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Sim City is the perfect God –or super mayor if you prefer- game that puts you in charge of a new and fresh city from the ground up. As with many old games these days, it finds itself among a throng of refurbished games made available for the iPhone. It makes sense – if you’re going to bring something to the iPhone, you may as well bring something that created and defined an entire genre. You’re in charge of zoning, utilities and even schooling and it’s entirely up to you whether you make a crapsack of a town or a bustling metropolis.

This iteration of the classic game appears to draw inspiration from Sim City 3000. The interface is an isometric view that you can move around your city, checking out details on your little pet. There is a surprising amount of detail to be seen in a bustling city but of course, before you can look at the detail in the city you first have to build one. Luckily, it holds your hand through the process of building one from the ground up with a very detailed and yet simple tutorial. Even if you find yourself stumped despite the tutorial, there are starter cities provided that you can use to experiment and thus get your feet wet.

As you are starting a city, you are predictably posed with a huge number of tools in Sim City by which you can turn a simple grassy field into a place filled with businesspeople and other things. It is, like many things in life, a matter of balance. Creating enough jobs to give everyone living in your city something to work with is part of the balance, as well as police and any number of other bureaucratic concerns that most cities need to handle. That’s where the meat of the game lies, in first achieving that balance and then maintaining it as you attempt to grow your city.

Now, this is where the game starts to shoot itself in the foot. The iPhone, while a capable device, isn’t one that is optimally designed for gaming. This is most expressed when you decide to zoom into a highly functional city and find the iPhone struggling with Sim City. Sometimes it stutters, sometimes it hiccups and every now and then, you’ll run into catastrophic failure with a game crash. Sure, it looks wonderful when it actually works but this is a game, not an experiment. You at least expect things to work well if they’re offering the option.

All in all, Sim City is an ambitious title with some minor hiccups that fans can ignore. However, if you’re not a fan and if you’re just a casual gamer, you’ll find that Sim City is way too ambitious and way too buggy to contend with.

The problem with movie to video game adaptations is that they’re rarely good. In fact, it’s unsettlingly difficult to think of a good one. It gets worse when you try to bring it to a mobile platform and Terminator Salvation for the iPhone continues the horrendous legacy of bad adaptations. The console version was horrendous and got boring really fast, which is good in the worst possible way as the game s far too short.

While fulfilling the basic need of becoming a game, it actually appears as if Terminator Salvation was rushed out and considering all the issues it brings to the table, it’s not hard to think that. With a little more time, this could’ve been a game that was at least, a little fun and not the mishmash that comes to us iPhone owners everywhere.

It succeeds in one thing and that is evoking the spirit and feel of a Terminator movie. The graphics themselves actually look great and the enemy robot design looks amazing – each and every enemy looks like its only purpose for being is to eradicate humanity. The environments are engaging to a point as they are well done and look great for a mobile game. Unfortunately, that’s where the good news ends.

One of the biggest holes that the game cannot help but have is the story. It revolves around the movie Terminator Salvation’s storyline but because it doesn’t want to spoil anything, it avoids the story like OJ Simpson and innocence. You end up with a half told story, never quite sure what’s going on and that easily robs from the feeling of accomplishment as you’re not sure what you just accomplished.

It plays like your standard duck, cover and shoot game. The problem is the cover part has a chance for failure. This wouldn’t be such a problem if the chance for failure stemmed from a gameplay mechanic and not just random failure. Sometimes you’ll find yourself trying to run to cover and failing for some reason, instead hugging the chaingun of a very angry terminator unit.

That wasn’t the worst part of the game and when you say something is worse than wonky controls is bad. There are some parts of Terminator Salvation wherein you’re looking at a stage and you’re just thinking that it’s unfinished, like they forgot to put in some extra events. As with all unfinished things, it ends fairly quickly – around an hour and a half of total playtime.

