Mobile Games Roundup
Bejeweled! Potter! Speed! Golf! Birds!
Bejeweled LIVE
- Windows Phone 7 - £3.99
- Bejeweled 2 + Blitz available for iOS platforms for £0.59
Either we're all getting really old, or someone just put the calendar on fast forward. Apparently it's nearly ten years since PopCap first unleashed Bejeweled on an unsuspecting world. And to celebrate, the beautiful Seattleites have delivered a LIVE-enabled version of its match-three puzzle classic to the shiny happy world of Windows Phone 7.
As with all things WP7, it's alarmingly overpriced, but don't let that put you off trying to scoop another 200 Gamerscore points: this is, after all, an essential puzzle game. If you've never played it (in which case, ?!?!?!), it utterly debunks the theory of three being a crowd. Here, threesomes, foursomes or moresomes are deemed socially beneficial, as you slide gems one space in any direction in order to create a chain.
This is a somewhat stripped-down version, featuring three modes: Classic, Action and Endless. Classic is the tetchy teacher of the bunch, sending you out of the class as soon as there are no longer any moves; Action tests you against the clock with an ever-depleting bar; while Endless mode comes over all peace and love, allowing you to play for as long as you can stomach.
Online leaderboards and achievements add a smidgen of added value to the perennial favourite, but this might be one to pick up later on when some sort of pricing sanity check comes to WP7.
7/10
Must. Eat. Birds
- Android - £0.59
- Also available on iPhone - £0.59
If you're going to mercilessly suicide-bomb pigkind by the million, it's only fair to expect proportional retribution. Step forward the Nomster, a professional space hopper and consumer of perpetrators of injustice.
Your job is to launch the balloon-faced assassin into the air and guard your picnic from the greedy beaks homing in on it. But with only a limited number of Nomsters available to launch, you have to meet your targets with a dead-eyed aim and with hate in your heart. Tough work on a Monday lunchtime, but just you wait until you next get stuck on a freezing train to nowhere.
Blessed with the awesome ability to eat each other, Nomsters' dimensions can be swiftly inflated by catching them on the way down, and then you can bounce around the sky consuming the avian onslaught in one fell swoop.
Despite sporting a relatively miserly 18 levels, Must. Eat. Birds. is more of a time-sink than you'll give it credit for, and its four score-based challenge levels promise to keep you coming back for more.
7/10