Cube Runner: A return to my lost childhood.

I stumbled across a great game and would like to share the fact that I am addicted.


It has no bells and whistles.  No matter how well you do, you can never really win, and the only way to gauge your progress is to rack up points by not dying.  Each venture out is a suicide mission, and each turn contains mortal peril.  It reminds me of the great Atari and NES games I grew up with.

The name is this app is Cube Runner.

The concept is simple.  You are a starship (or individual, or time pilot... we don't really know because the game doesn't say). Your goal is to navigate a minefield of perfectly shaped multi-colored cubes for as long as possible before hitting one and breaking into a thousand pieces.  We've seen variations on this game many times before, and it has been created in a much more complicated way, but this time we get to take advantage of our iPhone's magic sensors, tilting the device like a steering wheel to navigate.  The horizon always stays level, and we careen through the maelstrom of impending doom with increasing speed.

The first week I had this, I was addicted.  It's the perfect app to get a person to focus.  If you're pissed off at your editor for deleting the best part of your articles or can't get over the pain of ONE OF YOUR GREATEST ARTICLES EVER BEING DELETED OUT FROM UNDER YOU [Your tears fuel the furnace that lies in the void where my soul once was. -ed.], then just turn this baby on, play for a few minutes (or hours), and with your intense level of concentration there will be no room in your mind for any bad or evil thoughts.

I've said too much.

Really the only adjustable parts of the game are switching the difficulty mode, changing the game orientation from landscape to portrait, and turning up or down the music.

And what amazing music it is.  Techno thriller stuff that makes you want to rave and forces you to work up some kind of back story for this tabula rasa.  Me, I'm pilot Skip McGee of the USS Montpellier, traveling on a suicide mission through the maze of anti-matter blocks just to prove that there is someone out there with the guts to do it.  Just to show them that death can be a noble endeavor.  To prove that I can make it farther down the path of insanity than anyone thought possible.

Film rights are available in the six figure range.  Contact me directly.

I think what I love most about Cube Runner is its simplicity.  In a world where we can customize almost anything we want and have thousands of choices; where every decision seems to be composed of a thousand variables and even websites change themselves to cater to us, it's nice to have a game that takes away all the bells and whistles and simply allows itself to be fun.

And it's free.