That’d be good if the game was free or even a dollar to play. As it stands, it’s ten dollars to buy and at ten dollars, well, you’re better off just getting something else. Terminator Salvation is an atrocious game whose good points are far outweighed by the fact that the producers simply didn’t seem to care about making a good game.

There’s a niche phenomenon called collectible card gaming around where people pay tens of dollars for pieces of cardboard with fancy art and text that makes them valuable in a limited gaming setting. Similarly, jigsaw puzzles just aren’t that fun anymore for most people except if they happen to be rearranging a picture of their face or the like.

Zentomino involves the jigsaw puzzle, although it doesn’t waste cardboard. Available on the iPhone, it cannot help but remind you conceptually of a jigsaw puzzle, though calling it one would be like calling the Lord of the Rings a long walk towards a fiery mountain with a bunch of short guys and a magnificent beard. Sure that’s technically accurate but it undersells the epic journey short.

It starts with a silhouette in the middle of your screen and around twelve shapes floating happily on your iPhone screen. Each shape is unique – no two are alike in Zentomino. Some people might get Tetris flashbacks, as the occasional L shaped block floats around the screen. They each have a unique color to make sure that when you put them together you don’t end up losing sight of each individual shape.

Yep, you’re supposed to fit this rainbow menagerie into that silhouette. You can rotate, flip and turn as much as you want to make this work, which offers a different level of depth compared to the matching the corners action involved in a jigsaw. Adding to the flipping combination is the fact that you might have extraneous pieces floating around your screen, meaning you could be staring at a perfectly simple puzzle rendered unsolvable due a single misplaced piece.

For those with less pride than others there’s a hint option to nudge you along in the right direction. It’s not a big a hit on the pride as it is with other puzzles, as knowing the place of a single piece doesn’t actually make it less challenging, though it does give you a step in the right direction. It might even make it more challenging if you’ve ended up so far off the track that the reveal ends up shocking your thought process.

Zentomino also offers a save option to make sure you can stop and continue it later in case it gets to the point where you would prefer a migraine to the game. The graphics of the game are simple, clean and don’t distract from the game, which is all good considering you have to start deep into the screen for minutes at a time. Zentomino is a good way to use your iPhone to take a break from the world and is a great addition to any iPhone game library.

It’s gotten to the point where Apple can actually say their iPhone is an actual contender for mobile gaming. It may not be as complex as offerings from Nintendo and Sony, but it appears to have its own wide selection of games for the iPhone and some of them are even free. Flood It is one of those games that could be good if bought and fantastic if gotten for free.

Flood It is one of those simple games that aren’t around to wow you or turn your world on its head – it has been often compared to a multi-colored minesweeper, one that needs you to open up a screen filled with so many different colors into a single color, the way the KKK must think of in their intellectual discussions while they teach the younguns how to knot a noose.

Flood It always requires you to start from the upper left corner. Like that ancient puzzle, every time you click on something you change the colors of the square you clicked as well as adjacent squares. It looks easy until it dawns on you that you’ve only got twenty two moves to do it in, like some odd reference to catch-22, a saying that hasn’t been used in media for half a decade.

There are different difficulty levels, offering a greater number of squares to work through, though with more moves. Unfortunately, it’s as difficult as winning a pie eating contest after chugging down a gallon of milk and sewing your mouth shut. Yep, it’s very, very difficult. While there are those out there that will find this preferable to a crossword that refers to obscure Broadway shows in the 50s, there are better options.

Fortunately the game is free – if this had a price, this game would be overshadowed by other, more polished games. The fact that it isn’t designed in a way to show you that it is always solvable can be very frustrating. The random assortment of colors on the screen sometimes suggests that it’s actually impossible to get anywhere productive with Flood It.

Like many free games it’s definitely worth a look and a twiddle. The graphics are very, very simple and you can’t fault the designers for that as it is a very simple game but you can’t help but think that there’s a way to make squares a lot more interesting to stare at. Try it out – downloading is free.

