Touchris

Isn't it annoying when things that should work, without question, simply don't? Surely there can't be many easier tasks than taking someone else's work and doing nothing more than adding a feature or two, right?

If you used Touchris as an example to answer the latter question, the emphatic response would be that it's obviously a lot harder than we think. That's because Touchris is an attempt at Tetris for the iPhone generation with one major problem - it doesn't work.

Don't get me wrong - the game starts up and runs fine, but its issues lie with the methods in which you control the game. They're so incredibly flawed that, in parts, it's aggravatingly unplayable.

That's hardly a selling point for a title that attempts to recreate the magic behind one of the most popular games of all time: Tetris is like gaming royalty, available in some form on almost every format ever released. Its appearance on iPhone should hardly come as a surprise.

But, when you consider an official EA licensed Tetris title already made its way to Apple's mobile earlier in the year, you have to wonder just what the point of Touchris is - besides tempting a lawsuit or two, of course. Sure, official iPhone Tetris isn't available here in Europe yet, but it's expected imminently.

Well, even after several hours play, it's still hard to fathom. There's no fussiness to Nigel J W's crack at the Russian classic, with extra modes or additional content cast aside – this is straight Tetris as everyone knows it, bar the name.

If you're one of the few who've never sampled its delights in the past, the aim of the game is to rotate and move various four-block shapes falling from the top of the screen so that they create a solid line of squares at the bottom. Completed lines are then cleared from the board, with all the lines above moving down a notch - and so play continues.

Should the screen fill up, leaving no space for further blocks to make their way down, then it's game over - quite literally in Touchris's case, with the game freezing as soon as it happens, leaving you with a button press back to the iPhone's menu screens the only option. That's not the only problem that comes with this touchy-feely take on Tetris, as some of the features designed to make the most of this new technology fall flat on their face.

While speeding up a block's descent is a simple case of moving it down with your finger, rotating it is a different matter. Officially, there are two ways of achieving this essential task; one requires you to swipe your finger across the screen, twisting each block as you do so, while you can also tip your iPhone left and right to, supposedly, turn said shape in that direction.

There are fundamental problems with both methods, however. It's far too easy, for instance, to end up pushing your block down to the bottom of the screen with a swipe, completely hijacking any gameplan you might have.

Tilting the phone is also fairly hit and miss. In actuality, to get Touchris to respond it requires more of a short sharp shake than a tilt.

The main problem with this is that quite often your work will be undone when you bring the phone back to its normal position, meaning games can often become a frantic process of shaking the phone all manner of directions to try and get the shapes to turn in the direction you'd like.

If you're a newcomer to the iPhone, Touchris's attempt to make use of its capabilities would probably be enough to put you off the device for good. If you're not, then you'll have enjoyed plenty of better experiences that highlight just how frustrating the game's application of the iPhone's assets is.

Either way, the fact that the game's intended distinguishing features from the leagues of other Tetris outings or clones out there are, for the most part, broken, means that the game's only selling point is its rock bottom price. (£1.19/$1.99 for the budget conscious of you out there.)

On a platform that has so much to celebrate, a title that flouts the opportunities the iPhone presents somehow seems all the more unacceptable, even if it's not totally disastrous in itself.

If you're looking for a Tetris game to play on your new piece of tech, it might be worth skipping this and waiting for EA's official outing, because sometimes there ain't nothing like the real thing.