Friday £5 - SpellTower, Desert Bus, Major Mayhem, and more

This is Friday £5, a weekly endeavour to raid the App Store, delve into the last seven days' worth of releases, and find as much good stuff as possible for a fiver.

As ever, the new releases on iTunes are as unpredictable as Lady GaGa's wardrobe. This week we're treated to hazardously addictive word games, puzzlers about sneaky mice, action movie parodies, and a game about driving a bus for eight hours straight.

At this time of year, it's good to put a budget on your spending. It's all too easy to sap your credit card dry on new iOS games, but with some of the best console games ever hitting the shelves and your winter holiday of choice just around the corner, you'll need to save your pennies.

SpellTower
iPad - £1.49 - Zach Gage

Word games are a dime a dozen on iPhone, but indie developer Zach Gage (he of Bit Pilot and Halcyon fame) looks to have brought something fresh to the table in iPad-only vocab-puzzler SpellTower.

The premise is pretty simple. You're given a huge grid of tiles with random letters on them, and it's your job to drag your finger from tile to tile, hopefully spelling out some lengthy word as you go.

So far, so Boggle. But SpellTower ramps up the tension with some seriously devious twists on the theme. Puzzle mode, for example, has unused columns of the grid scooch closer to the top every time you make a word, forcing you to dance around the board and ignore obvious words for strategic plays.

The heart-racing Rush mode sees the entire grid rise upwards as you play, unless you're fast enough to spell words, destroy tiles, and keep the board falling. It's a tense tug-of-war that will put your erudite vocab to the test.

The timer-free Tower mode, thankfully, is a little more laid-back.

Desert Bus
Universal - 69p - Amateur Pixels

Okay, so this game is going to require a little explanation. Back in 1995, comedy-magic duo Penn & Teller made a (cancelled) Sega CD game. It was full of fake mini-games and virtual tricks, designed to fool the player's moronic friends.

But the pièce de résistance was the comically dumb mini-game Desert Bus. A realistic, real-time representation of the eight hour drive from Tuscon to Las Vegas. The scenery rarely changes (though a bug does appear on the windscreen at about hour five) and surviving the boring trip nets you just one point.

You can boost that score to 2 if you turn around and drive the eight hour trip back, too. Oh, and the bus swerves slightly, so don't even try and glue down your button. Smartypants.

The game never came out, but fans dug up Desert Bus's code and it has become something of a cult classic. It's used every year in LoadingReadyRun's charity marathon "Desert Bus for Hope", and now you can follow along on your iPhone with this digital curio.

Sure, it's probably one of the worst video games ever made. But... uhm... what was my point again?

Spy Mouse HD
iPad - £1.99 - Firemint

Spy Mouse is a lot like Firement's previous line-drawing mega hit Flight Control. Only with more mice, fewer planes, a touch of stealth, and a focus on puzzles rather than hair-raising near misses between passenger jets.

You use your finger to pilot the eponymous Spy Mouse (nee Agent Squeak) as he tip-toes through living rooms to snaffle wedges of cheese.

He'll have to move in sync with prowling house cats so he can nab chunks of cheddar and return to the safety of a mouse hole without becoming lunch. It's a stealth game - Metal Gear Mouse, if you will.

Levels soon start to ramp up the complexity with new moggies and fresh obstacles. Like the toy mouse that you can sacrifice in neck-snapping mouse traps to safely dislodge the treat. Over 72 levels, you'll constantly find new challenges and smart ideas.

Spy Mouse originally hit the iPhone earlier this summer (when we gave it an impressive Silver Award), but the game now comes in super-sized HD form on iPad - with a few exclusive features to boot.

Major Mayhem
Universal - 69p - adult swim

There's something to be said for the fact that Major Mayhem - a bonkers satire of '80s action heroes - is Adult Swim's most sober game yet. Most of the studio's output revolves around floating dead bodies, removing an appendix with a pizza cutter, and committing suicide with a photocopier.

No, this game is far more traditional. You play as Major Mayhem - the brawny hero who can take on an entire army with little more than a shotgun and a v-neck vest - as he goes toe-to-toe with endless waves of enemies.

Most of the time Major is pinned behind cover. All you need to do is pop out, tap baddies to shoot them, and then squeeze back behind the relative safety of a palm tree to avoid incoming fire. You'll get points for being quick on the draw, and different weapons mix up proceedings.

Between those Time Crisis-style firefights, our gun-toting badass automatically runs between cover points. You might need to run-and-gun down some foes and do the odd leap over obstacles, but for the most part Major Mayhem is entirely on rails.

It promises to be a fun, if rather brainless, blaster that will just about keep you entertained long enough to save the president, humanity, and your girlfriend. All the while doing cartwheels and slowing down the clock in ultra-satisfying Mayhem Time.