"Football, bloody hell." There's probably never been a truer, more eloquent summary of the beautiful game than that given by a beaming, breathless Alex Ferguson after his side's last-gasp Champions League victory against Bayern Munich. Those three words perfectly encapsulate a sport both vainglorious and just plain glorious, a game that can swing from abject tedium to high drama in seconds.

It's a delicious irony that perhaps the acme of Ferguson's statement should end up condemning his side to a trophyless season in what may have been the craziest English top-division campaign to date. Fitting, then, that a game almost as maddening and wonderful as the real thing should land on the App Store just as Martin Tyler's feral roar of "AGÜEROOOOOO!!" finishes reverberating around the Etihad.

Score! Classic Goals is essentially a line-drawing game with a football theme. The objective is to recreate famous strikes from international matches by hitting passes and shots with the right strength and direction, with power an additional consideration when you reach Professional mode.

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Nostalgia's a powerful weapon, and Mighty Rabbit's pixelated gem Saturday Morning RPG is armed to the teeth. For any TV-addled child of the 80s, this knowing trip down memory lane should be utterly compelling; a turn-based RPG based in and around a fictional cartoon world, with barely a minute passing without some nod or wink to our misspent youths sat cross-legged in front of the family telly.

The other thing with nostalgia, though, is that it can play tricks on you. Thankfully, Saturday Morning RPG has more than just mindless reverence under its blocky hat. You play as Marty, a typical nerd-turned-hero underdog, who gets sucked into the latest episode of his favourite generic action animation as he drifts off to sleep. Soon, he finds himself doing battle with the odious Commander Hood, a dastardly type who's kidnapped Marty's sweetheart and charged a pack of armed guards to stop our hero from ever getting her back.

Good job, then, that Fred Savage's Nintendo-powered superhero The Wizard is on hand to give Marty the confidence and strength he needs to fight back against the Hood army and rescue his good lady. And with this being the world of 80s cartoons, there's no better way than to do this than good old-fashioned fisticuffs.

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It's odd that Penny Time should celebrate the anarchic, anti-establishment nature of skateboarding, only to then submit to one of the most punishing authorities of all: rhythm. Here you skate to the beat, pulling off hippies (it's a boarding term, you filthy animals), ollies and slides within coloured markers. Screw up the timing, or pick the wrong move, and you'll fall off - or 'stack', as the game would have it - and it's all the way back to the last checkpoint with you. In other words, this is a game that asks you to stick two fingers up to the system by following the most exacting of rules. It's a curious irony in a very strange little game.

That's not to say that it's entirely new, of course. If you've played the likes of Bit.Trip Runner or Tomena Sanner (you know, that weird one with the dancing salaryman) you'll know what to expect. Here, instead of sprinting through rapidly scrolling environments, you're skating past a series of hazards frozen in time thanks to the bizarre temporal properties of your board. As you approach each obstacle, you'll see a coloured circle: if it's white you need to swipe up to ollie over it; blue, and it's a hippie jump; yellow, and you'll have to slide underneath it.

The problem with swipes rather than taps in a rhythm game is a familiar one, as anyone who played Rhythm Paradise will attest. You're never entirely sure whether you're supposed to start the swipe as the beat hits or to start a split-second before so your finger leaves the screen at the exact point your skater passes through the middle of the circle. After a while, you acclimatise, but it never feels entirely comfortable, and seemingly perfect flicks can result in a bail, with little feedback to determine what you did wrong.

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Apologies in advance for this: as Saturday Soapboxes go, it's going to be chirpy and probably quite inane. That makes some kind of sense, at least. The conversation it was based on was chirpy and inane too. That's my bag, I guess.

A few days ago, a friend of mine challenged me to think of something genuinely positive about the current gaming scene. He'd been listing all of the woes for the last few minutes: studio closures, brain drains, cloning, delayed next-gen consoles, triple-B games vanishing, traditional handhelds in trouble...

I'm not going to pretend what I came up with can match any of that. Truth be told, there are hundreds of thousands of things I feel genuinely positive about, anyway. There's the theoretically easy route to market, the range of platforms for developers to aim for, the endless possibilities of cheap middleware and - oh yeah! - the sheer amount of good games that are coming out. Something else - something far more basic - popped into my head, though, and then it wouldn't go away. Over the last few years, games have rediscovered colour.

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There was a time I frequented a particular dive I'll call "X" that was well known as a destination to drunkenly meet and possibly hook up with the opposite sex. It was a scummy little hole in the wall that, in reputation anyway, provided asylum for wayward hipster types from the rampant club-bros and their arm candy that populated pretty much every other square inch of the neighbourhood.

I don't know why anyone would go there, other than out of obvious motivation. The place was a matchbox, the dancing real estate made it impossible to move, and they made lousy drinks. (And that bit about unattached girls? An urban legend.)

Go Robo! reminds me a lot of going to X, not because it's icky or it slings bad cocktails, but because its robot protagonist is cool with just dancing. About 95 per cent of X's clientele just wanted to dance, too, though ultimately they probably aimed to get down in a different way.

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Minecraft has now surpassed nine million sales across all versions of the game.

Minecraft's PC, Android, iOS and Xbox Live Arcade editions have collectively sold 9.2 million copies, Mojang's business developer Daniel Kaplan wrote on Twitter.

Sales of the creative cube-based sandbox today hit six million for the PC version alone, creator Markus "Notch" Persson revealed.

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Browser-based strategy MMO Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances has exited beta and is now formally open for business, publisher EA has announced.

You'll pick from one of two factions - the Global Defense Initiative (GDI) or the Nod - and then set about managing your resources, building an army, fostering alliances and generally throwing your weight around.

It's free-to-play and works cross-platform. A cloud save feature will be available to make it accessible across both web browsers and mobile devices.

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It seems that UK PM David Cameron has got himself hooked on ubiquitous touchscreen time-waster Fruit Ninja.

As reported by The Telegraph, a senior adviser has revealed that our benevolent leader pours "a crazy, scary amount of time" into the Halfbrick-developed title.

Cameron is apparently a big fan of his iPad and has recently commissioned a bespoke app "that will give him a management dashboard, with everything from dole figures to inflation".

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A developer who created fake versions of Angry Birds, Assassin's Creed and Cut The Rope mobile games has been fined £50,000.

The scam apps sneakily sent three premium SMS messages to users. Each message cost £5. Customers claimed they weren't aware of the ruse until receiving their monthly phone bills.

The apps were launched on Google's Android Market (now Google Play) last November by a Latvian firm, which must must now refund £28,000 to affected mobile users.

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Games are excellent teaching tools. After all, what are they if not mechanisms that teach us how to use themselves through interaction? By playing, we learn how to play. It's something of a no-brainer that those same loops of feedback and reinforcement can be used for more than training us to be really good at headshots.

