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Games based on comic books have been almost as hit or miss as games based on movies in the past, so I think my cautious optimism for Gameloft's recently released Spider-Man: Total Mayhem [$6.99] was well deserved. Sure, there are some absolutely fantastic comic book games such as the quarter-sucking X-Men Arcade Game, and a few others over the years. Unfortunately, many fall in to the same pit that movie games fall in to where they lean far too heavily on whatever intellectual property the game is based on instead of actually having good gameplay. This is true to some extent in Spider-Man: Total Mayhem, but the whole package is comprehensive enough that it doesn't even seem to even matter.

Like all Gameloft games, many parts of Spider-Man are clearly borrowed from other titles of theirs, and Total Mayhem is no different. A lot of the combat feels like a mix of James Cameron's Avatar [$4.99 / Free / Free] and Iron Man 2 [$4.99 / Free / HD]. Spider-Man is host to the same wall climbing and rail sliding sections as nearly every other 3rd person action Gameloft game, and just like almost all of their other titles, the voice work is laughable at best and face palm worthy at worst. They even managed to sandwich the upgrade system from Hero of Sparta II [$6.99 / Free] in that nearly everything in the game drops orbs of various colors which are then used to upgrade Spider-Man's various abilities.

What saves the whole game is that even though they recycle all these different elements, they seem to combine extremely well to create a game that just feels like a Spider-Man game should. There are endless thugs for you to bash, a heavy reliance on the spider sense, and a surprising array of extremely recognizable bosses that anyone who has read a Spider-Man comic or watched a Spider-Man cartoon will know. The levels included are fairly linear, but feature a great mix of fighting standard enemies, bashing mini-bosses, swinging around, climbing, and the varied events leading up to the boss encounter.

The combat system works well, and even though it feels a little button mashy at times, it's a lot of fun to watch Spider-Man execute his combos filled with punching and web slinging. However, even fighting bosses is a little too easy because of how well the spider sense evasion system works. Whenever you're fighting, when there's an incoming attack you're able to slam your thumb down on a virtual button that appears just to the left of the joystick. A successful button mash kicks the game in to slow motion, and Spidey evades the incoming blow and counter-attacks. It all flows together great, and these spider sense moves usually look really cool.

There's a surprising amount of content in Spider-Man: Total Mayhem, including a hefty amount of unlockables to boost replay value. Twelve levels are included, and in each of the levels are tokens you can pick up to unlock bonus art to look at. In addition, there's an "ultimate" difficulty to unlock as well as a boss rush mode. There's even the black Spider-Man symbiote suit to unlock to play through the game again with Spidey powered up. Also, when fighting bosses you have opportunity to take photos of them, and these photo opportunities seem fairly easy to miss. If you're a completionist, you will be playing through Spider-Man: Total Mayhem many times.

Total Mayhem is loaded with high resolution graphics that look absolutely fantastic on the iPhone 4. It's not universal, but like most Gameloft games it wouldn't surprise me if an iPad-specific HD release was on the horizon. Gameloft did a great job of making a game that plays like a Spider-Man game needs to. The spider sense seems entirely overpowered in combat, and it won't take long for you to get tired of the spider sense quick action sequences that are liberally used in cut scenes, but beating up an endless array of nameless thugs is just as fun as it should be.

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I hesitate using the word "addicting" when talking about iPhone games anymore, as it's a pretty tired cliché, but I can't think of a better way to describe the new iPhone game Slingo Supreme. I use the term “new” loosely, as Slingo itself has been around since the mid-nineties, but is new to the iPhone platform. Many gamers will probably remember playing Slingo on AOL back when your 28.8k modem was the hotness. I remember the game from back then, but somehow managed never to have played it until this iPhone iteration. The game evolved a lot since the first release from 1995, and Slingo Supreme for iPhone is based on the PC game of the same name from 2008.

