Be warned: The title leading off this week’s Best Games list is a quality release, but it’s going to frustrate you. That’s because Street Fighter IV Volt is merely a slight update to Capcom’s high quality fighting game Street Fighter IV due to the addition of online multiplayer. If it sounds like fun, you’re right, it can be – until you take on some eight-year-old with an insane mastery of Ryu’s fireball move and some kind of supernatural ability to anticipate every time you’re even thinking about jumping. It gets frustrating, and…well, that’s why this is a five-game list instead of just one. We’ve got four other great titles that you can play while you let the bruises to your Street Fighter ego fade.
Street Fighter IV Volt (iPhone, iPad) $0.99 (going up by $1 each day after launch)
One of the more impressive games in the App Store in terms of graphics and conversion to touch controls from a classic console gamepad or arcade joystick is Street Fighter IV. Volt is an update of Capcom’s popular 2-D fighting game, with new characters (Balrog, Cody, and Vega) and a phenomenal new feature: online and local multiplayer. You can take on players in ranked or unranked matches using Game Center over a Wi-Fi-enabled connection, or beat on your friends over Bluetooth. It’s a big addition to the earlier version of the game, which only let players battle computer-controlled opponents. Expect to get a little annoyed with the “cheap” special move tactics of the players online, though. Time to practice.
Tiny Tower (iPhone, iPad) Free
Freemilaum title Tiny Tower succeeds where other games in the same vein annoy. Yes, it’s a time nmanagement game that makes you wait around a lot. As the owner of your own tiny tower, you construct the building layer by layer, adding floors when you earn “coins” and then deciding what to do with those floors. First you’ll add apartments and rent them to “bitizen” characters who frequent your tower, but later, you’ll add businesses based on the demands of your residents. The management aspects have you giving all your bitizens jobs in your stores based on their preferences, and each one will earn money by selling things to customers, which you have to keep stocked. While Tiny Tower makes you wait quite a bit while you stock things and construct floors, it also dishes out the game’s premium currency, TowerBux, with relative frequency, which allow you to cut out some of the waiting. It’s just enough to keep the game engaging without feeling like it’s trying to dupe you into paying for premium content, which is nice. Oh, and Tiny Tower is also an addictive good time.
Continuity 2: The Continuation (iPhone, iPad) $1.99
Continuity 2 mixes two fun game types: slide puzzles, in which you maneuver pieces of a picture arranged in a grid around the screen to make a picture, and platforming as seen in titles like Super Mario Bros. In Continuity 2, each of those sliding pictures on the grid is actually a room in the puzzle, and moving them around makes them match up in different ways. With different matches, you can steer your character into new rooms and use them to collect coins before heading for the exit of each level. The game is at once a combination of skills, allowing you to exercise your video game smarts alongside your puzzle-solving smarts. Add in a few extra-cool mechanics, like rotating your phone to change gravity for your character, and Continuity 2 has a lot of fun and interesting gameplay to offer. It also has 50 levels and Game Center support to offer, as well.
Sonic & SEGA All-Star Racing (iPhone, iPad) $4.99
Imagine the popular Mario Kart franchise on your iPhone – but instead of Mario, you’ve got Sonic the Hedgehog. That’s Sonic & SEGA All-Star Racing, a kart racer that blends solid 3-D graphics and tried-and-true gameplay with tight tilt controls. The game is filled with popular SEGA franchise characters for you to choose from to race through inventive environments. You get 10 characters to race with and against across 25 levels that make up three Grand Prix cups in Sonic & SEGA. The game also features support from Game Center, so you can log your best times on the Sonic & SEGA online leaderboards and see how good a racer you are compared to players all over the world.
Puzzle Agent 2 (iPhone, iPad) $4.99
Sequel to Telltale’s acclaimed Puzzle Agent, the second game in the franchise picks up right where the first left off, continuing the story of the last title and adding a bunch more great puzzles, as well. In Puzzle Agent, you play FBI Agent Norman Tethers as he works to solve a case using his skills as a member of the Puzzle Division. But after solving the case last time around, he returns to Scoggins, Minnesota, because he still feels uneasy. Puzzle Agent 2 has the same great storytelling present in other titles from Telltale Games (this is the developer behind Back to the Future, for example), as well as lots of challenging and diverse puzzles to tease your brain.
