Bubble Head is psychedelic rotatey goodness.

If there is one theme that runs constantly through my iPhone game reviews, it's this: Simplicity rocks. Bubble Head, by Crowd Café, is yet another example of this mantra realized.

It's not quite as bare-bones as Jetman Jack, but there is still a purity to this game that makes it a lot of fun to play.

You see, I was never really what you'd call a "gamer."  I enjoyed the original Nintendo, but the more buttons and combos and options they added, the more I checked out.  When I played Mortal Kombat with friends, it seemed I got my ass kicked not because of my poor hand-eye coordination, but because of my inability to remember a complicated series of button pushes.

Give me Pac-Man any day.

Bubble Head isn't one of those retro gaming experiences, porting old Atari fare to a twenty-first century platform.  Instead, it takes advantage of new technology to create a very simple, fun challenge.

The technology, of course, is the iPhone tilt control.  Instead of using a clunky joy stick, I rotate my phone to guide my small bubble laterally across the screen.  If I put my finger on the screen, the bubble starts to gently rise.  If I let go, he begins to fall.  The goal is two-fold: get to the top of the obstacle course as quickly as possible, and collect all the gold stars.



In your way are a series of maze-making artifacts, each themed to a different world.  You start in "Fast Food Planet," filled with pizzas and hamburgers, and eventually progress to "Medical Planet," where your foes are stethoscopes and crutches.

Okay, the game won't win any awards for story or creativity, but it's cute as hell.  Your bubble man careens and spins through the simple, two-dimensional graphics with reckless glee, and text takes on the form of old-school comic book exclamations.  The overall design is well themed and put together, creating a fun little world (or series of planets, as it were) in which your bubble can strive for greatness.  

There are five planets in all, each with five levels to make a whopping twenty-five boards...not bad for a $1.99 game.  There is also a "Random" mode that allows you to attempt to beat the high scores of players worldwide, effectively extending the gameplay endlessly.

The game starts out fairly easy and gets pretty damn challenging by the end...which is the way these games should be.  After running into a few games that are annoyingly easy, it's nice to have something that gives me a real, frustrating challenge.

If there is one big problem with this app (and there is), it's load time.  The simple boards can take upwards of twenty seconds or more to load--odd, considering the basic graphics involved.  I can't help but think there might be a better way to program this and cut down on this wait time.

Overall, though, this is a great game for people who like simple challenges without too many bells and whistles.  At $1.99, I'd say it's priced pretty reasonably.  

One warning though...don't play it while under the influence.  It can get fairly trippy (or so I've heard).

You can buy Bubble Head HERE.