Bomberman

When we get excited, we're liable to do silly things like pump the air with our fists, whoop triumphantly, and even put our hands through plate glass. When playing video games we sometimes yank and hammer our control pads, not breaking them, exactly, but pummelling them much harder than necessary because we're so damn juiced. It may not be wise, but it's human.

Bomberman is an exciting game. Running around in a maze, laying bombs for enemies, searching for power-ups, and desperately trying to escape the blast radius of your own explosions is a combination of activities designed to thrill. Should this enthralment translate into a wayward button press, however, this latest iPod version of the classic game will respond in a number of more or less unpleasant ways.

Assuming you're listening to a song, a spurt of leftwards excitement will reset the track, while a jerk of rightwards elation will skip you onto the next. Spasming with delight whilst travelling downwards will pause the song, and doing so upwards will promptly deposit you in the menu screen. Fatal? No. Annoying? You're hot darn tootin'.

It's almost impossible to write a review of an iPod game without mentioning control. Some games are perfectly suited to the touch-wheel, like Peggle and the forthcoming Pole Position: Remix, while some are utterly incompatible with it, like Sega's recent port of Sonic.

Feathering the wheel delicately with your thumb rather than jamming it down is counter-intuitive, as is the mapping of solely horizontal and vertical fields of movement to a 360-degree input. Laying a bomb with the centre button only to be trapped by it as your thumb brushes the wrong part of wheel is all too common, and while with care and practice you can learn to avoid these disasters, Bomberman is simply not a game that lends itself to painfully restrained control.

The object, for those new to the game, is to kill a set of enemies in a maze and then find the exit.

While the cherry bombs you use for this purpose are stationary, your enemies are mobile, so to succeed you generally need to box them into cul-de-sacs, a mechanic that works best against humans or computer opponents with decent AI. The bovine monsters that populate this version's mazes aren't the wiliest opponents, but they become faster and more aggressive as you climb up through the game's 20 levels, and the hulking final boss takes some killing.

To help you along there are the aforementioned power-ups, including speed boosts, extra bombs, and modifications that increase your bombs' blast radius. The blocks you need to destroy in order to uncover these power-ups hold no sign of what they contain, and so the search for both power-ups and the final exit is a groping affair. While for the most part this makes the game interesting, it can be tedious searching for the exit once you've killed all the monsters.

At its core, Bomberman is a fair but unremarkable port, short at 20 levels and impoverished by the lack of multiplayer. All of this would have been fine if not for the fact that the controls are infuriatingly delicate, with buttons you can't press and axes you can't see. If you're a die-hard fan of the series, you'll learn to overcome these problems, but you're far better off getting one of the mobile versions than struggling with this.