Here to illustrate the point is Hiragana Pixel Party, one of many apps that promise to teach you Japanese. The difference here is that it's a rhythm-action game, and the only way to get good is to understand Japanese writing. You play because you want to win; you want to earn all three ranks for every stage. Language acquisition is just the mechanism you engage with to achieve your goal.

Our hero is the aptly named Hiro, who jogs his Limbo-esque silhouette across the screen to the sound of jaunty chip-tunes. Up pops a young girl, who starts by uttering vowel sounds in time with the music. You then copy her, by tapping on the relevant symbols, helping Hiro hop over obstacles in the process. The more obstacles he clears, the more birds he attracts. Make a mistake and one of the birds flies away. Run out of birds and Hiro's adventure in linguistics is over.

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Mobile shooter Mass Effect Infiltrator is now available to download on Android devices, BioWare has announced.

It costs £4.43 from Google Play.

The enjoyable tie-in is created by IronMonkey Studios, developer of the mobile Dead Space spin-off. iPhone and iPad versions launched alongside Mass Effect 3 earlier this year.

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In most games you essentially act as your avatar's brain, using your fingers and thumbs to send electrical impulses to their body and limbs: run here, jump there, climb this, pull that. In This Could Hurt, the latest game to roll off the prolific Chillingo production line, you have but one command to issue to your plucky hero: stop.

Apart from his blue quiff, the protagonist is a fairly old-school adventurer, complete with tunic, red neckerchief, tights and thick brown boots. He's an apprentice, training to become an Oakguard, the protectors of a magical tree that sustains life in a quiet village, and he's about to take his final test before he gets the job.

And it's a tough one. His task is to walk the Path of Pain, a series of dangerous obstacle courses filled with the kind of hazards that suggest the Oakguard elders have been playing a lot of Rick Dangerous or Super Meat Boy recently. Little wonder the boy carries a permanently anxious look on his face.

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New Ubisoft god game Babel Rising launches on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade on 13th June, the publisher has announced.

It then gets an iOS and Android release on 14th June, followed by PC on 27th June. A Windows Phone 7 version will follow some time thereafter. No price tag for any platform has been confirmed.

The PS3 and Xbox 360 releases are compatible with Move and Kinect as applicable.

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In an industry driven by the constant forward thrust of technology, labels can very quickly turn from useful signposts to restrictive dogma. Take the word "sandbox", for example. Once used to help us understand the anarchic freedom on offer in games like Grand Theft Auto, it's now become a catch-all term for games set in cities where you get to run around and blow stuff up for no reason.

As you'd expect, given its name, The Sandbox is a sandbox. A literal sandbox, mind you, into which you pour various elements and see what happens. Think of your iPhone as a cosmic petri dish, ready to see what happens when acid rain falls on a volcano during an ice age.

There are 30 elements to tinker with in The Sandbox, ranging from obvious building blocks such as dirt, sand and water, to more technological tools that enable you to construct electrical circuits, powering heaters and coolers. The sun and weather can be switched on and off, and you also have control over the climate of your tiny pocket-sized universe, freezing it solid or subjecting it to blistering temperatures. You can even unlock musical notes, transforming your improvisational landscapes into chip tunes.

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Snubbed no more - Activision has picked the UK as the location for a new studio, GamesIndustry International reports.

Martyn Brown - he who co-founded Worms maker Team17 and led the studio for 20 years - will advise Activision and help put together a team. Apparently a "significant number" of hires have been made.

The city of Leeds looks like a likely location, but nothing has been confirmed.

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We live in a time where most games are delighted to hand out virtual tchotchkes for the lowliest accomplishments. Pressed start to continue? Here, have a Trophy! Viewed the tutorial? 20 Gamerpoints for you! It's an ego massage for the easily disheartened: reward the player to keep them from switching off. All of which makes Match Panic something of an anomaly; it's not often you'll find a game purpose-built to make its users feel very stupid indeed.

Of course, to make players feel really stupid, you first need to make them feel smart. Match Panic's opening stage is artfully constructed to induce maximum overconfidence. You have a pixel art character (a panda, say) on the left of the screen and one on the right (a happy cloud, perhaps) with a scrolling column in the middle. The object is to tap left or right to match the central image to those on either side. Rattle through the whole stack within the allotted time and you'll move on to the next stage.

At first, it seems laughably easy. Even when Match Panic springs its first surprise by putting two images on one side you'll comfortably be able to cope after a split second's adjustment. Several stages later, when you're dealing with three pictures on each side, your thought processes will have stuttered to a near-standstill, leaving your thumbs hovering uselessly above the screen.

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When you hear the word "safari" you probably get pretty distinct mental images: the savannah, lions and elephants, straw yellow and burnt earth. But this is not what Brisbane-based Defiant Development had in mind, at least if Ski Safari is any indication.

Maybe it has something to do with living in a country where a mundane trip into your backyard could yield a wildlife encounter considered exotic on other continents. It could be that the developers just have an affinity for the scant parts of Australia that can support a skiing tourism industry. Whatever the case, Ski Safari's brand of outdoor expedition is a bit more SSX than Afrika, more escape than serene savannah experience.

Unlike the crudely slaloming found in SkiFree's similarly endless mountain, Ski Safari gives you bigger problems than wayward abominable snowmen looking for a quick snack (on the contrary, the yeti population of this mountain are actually quite helpful).

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While I'd never stoop to the old "games cause violence" argument, there's little doubt that games teach us to treat death as a numbers game. Each individual demise isn't important: what matters is the body count, the chain reaction, the comforting tick of small numbers getting bigger.

Pandemic, a morbidly fascinating disease simulator from Dark Realm Studios, is a game that, played successfully, trades in enormous numbers. Get things right and billions of people will die, yet it's always that first death that feels the most exciting and special. It means you're on the right track. The counter will rise.

Pandemic started life as a Flash game on the Newgrounds website that went appropriately viral, but it's been heavily redesigned for its first paid outing as a 69p app. Not all the changes have been for the better, but the ghoulish core of the game has survived intact. If you ever wanted to exterminate mankind, here's your chance.

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Coincidence or not, it was a warning to console makers of things to come. While the old games industry gathered in LA for its annual E3 pissing contest, a loud message was sounding 350 miles to the north.

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, which just happened to overlap with the biggest week in the games industry's calendar, also just happened to feature a games-heavy keynote.

Nine months earlier, Steve Jobs had unleashed both barrels against handheld rivals, declaring iPod Touch, with a sneaky fudge, "the number one portable games player in the world", boasting that it "outsells Nintendo and Sony handhelds combined".

