Pocket God

I love Bolt Creative's Pocket God. It is one of my favorite iPhone apps these days. At $0.99 (at least for the moment), it's not horribly painful. The price is supposed to go up in another week or so with the last planned update to the game.

As the title implies, you control the lives of the natives on two islands on your iPhone. You can be a benign God and give them food and try to keep them from dying. Or you can be like me: a quirky, wrathful God.

Once you accept your inner wrath, you can wipe out the little islanders in new and exciting ways: zap them with lightning, whip up a storm and blow them out to sea, fling them into the ocean, sacrifice them into a volcano, cause a volcano to erupt, turn one of them into a vampire who will kill the others, bring the sun to fry a vampire, feed them to sharks, cause an earthquake, watch them explode because they're unable to use the bathroom, or summon a T-Rex to eat them.

As an added bonus, you can name the islanders with that same names as people that have annoyed you and live out some vicarious voodoo doll fun.

The animation is a little cutesy, but my niece, my nephew and my friends' kids can't wait to get their hands on it again to live out some of their little kid homicidal rage -- just like me. I can't wait to see what the guys at Bolt come up with next.

Vampire Live! and Ninjas

One of the banes of my existence are those ubiquitous Facebook app requests for the Zynga games. Now the damned things have migrated to the iPhone.

Luckily, because of the way they've done it, I shouldn't be getting clan requests from all of my friends using iPhones or iPod Touches. Using things like Apperian or other third party libraries, there's the possibility of sharing information for these apps from one platform to another, whether it be Facebook, Android, Blackberry or iPhone. That's not what they did with Vampires Live, the free app for the iPhone.

All the time that you spent building up your character on Facebook? Gone.

If for no other reason than that, I don't see a lot of people switching platforms to play this. And for that shortsightedness, I thank the developers.

The game play is fairly similar to what I'd seen before with the Facebook app. You perform missions, raise your pool of wealth, increase your level and stats, buy abilities that will help your character grow.  It also doesn't really add anything new other than a way to play in the palm of your hand.

The biggest problem is that it needs Internet connectivity to do anything, because it is tightly coupled with the web site that powers it.

The second game that I'm reviewing, Ninjas, is a similar type of game. It has better graphics, but it is also tightly coupled to its web site.

Game play is similar: missions, wealth, abilities, weapons, character growth and advancement.

If these are the sorts of games that you enjoy, you'll like both of these.