There's a lot going on in Slingo Supreme, but I'll do my best to sum it up for those not familiar with the game. In essence, it's exactly what the name implies – a mixture of slots and bingo. Each game starts with a 5 x 5 board of randomly set numbers, with a row of five numbers along the bottom that changes with each “pull” of the lever, like a slot machine. The task is to match each number from the bottom row with one from the corresponding column above it. You're given 20 pulls of the lever to accomplish this task, with the ultimate goal of racking up a high score and completely clearing the board of numbers. This is Slingo at its most basic level, but there are many twists to the formula.

For starters, you can randomly get jokers in the bottom row which allow you to choose any number in the column to clear, or super jokers which let you clear any number on the entire board. Sometimes you'll get a devil in the row which will deduct points from you, unless you get lucky and a cupid appears to block him. This all applies to Classic mode in the game, but there is also Supreme mode. In Supreme mode, you can choose from sixteen different powerups to use, which allow for bonuses such as earning extra spins, score multipliers, mystery chests, and more. Running into a devil is also a bit different, as it allows you to wager a portion of your score in one of several mini-games against him, with the possibility of doubling your entire score should you win.

There are eight slots to place powerups in Supreme mode, and the powerups and slots are initially locked and slowly unlock as you progress in the game. In fact, the unlocking aspect is what really hooks me about Slingo Supreme. It seems like every few games you're earning a new reward of some type, and it really compels you to keep playing. Games can be played fairly quickly, and they strike a great balance between strategic and mindless. Pulling the lever and matching numbers doesn't require a ton of skill, but smart use of powerups and efficient matching can take your scores to astronomical levels.  This video shows gameplay from the PC version of Slingo Supreme, which plays exactly like the iPhone version just with a different screen layout:

In addition to the Classic and Supreme modes, there is a Daily Challenge that tasks you with earning a certain high score using the specific powerups of the day. It's a fun mode as well, but unfortunately Slingo Supreme doesn't feature any kind of online scoring, which is a feature it definitely needs. The developer has stated in our forums that online scores will be coming in an update, but until that time there are four profile save slots so you can have some same device competition with family or friends.

Even without these additions, Slingo Supreme is an engaging affair that's well worth checking out if you're a fan of the series, or even a newbie like myself who just can't seem to put it down.

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It's not very often that a game comes along on the App Store that is too different to really liken it to anything. I suppose since the game involves going moving to the right it could be compared to Canabalt [$2.99] or Line Rider iRide [$1.99] since you're technically drawing the line that your character skis on, but neither seem like apt comparisons. In Solipskier [$2.99], you draw the mountain that your skier flies down by placing your finger on the screen. When you pick your finger up, you stop drawing but your skier keeps going– So, by tapping and moving your finger around you can create slopes of all kinds, along with ramps and huge jumps.

The way this all works on the iPhone goes together so well with the touchscreen that I was more than a little surprised in researching this game for this review that it started its life as a completely free to play flash game that is played by clicking the mouse instead of dragging your finger around. The presentation is top notch too, with music that ranges from this really somber sounding piano piece in the menus to a fast paced heavy metal rock ballad while you're skiing.

Also, as you paint the slopes with your finger houses and trees spring up from, and despite being largely black and white and 2D, the scenery has quite a bit of depth to it, with trees and houses scrolling on front of the scoreboards. Yet another cool little flourish in the game is that the music you're listening to is actually emanating from your character's headphones. If you go fast enough for them to fall off, all you hear is the sound of the wind. Upon successfully landing a jump, you're judged by off-screen judges who hold signs up scoring it, and the name of the game is to just score as high as possible.

Included in the game is OpenFeint online leaderboards for tracking scores, although achievements are curiously absent. Scoring high seems to be highly dependent on keeping your combo going to keep the rainbow following your skier up, which involves constantly skiing through the gates and tunnels are they appear on screen. One mistake I initially made when playing the game was drawing my jumps far too steep, and seem to be having better luck with long slow inclines and then short ramps at no more than a 45 degree angle. Forum member Ataloss offers additional tips in the Solipskier thread.