The Fast & the Furious is a movie franchise that simple refuses to die. While the appeal can easily be seen for most people, other people see it as a bizarre car movie that seems to apply video game physics in place of an actual storyline.

Luckily for iPhone gamers, Fast & Furious the Game is available on the iPhone. While you don’t get too much of the surprisingly charismatic Vin Diesel, the way the Fast & Furious the Game world works is surprisingly conducive to gaming, what with the over the top sequences and all. People who want some over the top driving action without having to watch the movie need not fear – it doesn’t have anything to do with the franchise.

Fast & Furious the Game doesn’t even need you to know that there’s somehow, a movie running around. It simply seems to have borrowed the movie’s name to help sell the game. While the world of Fast & Furious seems completely conducive to over the top car stunts, the game actually fails to completely embrace the spirit of insanity that makes driving a car under a fireball seem so appealing.

It’s a dud.

It’s cute that again, the accelerometer comes into play. You steer your car by titling your car appropriately. Unfortunately, the accelerometer works too well. Much in the same way the Wiimote is starting to ruin the Wii, the accelerometer’s sensitivity issues come into play when you’re trying to play on the bus or in the car. It is just not gonna happen. If the car you’re riding in turns, chances are, it’ll turn your videogame car right into a wall.

It’s like you’re playing with a car made of paper in Fast & Furious the Game – there’s no real sense of weight. Handling doesn’t change whether you’re running with a police car or trucking along with, well, a truck. The handling issues actually take over the game – most people would end up being way too busy to actually use, say, the nitrous when they’re too busy begging the car to please pay attention to them.

Fast & Furious the Game miraculously has a story mode offering, though considering the source material, you may take that as either a pro or a con. Unfortunately, the other modes appear to actually make an already hard to control game worse. The Drag Racing option actually takes the controls away from you. It seems like it’ll be a good idea as the controls are bad, but this is a bloody racing game. If you’re not controlling anything in a GAME something went terribly wrong.

That unfortunately doesn’t work well, predictably, for Fast & Furious the Game. Something went terribly wrong when someone said this game was good to go for the iPhone. This should have never made it out the door.

If anything, bizarre concepts at least allow a games metaphorical or imaginary foot to get lodged in the door. Balloon Headed Boy for the iPhone, a title that provokes very disturbing imagery and couples that picture with a background that appears to have been infested with candy elves into a reasonable game. I mean, let’s face it – any game title that suggests the existence of a boy who is threatened by the mere presence of a needle probably provokes something.

Balloon Headed Boy is fortunate enough to exist in a world created by someone on an acid trip – that is to say, as if a rainbow vomited onto the background. In a good way. The game starts when a massive and unfortunate storm tosses that bizarre world asunder and since you happen to have functioning limbs, it’s up to you to save the day by bringing in and saving the rest of your balloon buddies.

It’s your standard given side-scroller, although one with a strange gameplay mechanic. With a stroke of a finger you can inflate or deflate your little freakish hero’s head and have him float up to the ceiling, allowing you to reach a higher area or to float down safely from one.

Curiously or at least, fitting the theme of drugs, you need flowers or plants to help you get high. This gives it a puzzle angle which revolves around the proper use of your flower power to get through the stage. Action is definitely still a part of the game as you can hop on the heads of your enemies to eliminate them, the way Mario taught us too so many years ago.

It doesn’t take itself seriously – it knows it’s a silly concept and it knows it is supposed to be more fun than challenging. It offers thirty four levels for your inflated hero to run around in. After finishing a level, your time is recorded so you can still compete against yourself if you want to. Unfortunately, the game falters on a very basic level – the controls.

Like the Wii, the iPhone’s accelerometer gives the impression of varied and different gameplay and fails in the same way – sensitivity. It just doesn’t work very well. Perhaps technology is still worlds away from truly giving us a new way of communicating with our games. Most of the time, with both the iPhone and the Wii, it actually seems like flailing works just as well as controlled movement.

