your headphones on, and prepare yourself to be absorbed into the world of Osmos.

Gravity: it can be your friend, or it can be a "fall to your death" enemy. In Semi Secret's newest iPhone game Gravity Hook HD, it is mostly the later. In this new arcade game, you take on the effects of gravity with a robotic hook which you use to latch on to floating mines that will propel you upwards. This game has all the attention to detail and charm that we have come to enjoy with Semi Secret's previous entry in the app store, Canabalt.

Much like Canabalt, there isn't much story, but lots of detail to say otherwise. The music is pounding and as the first screen suggests, the game is best enjoyed with headphones. The environment is beautifully rendered, and as you progress higher the ledges you relied upon for a moment reprieve, will fall away from under you. At certain intervals there are floors that close below you to allow a rest, but as you climb higher you will find that stopping can be more of a detriment that keeping your current momentum.

The initial mines are really more floating orbs, but life does not remain so easy. The green "safe" orbs soon disappear and are replaced with blue mines that will quickly explode if you remain attached to them as well as the evil red mines that will explode if you run into them. There are also the occasional line of grey mines that while unsuitable for attaching to (unless you want a quick death at the bottom of the screen), are great for bumping into to help propel you upwards. One must also be careful not to grab a mine too far away as the force to pull you up is lessened by the distance from the mine.

It would not be an exaggeration to say this game is quite challenging and will take time to master the rhythm of the game. For those that do find this game to be a walk in the park. The game unlocks a classic mode which is the original version of this game. This is pixel art style and contains only the blue type mines. The timing of this version is much faster and is even more challenging that the updated version. Semi Secrets high score boards and twitter announcements are built in just like their previous game. This is another example of the high quality gaming we have come to expect from Semi Secret, and is not to be missed.

Speak the word 8-Bit and you have me. There is just something about that pixelated graphics and those chip tune soundtracks that endears me. Perhaps it is the nostalgic look and feel of the games I grew up with, but I can never get enough. Bit Pilot definitely has the makings of a great retro style arcade game. The gameplay is simple and the look is classic.

In Bit Pilot you command a space ship that is in an arena dodging asteroids. Controlling the ship is done with swipes. One finger swipes for small movements and two fingers for faster and more controlled movements. This control scheme allows for very precise movements which are required as the levels progress. As you fail to be destroyed, the game throws larges and more numerous asteroids as well as lasers that fire horizontally across the screen. The only thing keeping your ship intact is your shield which can be regenerated by capturing pills that fly across the screen. As you continue to play your cumulative score unlocks new music tracks. The game also packs a fair number of achievements without the open feint network for those social gamers.

This game reminds me of why games like Canabalt are so popular. The simple game play mechanics, and high quality graphics make for a game you don't want to put down. Bit Pilot doesn't crowd itself with too many fancy features, but above all else, fun.

Bit Pilot was free for its first day but as since gone up to $.99, which isn't too much to ask for a delightful game.
 

My first Macintosh was a Performa 475. With its 25mhz 68040LC, and 8MB of RAM it wasn't much to look at, but it was mine. One game that came bundled with my Mac was a great 3-D tank game called Spectre. I would play this game for hours and even when I eventually moved up to an iMac, this game was still in regular use. I would later get Spectre VR but never played it as much as I did the original. So you can imagine my elation when I saw the Spectre game coming to the iPhone. Can this port deliver as great an experience, both single and multiplayer, on the iPhone as it did so many years ago on my old Mac?

Spectre, for those who missed this bit of gaming history, is a three dimensional tank battle in which you attempt to capture all the flags on the map without being destroyed by the enemy tanks guarding them. There are blocks, windmills,  and walls to use for cover.

You can play Spectre from three view points: first person, third person, and top view. Each have their advantages and disadvantages so everyone has their preference and some will even switch between views during combat to gain an edge. In the original Spectre, you are limited to a tank with a simple cannon. In Spectre VR, not only do you have an array of different weapons to get such as grenades and smart shells, but your tank can fly for short periods allowing you to jump over enemies or obstacles. Spectre VR also has four game types from Base Raid to Capture the Flag. Multiplayer supports four players via bluetooth and 16 online over Wifi or 3G. Not only can you play online with the dedicated servers, but you can also download the server software and run a server yourself. This is almost unheard of in the gaming world these days and it is amazing to see such a large range of options for playing multiplayer.

