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The free iPhone game Trawler Report Awards: Wild West Pinball and Rolando snap up some tuna chunks

27th July 2009

The free iPhone game Trawler Report Awards: Wild West Pinball and Rolando snap up some tuna chunks
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The Trawler Report has been running for some time now, bringing you the best free morsels the week has to offer. However, now that half a year has passed since the Trawler set sail, it’s perhaps time to reflect. (In other words, Williams is in Prague - ed.)

A great many of the freebies we’ve reeled-in from the App Store have escaped from us and have become fully-fledged paid-for games. It brings a tear to the eye to think of how fast they grow up.

Just as many have stayed with us in the land of the free, though. And, after all, you can’t charge for a Lite version, much as Red Bull Air Race World Championship Lite may have tried to prove differently when it was released for 59p back in April. It’s free now, of course.

Our Tuna Chunks Award winners are free games that have excelled in some way - whether a truly unmissable full game or just a textbook example of what a Lite version should be.

After we’ve doled those out, we’ve got a special commendation award for the publisher who has done the most for freebie fans in making the word ‘free’ a big part of their marketing strategy. Drum roll at the ready…

Tuna Chunks Award winners

Wild West Pinball
By
Gameprom
Awarded for top quality five-minute fun

Rockifone is probably going to put Wild West Pinball's price back up once its sucessor, The Deep, hits the App Store, but that doesn't make Wild West Pinball any less of an alarmingly good freebie.

It's a realistic pinball game that looks and feels admirably like the real thing. It may only have one table, and it may be fiendishly difficult to worm you way into decent scores territory, but Wild West Pinball remains a fantastic download. You can also upload your scores to the web to see just how bad you are compared with the rest of the iPhone gaming fraternity.

Lemonade Tycoon
By
EA Mobile
Awarded for its surprise entry to the freebie canon

Lemonade Tycoon disappeared for a while shortly after its release, and for a while we thought it must have been a mistake in the first place. EA Mobile releasing a full game for free? When they're known for selling almost exclusively premium titles?

It wasn't a mistake as it turned out. Lemonade Tycoon is indeed a full free game that lets you manage your own lemonade empire, choosing your recipe, marketing and location to make your millions.

There has since, perhaps predictably, been a paid-for version released that takes away this free version's ads, but free is free and you can't argue with that.

Rolando Lite
By
ngmoco
Awarded for services to Lite version standards

Now that the Trawler's been roaming the App Store's seas for more than six months, we've learned that beyond anything else, that there's no guarantee of quality on the App Store. Some games are bad enough to induce flu-like symptoms, while other free games are better than many of their paid counterparts.

Rolando Lite showed us how a freebie should be done. It gives you a robust slice of the full game that's enough to chew on for a fair while without removing your desire to play onwards. Of course, part of this is down to the fact that Rolando's a fantastic game, but we're not going to do Rolando Lite down for that glorious fact.

Garden War Free
By
Rockifone
Awarded for sheer number of hours played

When Garden War originally featured in the Trawler Report back in March, we weren't experting it to chip away at our game time in the way it has. Very much the traditional tower defence experience, it sees you planting towers to keep invading insects away from your veggie patch.

The lite version features three maps from the total twelve, but ploughing through those will take you a good long while, without even thinking about the two other difficulty levels available. Sure, it's unlikely to appeal to those that flinch at the sight of yet another tower defence iPhone game, but for the rest of us, Garden War is like gaming comfort food.

The Packed Like Sardines Award

The Packed Like Sardines Award goes to the developer that, more than just about anyone else, has supported the lite version by releasing a freebie to accompany just about every single game they release.

Yep, we're talking about Digital Chocolate.

It's now got a whopping 20 free games on their books, and while others such as Gameloft are starting to try and catch up with them, they’re not there yet. For now, the tactic seems to be working as Digital Chocolate claims it’s the publisher with the greatest number of downloads to their name.

Digital Chocolate’s Trip Hawkins has outlined the company’s plans to release 100 iPhone games in the next year. Is quantity going to win the battle over quality? Either way, we can vouch for Digital Chocolate’s Lite bites up until this point as an impressive selection of tasty finger bites.