With some tweaking, it could have been something great. Balloon Headed Boy could’ve been a fun game for anyone who had an iPhone. As it is, it’s a bizarre game that can definitely eat up some time – a good game, but not a great game.

Darned if I don’t hear the Tetris theme song playing in my head, because I most certainly do when I look at Parkinglot, a simple game that you can find on your iPhone. Well, to be honest, the Tetris theme plays a lot in my head whenever I get a game for the iPhone – after all, puzzle games are fairly easy to design and thus, there are a large number of them running around.

Parkinglot is one of those successful puzzle games, for any number of reasons. One of the finest reasons for its success is that it fulfills what a puzzle should do – make you feel like you’re busy and in the process, burn off some extra time during a break or if you’re waiting for someone. Parkinglot makes what is a horrendous and irritating experience into a game on the iPhone, one that a lot of people around the world find fun.

With four hundred and fifty scenarios and puzzles to work through to get your brave little car out the exit, you can bet that you’ll find your money and your time’s worth. It seems simple on paper and onscreen – you need to guide your Mr. Bean yellow car out of a jam packed, well, parking lot. The thing is, like real life, whenever you do something someone does something too. What they do could easily be good for your or bad for you, which forms the heart of the game.

You don’t need to know much more than that – it sums out the concept of a very simple, user and beginner friendly game that can consume endless hours. It could even become sort of a hobby – you could spend hours attacking a single puzzle with your yellow car and yet never make the least number of moves that you could as like golf, doing the least amount of work and getting the job done anyway is the objective of the game.

Even if you’re no gaming perfectionist, four-hundred or so levels can really eat up a person’s time, especially if you take a particular liking to this game. Parkinglot finds its success in its potential playtime coupled with the ninety-nine cent price tag – cheap and lots of playtime? Definitely a successful combination.

Platform games are a lost art on consoles, but not for handhelds – in fact, it is there that they may have found their newest and most welcoming home. Doodle Jump is one such game and one I would wholeheartedly suggest to anyone looking for an addictive game that can make wasting time a lot of fun. Even if you’re not a fan of platform gaming or gaming in general, it’s something worth taking a short glance at.

If you know Ice Climber, that ancient game on the NES, then you’ve got a good idea of what to do in Doodle Jump. Subtract the hammers and you’ve got yourself an adventure where you’re trying to hop up higher and higher, avoiding various skyblocks and so forth to get to the peak and zenith of everything. The controls are fairly simple, designed to push the game forward. Whenever your little avatar in Doodle Jump hits a platform, they immediately jump. It is up to you, by tilting the iPhone, to change the angles and direct the jump itself.

Tapping on the screen actually lets you shoot the various monsters that try to get in your way, even if the term monster is used loosely. The things in Doodle Jump are way too cute and adorable to be really called monsters and the glorious way that they’re animated only multiplies that aspect of the game. This is where the game gets the first part of its name. If you’ve ever doodled during a boring English class or a math class that you think you’re going to fail anyway, then you’ll recognize the style used in the game. Of course, the graphics in the game are far crisper and of course cleaner to make things easy to spot and identify.

Doodle Jump also provokes a sense of competitiveness. The objective of the game is to get as high as possible – in the game, not with something illegal – and when you get to the top scorers, you see a red bar on the side of the screen with a name on it. Yep, that’s where that score and height was, much like the way a child’s height is measured as they grow older.

At the end of the day, it’s a fun game and one that can get quickly addictive for those who enjoy these simple adventures. The game play is very crisp, responsive and is rarely, if ever, irritating or frustrating. If anything, the biggest problem is that there’s no real pressure – but for people who just want a quick and fun game, Doodle Jump is the way to go.

