How to win to at Monopoly

Luck is a factor, but here is how to win at 'Monopoly' on your mobile or on a board:

1) Buy every property on which you land. Mortage other properties if necessary.

2) Buy houses and hotels as soon as possible.

Congratulations, you're now ready to send your opponents to the poor house!

Word Games Vol. 1

Ah, here's a game I can justify downloading because it will stave off alzheimers and it even comes in a handsome volume the promise of more volumes to come: Word Games Vol. 1. The graphics are pretty utilitarian, however, and volume one consists of four games: word search, hangman, and the horribly named word mix and word match.
I never actually play word search for the same reason I don't try to get Ronald McDonald to Playland with a crayon anymore: I'm not recovering from head trauma. Hangman is pretty good for the brain but I use up almost all the guesses on vowels and then 'S' 'T' 'R'. The makers of Hangman know this and put in words that don't follow such easy patterns but they only deposited so many words in the word bank and I'm waiting hours for trains so NOW who's the dummy? Word mix is 'unscramble the word'. Can you unscramble 'NEWKTROK' with ease? Then you just might be ready for this purchase. That staves off the alzheimers but like hangman, repetition becomes a problem after a while. Not so with the horribly named 'Word Match'. You have 10 chances to guess a four letter word with no repeating letters. After each guess, the computer in your phone tells you how many but not which letters you got right and if any of those are in the right position. This is harder than it sounds, and finding the word in less than five guesses is truly satisfying. I don't think there is a Vol. 2 to this because how many more word games are there? Also, I don't believe this is available anymore. People don't seem to download word games like they used to.

FUN - 3.5

REPLAYABILITY - 4

GRAPHICS - 2.5

STATUS - part of my library's permanent selection

Goodfellas

This game is why this blog was created: it BLOWS. An interface of text screens with minimal graphics and animation enable you to amass money in your campaign to be Godfather but Francis Ford Coppala knew enough to keep his franchise away from this thing.
Loan money and offer protection to faceless people like "Jacob Cook" and "Bobby Ford"(remember them from the movie? Well, I'm sure they were in some movie), and then send faceless thugs with names like "Mad Dog" and "Tool" to collect. You can also send them out to hijack wine, gin, and other shipments of vice. But watch out! If you hire one a dem goons wit a low loyalty ratin', he's gonna get pinched and squeal, then you'll be pullin' time in the pokey and who'll have egg on dere face then? You, wiseguy! So don't go hirin' no thugs wit low ratin's. There's also five card poker in here which is the closest to a game you're gonna find in this shameless exploitation. Startin' to get da message? After you get enough monies dere, you can move up da ranks dere till you get to be Godfaddah and you get dat dere Oscar ya always wanted. Oh, you want action and movin' picshas? There's a graphic with a buncha liddle guys hangin' out in a backroom somewhere's; that picsher nuff for ya's!

FUN - 0

REPLAYABILITY - I replayed thinking I'd missed some aspect of the game. I had not.

STATUS - soon to be "deleted from my cell phone" if you, uh, know what I mean

PUBLISHER - iPlay. This is no longer offered!

Civil War: The Road to Gettysburg

Who's been in my diary?! A turn based Civil War game for my cell phone!? Fight your way as Union or Conferderate in squad/brigade/more-than-one-unit based combat across battlefields on your way to the big show in Pennsylvania. Enemy units die into money so you can afford things between battles like 'Infantry' and 'Artillery'. Units that stay alive have experience at killin' and killin' they more better do, but when you upgrade to better units you can kiss all those campaign ribbons goodbye. This was fun for the month, but I found myself winning against tougher troops in later levels simply by figuring out holes in the AI's defenses and not with my tactical genius. Eg. shelling troops without reprisal if you're parked in JUST the right spot. But you can switch from Confederate to Union for a whole different gaming experience, right? Not unless changing the color of your troops from gray to blue is fun(ny). This is fun for a month subscription but don't... reenlist in THIS army, General!

GRAPHICS: 3(surprisingly colorful)

FUN: 4

REPLAYABILITY: Saw lots of action during the month of June.

STATUS: Honorably Discharged.

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

Amazingly, this is worse than the movie. Your featureless visage scrolls east, swatting things with your lasersword until they are dead, dead, dead. Granted many games accomplish this with entertaining results, but the creators of SWRoS(an abbrv. never to be used again) must have thought the Star Wars mythos would compensate for the flat graphics and boring gameplay. With every swat your force bar grows until you blow it all on one swing at Darth Boss So-and-so. But wait, is there platform jumping? You're damn right there is.

GRAPHICS: 1

FUN: 1

REPLAYABILITY: 1

STATUS: Subscribed and cancelled.

PUBLISHER: Grand Moth Jerkface

War of the Worlds: the mobile phone game

'War of the Worlds' will always have a special place in my heart as the first crappy game that I ever downloaded onto my phone. I even purchased it outright instead of sampling it because who could every grow tired of scorching the Earth in a Tripod, right? Well, when the Tripod only walks, or 'scrolls', in one direction, you will be praying for a virus to off you pretty quick. "Move to the right... slowly... slower.... okay, shoot that.... yeah, shoot that, too... now here you're going to want to shoot that, but, like, a thousand times." You ARE in a Tripod, however, so you can pick things up and throw them for pre-"Age of the Heat-Ray" showboating. And you can pick up people, which is tricky because they are small and fragile so careful. I made it through the city levels of London and New Jersey and Tokyo before realizing I could zap every city on Earth and at the end still die of a virus. So who's REALLY won this game, Gameloft?

GRAPHICS: 3

REPLAYABILITY: 1

FUN: 1.5

ANTI-SOCIAL BEHAVIOR: Highly Encouraged

STATUS: Purchased 'Unlimited' and Cancelled. Rookie mistake.

PUBLISHER: Gameloft

Welcome to Tiny Tank Talk!

If you're like me, you bought a Kyocera QCP 3035 cell phone in Fall of '02 with 'Brick Attack' on it, and didn't find out until Spring of '06 that Verizon offers $100 towards new phones every two years. Having sucked 'Brick Attack' on late night subway platforms for the last four years, perhaps when you got your new phone with its innovations such as 'color' and 'sound', you went a little nuts downloading(or 'sampling') game after game.

Well, friends, I have downloaded, and I am here to share.

DISCLAIMER: we may not like the same things.

Many game reviews to come.

I should also mention that the phone I'm using is a Motorola E815 CDMA VCAST. Any similarities to other phones living or dead is purely coincidental.

Finally, this is a site for mobile cell phone game reviews.