The Best Games on the iPhone

 The Best Games on the iPhone

BOUNDEN

Bounden's predecessors, Fingle and Friendstrap, encourage players to use their body to gain advantage against a friend. But roughhousing and expensive smartphones aren't an ideal match, and so a match in either game could easily end in hurt feelings or worse, a broken screen.

And so Bounden feels like the culmination of years of experimentation by its creator. The key difference between those early games and Bounden is cooperation. Bounden is a dance game. Two people hold opposite ends of one smartphone, moving together to guide a cursor over a three-dimensional ball.

Bounden is simpler than it sounds, the sort of game that trains you to be an expert, as long as you give it the time. But more importantly, it's one of the very few mobile games that forces intimacy with another human. Beautiful and affecting, Bounden is a masterpiece.

DESERT GOLFING

Desert Golfing begins, like so many video games, as an escape from the banality of life. Maybe you're sitting on the subway or the toilet when you pull back the first swing and release. You finish one hole. You finish nine holes. You finish 18 holes. But the golfing continues to 50 holes, then 100, then 300, and slowly the experience changes.

At one point, a cactus appears. At another point, the game unlocks GameCenter connectivity. Sometimes the courses are extra hilly; sometimes they're extra flat. The game just keeps going.

You begin to ask questions. The game tracks your score, but does the score matter if the game never ends? If the score doesn't matter and the game never ends, why play? And why play video games? Here you are on the 400th hole in a 2D mobile golfing game and the big question hits you: Why do anything?

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DROP7

"It took 23 years for someone to design a Tetris-killer. Simple, elegant, endlessly deep, and shockingly novel. Drop7 is it." That's indie game developer Jason Rohrer praising Drop7. This is the only video game I've played at least once a week every week for over five years. I'm not even that good at Drop7, but it's simple and it can be played with one hand and one move at a time.

In short, the player drops chips labelled 1 through 7 into a 7-by-7 grid. Aligning for chips horizontally or vertically removes those chips to the board and does one unit of damage to unmarked chips, which gradually rise from the bottom of the screen. After a gray chip has been damaged twice, it breaks, revealing a numbered chip. Chips continue to rise and fall and you do what you can to trigger chain reactions and keep the screen clear. It's not easy.

Drop7 is the ideal game to pick at throughout the day. Waiting for the elevator to arrive or the coffee pot to fill? Drop7. Have a couple minutes before the football game starts? Drop7. Can't sleep? Drop7.

ANGRY BIRDS

Angry Birds popularity isn't a fluke. Its creators — intentionally or not — made a beautiful version of the browser classic Crush the Castle. On its own that would have been enough, in those gold rush days of the app marketplace, to earn its studio a few million dollars. But the small studio did the extra work, releasing free updates for over five years, retaining the app's spot on so many iPhones.

Now Angry Birds is a franchise and a phenomenon. There are plush toys, brand partnerships, and a feature-length film. You can play pseudo-sequels like Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio, and Angry Birds Star Wars. And its sequel Angry Birds Space is perhaps a more enjoyable game than the original.

But Angry Birds is the most approachable game in the franchise, and after all those updates, it's humongous. Costing 99 cents, Angry Birds is one the best deals in video games.

ELISS

Eliss is the sort of game you see people play in sci-fi films. You're not entirely sure what it is or how it works, as it appears all anyone's doing is moving around pulsating balls and dodging vibrating squiggles. Those impossible-to-decipher sci-fi game always look incredible. I remember the first time I saw Eliss. I stared at it like somebody had plucked a game from such a sci-fi film and placed it in front of me, like some sort of supernatural challenge — solve this riddle!

Eliss is actually easy to learn. Using all of your fingers, you split, combine, and move planets, so that they align with targets that appear on the screen. As the game progresses, the playspace fills with planets and you must be careful to avoid traps. It's a test of digit dexterity. Developer Steph Thirion released an update, Eliss Infinity, in early 2014. Infinity has better image resolution and widescreen support, and also includes a sandbox mode, a nice place to pretend you're in the sci-fi movie of your dreams.

TINY WINGS

Tiny Wings looks like a crude cash-in on "bird" games, a real "genre" of software that flooded the App Store in the wake of Angry Birds' success. But Tiny Wings isn't like Angry Birds or a bird game or really any game on the iPhone.

Frankly, I hate to call it a game. Specific goals are available for the player, and there's an imperative to scoot an adorable, plump bird up and down the game's two-dimensional hills before night falls. But for me, Tiny Wings is best enjoyed as a meditative tool. The wavy motion of the bird, its soft caws, the gentle children's song gently bouncing in the background: every component merges together into this blend of sound and color, putting me into a relaxed trance.

Sometimes I want my iPhone to be an escape from stress. I don't want something frenetic or an event that challenging. I want peace. How appropriate, then, that Tiny Wings ends with the moon rising and the bird gently going to sleep.

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KERO BLASTER

For the first five years of iPhone game development, both small indie studios and giant publishers alike tried to create touch controls so precise that a platformer — a Mega Man or a Super Mario Bros. type of game — would feel as comfortable on the iPhone as it would on a traditional gaming console.

In early 2014, one man accomplished the feat on his own. Kero Blaster is the best action and platforming game on the iPhone because it controls so well. And though it's graphics are simple, Kero Blaster is one of the most "console"-like games on the device that wasn't originally designed for another platform. Which is to say its adventure is so smartly designer that you'll actually want to play until the very end. As a frog, you unlock and upgrade weapons, fighting bad guys that look like dustballs. The game doesn't play like an original Nintendo game. It plays like those rose-colored memories of playing original Nintendo games.

GRAND THEFT AUTO: CHINATOWN WARS

The iOS ports of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and Grand Theft: Auto San Andreas, originally released on consoles roughly a decade ago, are serviceable for those who can suffer sputtering about a three-dimensional world with touchscreen controls. But the best Grand Theft Auto game on the iPhone is Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars. It's top-down view simplifies the experience of getting about, and looks better on the portable screen.

On the iOS version, the player can hotwire a car or break a window by twirling or tapping a finger against the screen. Rockstar designed Chinatown Wars for the touch-friendly Nintendo DS, and it shows.

Chinatown Wars also has one of the more interesting and controversial mini-games, a drug-selling simulation. It's the closest mainstream games have come to playing Drugwars on my TI-83 in the back of trig class.

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