Get five casual games in one app — for free — with the game that leads to day’s Fresh list. Plus, check out an iOS touchscreen version of Jenga, and an Inception app that uses the sound around to you create swirling audio dreamscapes. They’re all waiting for you below.
Pogo Games (iPhone) Free
Electronic Arts has packed five casual games from pogo.com into this app and is making them available for free, provided you don’t mind a little ad support. With a pogo.com, account, however, you can purge Pogo Games of its 10-second ad-viewing times that often crop up between game rounds. You might want to do that if you’re considering this app.
Despite the minor annoyance of ads, you’re still getting five free games here: Word Whomp, a Scrabble-style game asking you to rearrange a set of letters to create three- to six-letter words; Turbo21, a blackjack/solitaire hybrid in which you place numbered playing cards in various rows, hoping to reach 21; Poppit!, a game in which you pop groups of balloons to free prizes, which you have to guide to a target using tilt controls; Mahjong Safari, a version of Mah-jong involving tiles with animals that you have to match; and Sweet Tooth 2, which is a kind of match-3 game.
Jenga (iPhone, iPad) $2.99/$4.99
Most everyone has played Jenga. It’s a game in which players carefully remove blocks from a tower without knocking it down. The player who knocks it down loses, so a light touch and careful observation is key to victory. As you might expect, the Jenga iOS app turns the game virtual and uses touchscreen controls to make it possible.
Using tapping, dragging and swiping, you can carefully remove blocks from the 3D tower on your screen, while moving around it to find the best blocks to pull. It supports a pass-and-play style multiplayer, an arcade mode that rewards you for speed as well as delicacy, and Game Center for leaderboards and achievements.
Inception – The App (iPhone, iPad) Free
It’s a little tough to explain this game, which uses something called “augmented sound” to create musical soundscapes in your headphones. I know, it’s confusing — not unlike the film.
Inception – The App is meant to “induce dreams.” When you load it up, it takes in information from your device’s microphone, GPS, clock and accelerometer. The app knows when you fire it up and whether you’re moving or being loud when you do, and each condition — time of day, location, motion, noise level — open up different portions of the “dreamscape.”
The dreams are actually soundscapes, or dynamic, musical audio that mix atmospheric and ambient music with previously unreleased portions of Inception’s score. You play the game by using the app at different times and in different ways to unlock the various soundscapes. It’s not a game in the traditional sense, but Inception – The App is a very cool idea and features some beautiful, interesting audio wizardry.
