Mobile Games Roundup
Academy! Torture! Aporkalypse! Lumines! Boost 2!
Lumines
- Xperia Play/Android - £1.99
Any list of the most important handheld games of the past decade wouldn't be complete without Q Entertainment's magnificent Lumines.
As one of the titles that justified being an early adopter of PSP, Tetsusya Mizuguchi's simple block-dropping formula not only combined Columns and Tetris to great effect, but integrated the soundtrack perfectly.
On a basic level, the idea is to create 2x2 squares of the same colour by rotating and dropping them into the playing field alongside other like-coloured blocks.
Meanwhile, a timeline sweeps across the playing field, allowing you the opportunity to create point-scoring combos. The more blocks you can remove in one go, the larger the combo, and so on.
All of this would - and should - equal instant mobile gaming genius. But despite not being the most technically taxing game in the world, Connect2Media's attempt to bring it to Android cuts corners, with only three modes (Challenge, Time Attack and Dig Down), unwieldy touch screen controls and an unacceptably low-bit-rate soundtrack.
Matters improve substantially on the Xperia Play thanks to the tactile controls, but this 'In The House Ibiza 10' edition is a pale shadow of the PSP original in every respect. It's cheap, admittedly, but in this instance you get what you pay for.
6/10
Aporkalypse: Pigs Of Doom
As the nation gorges daily on a diet of free-range puns, the heroes of ham have a, ahem, 'pig' problem as the impending Aporkalypse approaches. Nurse!
For those of us with enough sanity left to see through HandyGames' flimsy ruse, we're firmly in puzzle game territory, where negotiating 30 hazard-strewn environments hopes to become your favourite waste of time.
Viewed from a pseudo overhead perspective, the goal is to reach the level's exit by whatever means at your disposal, and getting there involves working together with your porcine comrades to open doors, create makeshift gaps and destroy enemies.
After easing you into the mechanics gently, you find yourself dealing with evil coin-stealing sentries that have to be dispatched before you can progress. Don't mock: this is serious stuff.
And no sooner have you become familiar with the gluttonous crate-swallowing ways of the Hunger Pig, he's joined by the missile-spewing War Pig, the contaminous [I don't think that's a word, but it should be - Ed.] Pest Pig and the ghostly Death Pig. If you're going to ham-bush the four Pigs of Doom, needs must.
If you want to be cured of the puzzle gaming blues, this goes the whole hog. Just don't wait until Fry day.
7/10