10 iPhone, iPod Touch Games Youve Got to See

by Nathan Eddy

The classic game comes to the iPhone with a selection of single player battles, up to four multiplayer team mode and customized teams. The game offers 50 challenges, six environments with random battlefields, custom music support and an auto-save feature when you exit. Worms is for fans of Holy Hand Grenades and Banana Bombs alike.

An Apple Design Awards 2009 winner in the student category, this free game is the “ball in a maze” experience with a twist this time, you tilt your iPhone or iPod touch to get the ball through the maze. WL3D adds additional challenges, such as walls you have to jump over. The full version comes with 180 custom levels.

A simple game involving ragdoll physics, the object of the game is to swing from skyscraper to skyscraper without falling to earth and breaking into smithereens. The game offers an online high score ranking system, normal and hard difficulty modes and endless playing in never ending cities. It’s perfect for the highly-strung.

After all these years (25 to be exact), those little, descending colored blocks are still hard to beat for the fun factor. Version 3.0, from Electronic Arts (EA) allows you to listen and control music from the iTunes application while playing and slide, rotate and drop tetriminos (so that’s what they’re called!) with the touch-screen controls.

Using the iPhone or iPod touch’s motion sensitive capability, guide a tiny monkey in a ball down chutes and slopes, collecting as many bananas as you can along the way. The game offers five worlds and 110 stages with rich 3D graphics and an intuitive control system.

Remember the good ol’ days, when you’d just toss crumpled paper into the wastebasket for fun? That’s probably illegal these days, but you can still do it on your iPhone with Paper Toss, a free game where you, well, toss a digital ball of paper into a digital wastebasket. It features a flick control based on the iPhone’s touch interface, three levels of difficulty and a global online scoreboard. An added touch comes in the form of verbal abuse from angry (virtual) co-workers.

If you’re a table tennis maniac this is the app for you, with three modes (practice, arcade and head-to-head) awesome 3D graphics and eight computer opponents to choose from. Local and global scoreboards allow you to keep track of your progress compared with others, and a choice of two soundtracks will keep you blasting away.

For the urban fisherman in you, this app features fully animated environments with seven fishing locations, nine types of bait and tackle, 12 tournaments and dozens of species of fish. You cast the line with a flick of your wrist, and you can play against your friends with Network and Hotseat play. You can also show off your latest catch via e-mail using the “Brag” feature.

There are dozens of poker applications out there in Apple’s App Store, so if this isn’t your preferred hand you have plenty of other options. This app lets you play with friends over the Wi-Fi network (up to nine players) and allows you to switch between first person or top-down gameplay by rotating your iPhone or iPod touch. The game also comes with hints, tips, statistics and player ratings.

A wide selection of trucks, including a special truck with flexible suspension, huge wheels and more weight, as well as new developments to improve physics and graphics, this app takes the standard racing game to an explosive, desert-set level-eight of them, in fact. Also included are gesture camera controls and multiple camera modes, including Holographic Pro mode (whatever that is).