iPhone Roundup

Cash Cow

• Developer: Chillingo
• Price: £1.79

I'm hoping that Cash Cow's developers reverse-engineered the game from the name itself (and if this is the case, I'm looking forward to Butter Fingers and Numbnuts) because there's no other way to explain away such a wonky premise. Cash Cow is a game where you have to help a recently bankrupt Frisian - or Ayrshire or whatever - take control of his finances. Yeah. They went there.

Chillingo's game is a fairly standard match-three variant in which you sort through a board filled with coins, trying to build pennies into nickels, nickels into dimes, and dimes into quarters and dollars, all while the clock ticks down in the background.

It would be easy to write this PC port off as a form of first-wave indoctrination programming for the day that US money becomes the world's first global currency, but, more worryingly, I think it might actually be subliminal preparation for an era in which our bovine brothers are left in control of the world bank.

Whatever its true purpose, Cash Cow is a relatively charming spin on an old formula, with decent touch controls, a range of red herrings to avoid and power-ups to experiment with, and some truly ghastly music which, thankfully, you can turn off. The game's shiny cartoon farm animals are, frankly, the stuff of my worst nightmares, but a nice bonus mode where you can spend your winnings buying items to upgrade your homestead rounds out the package fairly well.

If you only buy one match-three game this year, you probably wouldn't buy this one, but if you're going to buy five or six - and why would you do this? - Cash Cow might make the cud.

I meant 'cut', of course. I just felt like I should drop in a pun about cows somewhere. [Moo. I mean boo. - Ed]

6/10

Word Ace

• Developer: Self Aware Games
• Price: Free

Good news everyone: now you can have the cerebral pleasures of Scrabble mixed with the dingy thrill of professional gambling. It's hard to argue that Word Ace, the results of such a lop-sided union, is a puzzle game in the strictest sense, but I've been playing it solidly for two months, so it's possible you might like it as well. Also, it's free, and in these times of cruel economic hardship - a very good cow friend of mine just had to sell his farm - that's got to count for something.

Self Aware Games' strange little offering is pretty simple to get to grips with: you and a group of other online players are dealt a series of cards, all of which have letters on. Using your personal cards and a communal stash visible to all, you have to piece together the longest word you can - mine are often world-beaters like 'ant' and 'toe' - and then bet fake money on the results.

The presentation is fairly basic, but in combining two such addictive ideas, Word Ace was never going to go that far off the rails. Furthermore, the interface and the online elements are all pretty much perfectly integrated, with precise controls and speedy match-making.

If you like spelling, or if you're addicted to gambling (and if it's both, Hello Mr Morris, you took me for English back in 1993, sorry to hear about the divorce) Word Ace is probably worth at least a few minutes of your time.

7/10