The controls are the standard virtual analog stick with fire and other controls on the right. Lefties can switch the controls and there is an option to make the analog stick smaller. The graphics are spot on and run seamlessly even when playing online. While this should be expected from a game made in the early 90's, it is still great to see how well this game performs even on my aging first generation iPhone. The game even offers a 3D anaglyph option for real 3D play. While the multiplayer is pretty empty right now, you can pad the game with bots that will actually attempt to accomplish the goal of whatever game type you are playing. The single player levels also offer plenty of challenge with both the original Spectre and VR levels, there will be plenty to help sharpen your skills for online.

Games like Spectre are timeless and it is good to see a game like this come to the iPhone platform. With such a great foundation there wasn't much Brilliant Bytes Software had to do to deliver a superior game. As I have been playing Spectre 3D, it is hard to find an area where it is lacking. If I had to put down some weak spot I would have to say the analog stick could use an adjustment for sensitivity. The lack of online players at this time take away from the multiplayer fun somewhat, but I am sure that in time more people will rediscover this great classic form days when LAN multiplayer games were unheard off, especially in 3D.
 

Duck in the Truck is the first among HarperCollins's adaptations of children's author Jez Alborough's "Duck" tales. Optimized for the iPhone's screen and touch controls, Duck in the Truck is a vibrant storybook improved with bits of animation and sound effects, elements that are exclusive to this version of the storybook.

In the storybook's journey from physical to electronic, the quirky story of Duck and his bright red truck remains intact. "This is the Duck driving home in a truck. This is the track which is taking him back," begins the story. And with that, a delightfully rhythmic little tale about kindheartedness, teamwork, and perseverance is set up. The Duck later gets his truck stuck in a muck, and he is soon joined by Frog, Sheep, and Goat, who try to help him get out of his sticky, or should I say, muddy, situation.

From Alborough's wonderful rhymes and colorful illustrations to the pitch-perfect narration by Harry Enfield (which you can turn off if you want to read it aloud yourself), it's obvious that a lot of work was put into making this app squeaky clean, quite unlike how the Duck's truck becomes after it gets stuck in the muck. Every page is enhanced with animation and sound effects that are tap-activated. For instance, when the Duck's truck hits a bump in the road, the page is animated to show the vehicle and its feathered driver flying across the track, and the Duck's panicked quacks can be heard every time the page is tapped.

Truly, every element of this interactive storybook is clean and well refined.

One day when I was seven, I climbed a tree to look at a bird's nest. As I approached the nest out on that branch, I hadn't got within 4 feet of that nest when I heard what sounded like a banshee coming straight for me. Sparrows may look cute, but mother sparrows are vicious, and a beak to the head at full speed will leave a knot for days. I know first hand what birds are capable of when you get on their bad side. The folks at Rovio must have had a similar experience, because their latest game, Angry Birds, is all about the wrath of our avian friends.

The plot of Angry Birds is simply; a bunch of birds trying to get their eggs back from a bunch of green pigs. What Angry Birds lacks in story, it makes up for in game play. the basics of the game consist of launching your birds into a structure build by the pigs in order to destroy the building as well as the pigs. You have a limited supply of birds, and all of the pigs must be destroyed to finish the level. At the end of each level you are judged with one to three stars based on the number of birds and the amount of destruction you have caused. While early levels can easily be finished with the provided birds, later levels require multiple shots with increasingly better accuracy in order to defeat the pigs.

As you progress you are provided with more than your basic winged munitions. There are six different birds, most of which, have a triggered ability that is activated when you tap the screen while the bird is in flight. Each level only provides you with certain birds and in a certain order which increases the puzzle elements to the game. For those of you that are perfectionists there are a multitude of achievements to obtain.

Angry Birds uses Rovio's own social game network called Crystal that tracks achievements and high scores, as well as allows for challenges. The sign up for Crystal is quick, but it is yet another in a long line of social game networks.

The best feature about this game is that it has a lot to offer, both for the casual gamer, as well as the hardcore gamer. Most levels are given adequate ammo to finish the level without too much problem. Those that enjoy the gameplay and don't care about the achievements or the challenge of getting perfect scores on every level, will find a lot to enjoy. On the other hand, getting three stars on some levels requires expert placement of your shots and even figuring out where to place them in the first place can be quite a challenge. The music, graphics, and sound effects are high quality and really set the mood. Every bird and pig has their own subtle personality on the screen, and it drives you crazy when the pigs jeer at you with those smug grins when you fail to destroy them. As if that weren't enough, the game has enjoyed multiple updates with additional levels which further increases the value of this already inexpensive title. With the game still at $.99 I can't think of any reason not to give this game a shot if you are even remotely interested.