If nothing else, you should really try the free flash version, but just be aware that the game seems to work even better using the touchscreen of iOS devices. Solipskier is universal, and even comes with high resolution graphics for the Retina Display of the iPhone 4 (which look excellent, by the way). The game plays nice with the fast app switching in iOS 4 and reloads instantly, but it would be really nice if the game resumed in a paused state to give you an opportunity to reorient yourself before playing instead of having your little dude just go right back to skiing almost always resulting in death.

Overall, it's really hard to ask for more in a Flash to iPhone port, and Solipskier is really worth grabbing if you're even the least bit captivated by the Flash game.

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With the week coming to a close and the weekend almost upon us, why not load up on freebies to spend your time playing iPhone games instead of going outside. (Or I suppose you could play them outside too if you really wanted.) These free game promotions are temporary, with some running longer than others so if you're interested in any of these games, it's best to snag them ASAP. For a listing of all paid games that recently went free, check out this page on AppShopper.

The game that everyone should download that's free right now is Touch Racing Nitro [Free]. I thought the game was great in our review, and is totally worth grabbing now that it's free. Take a peek at the trailer:

Other cool free games today include:

Chop Chop Runner, Free The ninja from Chop Chop Ninja is back in this fast-paced single-button sidescroller. See how far you can go while unlocking a hand full of achievements and finally submitting your best scores to the game`s OpenFeint-powered online leaderboards.

Flipstones, Free This recently released puzzle game puts players to the task of drawing lines to flip different triangular stones around the screen to form larger gems which each have their own unique power-up effect such as exploding or speeding up the game. There are tons of levels included to be solved, as well as an endless mode.

Jelly Invaders, Free An interesting take on the Space Invaders formula of shooting enemies invading from above. Jelly Invaders has two game modes, power-ups, cool graphics, and OpenFeint for online high scores, achievements, and all that other fun OpenFeinty stuff.

Starship Defense, Free This is an odd conglomeration of gameplay mechanics that go together quite well. In Starship Defense as the title implies, you defend your starship. I`m not sure if it would make more sense to compare it to a tower defense game or a castle defense game, but if you like either genres you should check this out.

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The Madden series hardly needs an introduction, as football player turned coach turned commentator John Madden has had his name on football games for the better part of 20 years now. On home consoles, it has become tradition for EA to release a new Madden game each year with updated rosters, a few new features, and other various tweaks. As of tonight, the second yearly installment of the Madden series has arrived for the iPhone.

Last year we took a close look at Madden NFL 10 and thought it was a really great football game for the iPhone. Madden '10 came loaded with all the licensed players, stadiums, logos, and everything else you'd expect of a Madden game along with game modes ranging from single exhibition games to full seasons. The two hip new features of Madden NFL 10 for the iPhone were hot routes allowing players to draw on the screen to control players, and "action control time" which switched the game to slow motion mode allowing for precise maneuvers with the virtual controls.

There wasn't much to complain about with last year's Madden, which really left me wondering what EA was going to include in this year's release to up the ante. The preview we got revealed substantial graphical upgrades including Retina Display support, but it wasn't until I got to spend more time with the game today that I realized just how much more fun the other new features made playing Madden NFL 11.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not a sports person by any means. I don't remember the last time I watched anything more than the Super Bowl on TV, and the only sporting events I've attended have been the result of friends with extra tickets. I play sports games, but generally gravitate towards arcade style sports games like Homerun Battle 3D [$4.99 / Free], or sports games that have RPG elements such as Baseball Superstars 2010 [$4.99 / Free].

I mention this because I generally never really got into a Madden game, or really any full football game. The weak link for me always came in choosing from an endless array of both offensive and defensive plays, with each yearly iteration of football game boasting even more plays to choose from. I don't know enough about the strategy of football plays to have ever felt like I was making a wise decision, and when it got down to it, play selection just always seemed like a needless interruption every few seconds while playing the game.