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Because We May is the name of a new indie campaign lowering the prices of some big name games later this month.

The aim is to celebrate developers being able to control the prices of their games - lowering them on a whim, like now, if they so please.

The Because We May campaign runs from Thursday, 24th May to Friday, 1st June.

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One of the beauties of smartphones, and especially tablets, is how beautifully they fit traditional board games. The daddy of them all is chess. It's been rather brutalised by technology in the past, one of computing's pre-emininent challenges being a program that could defeat a human grandmaster, until, in 1997, Deep Blue finally felled Kasparov. It's a mighty achievement, tinged with tragedy.

15 years later, supercomputers seem like relics and you can buy a chess app called HIARCS Chess that wins real-world tournaments, dispatching grandmasters as a matter of course. There's a bewildering range of tutorial programs, problem-setting, and multiplayer-focused apps. Some even do all three. But if you just want to play the king of games against other people, then the best of the bunch is Social Chess.

The thing about Social Chess is that it isn't rammed with features: just all the ones you need. It incorporates the ELO rating system and lets you search for similarly ranked or random players. Finished games can be saved or emailed. Players can chat, there are no ads, and you can have five games on the go for free. If you want to play more games simultaneously then it's £3 for a year's sub, which I handed over after the generous month's trial without hesitation.

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The winning game design will be built in 100 days at the University of Abertay Dundee, and launch in beta form at the Eurogamer Expo. Your design could be playable on the show floor by this year's 50,000-strong crowd.

The winning designer or team will be awarded up to £10,000 for use in a career in games design.

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The first episode of Telltale's TV/comic tie-in The Walking Dead has become the studio's fastest selling game ever, hitting the one million mark just three weeks after launch.

That figure includes sales on Mac, PC, PSN and XBLA sales, but not iOS - the portable version is due out later this Summer.

There are four more episodes still to come, with the next, titled Starved for Help, due out some time in June.

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Somebody needs to check Sega's calendar. It's been 18 months since the first episode of Sonic the Hedgehog 4 was released, leading many fans to believe that the wild blue wonder's foray into episodic digital gaming was over before it had properly begun. In truth, the delay is just the latest example of how Sega is still frantically trying to retool its mascot for modern audiences while appeasing a vocal fanbase that has stuck by him through thickand thin.

Sonic the Hedgehog 4 was, in most respects, a game aimed squarely at those loyal yet disgruntled fans. A 2D platformer in the '90s style with none of the 3D distractions or cosplay characters that blighted the series in the 32-bit era and beyond. It succeeded, mostly, but there were still enough dissenting voices that Sega clearly felt the concept needed more work before serving up the next helping.

Episode 2 arrives with some major changes then, and not all for the better. Old, bad habits are once again evident, while the design itself is still frustratingly not quite right. Sonic is less weightless and skittish than in Episode 1, but now the scale has perhaps tipped too far the other way. Getting up to speed takes longer, while movement at low speeds is incredibly sluggish; annoying when trying to navigate some platforms, absolutely fatal when attempting to survive the poorly handled boss fights.

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The human immune system is one mad marvel. It monitors our physical well-being through a series of rigid precautionary and at-the-ready defence systems. It's governed by an army of cellular bodies carrying out their respective duties, in order to repel invasion from hostile viral and bacterial agents.

With that in mind it's no stretch to imagine your role in Ballistic SE as that of a renegade code hacker who must break into a totalitarian empire's sophisticated online immune system. You are a single invading aggressor in a wild, Gibson-esque digital grid; a lone orb versus a seemingly never-ending barrage of swarming enemy sentries. You'll want to take down as many as possible - it's just the staying alive part that isn't easy.

Viewing Ballistic as a sort of digital ecosystem under attack (you can still pretend you're Neuromancer's Case or Neo if you feel the need to justify your assault) may seem like an odd comparison, but it makes sense when you see this dual-stick shooter in action. Since each level's set number of enemies can be cleared in a matter of minutes, you'll quickly learn to tell the behavioural characteristics inherent to each of your colour-coded opponents.

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The Elder Scrolls publisher Zenimax has taken legal action against the developer behind Dragon Shout, a free map app for the former's blockbuster RPG Skyrim.

As reported by Touch Arcade, Blalock has been served with a copyright infringement notice.

However, he hasn't yet received a cease and desist notice, and Apple hasn't taken his app down as "ZeniMax didn't specify what the app is specifically violating."

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Football games on handhelds can usually be divided into two camps: those that offer a cut-down version of a PC or home console game, and those that fixate on a single element, like shooting, and try to make a high-score game out of it. There are some fine examples of both on iOS and Android already, but New Star Soccer is something else: it's a football career built from the ground up for mobiles and tablets, a mixture of Flick Kicks and Football Managers that may even represent a greater threat to your free time than its inspirations.

There's a free Arcade mode where you just flick the ball into the goal in increasingly difficult scenarios - you pull back from the ball with your finger to measure power, then another screen pops up with the ball bouncing or rolling across it and you have to tap to indicate where you want to strike it. But the Career mode - free for your first 10 matches on iOS - is where you'll spend the bulk of your time, gradually levelling up your skills, dividing your focus between training, gadgets, girls and gambling, and making a name for yourself.

Initially you're signed up for a non-league team in a country of your choosing and paid very little for your services. Using canny judgement and a bit of experimentation, you quickly learn how to make more money out of football: investing your earnings in energy drinks that allow you to take part in more mini-games to upgrade your skills between matches, and then taking advantage of your increasing proficiency to make your mark on the pitch and earn performance bonuses and catch the eye of sponsors and bigger teams.

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As much as I enjoy iOS gaming, I have to admit that a vast majority of games on the platform feel rather slight. Many have novel mechanics or neat art styles, but do little more than help fill the two minute gaps when the person we're hanging out with goes to the bathroom.

There are few that I find comparable to the sort of fully-fledged experience you get on a console, and LostWinds 2: Winter of the Melodias is one of those exceptions. This shouldn't come as a surprise, being a port of a WiiWare game, but the new mobile version is a splendid translation of an already excellent title.

LostWinds 2 is a semi-linear 2D Metroidvania-style adventure, with a hint of Okami's gesture-based environment manipulation set in a lovely storybook world. I fear the "2" in the title will scare off newcomers, and that would be a shame as it's not necessary to have played the original LostWinds to appreciate this one. You'll miss a crumb or two of backstory, but all you need to know is that a young boy, Toku, has befriended a wind spirit, Enril. Aside from this very basic premise, LostWinds 2 is an entirely self-contained tale.

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At first glance, Spellsword might seem like a clone of Vlambeer's Super Crate Box. It's got that game's arena-based combat, endless waves of enemies, and a steady stream of power-ups you're encouraged to collect. But rather than settle for a "me-too" copy, developer Everplay has taken the structure and infused it with its own magical spin.

