Got an iPhone? Looking for Games?

You want 'em and it seems like iGiki.com has 'em in the dozens. "Gikis," designed specifically for the iPhone, can be licensed for 99 days for a $1 donation to the developer and include fare like "Sink or Swim," which bids you rescue sailors from shark attacks and "iTrek," which harks back to Superior Software's Thrust and tasks you with maneuvering a spaceship across a tricky alien landscape while juggling fuel and time. "Outer Wars" might as well be called "Star Wars Trench Run" with tie-fighter-esque ships plunging through orthogonal canyons, and "EuroDarts" is a rather morbid-looking dart game where you're tossing tiny finned missiles at a bullseye overlaid by a human target.

"GikiMinis" are freebies, compliments of the developer, and include games like "Icer" which has you destroying a crazed penguin's ice cream bombs before they touch down, "iTouch," which tests your skill tapping the center of a moving target as quickly and precisely as possible, and either the coolest sounding or most potentially annoying: "Music Maker," which puts "a band in your pocket" and lets you play the drums by tapping on your iPhone. Move over John Bonham.

What else. Well, Electronic Arts was quoted in Business Week saying "We have been talking to Apple about games on [the iPhone]." My guess is EA's watching to see how adoption plays out in the first release quarter before committing anything major like a franchise sports port. In fact I'm betting most game publishers are on standby, ready to drop the hammer if Apple's mobile super-tool takes off, but contingent thereupon.

Then there's the rumor about Nintendo releasing a series of iPhone games via iTunes for $29 a pop. Regardless, iTunes games from somebody (including Apple?) are a shoe-in, and someone over at the Apple discussion forums has apparently unearthed hidden scripting in iTunes for syncing games with a mobile phone.

CS Odessa just announced plans to port its Aha! logic game (score high by removing as many quirky objects from a playing field as possible) to the iPhone. It should be available for download sometime in the next week or two.

Another company, MacMost, has a GameScene iPhone experiment page up with casual games that use QuickTime and JavaScript ready to roll but pending testing. Says MacMost: "We'll be standing in line on Friday to get one, so we'll be testing and adjusting these games this weekend."

If you're feeling totally retro, you might want to point your iPhone's Safari browser at iFiction.org, a collection of some 264 games in 45 categories including classics like Colossal Cave, Hunt the Wumpus, and Zork. All of the latter games use Javascript, which the iPhone supports (as opposed to full-on Java, which it doesn't).

In fact, pretty much anything that's Javascript-based and which works in Safari on the Mac should theoretically work just fine on an iPhone, including stuff like Battleship, Checkers, Connect 4, and Tic Tac Toe.

If you want more, just Google "javascript game" and start poking around. If you find anything particularly interesting, post here, or drop me a line.