The 15 Games You Need For Your New iPhone (pg. 02)

Go Go Rescue Squad • Connect2Media • App Store Link • www

Placed here to round off the types of games worth exploring on the iPhone, Go Go Rescue Squad is one of the device's best entries for puzzlers in the same vein as Lemmings, The Lost Vikings or Taito's Exit: a little bit action, a little bit cerebral, with your goal to rescue 'Darwins' from their burning confines by guiding your team of firefighters and tossing both extinguishers and the Darwins themselves from team member to member to the exit door.

KarmaStar • Harvey Smith • App Store Link • www

Coming to grips with Karmastar is like making small-talk conversation with a genius astrophysicist lacking in social graces: you know that there are brilliant things trying to be conveyed, but it's hard for them to put it to you in terms you can easily come to grips with.

That's the game's near-fatal flaw -- an inability to gently ease you into its dense logic -- and what makes your first minutes with the game inevitably monstrously baffling. But, and you'll have to trust me on this one, stick with it for a few more rounds and it does start to make its own brand of twisted sense, and eventually does grant you a wide range of strategic options.

Built on top of a paper card game prototype, you can feel a very deeply underlying metaphorical life lesson desperately struggling to surface -- messages about the things you have to sacrifice in life, from money to love to work, in order to excel in others -- but the message has been so obscured by what I can only assume was a mandate from above to give it more friendly casual appeal, that the two ferociously butt heads and threaten to cancel each other out.

Karmastar's probably the most 'difficult' game on this list -- in the sense of a book or an album that asks almost too much of you -- but it's also one of the more rewarding when you finally learn to speak its language.

Peggle • PopCap • App Store Link • www

Chances are you don't need an introduction to PopCap's massively popular mashup of Pachinko/Plinko madness, especially after its recent expansion to nearly every platform. What you do need to know is that yes, it works brilliantly on the iPhone, and yes, its round ending rainbow-explosion ode to joy feels just as massively rewarding coming out of your palm top as it does from your desktop. One of the easiest games on the list to love.

Puzzle Quest • Infinite Interactive • App Store Link • Lite Version • www

Puzzle Quest, like Peggle, has conquered so many other platforms by now that it's almost impossible to have already run across, but it's finally gone from a slightly clunky port to catching up with its DS and PSP sister releases (and, indeed, almost accidentally surpasses them -- its uncapped framerate has made it almost 'Yakety Sax' type fast on the 3GS).

Either way, it's still, obviously, the most handy way to experience the game when it's your constant companion: it lends itself perfectly to quick time-wasting rounds that can be pocketed immediately afterward, and it doesn't suffer from some of the unfortunate bugs that marred the other handheld releases.

Reflexion • Trileet • App Store Link • www

To be sure, the iPhone is not suffering for want of yet another Breakout clone -- it's got nearly enough to justify its own App Store category (some genuinely excellent, as with Epic Tiles' Paper Breaker).

But Trileet's Relfexion comes with a twist that perfectly sets it apart and ahead of the rest: rather than giving you the traditional paddle to swipe control, the game lets you swipe-draw your own paddles precisely where you see fit.

And what that sets up is the opportunity to defy the standard rules of Arkanoid gravity and give you 360 degree fields that work just as easily on their side or head than just bottom to top.

Add to that a nice influx of free Trileet-made bonus packs and, more importantly, a just-added Facebook level editor that lets you create, publish, and share packs of new boards yourself, and Reflexion's probably the first and last game of its type that you'll ever need.