Each of Spellsword's missions tasks you with surviving throngs of monsters pouring out from the edges of a handful of single-screen stages. Your weedy attack combined with rudimentary virtual buttons might sound like an uninspired tap-and-slash, but a series of elemental power-ups bring a spark to this rusty template.

At any given time, an enchanted card appears somewhere on-screen. Snatch it and you'll release an area attack as well as infuse your blade with the appropriate magical properties for a short while. For example, grabbing a fire card launches homing fireballs at foes and sets your sword ablaze, while the poison card infects all enemies on-screen, causing them to explode after a few seconds.

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Last autumn's Deus Ex: Human Revolution and this year's Final Fantasy 13-2 have helped Square Enix return to profit making.

Last year, Square Enix lost 12 billion yen (-£94 million). But this year, Square Enix gained 6 billion yen (£47 million).

"The Group's results were favourable due to increased sales of console games boosted by our major titles, Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Final Fantasy 13-2," Square Enix noted. Expanding web and smartphone business were also picked out.

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Skylanders, eh? What a cracking wheeze. Take a game, gate off much of its content (including several levels, a clutch of power-ups and all but three of its playable characters), and release a bunch of toys at seven quid a pop to act as glorified unlock keys. Then drip-feed supplies to stores over six months and watch the cash roll in. You can almost picture Bobby Kotick skipping around his boudoir, casually flicking piles of loose banknotes into the air in slow motion. Just me?

But here's the kicker: Skylanders is actually brilliant. You're not paying for crappy plastic bits of nothing, but genuinely well-made and characterful figurines. And you're not merely unlocking fresh content, but buying into a world. Quite apart from the NFC-driven wizardry of the Portal of Power (it's kind of magical the first time even for an adult; the effect lasts much longer if you're six), you've got a Top Trumps-style card game, a substantial browser-based multiplayer universe, and now a perfectly enjoyable iOS spin-off.

Cloud Patrol is a shooter of sorts, tasking you with firing cannonballs at trolls who've taken up residence on a series of floating islands. Tapping them individually is the easiest and safest way to get rid of them, or you can draw a continuous line between them all to earn a combo bonus. The trouble with this latter method is that it's all too easy to drag your finger into the spiked bombs that bob and swirl around each archipelago, and which result in instant death.

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The first thing you see when you boot up 774 Deaths is a black loading screen with a tiny brown dog running in the corner. "Oh no!" I thought, considering the game's ominous title and stark monochrome title screen. "Don't kill the puppy!"

Well, I got news for you, kiddo; that puppy will die a horrible gruesome death a thousand times over. Fortunately, you'll likely never reach that point, as you don't unlock the pooch sprite until very late in the game. For most, he'll exist only as a spirit haunting the load screen, or a proud symbol of triumph starring in extraordinary YouTube videos by insane people who conquer the final stages.

Saying 774 Deaths is hard is an understatement on par with saying Hitler had some unpleasant qualities. The untamed brutality of the game makes Super Meat Boy's dark world look like My Little Pony. It's so hard that single stages will likely take well over 774 tries alone. In the fatalistic world of 774 Deaths, you have the life expectancy of a mayfly caught in a spider web.

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In collaboration with NG:DEV.TEAM man René Hellwig, the developer has launched a Kickstarter drive to help raise funds towards dev kits for PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade versions.

Rather than just receive a download of the game when it eventually releases, as is customary with these sorts of things, it's offering a Dreamcast-compatible hard copy.

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It successfully raised $500,000 with seven hours left on the clock. That has since risen to $506,733 from 9981 backers.

It's an unlikely success story - four days ago it still had more than $200,000 to go. However, former Kojima Productions man Ryan Payton and his Camouflaj team have somehow managed to rally some serious last-ditch support.

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Konami's yearly accounts are out, whoopee, and the big success story is games for social networking services (SNS).

These helped Konami's profits nearly double to 23 billion yen (£178.5 million), despite net revenue being roughly the same as last year - 265.8 billion yen (£2.06 billion).

More, more, more, said Konami, even name dropping a possible partnership with Zynga.

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Angry Birds developer Rovio has announced plans for its first non-avian related release since Angry Birds made it very, very rich a few years back.

The Finnish studio has acquired the rights to physics-based smartphone puzzler Casey's Contraptions from developers Snappy Touch and Mystery Coconut.

It's removed the original from the App Store and plans to re-launch it in the Summer on both iOS and Android with a few enhancements and a new name: Amazing Alex.

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Some genres are so saturated with class, and so large in the first place, that a new contender needs something special. A name as unimaginative as Jelly Defense doesn't help. Although, to be fair to its developers, the bleed of SEO tactics into the App Store's line-up makes such blandness almost a pre-requisite for success. What's that thing about judging a book by its cover?

Jelly Defense makes a good first impression by virtue of its gorgeously gloopy world - looping monochrome backgrounds dotted with bright, bouncy jellies and skittering enemies. It serves a purpose, too, as the key twist to the usual tower defence ruleset is in the form of colour-coded enemies. Red towers attack red enemies, blue towers attack blue enemies, and certain towers are half-and-half. Which sounds manageable, but is the reason behind almost every restart and failed level. It can hurt bad.

The goo-goo eyes and cute touches are there to distract attention from the fact that Jelly Defense is a monster. Things start off simply enough with a few levels featuring long curves and plenty of time to bosh the clueless jellies. Perhaps a little bit of over-confidence settles in - who knows? Then things turn ugly. Jelly Defense has balls of pure steel, and intends to take a hammer and test yours.

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Critically revered WiiWare platformer LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias arrives on the App Store some time tonight, priced at £2.49/$3.99.

As reported by Pocket Gamer, it's already available in New Zealand, meaning a European release is imminent.

See the clip below for a glimpse of the iOS version in action.

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Something called SimCity Social is on its way to Facebook, judging by a series of new domain names filed by EA.

As reported by SimsVIP, the publisher has snapped up SimCitySocial.com, SimCity-Social.com and SimCityFacebook.com.

Not only that, but it is also hosting an unpublished "SimCity Social" Facebook Page and has reserved a SimCity App on the social network through its Playfish subsidiary.

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Let's talk about social networking and driving. Chances are if you've got wheels and a smartphone it's likely you've been tempted. When bored and caught in traffic or waiting for a signal change there's no harm in a quickie status update or tweet, right? Even if you don't have a vehicle you probably know someone that does, and I'm pretty sure they're guilty. Despite the potential risks of such a silly thing to do, I know I've certainly been there.

