Your reactions to our recent list of 10 awesome iPhone games said pretty much one thing: We're crazy for not including your favorite game.
See also:
10 iPhone Games You Must Own
Top 10 Games of 2008
Top 11 Most Anticipated Games of 2009
The 10 Most Disappointing Games of 2008
But then, how could we please everyone? With more than 4,700 games in the App Store for Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch music players, completing a thorough review of the library's offerings would be impossible.
Luckily, plenty of you are playing games on the gadgets. Apple has sold more than 20 million iPhones, plus countless more iPod Touches, and market-research firm comScore reports that 32.4 percent of iPhone users say they have
downloaded a game
in the last month, compared to an average across all mobile devices of 3.8 percent.
Hoping to tap the wisdom of the crowd, we asked you to vote for your favorites. Here, after more intensive play-test sessions, are Wired.com readers' top-rated iPhone game picks, plus our take on each one.
10.
JellyCar
(Free)
You said:
"You guide your car through various courses trying to complete in the best time. The game uses 'Jelly Physics,' where your car bends, stretches and even breaks. It seems silly at first but after a few minutes, you're hooked!"
Our take:
Based on the Xbox Community Game of the same name,
JellyCar
has clever crayonlike graphics and a unique gameplay gimmick where your gelatin-based vehicle rolls and smooshes its way toward the goal. Figuring out the physics can be challenging, and playing with the iPhone can be a bit of a pain. You have to press the left and right areas of the screen to get the car accelerating, then tilt the iPhone to add rotation to the vehicle. A few minutes of this and it's carpal tunnel time.
9.
WordWarp
__ ($1)__
You said:
"Take six given letters and make as many words as possible in the time limit."
Our take:
Do you enjoy playing
Jumble
in the daily paper? Just like the well-known pen-and-paper puzzle,
WordWarp
gives you a scrambled six-letter word. You're tasked with unscrambling it, but also with coming up with as many smaller words as can be made from its letters in a two-minute time window. The "warp" feature lets you randomize the letters, which helps when forming words. Unfortunately (and aggravatingly), the word list isn't complete -- we found a lot of words it didn't accept.
8.
Cube Runner
(Free)
You said:
"Free and highly addictive."
Our take:
Looking very much like an early prototype of
Star Fox, Cube Runner
is a very simple exercise in not screwing up. Pilot your ship by tilting the iPhone left and right. Don't hit any of the cubes. For each second you stay alive, you get points; crash and it's game over. No checkpoints, no goal other than a high score.
Cube Runner
makes great use of subtle and responsive tilt controls, but it's less a test of your gamer aptitude than an exercise in seeing how long you can be exposed to the same repeating stimulus until you inevitably get distracted and crash.
7.
Tap Defense
(Free)
You said:
"Set up turrets, then let the demons attack. It's great for playing in short bursts."
__Our take: __You're lucky we even let this one on the list, considering we covered its genre to death with
Crystal Defenders
and
Field Runners
in our previous Top 10.
Tap Defense
is nearly identical to those games -- waves of enemies approach your position, and you have to set up increasingly powerful sets of weaponized defense towers to hold them off. Once you buy and place your towers and the enemies flood in, there's nothing you can do except wait to see if your automatic defense system works.