If you've played tower defense games before and think you've had enough, I wouldn't blame you. Truth is, this is by far the best one that I've played in a very long time. Even if your sick of tower defense games, or if you've never played one before, this is the one you should try. 

The artwork is zany but the quick iPad processor makes even the full screen of zombies move smoothly and never miss a step.

The game is based on you controlling a yard of plants that sit between your house and a mob of zombies who will stop at nothing until they reach your home. You have some pretty strange plants at your disposal to stop the zombies from reaching your home, including pea shooters, magic mushrooms that fire spores, venus fly traps that lost the taste for flies and found one for zombies, and a whole slew of others.

Unlike other tower defense games, this one doesn't have a winding path that zombies follow to your house, instead your front yard is divided into 6 rows and zombies walk straight down those rows towards your home. At first, the game seems awfully simple and you might even think its too easy to play.

The truth is though, that the incredible variety of Zombies (many have special unique skills like pole vaulting, or dancing like Michael Jackson and raising other zombies from the graves), and the huge variety of plants makes this a fun ever changing strategy type tower defense game. There are 48 different kinds of plants and 26 different types of zombies.

Every time you complete a level, a new plant you could use is added to your weapons. In addition, the game is constantly adding new Zombies with unique skills to the fold. At the beginning of each round, you get to choose which plants you want to take (6 to start, and you can buy more as you progress from the trashy next door neighbor).

In addition to picking your plants to battle the Zombies, the game also changes the environment. Sometimes the game takes place during the day, other times it happens at night. Each environment determines what types of plants you should take (mushrooms seem to work better at night).

The game just continues to add new and fun changes as you get further into the rounds. There are even mni games you'll encounter very so often (including a wack-a zombie mini-game) that are lots of fun. Even the music is appropriate and has a catchy intense feeling as your law fills with zombies.

If you get just 1 tower defense game for your iPad, this is the one you should get! Its that good.

The introduction of iPhone os 3.0 brought with it a feature that may not be used everyday for some of us but never the less is a vital feature: copy and paste. We all use this for moving text or pictures from app to app. Apples implimentation of copy and paste is good, but Tapbots has taken this feature and enhanced it; making pastebot one of my must have apps on the iPhone.

Pastebot appears at first to be like the multi-clipboard apps on the old Mac OS offering a holding place for items copied to the clipboard. When you start the app it immediatly captures whatever you have copied and saves it to the app's clipboard. Pastebot take this further with folders for sorting and organizing clippings. All Clippings can be titled and those titles are searchable within the app. While the clipboard only holds the last 99 items, folders allow you to store as many items as you want nicely organized within the app.

Besides folders Pastebot offers a variety of tools to manipulate both images and text. For text, Pastebot has a large assortment of filters from find and replace to even a translation tool. Pastebot has the ability to encode and decode html tags as well as convert smart quotes to straight quotes and visa versa. Selecting an image and pressing the filter buttons offers five filters: Brightness, Black and White, Invert, Saturation, and Sepia. While these filters are basic, they offer quick and easy effects to add to photos. If you view the image and choose the edit button, Pastebot has the ability to rotate and crop the image as well. I personally find these tools to be the most useful to quickly rotate a screenshot or crop a picture before sending it out.

Finally we come to the coolest part of Pastebot. The app by itself lets you copy an image, save to your library, or send as an email. For text it also lets you search Google with the text.

With a free OS X download from Tapbot's website, Pastebot gains the ability to send text and images to and from your Mac. When the app is running, and both Mac and iPhone are connected to the same network, anything copied on the Mac is immediately sent to the Pastebot app. This features works great for sending large blocks of text or large collections of images quickly to the iPhone. Pastebot also works the other way with an option to paste to the Mac. With this combination Pastebot can effectively become an interactive multi-clipboard for the Mac as well. I have been using Pastebot for moving screenshots to my Mac without having to open iPhoto and perform a complete sync of the iPhone.

What Pastebot does, it does flawlessly and with an elegant interface. Not everyone will find a place for Pastebot within their work flow, but for those that want a simple tool for organizing images and text on the iPhone with the ability to sync to the Mac, it doesn't get much better than Pastebot.

Tired of helping a bouncy fellow jump from one platform to another while avoiding bugs, UFOs, and paper holes? Tired of playing any jumping character, for that matter? If you answered yes to either question, then you're in luck. Super Fall might be what you're looking for. At a time when going as high as you can seems to be the "in" thing among iPhone games, Super Fall dares to be different by presenting a game where the goal is the exact opposite.

