Sneezies (iPhone/iPod Touch)

I'm bloody hooked on this thing.

I've got a workmate to blame for the addiction. She got an iPod Touch for Christmas, but didn't have broadband until a week ago. And one of the first things she downloaded was Sneezies, which she naturally wandered over to tell me I had to download. So I did, and I might as well have just injected crack into my eyeballs. Thanks, Jane.

The object of Sneezies is simple. The Sneezies are cute little creatures, which float around the screen in bubbles. You get to touch the screen once per level, and when you do, you release a small cloud of something that irritates their little noses, causing them to sneeze. When they sneeze, their bubble bursts in a colourful cloud, and they parachute to the ground. That colourful cloud will irritate any other Sneezies within range, causing a chain reaction, hopefully big enough to meet your objective for the level.


Awwwww. Cute ickwe fwuffies!

And that's it. Very simple, and stupidly addictive. There are three different game types: Classic, where you simply have to meet the specified target on each level; Challenge, where you have a certain number of touches to meet your objective, and Score EX, which is a high score mode. Each mode offers something different, fun and addictive.

An added bonus is that when the bubbles burst, it creates something of a firework display on your screen. It's a nice little visual... in fact, the whole game is very nice to look at, and sounds cute too. But it's all about the playability, and Sneezies is overloaded with that one-more-go hook that'll never let you go. For only 59p, this one is almost impossible to resist.

Big Bang Mini (Nintendo DS)

I've played a couple of fireworks-related games in the past: Fantavision (which I liked), and Boom Boom Rocket (which I didn't, although to be fair, I only played the demo which was far too hard).

Big Bang Mini promised to be different, though... in a spectacularly obvious move, you get to use fireworks to blow stuff up. Yes, Big Bang Mini is a shoot 'em up. And that's good! I haven't played one in a while, and I haven't played a good one in even longer. So it was about time I blasted some stuff.

I don't know if the game's quite like I expected it to be, though. The fireworks are maybe not used to their full explosive potential. But on the other hand, the game mechanic forces you to be more accurate with your shooting. Every time you miss your shot, the firweork explodes, and the debris falls back down. And being debris from fireworks, they'll cause you damage if they hit you.


Oooh, it's like Chinese New Year.

Of course, this being a DS game, you use the stylus to fling your fireworks skywards. It takes a while to get used to this... you think you're moving your stylus in the right direction, only to be surprised to see it go the other way. It's all your own fault when that happens, though! Strangely, you ship is only on the screen as something to be hit. It doesn't fire the fireworks, it's just there for you to drag around out of harm's way.

It's fun enough, if not quite as frantic as I'd hoped for. And there are plenty of stages to unlock and play. The biggest disappointment to me is that there's no scoring, just the completion of stages. And for a shoot 'em up, that's pretty close to unacceptable. It takes the gloss of a decent little game, for me, but it can be found cheap enough to make it more than worthwhile.