The economic crisis has had very little to do with the realm of flash gaming, though it has appeared to have forced people into examining entertainment that is, for the most part, free. Bowman is one of those simple yet elegantly entertaining games that first made the splash in the pools of flash gaming. For those who’ve always fancied a quick game while on the subway or on breaks, now there’s an iPhone version.

If you bring your phone with you, now you can have it cart with it Bowman. With four game modes presented to you, it promises enough variety to make it appealing. If you’re familiar with the games Scorched Earth or Worms then you’ve got a pretty good idea of how the game goes. You play the part of – you guessed it – a bowman who’s trying to shoot their opponent before they poke holes with you with a bunch of arrows. You don’t move, you just stand still and battle the wind for the accuracy of your shot.

The various modes determine what or who you’ll be knocking the arrow against. You can pit your bowman avatar against the computer, another person or even some birds that are flying about, minding your own business. The last one, aptly titled bird hunt, gives you three minutes to play the part of a hunter, decimating entire flocks and flights of birds.

The controls are very, very simple. You touch the screen and slide your finger along it – the direction and distance that your arrow will go is determined by how you do that. It seems fairly simple until obstacles get in the way and when the wind’s just not going the way you want it to. Like Worms and Scorched Earth, the game is based on a very, very simple premise but is very, very fun.

For those who enjoy bragging, the games keeps a high score list, both of the highest number poor fowl you’ve destroyed in a single round and the least number of shots it took you to assassinate an opponent. The options available to the game directly correlate to the game play itself – you could change the amount of health that each participant has, or you can turn on the idea of critical hits in Bowman. Bowman, without it, doesn’t care where you hit your opponent, only that you do. With critical hits, a headshot means that you win, period – no questions asked.

For ninety-nine cents, this simple game is definitely worth a buy. The game play is simple is easy to understand and has graphics that are clear and clean. It’s a fun game to play with a friend or even against yourself and a worthy addition to any iPhone.

Cuteness makes a normally simple game into one that’s memorable and sometimes, addictive. Even simple number games can become a lot more entertaining with some cutesy stuff and in the case of the iPhone game, Brain Thaw, it does. Groovy Squared brings to the many hand held players out there a cute little penguin named Newton, whose meaningful name pretty much implies that he’s the smartest penguin you’ve ever met. Not that the glasses wouldn’t have showed off that aspect of him at first glance.

Brain Thaw is a game of numbers – or rather, a game where you feed Newton numbers. Unfortunately Newton, like many pets and animals, can sometimes be picky. Some dogs like wet food, some animals want their food to be dead for a few days. Newton on the other hand enjoys numbers that fit his current mood.

That mood is portrayed, per level, in the form of a mathematical equation. That equation tells you which of the numbers on screen Newton wants to eat that level. Double tap or double click those with the right mathematical flavor and Newton will chomp them up. Fortunately, that’s not the end of the Brain Thaw deal – if it was, it wouldn’t be as fun, even if it does exercise your brain with some light analysis.

Our good penguin Newton is haunted by Yetis, who, mythical as they are, apparently enjoy a good penguin shaped snack. No one knows if Newton did something to provoke these Yetis into targeting it or his numerous snacks simply fall into their feeding grounds, but no matter what the reason, they’re his adversaries. Like people, the Yetis in Brain Thaw are moody in a number of ways, from aggressive yeti who will chase your penguin avatar down with a vengeance to lurkers who’re simply waiting for the right time.

Winning is simple – since Newton is a glutton, you just need to consume every single number that fits the set numeric equation on the board without getting chomped on by a yeti. Like any other game, there are bonuses that can pump up your score, which can give you a nice place on the leaderboards.

Brain Thaw delivers a nice little experience with nice music and cute characters and of course, a nice premise for the game’s mechanics. Unfortunately, it never really draws a person in. It’s never difficult enough to really drag someone into it. If a kid’s playing it, you can be sure that they’ll milk it for all it’s worth. For an adult however, they’ll find that even at the hardest settings that the game has an extremely limited lifespan.