GameFlow changes all of this, and I really can't overstate how awesome a feature it actually is. Using some new AI algorithm likely designed by a team of people who know way more about football than I ever care to, Madden 11's GameFlow will intelligently chooses plays for you. It is absolutely insane how much this changes both the feel and the pace of the game. Using GameFlow, endless submenus of plays are a thing of the past. Instead, you just play football. The plays it selects work fairly well too, or at least, much better than my typical choice of plays which usually alternate between the hail mary and the fake field goal kick– both favorites of mine.

What's also shocking is how much this actually speeds up playing the game. You can tap the screen to skip through the extra animations, victory dances, and other junk and play through a whole football game in what barely seems like any time at all. Of course, if you are the kind of person who knows exactly what every play does, all you have to do is flip GameFlow to off and you have complete control of each and every play.

The hot routes functionality from last year has been expanded, and at any point during the game you can pause the action and draw paths for your players. If you're playing offense and do this, you can save those routes as an audible, or if you're playing defense you can just send your players wherever you want. The whole system works very well, and by drawing lines you can send dispatch players to man to man duty, follow the ball, or really anything else. This really makes defense a lot more fun because you can now actually sensibly direct your team around instead of just tabbing in between players and chasing after whoever has the ball. Check out my top secret LOL offense:

As mentioned already, the graphics of Madden NFL 11 look fantastic. The stadium crowd has actual depth now, and they even wave around signs for the home team. The included weather effects look good, and overall it seems like all the player models and animations are more detailed. Every texture in game also seems to have been substantially improved, making going back and forth between 10 and 11 seem fairly drastic.

Madden 11 also is host to some other noticeable tweaks over last year's as well such as controls that feel a little better and a spruced up interface. There's an in-game store which currently is home to a free roster update, but seems like it might be used for future DLC . Finally, Madden NFL 11 behaves beautifully as an iPhone game, gracefully saving your game and resuming quickly when you load it again.

Like last year, the inevitable comparison between Gameloft's NFL 11 [$6.99] and Madden NFL 11 will likely take place in our forums for months to come, but in my opinion, Madden wins by a landslide. Gameloft's offering seems to run at a higher frame rate, but Madden looks better overall– rspecially when it comes to how the crowd and stadiums are rendered. Madden NFL 11 has local bluetooth multiplayer while NFL 11 is single player only, and the commentary in Madden seems less repetitive than Gameloft's. Where Madden really wins though is in the extra features. With how much I've fallen in love with GameFlow I can hardly bring myself to deal with NFL 11's play selection, and Madden's total defensive control makes playing defense in NFL 11 flat out boring in comparison.

At the end of the day, people who like Madden games likely don't need this review, or anything more than the iTunes link to download the game for that matter. Who I really expect to sway into checking out Madden NFL 11 are the casual sports fans, or people like me, who are vaguely interested in sports games but found the various technicalities of football games to generally be annoying. GameFlow fixes all this, and I can hardly believe that I spent the majority of my day today playing Madden 11 on my iPhone– not because I was trying to power through it to write a review, but because I was actually really enjoying a football game for the first time since Mutant League Football on the Sega Genesis.

The iPad and iPhone versions are essentially the same aside from the price difference and UI tweaks to make the controls more comfortable for playing on the iPad. The iPhone version is workable with pixel doubling, and the only thing you're really going to be missing out on is the upcoming "Vintage Voltage Football" mode which is basically just Super Shock Football [$1.99 / Free] with Madden graphics.

International App Store Link: Madden NFL 11

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Semi Secret Software seem to be making a name for themselves as developers of games with great pixel art graphics, fantastic music, and high-score centric gameplay that in the case of Canabalt [$2.99] has kept me coming back for just one more try for the better part of a year now. Gravity Hook HD [$2.99] hit the App Store tonight, and provides much of what I loved about Canabalt, only in a vertical climb instead of a side scrolling run. In the game you play as a lovable little robot with a grappling hook who ascends to, well, wherever he's climbing to, by grabbing on to a randomized series of orbs, reeling himself in, then flinging to the next one. Unlike Canabalt which you could hand to anyone with it running on your phone and say "tap the screen to jump," Gravity Hook HD has a bit of a learning curve as you get used to the physics of the game.

