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Long read: The beauty and drama of video games and their clouds

"It's a little bit hard to work out without knowing the altitude of that dragon..."

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Mobile Games Roundup

Silverfish! Spin! Corpses! Hearts! Squibbles!

Kosmo Spin

  • iPhone, iPad (universal app) - £0.59

Having a face only a mother could love is perfectly fine when you're edible and shaped like a slice of toast. It might even make you a hero, if it allows you to spare an improbable cast of muffins, cups of coffee and fellow breadheads from being abducted by aliens.

Who needs plotting when you're in charge of a bug-eyed dude who can run around the surface of a planet several times a second? Thanks to the magic of touch-screen play, Simogo has come up with an utterly charming load of nonsense that involves little more than spinning yourself around a sphere, rescuing your tasty friends and avoiding the abductor beam of a nearby UFO.

Two modes of play help keep Kosmo Spin interesting for more than the regulation 10 minutes that 59p games are supposed to last. The first takes the form of a simple score attack and challenges you with collecting as much tat as possible without being abducted, while the quest mode goes for a structured run of 36 challenges, such as heading a ball ten times in a row or avoiding UFO abduction for a set period of time.

Simple, beautifully illustrated and packed with addictive lunacy, you should give this a spin immediately.

8/10

Corpse Craft

  • iPad - Free, full game costs £2.59 in-app
Zombies Vs. Other Zombies didn't really cut it as a title.

This one-time darling of the Flash gaming scene finds itself in rude health in the lavish new surroundings of expensive touch-screen gadgets.

If, like me, you completely missed this a couple of years back, you might find the idea of an RTS-puzzle hybrid about as appealing as a meat feast ice cream with dog hair sprinkles. But don't worry. As developer Three Rings says: mayhem, drama, English accents and zombies await. Only a fool would resist.

It goes a bit like this: you need to continually prod a grid of puzzle blocks to generate the funds to create units. Every time you remove blocks of three or more, you're quids in. From there, you have to roll out your army of undead warriors in the hope that it's enough to break down your enemies' defensive barrier and expose their feeble hut HQ.

But all-out attack proves fairly useless in the long run, and you'll quickly discover that you have to balance things out a bit and put your multi-limbed blockers in the way. It ramps up rather gradually, introducing all manner of units and regaling you with a curious tale in a distinctly Edward Gorey style.

And just when you've started to really enjoy it, you're politely informed that you have to cough up a few quid to access the rest. Fair enough. Anything that's this determined to be unhinged is thoroughly deserving of our loose change.

8/10