Game of the Week – Flight Control

As I mentioned in last weeks game Wordament, the keys to a successful portable game are firstly, the game need to be easy to learn but takes a while to master and secondly, you can play for as little as a couple of minutes or a couple of hours. Flight Control is one of those games that will keep you playing all day and not want to put it down.

The game is quite simple, aircraft enter from the edges of the screen and its your job to direct them to their runway to land. The only real rules are that different aircraft types have specific runways that they need to land on, and don’t let them crash. Simple enough hey, but as I said earlier, it will keep you coming back for more as you try to squeeze dozens of aircraft on the screen at the same time and keep them from crashing into each other.

Flight Control was originally developed for the iPod touch by Australian game maker Firemint and has remained in the top all time games for several years now. Flight Control is one of those success stories which has racked up over 4 million downloads and has since been ported to the iPad, Android, Windows Phone 7, Nintendo DS, Playstation and also the PC and Mac. Recently Firemint was acquired by EA Games which will hopefully mean some more capital investment to allow them to keep coming out with more great apps like this.

Windows Phone 7 Game–Wordament

I was listening to the Frankly Speaking Podcast the other day and was put onto a great new game for the Windows Phone 7 called Wordament. It’s essentially a word search game, but played in real time against other players on the internet. The board consists of 16 tiles and you have 2 minutes to try to find as many words as possible by dragging your finger from one letter to the next. At the end of the 2 minutes you get to see the words you missed, then get shown a leader board to see how you went against your online competitors. I’ve never been big on word games like boggle or scrabble, but the fast pace and the multi player aspect of the game gets you totally hooked in very little time.

One of the best recipes for phone games is they are easy to play, but take a long time to master, plus, you can play for as little as a few minutes or can play all day and this game certainly fits that bill nicely. You’ll go to bed and think, I’ll just have one quick game, and before you know it you’ve been sitting there playing for an hour. I’m totally addicted, not to mention the other great thing is that the game is free. Definitely give it a try.