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Simple board games are often a great source entertainment. Those adding a puzzle element that is simple yet vexing stretch brain cells during lazy holidays! The Gogetter Cat & Mouse puzzle consists of nine elements depicting pathways.

In conjunction with a square board and a book of challenges, the simple task of leading a mouse to a piece of cheese becomes quite a head-scratcher: setting the path from one to the other is reasonably easy, but the important thing to bear in mind is that the remaining pathways cannot simply dead-end.

As skill levels increase, so does the difficulty of the puzzles, often involving the connection of three or more objects and avoiding a connection to others at the same time.

Available at select toy stores, this is a great puzzler for young and old alike.

The iPhone is without doubt a gaming platform to be reckoned with. The hardware and software combination Apple has put together has astounding abilities from a graphics acceleration and rendering point of view. The touch interface brings a new dimension to gaming and makes many titles easily playable: none of those pesky button combinations to worry about.

id Software ported an old classic and certainly on of my favourites to the iPhone recently. Wolfenstein 3D retains all the charm of the original, down to the soundtrack. With the port of Doom Resurrection, they have another winner on their hands. Gameplay has been adapted slightly to suit the iPhone, but the graphics are stunning and the action quite frenetic.

The purchase price is USD 9.99, which is more expensive than Wolfenstein 3D. But, Doom Resurrection is not just a port of the original. Instead, the game features a brand new chapter designed specifically for the iPhone. As I mentioned, gameplay has been altered slightly to suit the Apple device: instead of moving the character around the map, the course of movement is pre-determined and all that is required is to aim and fire and pick up items. That’s not as boring as it sounds and works rather well.

The ominous graphics remind me of the PC classic.

The gamer is guided through the game by being presented with help screens and an introduction to the story.

A nice touch is the cinematic 3D flyover of the environment during the introduction, ending in the first-person view we’re all familiar with.

Help is at hand at the beginning. The environment is exceptionally detailed. The icons in the corners of the screen are used to fire a weapon, change weapons and so on. The character moves along on a pre-determined course and the gamer needs to tilt the iPhone to aim at the nasties that lurk in the base on Mars. The control system works well.

There are eight levels in total to battle through.

Zombies and worse attack whenever possible.

When they grab hold of you, the only way out is to shake the iPhone around to escape. Not really a game you should play in a business meeting…

Doom Resurrection is another great port of a classic game to the iPhone.  USD 10 is expensive, but the new levels make this a must-have for the serious Doom fan.

I’m not a huge gamer and rarely spend a lot of time immersing myself into any particular genre or title. But there are certain classics that I really enjoyed and I was overjoyed to see a port of Wolfenstein 3D being made available for the iPod Touch.

The game costs USD 4.99 on the App Store and includes the original adventure with all six episodes and almost 60 levels of action. Of all the games I ever played this is one I not only finished more than once, but kept coming back to.

I’m happy to say that the iPod Touch port looks exactly like I remember the PC version. Controlling the action is possible in one of two ways, by either using a configurable button arrangement for turning, walking and shooting, or by employing the motion sensor on the iPod Touch.

The use of the motion sensor takes a bit of getting used to, but works remarkably well after a couple of attempts – I kept straying to the left and running into a wall, but eventually learned to compensate by leaning more to the right…

For fans, John Carmack goes into a bit more detail regarding the coding and port of the iPhone version of the game, as well as offering the source code as a free download. You can get to that here. That’s certain to be of interest to developers of games on any platform, I would imagine. Best of all, he hints at a release of Doom for the iPhone in the not-too distant future. Now there’s another of my favourites I’d download the moment it is released!

Wolfenstein 3D for the iPhone is tons of fun and well worth the 5 bucks. I’m very impressed with the in-game soundtrack and have found myself humming the Wolf-tune every now and then…

I used my iPod Touch extensively during our holiday, crammed full of audio books, music and a number of interesting applications from the iTunes store. Unfortunately, the Touch‘s life came to a rather sudden end two days prior to our flight back. It suffered the white screen of death and could not be coaxed back to life. A number of restores and reinstallations of the latest firmware could do nothing but keep the white screen from being lit up.

A visit to the local iStore achieved little – the unit has been sent in for repairs… since these things are pretty much sealed and not really designed for opening up, I’m hoping for a replacement.

While the Touch was still operational I quite enjoyed playing chess. One of the better applications available is Deep Green. It features attractive graphics and a very intuitive user interface. At USD 7.99 it’s not cheap, but its chess engine is suitable for a wide range of skill levels and offers custom board setups, too.

Deep Green has deep Apple roots, having been coded to run on the Newton almost ten years ago. It is one of the few chess applications for the iPod that includes move suggestions, playback of moves, display of captured pieces, play modes against the machine or another human and a concentration engine to make the program behave in a more human fashion.

Numerous options are available to control how the engine behaves.

Luckily for me, Deep Green is able to cater for those who don’t spend too much time in front of the chequered board. It can be a rather tough opponent.

I’d say Deep Green is one of the best looking chess games available at present, but it’s not just a pretty face. If you’re in the market to test your chess skills, this game comes highly recommended!

There are many open source games available, something most of us don’t consider. Many of these are multi-platform and various genres and categories of open source, free games ensure there’s something for everyone. If chess is your thing, you may want to have a look at DreamChess. DreamChess runs on Linux, Mac and Windows and has the ability to save games in PNG format, undo moves and play sound effects. A reasonable chess engine is supplied, but many XBoard-compatible chess engines may be plugged into DreamChess.

It’s nowhere near as feature-rich as ChessMaster or Fritz, but the basic options for playing chess are provided.

There are various difficulty levels to choose from. These are determined by the chess engine in use.

The greatest pity about the program is the fact that only one view of the board is available. It’s adequate, but it would be nice to pan, zoom and rotate, if only to a limited extent.

With the promise of a network play option to be included in the next release, DreamChess is worth a look.