It’s a shame, then, that the commentators thought the final was a semi-final. No, Clive and Andy, I won’t be looking forward to the final, I just won the bloody thing.

FIFA 11, you see, is brilliant, but buggy. Goalkeepers drop balls and then refuse to kick them. The commentators refer to cup matches as friendlies and think Wembley Stadium is Villa’s home ground. That sort of thing. It’s never really anything very serious, but there are some terribly rough edges. (Especially on the iPhone 4, it seems, where slow-down is a real problem. I’ve had the odd stutter on my 3GS, but it’s generally been absolutely fine.)

Get in!

It’s a game engine that has huge potential, but as well as being buggy it’s lacking in a lot of features you’d expect a flagship game to have. Multiplayer, for example. Or Manager mode.

Look past all that, though, and just play the game and it’s brilliant. It’s hard at first, but once you get into the rhythm of it and work out the timing it eases up and I wasn’t troubled in my last few matches on Beginner difficulty. If I was keeping the game on my phone I’d definitely up the difficulty for my next cup run.

Unfortunately, as I said yesterday, it’s just too big to keep around. I’m down to 150MB of free space on my iPhone and it’s just not enough. FIFA has to go. It must. I just can’t bring myself to actually delete it yet. It’s too good.

Oh, the humanity!

Here we have FIFA 11. It is, basically, the brain to PES’s brawn. A much less physical and muscular game of football, but one that rewards thought and patience. Initially sterile and unfriendly, the more you play it, the more it reveals itself. I’m still have the odd WTF? moment when one of my players boots the ball off the field for no apparent reason, but these are lessening the more comfortable I get with the controls.

It's a hard game, even on Beginner difficulty, but rewarding.

It’s a very good football game, with amazing commentary and great graphics.

The tragedy, then? Well, it’s 858MB, and, good as the game is, I really don’t think I can keep it on my iPhone. I haven’t got that kind of space lying around. I had to sacrifice a lot to install it and now I’ve got no space left. So I think FIFA will have to go, which is a crying shame.

I’ll just have one more game first…

I was playing as Brazil.

Once again, my iPhone predict-o-tron fails me, but at least it got the winners right for once.

That was my first game on Semi-Pro difficulty. I’m not sure if that’s why I conceded a goal or whether it was because Robinho got sent off about five minutes in. Putting the difficultly up hasn’t stopped the AI running around like a blind, suicidal chicken, which is a pity. I’d been assuming the idiotic runs my opponents sometimes made were due to the difficulty level of the game, rather than just poor AI. Mind you, I’m still only playing one level up from the bottom, so things might improve yet.

I made it all better!

Yay Mexico! Hooray!

You know, the more I play FIFA, the more I like it. It’s a great little footie game. For quick games where I can play current World Cup matches, it’s just about perfect. Very enjoyable stuff. I might put the difficulty level up at some point, but right now being able to play games I know I’ll win is just what I want.

And a bird on a goal making a mockery of the whole thing.

At least I had FIFA here so I could play the match myself and get a better result.

Aaaaaah, much better.

In my version we won comfortably and Rooney scored with a gorgeous chip over the keeper that, had it been, you know, real, would have gone down as one of the best goals of the tournament.

Sigh.

Carcassonne

The rules are simple, the strategy less so.

Mostly excellent conversion of the classic board game. The interface is lovely, playing against the AI is fun and it’s a wonderful conversion. It’s let down a bit by what appears to be a completely broken online implementation – many games I’ve tried to play have been full of baffled chat messages and no actual game – but when it works it’s excellent. Easy to pick up, but brain-twisting in the best possible way as you try to make long-term plans based on hopes and educated guesses. Buy it as a single-player or local-multiplayer game with a possibility of bonus online multiplayer against friends and you won’t be disappointed.

Civilization Revolution

Conquer the world in a lunchtime.

The App Store is built on novelty. Games appear for pennies, are the best thing ever for ten minutes, then disappear. Civilization Revolution is different. It eats both hours and battery life with equal abandon and is almost impossible to put down once you’ve started a game. You start with a small, wandering prehistoric tribe capable only of building a small settlement. You end up with tanks and fighter plans and nuclear weapons as you struggle to dominate the world through your military, cultural, economic or scientific might. It’s all incredibly absorbing and doesn’t deserve to be left to rot as you devour the latest, greatest arcade novelty.

Cubed Rally Racer

You will crash. A lot.

Of course, there’s a lot to be said for arcade thrills and Cubed Rally Racer is one of the best of the newer games on the App Store. Essentially it’s an isometric driving game, where the aim is simply to make it to the end of the randomly generated course with as many points as possible. You simply choose how long you want the course to be – ten sections for a commercial break, twenty-five sections for a serious challenge – and then try to get to the finish line without crashing. Hard to put down, seemingly infinitely replayable, this is a serious bargain.