Your aim in playing Super Fall is to fall as deep as you can in a vertical scrolling game world fashioned with various types of obstacles on either side. These obstacles range from seemingly harmless bumpers (like the ones found in a pinball machine) to deathly black holes (like the ones found in deep space). By tilting your device sideways, you must try your best to avoid these obstacles in order to go deeper into the game world. Of course, these obstacles would be the least of your worries if the game character you're playing is an armored juggernaut, but the somewhat sad reality is that you play as, of all things, a mere ragdoll. So it's imperative that you avoid every obstacle, unless you want your ragdoll to lose all of its limbs just seconds into the game.

Aside from the many obstacles your ragdoll must pass as it makes its descent, power-ups and other items are also found along the way. Collect stars and experience in order to unlock awards and other types of dolls with varying characteristics, but avoid the items that make your doll intoxicated or catch fire in order to prolong its health and make it fall deeper while your score climbs higher. You may also tap and hold on the screen to activate a time warp that would make everything move in slow-motion, enabling you to more easily control the direction of your doll and lessening the impact of the obstacles on the doll.

A couple of things stand out in Super Fall. One is the ragdoll physics, which is very important in this case since we're actually dealing with ragdoll figures. I understand that the developers used an advanced physics engine for Super Fall, and you need only play a single game to see proof of the precision of that engine with regards to gravity, friction, and restitution, among others. The other remarkable thing about Super Fall is the overall design of the characters, the environments, the obstacles, and pretty much everything you see on the screen. The visuals are rendered in a style that is unlike anything I've seen before in an iPhone game. I'll even go as far as to say that such design and execution have the makings of an Oscar-worthy animated short. It's just so beautiful to behold and almost photorealistic. Buy this game if only for the visuals and you won't be disappointed.

Zombies are all the rage nowadays. They're just everywhere: in books, in movies, in TV shows, in music. References to zombies abound in almost every arm of popular culture, especially in electronic games, including, of course, iPhone games.

A bevy of zombie-fied apps and games are available on the App Store today. Enter "zombie" in the App Store's search bar and you'll be shown well over fifty applications inspired by the undead. It seems that the iPhone platform is under a zombie apocalypse, one that is showing no signs of, er, dying down soon. It's no surprise then that sifting through the assortment of zombie titles to find something worthwhile can be quite a chore. It's only when some of the high-quality apps that don't get much initial attention reduce their prices or even become free for a limited time that they get bumped up the App Store charts and people start taking notice. Such was the case with one of the more, if not the most, worthwhile zombie games for the iPhone and iPod Touch, an excellently designed game called ZombieSmash.

There's a lot of things that you simply must experience firsthand in order to fully appreciate how fun they are. Apparently, one of those things is smashing an army of zombies who are out to invade your humble little home in the middle of the night. ZombieSmash, which is currently on sale at only $0.99, lets you do just that.

ZombieSmash has three game modes, namely, Endless Siege, Sandbox, and Campaign. Endless Siege, which is initially unlocked, pits you against an endless succession of zombies to test how long you can hold your ground, while Sandbox is so named since it just lets you play along without worrying about defending your house. Campaign mode is where most of the game's heft lies and is by far the most fun you will ever have on your iPhone.

In Campaign mode, you are to defend your house against zombies for 31 straight days by smashing them after dragging and throwing them across the screen or killing them using the various weapons at your disposal. Every day offers a unique challenge in the form of a new breed of zombies (like Lucy, who is unusually quick for a zombie, and Bruno, who is so huge and heavy that he can't be dragged around and therefore must be defeated by means of special weapons) or a more difficult gameplay direction. Either way, the objective of the game remains the same throughout the mode: destroy those bleepin' zombies. And boy, is destroying them so much fun that you can't help but sustain a grin, especially since new weapons are introduced every now and then.

Imagine, among other crazy techniques, letting loose a five-ton wrecking ball or dropping a giant block of cement to pulverize the enemies and keep them at bay, away from your precious house. And with the game's darkly humorous video recorder, you can even capture the best of your "finishing touches," killing off the last zombie for the night by using any or all of your available weapons or by simply but triumphantly smashing the poor guy to the ground. Sounds good? You bet. Smashing? Absolutely. For a game that's centered on the undead, ZombieSmash is, ironically, one of the liveliest and most fun out there.