Geometry Wars for iPhone (and more)

I have enjoyed the heck out of my iPhone 3G — but I got it two years ago, and I took the contract renewal opportunity to upgrade to the latest (but arguably not greatest) iPhone. As a gamer, there’s a lot to like — there is a noticable speed boost with everything. Guitar Hero is nice and smooth, and Monopoly no longer complains about being low on memory, either. Who cares if it can’t make calls simply because I insist on holding the phone in my hands? The games are groovy.

In checking out new apps and rediscovering old ones, I learned something surprising: Geometry Wars: Touch came out for iPhone the week of E3 and I didn’t notice. I am guessing you might not have realized it either. The iPad version got all the positive press, but the pocket-sized iPhone and iPod Touch is just $4.99 and uses a virtual-twin-stick control scheme. That works…fairly well. I am notoriously in love with but suck at Geometry Wars, so I don’t know if my sad scores are because of the game or my lack of skill.  I will keep practicing.

While I’m on the topic, in addition to the aforementioned Guitar Hero and Monopoly (and of course the Battle.Net Mobile Authenticator), here are some other apps I randomly recommend.

Dicenomicon ($4.99)
Like a lot of gamers, I believe your D&D polyhedral dice are an extension of you. I shop for dice the way I shop for shoes or guitars — no, that’s not the right color, no, that’s not the right weight, no, I don’t like the ink on the numbers. But despite my preference for real bones in real hands, I bought this app anyway — and it’s awesome. The customizations are insane — color and texture of dice, texture of the sure, but hardcore players can create their own formulae (you heard me) to make custom rolls for custom campaigns. I just like the fact that you can tap the D6 button about 25 times before you see a slowdown on iPhone 4. And who doesn’t want to roll 25 D6s at once — just because you can?

QRANK (free)
Pronounced “crank” despite the obvious puns on “question” and “rank,” this free app is a daily trivia quiz. You can compete with friends via a leaderboard on 15 new questions every day, across four categories. You can sometimes use Millionaire-style boosters like reducing the number of answers or polling all previous players for the most popular answers, but you have to save those since they take time to regenerate. There are lots of current event “ripped from the headlines” questions so you will do better if you pay attention to the news on a daily basis — which is one reason I often do poorly in my leaderboard. But if you’re a pub quiz junkie, there’s honestly no better app out for the iPhone right now.

Shanghai Mahjong ($0.99)
Old-timers will remember this matching game played with mahjong tiles as a staple of Activision’s mid-90s PC offerings. “We sold Shanghai to everyone,” joked Bobby Kotick in a Game Informer interview earlier this year. “If you had an LCD screen on your microwave at home, we sold you Shanghai!” Activision licensed Shanghai to mobileAge for the iPhone verison (and many other mobile editions in the past). It looks particularly lovely on iPhone 4, due to the improved screen — and this app’s art assets were upgraded to take advantage of it. If you don’t like the traditional tiles, there are tons of other customization options. I find myself playing this more often than I thought I would.

iStroboSoft ($9.99)
Not a game at all, but the coolest guitar tuner you will ever find, ever ever ever. Peterson makes the most accurate digital tuners in existence, and they usually run a few hundred bucks if not more. For some reason, Peterson has now distilled the core functionality down to a $10 iPhone app — and it works brilliantly. Each horizontal slice of the screen represents another level of note accuracy. Once all the slot-machine-style columns stop spinning, you’re in perfect tune. I still tune by ear and by fork, but I’ve used this app several times just by resting my phone on the guitar’s body and plucking a few notes. At $10, this tech is a steal.

Okay, hit me — what’s on your iPhone?