With respect to the big-budget masterpieces and sprawling epics crashing on to store shelves, sometimes all you want to do is dunk a basketball.
Downloadable Game of the Week
Slam Dunk King
For: iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad (universal app)
From: PikPokiTunes
Store rating: 4+
Price: Free
On that, the polished-in-its-own-right Slam Dunk King has the last word.
In Slam Dunk King, basketballs fly into the air as if fired by a clay shooter, and your objective is to grab them with your finger and dunk them with a powerful swiping motion.
Where Slam Dunk King makes this fun is in its allowance for creativity - a no-nonsense dunk will get you a couple of points, but mimicking a windmill, corkscrew, alley-oop or double pump (among numerous others) will award you considerably more. (You even get bonus points for pulling down the rim post-dunk.)
If you want to net a truly inspired score, a combo system lets you chain a massive score by juggling one basketball in the air and dunking others without letting that first ball drop, which kills the combo and could potentially end the game.
The game's embrace of style and risk/reward makes it a ton of fun to play, and a levelling system and suite of unlockable power-ups and courts gives it surprising legs for such a simple idea.
It's responsive to your swipes, pretty to look at, and supports Game Centre and OpenFeint (complete with cloud saves, so you can resume progress across different devices) as well.
