![]() ![]() ![]() Think Jules Verne meets a visual novel meets Oregon Trail and that should put you somewhere in the right neighborhood. Not only is 80 Days a near-perfect travel game, but it’s also a near-perfect game about traveling. It’s been seven years since Drop7 came out and it’s still the best example of this type of game for this type of device.- Garrett Martin It’s not easy, though, offering up the kind of constantly escalating challenge you expect from classic puzzle games. The interface is slick and uncluttered, the controls are dependent on nothing but a slide of the finger, and the rules are immediately understandable. Go focuses more on the former than the latter, to the effect of not burying itself in needless pulp.- Matt Akersĭrop7 was an early and essentially perfect puzzle game for the iPhone. People have always been pieces, and Hitman has always been about manipulating them to accomplish a grisly deed. Guns and weapons are no longer tools of reckless aggression, but board tactics for puzzle solving and path opening, used only in careful consideration of cutting through the ranks of the other player’s men. Hitman Go transposes Hitman to the context of a board game, and in doing so makes every aspect it touches smarter. No matter how far I fly with that jetpack (or dirtbike, or mechanical dragon) it will never be far enough.- Garrett Martin Few games stunned me more with “just one more time” paralysis than this infectious one-finger pursuit. Mobile games often share the same sensibility today, and Jetpack Joyride fulfills its end of that bargain better than most games. They offered short bursts of play with a goal no greater than making the high score board. Videogames used to exist solely to suck up every quarter of our baby-sitting and paper route money. It might look complicated in words, but it’s a simple concept with a surprising amount of personality.- Garrett Martin Once the board is full and there are no possible combinations left, the game ends and your score is calculated. The game starts with nine tiles on the board, and a new one appears every time you swipe. You don’t slide individual tiles or rows, though-you slide every tile on the board in the same direction whenever you swipe. Two threes combine to form a six, two sixes form a 12, and so on. The goal is to combine tiles on a four by four grid by sliding them into other tiles with the same numbers on them. Threes is an elegant finger-slider for the discriminating player. This isn’t a countdown, but an overview of what iPhone gaming has meant over the last nine years. (Yes, Superbrothers came out for the iPad first, but we’ll let that one slide, as it only took a month to pop up on Apple’s smaller screen.) And to wrap it all up, we ranked them in no particular order. We’ve only considered games that were originally conceived for devices like the iPhone, and that weren’t ported from other systems or based on preexisting boardgames. We’ve gone back over those nine years to find 25 games that perfectly sum up the breadth of iPhone gaming, from quick burst pick-up-and-play time killers, to visual novels, to unexpectedly thought-provoking celebrity tie-ins, to arty explorations that question what it means to be a game. Paste has been there the whole time, covering the growth of iPhone gaming and the rise of the touch-screen interface. The iPhone has been a crucial driver in game development over the last nine years, introducing videogames to a broad new audience while providing designers with new tools and opportunities to explore. We’re just about a year away from celebrating a solid decade of finding new ways to connect to people who live far away, while ignoring people sitting directly across the table from us. When we started thinking about the best iPhone games, we were surprised to realize that the iPhone is almost nine years old. ![]()
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