It's funny then that Tweet Land conceptualises Twitter-bred vehicular calamity in such a literal way, materialising tweeted keywords from real users (who could very well be driving) as obstacles on a side-scrolling racetrack. Your aim is to survive from one stage to the next, avoiding collisions and increasingly ridiculous hazards as you rack up points by smashing into as many other drivers as possible.

In turn, objects or items are procedurally generated by whatever algorithmic magic the app employs to pick up certain phrases being used on Twitter. (Meanwhile, originating tweets are archived at the bottom of the screen.) It's kind of like a social media-driven Spy Hunter, only instead of Cold War automotive sabotage and Peter Gunn you have zombie hordes and Rebecca Black.

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Got a great concept for a game? Virgin Media is looking for the best new idea to turn into a working mobile or tablet title.

The game's beta version will be made in 100 days and be launched at this year's Eurogamer Expo.

Budding games developers can now submit their ideas via Virgin Media's 100 Day Game Project. Entry is open until 27th May.

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New entries in both the Dead Space and Need For Speed franchises will be on shelves by March 2013, publisher EA has confirmed.

Both were referenced during an earnings call today as among the company's blockbuster releases for the coming 12 months, though no specific details were announced.

Dead Space 3 is rumoured to take place, in part at least, on a frozen planet, whereas a retailer listing for Need For Speed: Most Wanted 2 recently popped up.

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Free-to-play mobile developers who exploit players by charging for incremental power-up and add-ons represent everything that's wrong with mobile and casual gaming today, according to Super Meat Boy studio Team Meat.

Speaking via a new blog post over the weekend, the outspoken duo of Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes promised that their debut mobile offering - Super Meat Boy: The Game - will go in another direction.

"As many of you may have noticed, there is a whole s*** load of wrong out there these days, from abusive and manipulative money making tactics, to flat out stealing," they wrote.

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Sharks get a bad rap in video games. Clover Studios positioned them as bosses in Viewtiful Joe and Okami, they'd devour Tony Montana if we went for a swim in Scarface: The World is Yours, and more recently Batman punched one in the face in Arkham City. Even games that let you play as the toothy predators like New York Shark or the infamous Jaws Unleashed portrayed them as fiends terrorising the land. Thankfully, Shark Dash is here to er, dash expectations of sharks.

You see, when a shiver of sharks have been abducted by malevolent rubber duckies and imprisoned in enormous bathtubs, their salvation lies in doing what they do best; solving physics puzzles. Each stage tasks you with eating all of your waterfowl overlords by flinging sharks around like rubber bands.

In true Angry Birds fashion, a dotted line gives a rough idea of a shot's trajectory and power, but much is still left to your estimation. Extra medals (used to unlock chapters) are awarded for collecting coins and completing levels in a certain amount of moves. It's a bit like golf, only with sharks (which is the sort of thing I'd expect Bond villains would do if they ever succeeded at world domination).

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Is there a genre more resilient than the puzzler? Seriously, decades pass, fortunes wain, oceans rise and platformers give way to shooters, yet puzzle games are always just quietly getting on with things. Timeless to look at and effortless to pick up, whether you're shifting cubes, connecting lines or chaining colours, this kind of fun is never going to grow old. If it's true that every narrative is, on some level, a mystery story, perhaps every game is, from the right perspective, a puzzler. Maybe puzzles lurk at the very heart of gaming? Maybe I should have finished this paragraph much earlier, quitting while I was still, briefly, ahead? Who knows, eh? It's all so puzzling.

MacGuffin's Curse is very definitely a puzzle game, anyway, a block-puller and switch-flipper that will keep you plugging away for hours. It's a selection of one-screen challenges telling the story of a reluctant thief who's stolen an amulet that turns him into a werewolf whenever he steps into the moonlight.

In this hairy state, he can pull heavy crates and batteries around, break stuff, and engage in anything that generally requires a bit of oomf - but he can't interact with machinery, swim across water, or squeeze through gaps in walls. For that, he needs to revert to human form, and most of the game's puzzles emerge from reading the environment, and then working out when and where to pull off a transformation.

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Beneath my bearded, haggard exterior and receding hairline lies the soul of a 13 year old girl. I like my drinks neon and sweet, got teary during The Muppets and often emit high pitched squeals around fluffy creatures - cats in particular. Though the App Store has no shortage of adorable games starring felines, Kitten Sanctuary might manage to out-cute them all with its delightful mix of traditional match-three style puzzling and pet simulation.

The gist is that aliens have been abducting kittens. Why is unclear, but if ALF is any indication, it's probably not good. Your job is to rescue them from puzzle box traps, comprised of a series of cat-related paraphernalia on a grid. To open the trap you must clear a series of red tiles by matching three of the same type of items together over them.

Matching items converts them into resources. Gather enough and you'll gain a special ability allowing you to vanquish everything on a large section of the board. Kitten Sanctuary isn't a terribly challenging game on its default setting, but bump it up to "tricky" and this cat has claws.

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It's funny to think that Remedy, that most verbose of modern developers, actually started life building a grubby top-down PC racer. The original Death Rally boasted no existential angst, zero trench coats and even fewer spiralling monologues about the nature of morality, and thankfully nor does its glistening iOS remake.

No, this is unadulterated action from green light to chequered flag; a classy combination of car combat and drift-happy racing that sits very nicely on the shiny screen of an iPhone 4. After a brief comic book-panelled prologue (alright, perhaps Remedy can't help putting a bit of story in there), you're left with nothing more than a banger to drive and a handful of curious-sounding events to enter, ranging from straight races to all-out ammo-fuelled wars.

Death Rally doesn't explain much at first, but it doesn't need to. With each race, the ideas driving the experience reveal themselves. First of all, winning doesn't necessarily matter. Far more important is picking up money along the way (done by shooting other cars and hurtling over pick-ups), all of which allow you to upgrade your motor, kit it out with new weapons or even buy a new one if you find yourself particularly flush.

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Draw Something fans will soon be asked to scribble advertising-sponsored words, paid for by companies like Nike and KFC.

This advertising brainchild comes from Zynga, the casual gaming giant that snapped up Draw Something developer OMGPOP for an estimated $210 million.

Zynga has been testing the new advertising scheme for several weeks, AdAge reports. Test words such as "Nike", "KFC" and "Doritos" were inserted into the line-up of possible Draw Something options.

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David Hayter, the man who voices Snake in Konami's Metal Gear Solid series, has joined the voice cast for Kickstarter hopeful République.

According the game's fundraising page, Hayter plays the game's chief revolutionary. Jennifer Hale - who lent her vocal chords to the female version of Shepard in Mass Effect, among numerous other game roles - is also helping out too. She'll voice The Mentor - a mysterious figure close to the game's protagonist Hope.

