Linez: Buy Linez (Don't Do It)

Because it’s temporarily free, of course. Do you see what we did there?

The game that Linez is a variant on exists in several guises on the App Store, but this is as good as any of them and it’s currently the free-est. The instructions are about as helpful as giving a man on fire a hammer, so we’ll have a quick run-through below, but the short version is that it’s well worth a download. I mean, obviously. Would we waste your time?

NB: Not "chess on speed"

This is a real favourite of mine. I used to play chess when I was a wee laddie back home in Scotchland, but in this fast-moving modern world I don’t know anyone who has the attention span/mental discipline for it any more. Speed Chess (or Chess – The Speedgame, as it appears to have clumsily renamed itself), currently selling for the bargain price of 0p ($0.00/€0,00) is the perfect solution.

The picture tells the story, really. The rules are the same as normal chess, but you only have five pawns and one of everything else. You can play against another human or three levels of CPU opponent, and it took me about 40 games to beat it even at “Student” (the lowest). The move clock can be set to 20 seconds (the default), 60 seconds or off, which somewhat defeats the point. Apart from the fact that it says “Times up” if you let the clock run out, it’s excellently presented and generally lovely.

I can think of literally nothing else to tell you about Speed Chess. Bye!

The biggest show on Earth

It’s generally accepted by most sane people that if you want to make money out of something – particularly if it’s something that costs almost nothing to physically produce -  you sell it cheap. The mainstream videogames industry is almost alone in continuing to resist this reality.

Despite comparable businesses like music and film having slashed the unit price of their products by something like 50% over the last decade (I still remember when new-release music CDs fetched £13.99 or more, and new movies on DVD went for £20-25), the price of games has edged steadily upwards since the advent of disc-based media, with £45 the normal RRP for new Xbox 360 or PS3 games. Some premium titles push that already-horrendous sum up by as much as another £10, plus there are numerous comedy “Special Editions” aimed at the super-gullible, charging as much as £30 or £40 more for discs or books full of screenshots, or little plastic toys.

Now, of course, there’s another way.

Pix'n Love Rush: Metagaming, the only true gaming

Here’s one for those of you joining us late, and because this game still hasn’t sold enough copies.

Anyone who’s been reading anything I’ve written for any amount of time will probably already have noticed that I have very little time for videogames that want to tell stories. There are plenty of fields of culture available already for people who want to be told stories. Books, films, comics, TV,  theatre and even music are all ideally suited to story-telling, and frequently do a brilliant job of it. You wouldn’t hire a footballer to come round and do your plumbing, so why would you look to videogames for storytelling?

What I’d like to draw your attention to instead is a glorious example of the art (dang!) of a videogame being a videogame. The unwieldily-titled Pix’n Love Rush ([59p]), in fact, goes beyond being a videogame – it’s a metagame. That is to say, it’s a videogame that’s about being a videogame.

Games We Would Have Written

…About Properly If Their Developers Hadn’t Provided Such Piss-Poor Excuses For Screenshots, But Which Are Very Good And You Should Download Anyway While They’re Free (ie Now) So The Stupid Idiots Don’t Make Any Money, Alongside A Picture Of Something Completely Unrelated That’s Less Likely To Hideously Disfigure Our Nice Website Than Their Crap-Ugly Marketing Shots.

#4: Fare City

Woah! Those funky little taxis look like Pac-Man crying!

Tree Connect: Tree fellers

…is the minimum number of friends you’ll need to get the absolute most out of this brilliant little nanogame, but even if everyone hates you it’s still a lot of fun. The inexplicably-named Tree Connect is currently zipping up the Top Free Apps chart, and justifiably so. It’s a simple reaction-tester distinguished by faultless presentation, and it’s a lot easier to just play than it is to explain, but we’ll have a stab.

A line of coloured blocks appears in the middle of the screen. The line can be made up of two, three, four or five different colours (you choose which). A clock starts (you can set it to 15, 30, 60 or 180 seconds) and you tap whichever of the coloured buttons at the bottom of the screen corresponds to the block highlighted by the two white arrows. Get it right and the line moves one block to the left (scoring you a point), get it wrong and it doesn’t. That’s it.

Fun For Free, Crap For Cash

It’s another exciting new series! This time we’ll be highlighting games which are hopelessly flawed, but still entertaining in a slightly rubbish sort of way as long as you didn’t have to fork out any money on them. Today’s temporarily-acceptable title: Chop Chop Soccer.

It’s a daft, fast-moving four-a-side football game, beautifully presented (Retina graphics, multiple venues and camera orientations, quick games and tournaments, action replays) but hamstrung by the absurd randomness of the controls, which reduce you to swiping wildly all over the screen in the hope of getting a lucky bounce before you’re instantly slide-tackled. You’d be justifiably miffed if you’d bought it at its previous prices of [£1.79] or [£1.19], but when you’re getting it for nothing you can just enjoy its silly playground kickabout antics. It’s FFF, CFC! (Pronounced “fiffcuff” – the last ‘c’ is silent.)

Black Cat: Minimalist to the max

It’s hard not to admire the sheer chutzpah of this one. Black Cat (free for its first two weeks) is the most spectacularly minimalist playable game I’ve seen out of the 2271 (yikes) apps I’ve downloaded since getting my first iPod Touch 18 months ago.

It’s a variant on the falling-down genre, in which you have to keep crashing into coloured lines to stop your energy running out. For full scoring/health details see the App Store description, or just have some fun figuring it out yourself. It’s actually pretty hardcore, so don’t be expecting a score in five figures any time soon. The music is a special joy, too. Go try.

VS Mode: Capcom X Namco

With the launch on Wednesday night of Capcom Arcade (free), the iThing now has two “arcade portal” apps from two of the most famous coin-op companies. The two take very different approaches, and we couldn’t think of anything that could be more entertaining than setting them up against each other in a classic head-to-head arcade deathmatch.

(This is because it was late and we were tired.)

VS Mode: Love is the Slug

We’ve encountered Triniti Games and their curious set of priorities before. Not shy of spending a few bob on talented graphics artists, they always seem to run out of budget somewhere very early in the development process, with the result that they have to hire someone who last worked in the East German coin-op industry in the 1980s to write the actual game.

Their latest effort, Desert Slug ([59p]/free) is a Metal Slug knockoff that’s without doubt their prettiest effort yet. But have they figured out how to attach a halfway-decent game in there somewhere as well? To find out, and also just for laughs, we decided to stack it up against the real iOS Metal Slug ([£2.99]), which is plenty weird by itself.