Capcom Relief Efforts

As well as pledging 100 million yen to relief funds, Capcom are also currently selling Street Fighter IV for the iPhone at a discounted price, with all proceeds from sales going towards helping those affected by the Tohoku Earthquake. UK readers can snag it for 59p, US readers for 99¢. Alternatively, British Red Cross donations can be made here.

Ten Video Games 2010: Game Dev Story

Beginning on the cusp of the 8-bit console era, Game Dev Story charts the progress of a video game start-up. Studio named and coders hired, early perils include high licence costs for console development, an unmotivated staff, and an indifferent audience. Although dressed up with cutesy micro SD stylings, there's a ruthless heart beating in Game Dev. The tippy-tappy stat management masks a small business headache simulator. You too can experience the joys of employee loathing, and industry exclusion! Players meander on as the years mount, perhaps hitting on a vague formula for success. The temptation to run this winning combination into the ground is total. Whether or not Game Dev Story bears any relation to actual game development is irrelevant; this iPhone remix of a decade old Japanese PC title allows an uncomfortable glimpse into any newly successful business. The wealthier you get, the further away you slip from your niche exploitation beginnings, often to the point were once loyal customers begin to resemble a mob of ugly discontents. How dare they reject your latest masterpiece! They should be grateful you make anything for them at all!

Canabalt

iPhone games struggle with mapping the multiple inputs usually associated with modern video games. In poorer examples players usually end up with confusing drag-tap gymnastics, or, even worse, a controller map stamped on the screen. Not so in Adam Saltsman and Eric Johnson's Canabalt. Tasked with making your daring escape from a fracturing city-scape, players assist a speeding pixel man with well timed one tap leap jabs. Your escapee will always be running full pelt, you simply have to judge the correct time for him to jump. Stress comes in the form of an ever-changing course: buildings crack and tumble out beneath you, alien machinery crashes in your immediate path, and building tops repeatedly fail to sync up. Canabalt seems designed to be played as a rolling series of attempts. Failures are not penalised with anything other than an instant restart, and the anxious invasion funk continues uninterrupted over any number of defeats. Repetition is also nixed thanks to random course generation, you never know what's coming next.

Play Canabalt for free here.

SPACE DEADBEEF

Nothing nets you a Gradius style sidescrolling shooter; in the fringes of the upper atmosphere your finger piloted spacecraft bobs about whilst you trace targets around polite formation enemies. Prod a destination and your craft will shoot a missile at it. The joy of iPhone freebie SPACE DEADBEEF is firing off a glut of deadly ordnance at these player marked destinations. Mindlessly carpeting an area in laser, as you do in most horizontal shooters, is fun, but getting to actually select a terminus point feels rather novel. It's a simplistic, but effective design flourish, virtually impossible on any other platform. Deadbeef's heat-seeking excess also recalls Treasure's pixel overload puzzle shooter Bakuretsu Muteki Bangaioh (distributed as Bangai-O in Europe), a game brimming with the same targeting pauses and screen filling feedback. Delight holds just as long as the enemies remain reluctant to fire back, once combat intensifies the game asks your one finger input to juggle movement as well as aiming. It's an inelegant set-up frustrated by your craft's tendency to drift in the direction of your frenzied target stabbing. As a teaser though, Space Deadbeef has you rooting for more from creator Yuji Yasuhara and publisher IDP.