Huh.

I hope this isn’t a trend. I don’t want another service to add to the list – I want Game Center to kick everyone else out of town and become the one, true way of comparing scores with my friends. And if they’re not going to go with Game Center surely – surely! – they should have gone with Facebook Connect so we can compare our scores with people playing the Facebook version?

LIVE IN HARMONY, HARMONY.

Also, Robot Unicorn Attack’s OpenFeint integration seems a little odd. It looks like it only uploads scores you’ve made since updating, not your best score so far. Not a problem for me, as I beat my old high score on my second go, but I imagine it’ll be annoying for some people.

Always I want to be with you...

This has appeared on Facebook now, so I wanted to see if my scores would appear there, so my wife could compete against them. (Or, rather, laugh with delight when she sees how much better she is at the game than me.)

Turns out they don’t, even though I’ve linked the game to my iPhone account and posted my best score to my wall. Update soon, please?

So, yeah, it runs, but it’s slow. Like, as slow as a zombie snail. With a broken leg. (Shush.)

My wife plays the game on her Samsung NC-10 netbook and it’s much faster, but still slower than it should be.

Robot Unicorn Attack running at the correct speed. Oh... wait...

To show her how it should run, I started up the iPhone version and promptly got my best score ever and continued playing when I went for a poo. It’s not easy to put down once you start playing, especially with the sound on. And I’m sure my wife enjoyed hearing the tinny sounds of Erasure coming from the bathroom as I wrestled with a truculent stool.

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.

Good taking a screenshot with no jumps in it, me.

The iPhone version of the popular Flash game. Graphics are blurry and reduced view makes it a bit more difficult for decent players (I’m just as rubbish at this version as the web version), but still very playable. I’m enjoying it, anyway, even though it could be improved.

(If you’re wondering why the posts are so short today, it’s because the new iPhone version of Carcassonne is causing me great rage and confusion. Except a blog post on Monday when I might have calmed down.)