There's been a fair bit of activity surrounding République since we last touched base with the project. While former Kojima Productions staffer Ryan Payton's ambitious non-violent stealth title started off as an iOS exclusive, a PC and Mac version has now been announced too.

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EA's (now withdrawn) decision to cancel support for Rock Band iOS has highlighted the cover-all nature of its mobile gaming EULA policy, which is largely inaccessible until a player has already paid for the game.

Rock Band iOS, like most mobile games, does not offer users easy access to its end-user licence agreement until after the title has been bought, downloaded and booted up.

But even then, you'd be hard pressed to find the documentation. This can be located by tapping on the "Extras" menu, then the "About" setting, then "Legal info", then "End User Licence". This opens up the phone's web browser and points players to a generic, US-orientated EULA document.

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I don't think I ever used the word 'asynchronous' before iOS took over the world, but it seems you can't escape it these days. What happened to good old 'takey-turny' multiplayer, eh? Why do we have to have a fancy new word for it? And while we're at it, what ever happened to 'skill' as a term of appreciation?

Of course, back in the day we didn't have games like Disc Drivin', so thank goodness for progress. It's a game where you compete with up to three online opponents - or seven if you're playing a pass-the-iPad game - across a number of courses with hairpins, bumps, boost pads, oil slicks, ramps and assorted other racing game clichés.

In truth, it should probably be called Disc Flickin', as there's not really much drivin' involved. For each turn, you drag your finger left and right to aim your circular vehicle, before swiping briskly upwards to propel it in the appropriate direction. It doesn't automatically follow the intended trajectory, however: if you don't keep your flicks straight, then you can find yourself veering off course. Most of the time you've got barriers on the sides of the track, but in some places the walls disappear and you're at risk of falling off and losing valuable ground on your rivals.

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UPDATE: Rock Band iOS will remain playable, a new statement from EA has announced, despite last night confirming the opposite.

A new in-game notification released to users of Rock Band iOS states:

"A special note: Rock Band will remain playable on your device. Please disregard the previous notification regarding availability. We're sorry for the confusion."

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The humble home video game console and the traditional publisher-led model that supports it is on its last legs, so says Firefall creator and former World of Warcraft lead Mark Kern, with developer-centric free-to-play titles waiting in the wings to replace them.

Speaking in an interview with Eurogamer earlier this week, the Red 5 Studios CEO argued that the free-to-play model offers developers much more room to flex their creative muscles, rewarding gamers with more innovative gameplay experiences than risk-averse AAA console publishers can hope to offer.

"The model is transitioning away from these big boxed games where you're pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a title, to these sorts of games that don't count on the distributor," he told us.

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Draw Something - the hugely successful social game recently purchased by Zynga as part of a multi million dollar deal with developer OMGPOP - is shedding players at an alarming rate, according to a BBC report.

Figures collected by US data tracker WebMediaBrands suggests that the game's daily active user count has dropped from around 14.3 million to 10.4 million between 2nd April and 2nd May.

Last month Zynga announced that the game had been downloaded 50 million times in the 50 days since its launch.

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Saucy Windows Phone apps are set to suffer from a fresh round of policy changes by Microsoft designed to "keep the quality bar high" for Marketplace content.

The company has admitted that while it has never accepted "sexually suggestive or provocative" content, some existing apps now face removal after deciding on a "more stringent interpretation and enforcement" of existing guidelines.

Microsoft has also responded to a rise in trademark-infringing Marketplace submissions, and is taking steps to clean up abuse of the app shop's keyword system.

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Scaling down a game where scale is a large part of the appeal has pitfalls, but Total War Battles: Shogun gracefully avoids them all by inverting itself. Instead of the sweeping view of a battlefield, cavalry poised and archers ready, this is like looking into a box of toy soldiers sprung to life. The massed ranks are replaced with units that occupy one segment of the board and consist of four dinky little men or less.

Basically, the object is to walk your men from left to right and kill whatever's there. The game field is divided into six lanes, each of which is segmented. Once units are set off they move ever-forwards, one segment at a time, unless in battle or stopped. With the right buildings you can produce everything from peasants (rubbish) to Samurai (ace), and setting them down and off feels a bit like winding something up and letting it go.

Constructing a base now means squeezing buildings of different shapes into an allotted space, after which they gather resources on autopilot and can be used to build units. This is Total War reduced to its bare elements, with unit strengths and weaknesses painted in broad strokes. But all sorts of factors play at the margins, so even though much is simple decision-making about what units counter X, pressure can build and burst through carelessly-maintained defences.

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On the Wind is an enticing mobile side-scroller from ex-Rare developer David Buttress. It's also impossible to describe without mentioning Flower, thatgamecompany's brilliant first-person adventure that allows you to craft vibrant gardens of colour by controlling the wind.

Like Flower, On the Wind allows you to control nature through the creation of gusts and flurries. Flower's influence is evident from your first swipe of the touch-screen, but there are enough differences to keep things fresh.

On the Wind places its world in a third-person perspective. Gone, too, is Flower's ability to soar around levels at will. Gameplay is transferred to a fluid 2D side-scroller, with Flower's sedate pace cranked up to arcade-like levels as you fight to keep your gust of wind alive.

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Theme park attraction Angry Birds Land has opened at Finland's Särkänniemi Adventure Park.

Angry Birds Land includes 12 rides, an adventure course and themed food outlets (lots of pig?). It's aimed at families and young children.

Angry Birds developer Rovio helped the park's staff design the experience.

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The second part of Frontier Development's LostWinds platforming series is on its way to iOS, the UK developer has announced.

Titled LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias, it originally launched on WiiWare back in 2009 to general critical acclaim.

Following its predecessors jump to iOS last year, it too is now going mobile, though no release date or price has yet been confirmed.

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Bejeweled bits and bobs and Plants vs Zombies playthings are on the way, courtesy of a new deal signed by developer PopCap.

The casual gaming giant has signed a deal to license its products for commercial use. In short, the Wall-nut-branded boxer shorts you've always wanted will soon be available.

Deals have been signed that include apparel, headwear, bags and accessories, plush toys, figures, headphones, USBs, speakers, device cases, wall graphics, Pop! Vinyl figurines, calenders, posters, adult sleepwear and boxers.

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Korean electronics firm LG has announced it will no longer produce Windows Phone handsets.

Future smartphone launches will now solely be Android-based, the company told Korea Herald (via WPCentral).

"The total unit of Windows Phone sold in the global market is not a meaningful figure," a company spokesman explained.

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Angry Birds Space has been downloaded a whopping 50 million times in the 35 days since it launched.

The incredible figure makes it the fastest-growing mobile game ever, and breaks all of developer Rovio's previous records.

