Of course, there are always going to be a handful of quirky, free applications to mess around with, and with the App Store exploding, it's no surprise that companies are coming together to specifically develop higher-quality content for Apple's little money machine. But most of these games usually come at a price. Are you really willing to pay eight bucks for a game on your phone? Especially when that game is kind-of-shoddy version of Uno? Especially-especially when you can get a better version of Uno for Xbox Live Arcade for five bucks? Nonsense!
With that in mind, I was prepared to write off ngmoco's Dr. Awesome, MicroSurgeon M.D., which was released earlier this week. The screenshots made it look like some kind of medical take on the Phoenix Wright style, and the game looked... kind of bad. But by incorporating names from your phone's contact list and basing its gameplay off of an arcade classic, it's actually kind of rad.
The game sets up the action by putting you in the role of Dr. Awesome, and the game is all about you fighting infections that pop up in patients. The patients are actually people taken from your iPhone's address book. So when the screen pops up and claims that John Vignocchi is infected with a grimy (but curable) disease--which I don't find surprising in the least--it's up to me to save him.
So I was having fun with it, but I also expected that the game was going to be selling for the typical "we're a real company that makes games" price, like EA's eight dollar Uno. That would be complete madness. But ngmoco is wisely charging $1.99, which is a significantly more palatable price for a simple, fun game. If you're the sort of person who's willing to pay for iPhone games and you have a hefty address book full of friends, you'll probably dig it. Or, at the very least, you'll probably get a couple dollars' worth of fun out of it.
While I'm at it, I should probably ask you about this. Do you care at all about coverage of iPhone games? We'll probably pipe in now and then when something like Dr. Awesome grabs our attention, but we aren't currently planning on going all-out with full-on reviews. Cool?
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