Android

Most mobile games are little time-wasters, suitable for entertaining yourself while you wait for the bus; few are deep, involving, and require strategic thinking. Plague Inc does, however.

In Plague Inc., you play a disease, and your victory condition is the complete extermination of humanity. Experiencing fiero because you've just killed every man, woman, and child on the planet is... strange, but interesting.

The game comes with seven different plague types (bacteria, virus, parasite, and so on); only bacteria is unlocked at first. Each poses somewhat different difficulties; for instance, the virus mutates frequently, which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it can gain new abilities without requiring you to spend "DNA points," but you may also evolve in a way to alarm humanity more quickly than you'd like.

Spaceteam is a crazy, highly creative little game that has more of the feel of a party game than a digital one. Like FTL, it's a kind of spaceship command sim, but the games could not be more unlike each other in terms of gameplay.

Its for two to four players in the same physical space, each of whom needs and iOS device. You connect locally to each other, and the game begins. Each player's screen shows a bunch of controls -- sliders, knobs, toggles, areas with two or more buttons. At the top of the screen, a command appears -- like, say, "Set Newtonian photomist to maximum." But the command on your screen references a control on some other player's screen.... So you shout "Set Newtonian photomist to maximum!" and hope that whoever has the Newtonian photomist control hears you, identifies the control on their screen, and turns the know or whatnot accordingly.

Tales of the Arabian Nights (TOTAN) is a hybrid electronic and mechanical pinball game. Bookkeeping, combo chain states, and scoring is managed by the electronic components while gameplay -- keeping the steel ball in play -- is managed by sloped angles, gravity and mechanical parts. TOTAN is ranked number seven of all pinball machines in The Internet Pinball Database. TOTAN gets interesting if you understand the goal and the various "side quests," and the subtle meaningful choices that designer John Popadiuk put in TOTAN. There are many ways to achieve your goal of rescuing the princess from the evil genie Saleem Bagazi. However because there is no tutorial for TOTAN (or most pinball machines), players cannot fully appreciate the intricate and clever game design. Even after reading the official manual (PDF), it is difficult to understand all the different scoring and combo options. Many players, unaware of specific goals, will play TOTAN by hitting random bumpers and other targets, and watch the pretty lights, unaware of the deeper gameplay.

Girl With a Heart Of is a sort of visual novel, a "graphic adventure lite" with little in the way of puzzle-solving. Play consists mainly of dialog with other characters and occasional FedEx quests; but the narrative you explore, and the world background, are quite interesting.

You are a young girl of "the Dark," living in an underground city that is currently under attack by "the Light." Your father has been killed, and your mother is severely injured. As is typical in quest fantasy, it turns out that the survival of your city somehow hinges on you, and you must learn magic and embark on a sort of vision quest to save it.

Age of Defenders is a nicely executed, but very conventional, tower defense game, with two unusual aspects: It's both multiplatform and multiplayer. Well, two-player.

It can be played on a computer for free, in Flash; and there are clients for both iOS and Android. Given the size of the play area, my guess is it works better on a tablet than a smartphone, although you can swipe across the play area fairly easily. On the server side, the game is platform agnostic, meaning you could be playing against an opponent on any platform.

The fact that it's multiplayer adds a strategic aspect missing in soloplay tower defense games; you use the same resources to build offensive units as defensive towers, so you make a tradeoff between one or the other. Essentially, you stockpile units until you release them in an attack, when they try to run the gauntlet of the enemy's defenses and inflict damage on their base. Base hit points don't regenerate, but with two defense-minded players, the game can go on quite a long time.

SteamBirds is a top-down, turn-based, aeriel dogfighting game with an unusual core mechanic. Each turn, you give orders to your aircraft by moving a pointer that indicates where it will end the turn; the system only lets you drag the pointer to a location the aircraft can reach, so that the turning radius, speed, and ability to accelerate or decelerate is build into the scheme. Elevation, and diving/climbing, are neglected. Guns are fore-mounted, so the trick is to get behind the enemy and stay on their tail.

Solipskier was a 2011 IGF Finalist -- in the mobile games category, and it is available for iOS and Android, but there's also a free Flash version you can play online.

It's a rapidly-moving sidescroller in which you "draw snow" that a little skier skis on, gaining speed on downslopes and losing it on upward ones, doing jumps if you draw a steep upslope. If you lift the mouse button (or your finger in the mobile touch version), the snow goes away -- which is fine if your skier is jumping, as he then does 'tricks' for additional score points, but not so fine otherwise, as he will then plummet to his death (game over, obviously).
More...

Why, you may ask, am I reviewing a game that has achieved tremendous, mainstream levels of success, such that the games' publisher was bought out for a relatively low 8-digit sum by EA? Is that indie? Well, I guess they were before they made any money, right? And it's a good little game.

But that's not why I'm reviewing it, sure I can examine how it embodies itself as a lightly executed, ergonomically poised platform-app, like Mario for mobile, but that's relatively trite compared to the more interesting layer: these birds are terrorists.