Game iPad

Presuming you weren't mountain biking over the Malverns or splashing around on Margate beach, what were your gaming highlights this weekend? Last Friday certainly wasn't a great one for new retail releases (unless you were rushing out to grab your copy of Paramedic Simulator), so my guess is you were sticking with old favourites, or hitting Xbox Live or PSN for downloadable goodies. It's certainly been a strong couple of weeks for XBLA titles with Bastion, From Dust and Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet all worthy of your must-buy list.

I was a little busy celebrating my birthday, but I did squeeze in some time with the controversial iOS hit Tiny Tower. If you've not heard about this, it's a sort of resource management/god sim, in which you build and then endlessly extend a skyscraper, filling it with shops, cafes and residential floors and attracting as many inhabitants as possible. The visuals are cute, and the relentless checklist-style gameplay is compelling, but several of my journalist friends perceive it as a thing of great evil. Like social games such as Farmville, it's not so much a game as a means of processing payments. The title is free, but players pay for extra "bux" that are used to speed up the building process and other in-game systems - and paying for stuff means you don't have to really work or plan for success.