The different orbs you can latch on to have different properties, ranging from the green orbs which you can touch without issue, grey orbs which are chained together and fall if you hold on to them too long, and blue orbs which turn in to bombs and explode if you get near them. You're also able to kick off the wall if you can swing your robot towards one, and mastering wall jumping as well as how to handle the different orb types are all required to get very far in Gravity Hook HD.

Just like Canabalt, Gravity Hook HD is playable in its entirety online for free in any browser with the Flash plugin. We've even embedded it below, just make sure you either have your speakers muted or are in an area where you can play sounds before clicking:

Gravity Hook HD is universal, and looks great on both the iPhone and iPad, although I've found myself leaning towards preferring it on the bigger screen. Scores are tracked online via Semi Secret's proprietary system which breaks scores out in to top daily, weekly, and monthly submissions as well as the best scores of all time. Gravity Hook HD translates very well to touch controls, and while you can play the whole game for free with a mouse, it really is a much better experience with your finger.

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Last week at EA's "Hot For The Holidays" event in New York City I was able to sit down and get a considerable amount of playtime in with the predictable yearly sequel of Madden NFL 11 which EA plans on releasing for both the iPhone and iPad with the launch of the console game on August 10th. One of the first things EA showed me in the demonstration was a side by side with Madden NFL 10 [$6.99] and the difference was remarkable. Immediately you notice higher resolution textures everywhere and stadium crowds that actually look like people instead of just a solid multi-color texture, something that was extremely noticeable that you can see in the screenshots of our Madden NFL 10 review.

The player models have also gotten a makeover as well, and appear to have a much higher polygon count as the stick figure models of last year's game are nowhere to be found. The animations seem improved, and the shadows below the players actually represent what they're doing instead of the small dark circles of Madden NFL 10. Weather effects are greatly enhanced too. It was really amazing seeing both 10 and 11 running next to each other, as the difference almost looks like a jump in console generations.

There are a heap of new features in Madden NFL 11, but what interested me the most was the new GameFlow system. With this enabled, instead of needing to wade through endless menus selecting plays that (in my case anyway) you're not even sure are appropriate for that particular point in the game, GameFlow will choose the best play for you. According to EA this takes in to account numerous different factors such as field position, score, and many other factors to make sure you're always using a play that makes sense.

This not only works great on a mobile device where quick play sessions are generally preferred, but also for casual sports players like me who enjoy football games but always just randomly choose whatever play has the most interesting looking lines squiggling about. Speaking of squiggling lines, the Hot Routes system from Madden NFL 10 has been totally reworked and similar functionality has been brought to the defensive portion of the game.

At any time when playing Madden NFL 11 you can pause the action and draw where each of your players should be going with your finger. You can completely customize offensive plays like this, and even save these custom plays to be later recalled using audibles. On the defensive side of things, instead of just randomly tabbing through players and running them towards whoever has the ball on the other team, you can similarly pause the action and customize the routes of each of your players.

The goal behind this was to make playing defense more fun, and it seems like EA succeeded. More often than not in football games it seems like playing defense was always just a clunky necessary evil while you waited to get possession of the ball again. Now that you can actually have precise control over your team, playing defense is actually quite enjoyable as you can easily use your own strategies instead of just controlling one player while the AI handles the rest of your team.

Aside from all the standard game modes we've come to expect from a Madden game, Madden NFL 11 will also include "vintage voltage football," which sounds identical to Chillingo's Super Shock Football [99¢ / Free / HD]. EA even went out and bought an electric football game to make sure the experience was similar to the original tabletop game. It sounds like a lot of effort is going in to this extra game mode, as they've even had custom announcer clips recorded to fit the action that takes place in an electric football game.

Like most Madden games, Madden NFL 11 is a substantial improvement over last year's game. The new features they're adding in should enhance the gameplay significantly on the iPhone, and I'm especially looking forward to the game automatically choosing the best play for me. Stay tuned for August 10th, as we'll have an in-depth look at the game as soon as it hits the App Store.

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