"This has been simply amazing, and the whole Rovio team is thrilled to see such a fantastic reception for the game," the Finnish company wrote on the Angry Birds blog.

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A recent block-pushing puzzle games I played was Catherine, which also happened to be a psychosexual horror drama about a man tempted by a lithe, young seductress. Curiously, it parsed its tutorial out over the duration of the game. You never gained new powers and the rules remained the same, yet plenty of techniques were so obtuse that a little guidance was appreciated for us lost little lambs.

Cubis Creatures is another game about shifting blocks, and though it's aimed at a much younger audience with fluffy characters that resemble cousins of the Viva Piñata cast, it offers less instruction than Catherine on how to best navigate its deceptively complicated systems. It starts off easy enough, but don't let that fool you. The challenge swiftly increases, and by the midpoint it becomes the equivalent of an abusive father pushing their offspring into a lake to teach them to swim.

The game opens with a cute little amateur magician accidentally lulling his animal friends to sleep. Your goal is to awaken them by solving block puzzles inside their mouths (naturally).

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Did you know that BP gets angry if you call it British Petroleum? Because, get with it grandad, that company is now Beyond Petroleum! This new marketing line and the accompanying sunflower logo in crisp green and white is typical of a large-scale corporate branding exercise; where a company that doesn't want to change its planet-ruining ways instead does the equivalent of slapping a smiley face on its HQ. Perception, rather than reality.

Async Corp has more than a whiff of this, being a puzzler that's gently themed as a corporate box-ticking exercise: it feels almost prophetic, to the extent you expect a popup congratulating you on "service excellence" after an especially good run. The game's all about making 'packets' out of two grids filled with colour squares. You can switch any single square with one from the other, and when four of them form a cube, or even more make up a rectangle, they pop together instantly into a single packet.

These can be tapped to be 'sent', which is how you score, or left in an attempt to add to their dimensions, the ultimate size being the eponymous Async. Simply doing this for its own sake is a pleasure, both for the way squares instantly gloop together into bigger packets and the satisfying chunk as one's sent off and the replacement squares fall into the new gap. It's all about how well your thumbs and brain work together, as you work out future switches and coax the grid into the kind of setups that a few quick changes will turn into packet heaven.

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If video games had existed in the Old West, I like to think they would have looked like Gunman Clive. A sepia-toned 2D Western done up as a platform shooter, its scratchy, hand-drawn aesthetic resembles early 20th century animation.

Its basic move/jump/shoot controls would have ensured young bucks gallivanting about town could easily manoeuvre their gunslinger alter-egos, while its often fiendish difficulty would have eaten up plenty of hard-earned coins. Lucky for us, Gunman Clive is priced more generously than the change-eating parlour games of the time. Heck, it doesn't even have micro-transactions. No daylight robbery.

Rather than focusing on the grit of the era, Gunman Clive provides a cleaned-up view of the West with a shooter that resembles Contra by way of Roy Rogers. In true shooting gallery fashion, bandits pop out from behind crates, windows and trapdoors in the ground.

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An angry mass of pink projectiles swarms from the top of the screen, surrounding a small craft near the bottom. Overwhelmed, the player guiding this avatar desperately attempts to manoeuvre between these deadly bullets. Time and again he's hit, a shriek piercing the air with every death.

Cave games are too hard, right? I mean, look at this. How are you supposed to manage that? Ridiculous.

That's conventional wisdom, right there. On the highest level, yes, Cave titles are punishingly hard. Exclusive. Elitist, even. But since when were games judged purely on their uppermost difficulty level? It's like watching a video of Modern Warfare on Veteran and writing it off, or watching Daigo Umehara in action and giving up multiplayer Street Fighter for good.

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Dave Gross, a writer steeped in Dungeons & Dragons history, has joined the Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition team.

He's written two Forgotten Realms books - Black Wolf and Lord of Stormweather - as well as Pathfinder Tales books Price of Wolves and Master of Devils. He also co-authored Winter Witch.

Gross was editor of TSR (publisher of D&D) magazine Polyhedron Newszine, too.

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Sega has detailed its ambitious free-to-play strategy for forthcoming MMO sequel Phantasy Star Online 2.

Speaking in a Famitsu interview, as translated by Kotaku, series producer Satoshi Sakai explained that while Sega wanted to make the game free-to-play it didn't want to lock the full core gameplay experience away behind a series of pay walls.

Instead, it will only ask players to cough up for relatively minor enhancements like upgrades for their rooms, increased storage space or specific trading features.

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Did you ever play Donkey Kong Country? If not, go correct that now. If so, you'll no doubt remember that game's fondness for barrels that acted as cannons. Donkey or Diddy would jump into a barrel and then you would press jump to fire them in whichever direction it pointed. Sometimes the barrels moved up and down, or side to side. Sometimes they rotated, and progress from barrel to barrel often meant dodging through bouncing crocs or buzzing bees. Success was all about timing.

Cannon Cat is basically those bits, except you're a cat.

It's better than it sounds. (And it actually sounds very nice anyway, thanks to a memorable backing tune that's reminiscent of Sonic the Hedgehog and other 16-bit platform ditties.) Cannon Cat leaps into a barrel and you tap the screen when you want to fire him in the direction of the next one. The barrels spin and rotate and there are flying ducks to avoid. Later on there are turtles to use as bounce pads (the belly side is your friend, the hard shell is not). After you pass through enough barrels you reach a glowing circular portal, and once you've fired Cannon Cat into that it's the end of the level.

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Microsoft will reportedly preview its new music service, code-named Woodstock, at E3 2012.

The cross-platform offering will operate on Xbox 360, Windows 8 PCs, phones and tablets, plus Android and iOS devices. It will completely replace the current Zune brand.

Woodstock will be browser-based, Verge reports, but run without plugins.

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Crash Lab, founded by Steve Ellis, Martin Wakeley and Lee Musgrave, is working on three iOS games, GamesIndustry International reports.

Ellis co-founded Free Radical, creator of the much-loved FPS TimeSplitters, in 1999. Before that he worked on seminal console shooter GoldenEye 007 at Rare. Musgrave headed up art at Rare, and helped design Xbox Live Avatars.

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Got Cow is colourful, playful, and - on the surface, at least - ever so slightly heart-breaking. It's the debut solo release from Dave Miller, who spends his days working as an artist at Relentless, in good old Brighton. About a year ago, Miller decided to start teaching himself Unity, and Got Cow is the end result: a neat leaderboard rattler in which you fling rockets around gravitational fields to take out a series of UFOs.

It wasn't the first game to use this kind of mechanic, of course, and it won't be the last, either. That's the problem, in fact: Angry Birds Space, which was announced about a month before Miller planned on releasing Got Cow is all about - that's right - flinging birds around gravitation fields to take out a series of pigs.

