Mobile Games Roundup
Spectrum! Glory! Rope! BitTrip! 0.03!
Cut The Rope
- iPhone / £0.59
- iPad / £1.19 (Lite version free)
There are two types of iPhone gamer: the ones who sit playing Angry Birds until the sky turns black and their eyes bleed, and the ones who would quite happily make the mood turn black and your eyes bleed for liking Angry Birds. If you're in the latter camp, you're not going to be thrilled about Cut The Rope.
The idea of this ludicrously cheap app is to ensure that a little green monster called Om Nom gets his candy fix. And, as the title handily points out, the way to do this is to literally cut the ropes to get this tasty morsel into his ever-willing gob.
As you'd expect from a Chillingo app, nothing is ever quite as simple as it seems. Sometimes your candy is suspended by numerous ropes, and you have to slice them not only in the right order, but at the right time to take advantage of the inertia. Other times, you have to make the candy land in bubbles, and float it up to Om Nom, whilst dodging spiky obstacles and collecting bonus gems.
Pitched perfectly for casual on-the-move play, it's the kind of game you can happily fill a couple of bored minutes with, or power through for a couple of hours, trying to snag every star. With 100 stages included for starters, and more on the way via updates, welcome to your new favourite waste of time.
9/10
0.03 Seconds Pro
- iPhone / £0.59 (Lite version free)
Take a pinch of WarioWare and and a sizeable dollop of Brain Training, stir them up and sit back and bask in the glory of an instant App Store chart-topper in multiple countries.
Ming Liang Chien's reaction-time app won't score too many points for originality, but once your initial weary cynicism subsides, you'll be more than happy to prove that age / alcohol / exposure to Jedward hasn't blunted your senses. Yet.
With no specific focus, the idea is to perform each of the 24 reaction tasks as quickly as you possibly can. It's all pretty familiar stuff, like tapping the screen when six different fruit appear, tapping the speed camera icon as quickly as possible when the yellow car zooms across the screen, or tapping the screen when the colour matches the word displayed.
You'll rip through all of them in no time, of course, but that nagging allure of wanting to top your best score gives it a disproportionate appeal. In reality, this is one of those games that is only worth the 59p, and ideally should have included far more tests to be recommended.
6/10