Dungeon Solitaire

You will be needing the tutorial, but it the game is a lot less scary than it looks.

Fed up of traditional Solitaire? Has even Spider Solitaire got tiresome? Try this. It’s very much a Solitaire game – it’s all based on a deck of cards and the shuffle is as important as the strategy – but you’ll also have to engage your brain. It’s a great game with the default deck, but there are numerous expansions that add new cards, often with new rules. It’s nothing like Magic The Gathering, despite the screenshot suggesting otherwise, but it is the best Solitaire game I’ve ever played.

FIFA World Cup

It's even got a good replay viewer.

This would not feature in a list of the ten best iPhone games, but you can’t really get more topical. And if you do get swept up in World Cup fever and want to play with real players on your iPhone, then EA have had the decency to put a decent game in this bit of merchandise. Nice features like arrows showing where your passes will go and excellent replays mean that this is a very solid game. Will you be playing long after the World Cup is over? I doubt it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a good game to have right now.

iNetHack

As a conversion of a game that uses almost every key on your keyboard, the iPhone conversion works far better than you might expect.

It’s always good to get free games. It’s especially good to get free games when they’re absolute classics. Initially baffling, if you can work your way inside NetHack, you’ll be rewarded with a deep, endlessly-replayable roguelike. You move through the dungeon, killing monsters, trying strange potions, attacking shopkeepers by mistake and, inevitably, dying. Just don’t get too attached to your pets.

Orbital

Make circles. Then destroy them.

An absolute, stone cold classic. This should be preinstalled on every iPhone. Today, for example, the queue in Spar was huge, so what did I do while I waited to buy my Mini Cheddars? Yes, I played Orbital. Three game modes, all worth playing, all sorts of high scores and a cold, yet beautiful, aesthetic. Absolutely essential.

Robot Unicorn Attack

Keep jumping so the unicorn doesn't explode.

This is one of those arcade novelties. Maybe you won’t play it forever. Maybe it’s not as good as the free Flash version. Maybe it’s overpriced at £1.79. Whatever. Right now, today, this is great fun. And it makes a change from Canabalt.

Slay

Conquer the world in a tea break.

If Civilization Revolution seems a bit too much, play Slay instead. Games are quicker, military conquest is the only option and, well, it’s not even remotely the same, apart from being turn-based and based on conquering territory on a map. It’s been around for many years, but the fact that it’s the same as the ancient PC game shows how well the mechanics have stood the test of time. Easy to overlook if you’ve not played it, this really deserves your attention.

Trucker’s Delight: Episode One

Sexual harassment for fun and profit.

And let’s finish off with another novelty. Beautiful graphics, simple yet addictive gameplay and a fairly worrying backstory based on a music video. I played it solidly for two days and haven’t been back since. I keep meaning to, but somehow things get in the way.

The replay viewer has more features than you might expect in a mobile game.

There are issues, of course. Player switching can be painful and there’s a distinct lack of teams compared to FIFA 10, obviously enough. I’m not even sure how well it would stand up to huge amounts of play. But for me, wanting just to play a quick game of footie now and again, this is just about right.

Of course, there’s X2 Football 2010 out now, which everyone’s raving about. I’ve not tried that (yet) and it might be a better game than FIFA, but unless I’m missing some horrendous bugs or exploits (perfectly possible given my limited time with the game) I can’t see anyone feeling too ripped off if they buy this.

I never touched him!

So, yes, in the early hours of the morning, still mostly asleep, I opened up the App Store and bought the World Cup game. Impressions next week.

I started with Torquay, as I’ve played them in Football Manager. Their £15M transfer budget seemed a bit high. You know, just a little. (I tried to buy David Beckham, because he’s only worth £14M, but he refused to come to the club, saying he was too good for us. More importantly, their name breaks the score display at the top of the screen.

I couldn’t live with that, so I started another game as Aston Villa, which gets nicely shortened to AV and looks fine. So far we’ve played three games and won two. Interestingly, the game doesn’t seem to randomise fixtures – I’m just playing through the Premier League in alphabetical order.

So, yes, the game’s a bit rough around the edges, but on the pitch I’ve got no complaints, and that’s where it counts.

One all after normal time, Carew scored in the first half of extra time to put us ahead and we carried that lead through to the end.

Hooray!

We’re winners!

Anyway, it’s a good game, though not perfect. The AI can do some very strange things at times. I’m not sure if that’s because of the difficulty level or just because it’s a bit rubbish. The highlights sometimes show completely the wrong thing. And I have honestly never heard such a repetitive commentary.

But the controls work well, it looks nice, it’s full of content and you get a fun, tense game of footie out of it. I can’t compare it to any other iPhone football games, because I’ve not played them, but I like this one.

Here’s a picture of the first goal I ever scored.

Beautiful, ain’t it?