This looks promising - seven spinning dials with various coloured marbles that need to be lined up so they can disappear, to be replaced by more random coloured marbles. This sounds like an arcade/puzzle game that I could get used to. Unfortunately, it's missing some mojo to lift it out of the sea of nice ideas in order to make it to gaming nirvana.
It's not one hundred percent clear if this game is officially derived from a "Bomber Man" licence or if it's just very clever use of language in the Ovi Store description ("Brave Pipyakas, the offsprings of Bombermen, settled down in cozy world of watermelon trees"), but I'm not that bothered, because what's on offer here is a wonderful mix of exploration, adventure and arcade action.
Here's something unusual - an application from Offscreen Technologies which, depending on the version you grab, isn't necessarily free! Video Poker Touch is one of their titles which is sold as a commercial app - which makes a review even more appropriate, as you need to know whether it's worth buying. In summary - possibly! - it depends on how hooked you are on the concept of video poker and how concerned you are about the relative 'flatness' of the game. As hinted at above, there is a free version, but only for Qt-compatible handsets and with in-game ads.
Every young child learns very quickly how to cut a cake so that everyone gets the same share (or, more likely, to make sure that their sister doesn't get more cake than they do). It's a skill that never really leaves you, which is a good thing if you've downloaded Slice It, the latest puzzle game from Com2us.
If you've ever fantasised about blasting off into space and saving the the world, then Celestial Navigator might be the game for you. Be warned though, there's a rather twisted plot quirk. You play the game as a number of pilots from a world of Teddy Bears! Even more twisted is that you have to embark on a series of ill-fated missions where each Teddy inevitably dies. If you have the right stuff to avoid astronomical obstacles, and the grit see countless Teddies perish, then you might be who we're looking for...
You know what you need for a long flight to America? A puzzle game that's relatively simple to understand, has some hidden depth, and one you can continue to play with no penalty even if you fall asleep in the middle of the level thanks to jet-lag. In other words, Sheep Mania: Puzzle Islands.
There's not a huge amount of choice for fans of real-time strategy games, but thankfully Net Lizard, with their release of Moon Colonization, have provided genre afficianados with a compelling game that manages to balance all the required elements, albeit saddling the title with a slightly ropey fictional framing device.
It's rare that you trace the rise of a new genre of game to a single title, but that's what Firemint's "Flight Control" managed when it was released on the iPhone. It stayed in the iOS family for a long time, but it's now working through the conversions and onto other platforms, including Symbian. I was hoping for the Concorde of line-drawing games, but instead I feel like I'm the last person to board a Ryanair flight to London Prestwick.
Thanks to Nokia's Calling All Innovators and the release of the Qt 1.1 SDK we've been seeing a number of interesting games and applications published recently. Bijou 360, an implementation of the popular gem matching style of game, is a good example of this. It's been written by Tom Udomprasert, in his spare time, and boasts a feature that we can't recall seeing in any other Symbian game: It is playable, to a real purpose, in four different orientations.
You might think that The Impossible Game is yet another running and jumping game, where you have one control (in this case tapping on the screen) to make your character avoid the obstacles. On a superficial level you'd be right, but as the game speed increases there's simply not enough time for "an older reviewer" like me to react to the terrain and decide the correct course of action. But there's more to it than reaction time.
