Paperjam

I lost many hours to the Amstrad CPC version of SimCity as a kid. Now that I don't have so much time to waste, what a brilliant idea to buy it all over again, for six quid off the Apps Store? Probably not.

By all accounts it's pretty much a version of SimCity 3000. Here's quite alluring office-y type woman from the tutorial. Oooh, she looks kind-of pissed off at me. Mmmm. Give me a slap, go on.

Slightly crappy typography but we'll let that slide for now - and not that I'm in a position to criticise.

During the tutorial dragging over the map is a bit of a, um, drag - your finger seems to get in the way. The secret seems to be to zoom in a bit more by pinching or double tapping. Here's me trying to shut up my demanding Sims by shoving in a bit of precious road - the circled arrows are the buttons you drag out.

Zoom right in and you get some detail, although it gets pixellated at the extremes. There's smoke stacks, traffic, mysteriously disappearing trains, and this Flea Market in the Commercial Zone.

As usual, Shitsville quickly started to fall apart when I took my usual hippy approach of building a public transport system alongside the road infrastructure. Briefcase wielding chappy looks unimpressed with my rail system. He goes on to say "personally I'd go with roads". Dammit, I'm trying to build the ideal town here.

SimCity ran impeccably, if a bit slowly on my 1st gen iPod Touch, which is reportedly the bottom of the bunch when it comes to performance. Other users have reported crashing on iPhones. The recommendation is generally to reboot your device before crying your shiny little eyes out in forums and blog comments. Zooming is a bit laggy, the pinch method is a bit slow compared to the double tap.

But it's great, if, you know, a bit pointless. There's already been a bit of whinging about the price being too high at £5.99, but how does it compare to the average DS game?

Also there's a whole load more; schools, water pipes, recycling, lots of advisors, taxes, ever increasingly ornate parks - all with the feeling that whatever you do, it's going to shit either way. It feels deeper than yer average quick and dirty iTouch game and it's worth it.

The internet flash games that are ruining the world economy one extended lunch hour at a time seem to fit into a number of fairly standard categories:

• The horribly, horribly addictive yeti sports games, our office shut for about a week when someone sent round the first one.
• Pervy hentai stuff from Japan involving cartoon alien schoolgirls, in pants.
• Games where you eviscerate large numbers of little stickmen in increasingly gory ways.
• Scatological efforts involving pissing, shitting, farting or spunking with a certain amount of timing or accuracy.

Whilst flipping through Edge (which, rather like the NME I have no idea why I keep buying), I came across mention of the deeply fantastic Boomshine, a flash game involving little coloured balls, bouncing around at random that you need to explode by starting a chain reaction.

All you do is click the mouse once to kick things off and then sit and watch while chaos theory in microcosm kicks in and hopefully a large number of the balls explode, albeit in an aesthetically pleasing manner and with pleasant little pings. Think Missile Command re-written by The Orb.

Easy to start with, success at the later points of Boomshine seem to be down to extreme cleverness, some sort of zen mastery or extreme luck. I’ve no idea but you do seem to have more success when a little, ahem, worse for wear, one way or the other. You can play it by clicking on this link right here. Take my advice and turn the music off.

No really. Don't get involved. You've got a life to lead, you know - that washing up won't do itself, that website won't design itself, that Hoover won't run round the house for you.

So don't under any circumstances go to MacMame and download the latest version of the arcade game emulator, then get hold of a NeoGeo bios (oh that's very illegal - I can't tell you how to do that - but Mr. Google might be able to) and then locate a Metal Slug ROM and then...

Oh no. Because you haven't done it, you won't need to know to turn smoothing off in the Options menu to make it run at a playable speed on an iBook G4. You also won't need to know that you'll need one of the latest versions of the NeoGeo BIOS, and about six hours spare as you lose yourself in sideways-scrolling mayhem.

Is there some sort of helpline?