Friday £5 - Jazz: Trump's Journey, PuzzleJuice, and Caverns of Minos

This week's Friday £5 - a weekly quest to find the best iOS games for a fiver - features a pair of mash-ups. PuzzleJuice and Caverns of Minos are like two Siamese twins, with multiple games being forcibly grafted onto one another in bold attempts to make something new.

So, while the blocky vocab game PuzzleJuice is unquestionably fresh, its composite parts are a little more familiar. Take out the part where you line up rows of oddly shaped blocks and you've got Tetris. Excise the bit where you trace your finger over letters to make words and you're playing Boggle.

Caverns of Minos pays so much debt to Caverns of Mars that Llamasoft might have to file for bankruptcy. But, it also pays tribute to thrusty moon game Lunar Lander, alien shooting gallery Space Invaders, bug fighter Galaga, and the infinitely-old Asteroids.

It shows that in an online ecosystem of clones, borrowing from others isn't always wrong. It's the way you spin and mix those patented ideas that counts. Make it your own, as they say on The X Factor.

It's not plagiarism, it's just inspiration for innovation.

"PuzzleJuice is a game that will punch your brain in the face." It's not the most welcoming message to see when you load up a new app, but in this case, it's also not without merit.

Part Tetris, part Boggle, and part Bejeweled, PuzzleJuice is a wicked blend of different games and genres and ways of thinking: more smoothie than juice. It tasks you with building rows of blocks, matching up colours, and spelling out words - all at the same time.

Make a complete row of dropping blocks and they won't explode into the ether like Tetris; instead, they'll turn into a row of vowels and consonants. You can then drop more blocks near potent letters, and transform handfuls of like-coloured squares into yet-more letters. Finally, you can Boggle the alphabet sea into dictionary words.

This mental triathlon means you can never concentrate on just one element at a time. For example, you need to focus on colour and shape while coaxing out words: otherwise, Game Over will come swiftly indeed. It makes it one of the most challenging puzzle games on iOS (in both genres it straddles: word and block), yet also highly addictive and wonderfully clever.

The games of veteran Welsh developer Jeff Minter are something of an acquired taste. His latest, Caverns of Minos, features antique graphics, endless references to farm animals, the odd fart sound effect, and pop-up My Little Pony pictures.

But, behind the odd and esoteric detritus that's shaken loose from Minter's brain hides an interesting shooter. Like PuzzleJuice, above, it's a mash-up of other games. Though this time its a jumble of arcade shmups, rather than brainteasers.

It borrows heavily from Atari's Caverns of Mars, where a little spaceship descends into a vertical cave, narrowly avoiding jutting-out rocks and enemy spacecraft. At the bottom, you pick up an object - a big bomb in Mars, a pair of pants in Minos - and fly it back out.

But, other shmups are knitted in, too. There's a Lunar Lander-like thrust system to carefully set down and rescue jumper-wearing minotaurs. There are sounds from Space Invaders as enemies flock to stop you coming back up. There's even a ship from Asteroids.

Together, they sing a hearty tribute to the days of Atari 2600 shmups. As long as you can look past Minter's charm (or, perhaps, madness), you'll find Caverns of Minos demanding and rewarding.

Jazz: Trump's Journey is a musical adventure set in 1920s New Orleans. It's also a loose biographical take on the life of Louis Armstrong in which parping on a magic trumpet momentarily stops time. Definitely something different, then.

The main action calls to mind Mario and Braid. It's a platformer, though it's infused with plenty of puzzles. There are moving platforms, buttons to push and boxes to pull, swinging ropes, and nuisance coppers. That time-stopping trumpet certainly comes in handy here.

The game also rewards exploration, with little musical notes to collect and sepia photographs to hunt down.

The platforming is fun, but the presentation seals the deal. The gangly Steamboat Willie art style. The way Trump pops his bowler hat before disappearing through a door way. The way vintage photographs are woven into the backdrop. And the way new instruments imbue the soundtrack.

Sadly, there's one big issue that sorely damages this game's charm. The writing is plagued with grammatical errors, forcing you to read every sentence twice or more to decipher it. Mercifully, a patch is coming soon.