iAppLover

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.

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.

Pakoon 3 iPhone Game

When you see the words “Pakoon 3”, you’re probably going to immediately wonder where Pakoons 1 and 2 are. Thing is, there is no prequel to Pakoon 3, a game on the iPhone that could easily entertain you whether or not you’re on your break.

Now, there are plenty of genres of games running around. PLENTY.  Everything from mini-rpgs to highly complex puzzle games is available for people to play.  Free or costly, it’s there, especially if you’re savvy enough with Google to find the game that’s just right for you.

And then, there are the eccentrics who remember the fond glory days of a game called Lemmings, where you had to guide a bunch of mindless yet cute little critters to safety through a variety of increasingly convoluted methods.  Pakoon 3 is a proud member of that guiding little critters genre, except here, instead of green haired idiots, you get to guide super-cute widdle baby chicks. (They are freakin’ adorable, I’m tellin’ ya…)

There’s one massive difference of course – in Lemmings, we had plenty of tools to achieve the aforementioned hyper-convoluted objective of getting them to their safe zone.  Girders, ladders, parachutes – you’ve got plenty of options.  In Pakoon 3, you get a bunch of high explosives, limited in number for each stage.  Your objective is to clear a path for these chicks using these explosives.  Click onscreen blows stuff up.  That alone will probably draw in a crowd, actually, but again, you’re supposed to blow stuff up to clear a path.

If can explode, it will explode and if it can’t, it will merely be thrown far aside.  Physics also applies here, as objects above an explosion fall down.  As said before, the number of bombs that you can use varies per level, making the game a matter of figuring out which things to explode to make that critical path for your chicks.

Scoring, unlike Lemmnings, is a matter of doing things quickly. The nature of the game also implies that you can get stuck in a level, forcing a restart.

The iPhone version of this game is particularly rewarding.  For people who like to watch their budget, the fact that this fun game is free should immediately draw their attention and favor.  Another bonus is that the levels on this version are unique, so even people who’ve played an earlier version of Pakoon can find themselves in wholly unfamiliar waters.

If anything, the only flaw this game has is that it lacks replay value – once you know how to beat a stage, that’s pretty much it for that stage.  If we’re all lucky, new stages would be available for download, further extending and improving its worth.  Even without those extra levels, it’s still a good choice for entertainment on a boring car ride or a slow day.