It’s Friday, so start your weekend off right with three free games from the App Store. At the top of the list is Sega’s ChuChu Rocket!, a cute and somewhat goofy grid-based puzzle game in which you have to help mice flee to rockets and escape from hungry cats. Squareball lets you guide a bouncing ball through a maze, but instead of moving the ball, you use touch controls to move the maze. And Wave – Against every BEAT! gets music into your sci-fi shooter, with some interesting old-school results. Enjoy.
ChuChu Rocket! (iPhone, iPad) Free (was $2.99)
Filled with puzzles, your job in ChuChu Rocket! is to get little ‘chuchus’ — Japanese mice — into rockets so they can escape to, uh… wherever. Some stages features hungry cats or pitfalls, but most are just puzzles in which you’ll need to place arrows on the grid tiles beneath the mice to guide them to the exit. Once you hit the start button on a level, the mice will continue in the direction they’re facing until they hit a wall, at which point they’ll turn clockwise. You need to use these rules to send them to their rockets instead of their deaths.
ChuChu Rocket! includes over 140 such puzzles in which you need to set tiles and figure out how to get the chuchus where they need to be. A remake of a game on the Sega Dreamcast, ChuChu Rocket! also sports a multiplayer mode that supports up to four players over a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi connection.
Squareball (iPhone, iPad) Free (was $0.99)
“Pong in a maze” is a pretty good way to explain the infuriatingly difficult and highly challenging Squareball. Don’t let its super-simple graphics fool you — this game eats the unskilled for breakfast, and you’ll need a light touch in order to excel. The game features a ball bouncing from the top of the screen to the bottom, running through a corridor. Sliding a finger from right to left moves the corridor, with the ball bouncing straight up and down along its walls. It’s up to you to guide the ball to the end, moving the walls to avoid letting the ball drop through holes or encounter other obstacles.
Squareball is a pretty tough game, with each level presenting challenges requiring speed, planning and precision. Squareball sports 20 stages with two difficulty settings, as well as multiple game modes. There’s also OpenFeint integration to supply the game with achievements and leaderboards.
Wave – Against every BEAT! (iPhone) Free (was $0.99)
Techno rhythm meets sci-fi shoot-’em-up in Wave, in which you pilot a spacecraft in a vertical “bullet hell” shooter. The game is as dependent on the enemies flying at you and the lasers you fire to destroy them as it is to its techno soundtrack, the beats of which help determine the movements of your enemy. Wave is tough in the old-school shooter way, but with new-school tilt- and touch-based controls.
Wave comes with three ways to play — arcade mode, which includes its 20 varying stages; survival mode, which is exactly what it sounds like; and free play mode, in which you can pipe in your own iPod music for the game to react to.
