Upcoming iPhone games: Burnout Crash, Five A Day, and more

Every Friday, we like to finish off the week by looking ahead and talking about the iPhone and iPad games that are just over the horizon.

It's the Easter weekend, so the entire Pocket Gamer workforce is off, binging on chocolate eggs and thanking that Jesus fella for giving us a four-day weekend.

We've got features and reviews going up over the break, and we'll be back on Tuesday for your normally scheduled service. Don't eat too much chocolate - you'll make yourself puke.

Note: Dates, prices, and features are subject to change at the whim of the developer and Apple's approval team. Dates were correct at time of publication.

Training with Messi
By Rock And Roll Game Studio - out on iPhone and iPad on April 11th (source)

I'm not the biggest football fan in the world, so I have absolutely no idea who this Messi chap is. Luckily, Pocket Gamer's resident football hooligan Richard Brown was on hand to offer some top Messi facts.

Did you know his nickname is La Pulga, which means The Atomic Flea? Fact. At the tender age of 24, young Lionel is now Barcelona's all-time top goalscorer. Fact. His girlfriend is "lovely". Not sure if that one can be considered a fact.

Anyway. Sounds like he's a top lad, and will therefore be more than qualified to take you on a strict footy training course. In each world you'll try to reach the goal by dribbling through waves of defenders, and sprinting or sliding past nuisance opponents.

It's got both gyroscopic and touch controls, the ability to customise your player's shirt and online leaderboards and achievements. Whether it can actually make you as good as this Messi character, remains to be seen.

Five A Day
By Jeff Minter - out on iPhone and iPad in April (source)

Eccentric Welsh game-dreamer Jeff Minter is back, with his latest pseudo-retro, hallucinogenic brain trip. This time, it's the fruity Five A Day.

"I know it sounds like I’ve given up all the shooting things and branched out into some kind of namby-pamby healthy-eating fad diet app in a final desperate attempt to actually make a living out of this whole malarkey," says the creator of Gridrunner and Caverns of Minos.

"That isn’t actually the case," he assures us. Despite its fruity theme and ambient new-age soundtrack, Five A Day is still a barmy score-attack shooter that's filled with incongruous nonsense (including Minter's trademark minotaurs in rainbow sweaters) and plenty of nods to antique arcade games

This time around, Konami's chronistic 80s shooter Time Pilot is Minter's muse. Nokia time-sink Snake is also a big influence.

Jeff Minter has submitted the game to Apple. If the Cupertino gatekeepers approve, Five A Day should be available to download in a week or two.

Burnout Crash
By Criterion - out on iPhone and iPad in April

In Burnout Crash (Or "CRASH!", if EA got its way), Criterion ditches racing altogether to make a game that's simply about crashing, smashing, and causing big pile-ups of expensive automobiles.

In each stage (there are 54 of them, across six locations), you've got to fire your car into a busy intersection and then use after touch (that magical ability to manoeuvre a crashed car well past the point of operation) to destroy the environment and other vehicles.

There are three modes. In road trip, you've got to use your smoldering pile of twisted metal (aka, your car) to stop any vehicles from escaping the intersection. If you manage that, an apocalyptic event - a UFO or alien or tidal wave or asteroid - will destroy everything on screen.

Rush Hour is a fast and frenetic score-chasing mode where you're given 90 seconds to cause as much carnage as humanly possible. Pile-Up, on the other hand, is a more deliberate and thoughtful approach to wanton destruction, as you carefully avoiding setting off explosions until the right moment.

At the Game Developers Conference in March, EA told the world that Burnout Crash would finally hit the App Store in April. Pocket Gamer reckons it will be out sooner, rather than later, this month.