Bad Cube
Platforms	iPhone
Genre	Cube shooter
Buy from App Store

The iPhone App Store is flooded with games, some of them very good, most of them bad, but there's just an oversaturation of everything.  Only the lowest common denominator crap rises to the top (unless it's Plants vs. Zombies, that game is awesome) and tons of gems are drowned by a sea of Sally Spa clones.

One of my close friends, Rory Johnson, is an iPhone game developer, and he just released his second game: Bad Cube.  Early last year he released Circle Challenge, more of a personal challenge than anything else, and I finally got the chance to talk about it at the end of last year.  It's a fun, free time waster where the object is to just draw circles.  A simple concept, but it helped Rory learn the ropes of Objective C and the App Store.

Bad Cube is definitely a game, and a fun, challenging one at that.  It's in 3D, features the shooting of hexahedron objects, and kicked my butt many times.  I had the pleasure of watching the game mature from the "look! a 3D cube!" stage to the "look! a 3D cube that I can shoot!" stage, and it was entertaining to say the least.

The objective of Bad Cube is to take on a cube in a one-on-one battle to the death.  In the game's Katamari Damacy-esque story, each cube has somehow wrecked a part of our hero's life and locked inside the cube is his dog or car (which was actually stolen during the development of the game, poor car) and it is your job to get it back.  The first level is simple, shoot the dog cube in the face while avoiding his laser eyes, exploding poop, and killer bees that fly out of its mouth. Yeah, you read all that right.

The beauty of this game is that it is so simple it feels like an old-school arcade game or something I played back in the day on the NES.  Your triangular fighter is stuck in an orbit around the bad cube, and you simply tilt the iPhone to rotate around it.  Sometimes it's to avoid incoming missile attacks or to hit the sweet spot on the back of the CPU cube, or both.  Oh yeah, tap the screen to shoot or hold your finger their a second to switch to a different fire mode. Now you know all the controls.

Bad Cube is actually a pretty tough game too.  A few of the cubes toss an overwhelming amount of junk at you and it really becomes a battle of survival.  If there's something about the gameplay that needs tweaking, it's that some of the fights last a long time!  You really need to concentrate to take on Bad Cube, and it'll take a few, long minutes to take him down.  I had to stop playing for a bit between each level because it becomes pretty intense.  And all I'm doing is shooting at a rotating cube!

Also surprising is the game's awesome music.  I really have no idea where this came from, but each level has its own tune and they're all incredibly catchy and unique.  Rory, give me some mp3's for the site!  Seriously, if Bad Cube ever goes free, just download it for the music alone.

I don't mean to make the game sound like it's the end all, be all of gaming, Bad Cube is just a fun portable game that'll leave you smiling.  I really don't want much of anything else except to enjoy my gaming experiences, and Bad Cube does it for me.  I may be a little biased because a friend developed it, but I can still tell when I'm having a good time: Bad Cube is it.