The Trawler Report: The best free iPhone games on the App Store (16 Feb 2009)

Welcome, brave trawlers. It'll no doubt warm your winter-battered souls to learn the App Store's waters have been positively brimming with free puzzle titles this week.

Sure, it's always nice to have a high profile freebie flop onto the Trawler's deck, as we've had in the last few weeks with the great Rolando and sneak-peek Super Monkey Ball lite versions, but in a way the dominance of relative underdog titles this week has been refreshing.

So sit up, sip your brew and take a look what the net's brought in…

The best free iPhone games: 16th February 2009

Tiltafun
By On the Rocks
What is it? It's a cute cake-guzzling accelerometer game
Type Demo

In this simple-but-slick accelerometer game, you control a little feline candy monster as it scurries around a maze, chomping any goodies that it finds. You need to avoid the maze's icy-looking walls though, or you'll have to restart the level.

This lite version contains two of the full game's ten worlds, but since there are a handful of levels in each world, it's plenty to be getting on with. Get on with the cake munching, greedy gamers!

Monkey Jewels
By Pocketfun
What is it? A superfast hexagon-matcher
Type Demo

Monkey Jewels comes with a familiar premise. You have to drag a line of the coloured hexagons in order to make a colour match with another group of hexagons. It's not about lines, though, but rather about making more robust circular or rhombus patterns.

It's got a curious speed to it, with matches often setting off lightning-fast combos that fill the screen with stars. It's a pity that not much has been made of the monkey theme, but it's a nicely-made title with a bright and cheery look to it. The lite version is a fairly quick blast, with just two levels from the normal version.

Sushi to Ggo Lite
By Sudden Games
What is it? An accelerometer-controlled sushi delivering game
Type Demo

This is almost certainly the most unusual title in this week's report. In it, you play as a turtle delivery man, delivering fishy food parcels to sushi fans across the neighbourhood. The tilt controls means it's simple to get your character up and swimming about.

Each level has a few sushi pick up and drop off locations, and you need to complete all the deliveries within a time limit. To make things trickier, the levels are full of dangerous obstacles like sharks and spinning algae-infested wood beams.

There are eight levels from the full 50 to play here, which should keep even veterans of the sushi conveyor belt going for a while.

Crossbones Lite
By New Insect Overlords
What is it? Poker meets snap meets a gang of swarthy pirates
Type Demo

Crossbones is a bit mind-boggling at first. It's a game where you have to match the rum bottle, cup and dagger symbols, except it's all a bit more complicated than that. Rather than just the symbols, there are the added features of the tile's colour, the number of objects on the tile and the type of border on the tile.

You can match like-for-like or you can match symbols that are completely different in all respects. There are still more possible matches to make, but we'll leave that for the game's tutorial to explain. Thanks to the lite version's ad support, it's actually fairly full-featured, but the paid version includes additional multiplayer support across wi-fi, 3G or EDGE.

Diet WordPop!
By Smart Box Design
What is it? It's a word search game
Type Demo

The iPhone is a great format for the word search game, since it can make great use of the touchscreen control without doing anything particularly dynamic or original. Diet WordPop! is no real gameplay revolution, but it has a refinement that's solid and satisfying. The 80,000 word list sounds pretty good to our ears, too.

The full version offers additional difficulty levels for those that get addicted to Diet Wordpop!'s carbonated charms.

Freebie Pick of the Week

Action Bricks Lite
By CDE
What is it? It's a Super Collapse-style block-tapper
Type Demo

Action bricks may look like any other matching puzzler, but you don't actually move the blocks around with your finger. Instead, double tapping on any groups of blocks will make them disappear, while turning your device will make the blocks fall as you'd expect through common-or-garden gravity.

It's a rather stylish affair, with colourful visuals and some nifty sound effects. You get ten levels to play out of the final 50 here, and since the full version is currently only 59p, we'd suggest that Action Bricks is well worth a look if your iPhone isn't already full of these type of matching puzzler.

The Crap Apps Box of Shame Award

iBurp On Your Fart Ahhhh
By Gidigo
What is it? It's a trinity of bad taste united
Type Full ad-supported

iBurp On Your Fart Ahhhh is a reductio ad absurdum of the fart simulator craze. Just look at the title: it's mental. It's essentially much the same as any other burp or fart simulator, except that, as its name suggests, it gives you a burp, followed by a fart, followed by a final 'ahhhh'.

There are actually a load of different burp, fart and ahhhh sounds to choose from. It's up to you to find the most 'hilarious' compilation. You can also set a timed delay to the sound to set it off without it being in your hands. We do have to hand it to Gidigo that this does place it above some other joke noise generators, but it doesn't stop this from being tasteless rubbish.