Star Trigon (iPhone game from the Mr Driller team!)

[Kaladron]

This game was originally released in the arcades in 2002 but never received a conversion until now. Made by the same team behind Mr Driller, it's a puzzle game where you hop between planets, a string trailing behind you that links each planet together. The aim is to form a triangle around any three planets in order to rescue the space creatures floating in the middle. Like Mr Driller you'll need to top up your oxygen to stay alive, though this only really matters on the harder levels.

The challenge is in knowing when to jump from the planets. Your character is constantly orbiting the planet and you just control when he leaves orbit. Get the timing wrong and he'll fly off at the wrong trajectory - landing on a different planet if you're lucky or flying off into space if you're not.

I've never played the coin-op but from what little I know this is a great conversion. The whole game is crisp, bright and colourful and the touch controls (just tap once to jump off a planet) work ideally. The price is a bit steep at ?5.99 but I'm so chuffed this has finally been ported and is actually fun that I don't really care.

Screenshots below.

[JamesS]

I got this a couple of weeks ago, and it's easily my favourite game on the system. It helps that the original game was designed around a single button, so it doesn't suffer from the usual problems of trying to map complex controls to the touch screen. It's really nicely presented as well. I'd not actually heard of Trigon before, and pretty much just bought it because of the Mr Driller/Dig Dug connections, but I'm glad I did.

A few more screens, as I was messing around with the screen grab function last time I played it:

[Kaladron]

How do you do a screen grab? Is it a separate app?

[JamesS]

No, it's an iPhone feature. Press the home and power buttons together, and it'll grab a screenshot of whatever's currently running.

[Kaladron]

Cheers, mate. You have no idea how useful that little feature could turn out to be for me.

Anyway, back on topic.

[losersclub]

Oh man i need a iphone now, i'm such a mr driller fan i feel a bit ashamed i didnt even know this game existed!

[Destrukticor]

i didnt either and was happy that way till this thread ruined it
little bit on the expensive side but if you liked Mr Driller then this is for you.
Now my most played iphone game

[VR46]

You can (well could last Friday) get refurbished first generation 8GB Touch's direct from Apple for 109.00 delivered ....

[Kaladron]

The more I play this the more I realise it's actually a very clever score attack game.

Once you make a successful alien-capturing triangle, it stays there for a few seconds and can be used to form the basis of another triangle - thus allowing you to combo lots of captures together. It's a bit hard to explain but it basically means you have to play extremely quickly to get the best scores. There are other methods too - such as capturing more than one creature at once or going for the bonus items.

There's so much depth that I wish the game had online leaderboards.