Look at screenshots, and the games seem very similar indeed. Here's the three-star rating system beloved of almost every smartphone hit; there's the cartoony space backdrops and big, chunky characters. In truth, though, there's plenty of room for both games to coexist.

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Apple's iPad sold 11.8 million units in the last three months, representing a year-on-year jump of 151 per cent.

The figure came out of Apple's latest quarterly financial report which saw the perennially successful hardware manufacturer rake in a whopping $39.2 billion in revenue and $11.6 billion in net profit between 1st January and 31st March.

That compares to revenue of $24.7 billion and net profit of $6.0 billion for the same three month period last year.

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After the brilliant Binary Domain reminded me how wonderful shooting robots could be, I happened across EPOCH on the App Store, which promised further mech-blasting fun. One problem: it was a third-person shooter.

Third-person shooters on iOS tend to fall into two categories: clunky and slightly less clunky. So it was with some surprise and more than a little delight I found that EPOCH has a control scheme I'd almost be tempted to describe as elegant.

Rather than forcing you into awkwardly manoeuvring your avatar with virtual sticks, developer Uppercut has opted for a system of taps and swipes. Slide your finger downwards and you'll duck behind the obligatory waist-high wall - or reload if you're already crouching. There are pillars at either side that you can glide to with lateral swipes. Then, when those robotic fools are reloading, you slide your finger up to pop out of cover and tap them to lock on, with your shots automatically heading towards their titanium target.

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Robert Bowling, ex-creative strategist at Call of Duty developer Infinity Ward, has founded a new game studio, Robotoki.

Bowling previously was the public face of Activision's Modern Warfare studio. Last month he abruptly quit Infinity Ward and severed ties with publisher Activision.

Ex-Activision employee Bowling explained that he now wanted to work somewhere developers retained "complete control" over their creations.

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Might & Magic: Duel of Champions is the latest spin-off from Ubisoft's long-running RPG franchise, due later this year on PC and iPad, the publisher has announced.

It's a free-to-play card-based effort that sees you facing off against opponents online and cross-platform.

You'll be able to pick up additional cards and gain experience either by emerging victorious from battle or heading over to the in-game shop. Screenshots below.

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With Zen Studios' Pinball FX 2 still dominating Xbox Live Arcade, it takes a bold developer to step into the arena with another - superficially similar - offering. Yet that's exactly what FarSight Studios has done with The Pinball Arcade, a pinball simulation platform that offers four tables in its basic form, with two more to be added as downloadable add-ons each month.

Both games use pretty much the same control scheme, and FarSight also uses similar systems - such as the countdown after pausing - to ensure the flow of the game isn't impacted by its digital form. The crucial point of difference comes in content - and it's here that FarSight has managed to create a title that complements, rather than competes with, its hugely successful rival.

Unlike the increasingly dazzling tables on offer in Pinball FX, where reality can be put on hold to allow characters to roam the tables and balls to be set alight, Pinball Arcade is pitched at the pinball purist, with painstakingly accurate recreations of the most popular real-life tables from the most prolific manufacturers. So we get Stern's Ripley's Believe it or Not from 2004, the 1996 Tales of the Arabian Nights table from Williams and Bally's Theatre of Magic from 1995. The outlier is Gottlieb's seminal Black Hole table, which dates from 1981.

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I can pinpoint the very moment that my appreciation of Coconut Dodge changed from bloodless admiration for an elegant, economical design into a helpless, wide-eyed joy. That's because it was the exact same point at which I was given a hat. Not just any hat, actually: this was a kind of golden Viking helm deal with huge tusks and other sharp bits.

The golden hat's a power-up that grants you a period of invulnerability in an arcade game that can otherwise be rather relentless. More importantly, though, it's also a golden hat. A sartorial embellishment that sits wonderfully well on the head of your scuttling crab avatar. It conveys a sense of power, nobility, and steely-eyed integrity. Priceless, really.

There's much more to the game than that, of course. FuturLab's iOS debut is riddled with clever ideas, although it initially seems so simple. At first, this appears to be nothing more than a 2D dodge-'em-up: you're a crab, wandering over the sand, avoiding the endless rain of coconuts that falls from the sky.

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From a studio as stylish as Helsinki's Housemarque, Furmins might come as a bit of a shock. This devious little puzzler brings none of Outland's chic or Super Stardust's sheen to the touch-powered land of iPhone gaming. No, this is the world of the Furmins; little fluffy balls with eyes, presumably the bastard offspring of Furbys and Gremlins, and about as appealing as a kick in the ribs.

Thankfully, you won't actually be spending much time with them, and you certainly won't be interacting with them. They're a means to an end, Lemmings by another name, and they only exist for you to show off your own aptitude at constructing creaky Rube Goldberg contraptions using a combination of trampolines, chunks of stone and whatever other fancy stuff happens to be lying around the game's 75-plus levels. Moving these bits and bobs around is as simple as dragging them with your finger and placing them where you want them (which is a bit easier on an iPad but still perfectly feasible on the iPhone's smaller screen).

Once your masterwork is in place, hit 'play' and watch as the Furmins drop out of their hatch and tumble their way downwards, then pray that your construction is robust enough to get them to their goal - another hatch that's guarded by a really odd-looking bird. (Seriously, it's like the cool guys at Housemarque were on holiday and their mums snuck in and designed the characters.)

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Arcade fighter Marvel vs Capcom 2 lands on iOS from 25th April, Capcom has announced.

All 56 fighters from the 2000 original make it into the iPhone and iPod Touch port. The publisher's announcement does not mention an optimised version for iPad.

There's no sign of a virtual D-pad in the screens below, but we're assuming that's how you'll control proceedings.

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Video games have always been a hotbed of escapism and Hungry Sumo is one of the finest examples in some time: a game where it's hard to put on weight.

It's a single-screen affair where you have to chub up your sumo by holding your finger down on his pasty belly. When you do this he expands outwards, grinning and waving his arms happily as he goes. But watch out! You have no control over his motion, which is a bit like that old screensaver where the words "Windows 95" bounced around your screen endlessly (at least until your brother changed it to "I SUCK"), and if you bump into one of the evil sumo that are also floating around the screen then your guy will shrink in size. If he's already small when this happens then he turns into one of the bad guys and it's game over. If you happen to be thumbing him at the time he makes contact then the outcome's the same.

It gets interesting when your sumo gets really quite large and starts dominating the screen space. You would think this would be advantageous, but if there are quite a few enemy sumo on screen and they're all clattering against his bulk then he will quickly shrink back down - or, worse, you'll inadvertently touch him when he makes contact with one of them and it's game over immediately.

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