Product Category: iPhone / iPod Touch Game

Manufacturer: Information Appliance Associates

Where to Buy: iTunes Store

Price: $2.99

System Requirements: 3.6MB of free space

Pros:

• Extremely fun;
• Great "pick up and play" game;
• More cuteness per second than any game in history.

Cons:

• Sound effects may freak out cat owners;
• Hitting home key wipes your game out.

Summary: Nothing says cute like kittens, and this game has loads of cuteness.

Another Falling Block Game?

Let's face it; the "falling block and color matching" genre has been beaten to death. Every game is a clone of either Tetris or Bejeweled. It's almost gotten to the point where developers don't even bother trying to come up with new concepts and instead resign themselves to making clones. Luckily, Shivering Kittens isn't one of those games.

Figure 1: Shivering Kittens in action.

The rules are very simple. A bunch of kittens, after a very cold couple of days in Minnesota, have been trapped inside ice blocks. To free them, you can do one of two things: Arrange five kittens so that they're touching (in any configuration or shape) or complete a line of frozen blocks (with or without kittens) from one side of the screen to the other. Doing so will get you a really cute meow, and the kittens will disappear off the screen. That's the game!

What Makes it Fun

The great part of Shivering Kittens is the strategy involved. Unlike Tetris, where the blocks fall in complete pieces, these blocks slide down when they land as if they're separate parts.

Figure 2: Blocks fall as separate sections, not one contiguous block.

This is what makes the strategy more intense. You'll never have empty space and you have to plan where your pieces are falling in order to make sure you complete rows correctly. If you time it just right, you'll get massive chain reactions and big points.