In place of the roller ball, you have the capacitive touchscreen, of course, and this has both an advantage and a disadvantage. On the plus side, you can aim incredibly quickly, just in front of incoming missile tracks and spacecraft, whereas the old roller ball was large and had momentum – it took a lot of practice to use it to aim quickly and precisely, and it took time to move your aim from one point to another.

On the downside, there’s no way to control which of your three missile silos are used to fire missiles – the game’s logic simply chooses the closest. Although this might seem sensible, this system does away with one of the key expert strategies used in the original game – that of using a side silo to lay down a blanket of explosions while you used the centre silo to pick off ’smart’ bombs and anything else that got through. With the current game logic, the centre silo usually gets exhausted first and you’re then into fighting a rearguard action trying to pick off smart bombs low in the sky with just the left and rightmost silos.

On balance, the two factors rather cancel each other out, in terms of game difficulty. There are three skill settings to choose between, but most people, most of the time, will have a challenging and memorable game. The classic Missile Command characteristic learning curve, where early levels are trivial but where the incoming bombardment rapidly starts speeding up, is represented more or less perfectly here, although I did miss the multiple waves-per-level from the original – there has been a definite simplification here.

So far so good though and Missile Command would be easily earning a four star review – but Ultra mode takes it all the way to five, with a glorious reworking of the title, bringing it bang up to date in 2009, with a wealth of digitised backdrops, detailed city sprites and a glorious stereo (music and effects) soundtrack. There’s nothing whatsoever added to the gameplay, but you’ll enjoy this reworking immensely if you’ve got a bit bored of the original’s simple graphics and garish colors.

Cementing the game’s quality is the save game facility, by which (after an interruption) you’re always returned to the exact point you got to in the game. Whether you want to play ‘retro’ or whether you want to pretend Missile Command is a 2009-designed shooter, you’re guaranteed a challenge and this game comes highly recommended.

Purplezoo Productions has changed the same-old, same-old with their new game Ballz! Pro Version for iPhone and iPod touch. Ballz (the original) was a traditional match-3 with smiley icons.

While loosely based on the original, Ballz Pro is a whole new game all together. Ballz Pro adds extra challenge with locking squares, extra help from the exploding bonus ball, large Ballz, 3 shuffles to extend gameplay when you run out of moves, and a localized and worldwide scoreboard. The whole game is wrapped in a sportier new theme that features animated sports Ballz similar the grimacing blocks in Topple 2.

Ballz! Pro is an interesting next step in the match-three game. The large ball and locking squares create a new level of challenge for anyone getting bored with the genre. It’s familiar enough to pick up and play without reading the instructions (my favorite kind of game!), but has enough to new twists to keep things interesting.

According to PurpleZoo multiplayer mode is on the way. I’d also like to see some new themes. The gameplay is fun, but sports isn’t really my thing… how about flowers or a nature theme for the next go ’round?

Either way, Ballz! Pro is animated addition for players looking to add some variety and a bit of challenge to their match-three gaming.

• rating: 8/10
• price: $2.99
• app_name: Ballz! Pro

Even with its clean adaptation to iPhone and touch, if you have no interest in retro games Ball & Bat Retro won’t impress you much. Even for someone who appreciates the classic games, revisiting some of them on a device that can do all that the iPhone can do is a bit like baking a freezer pizza in a convection oven. Nonetheless, Ball & Bat Retro – Pong Included is a set of four games – tennis, football, squash, and squash practice – for your iPhone or touch that is pretty much as retro as it gets.

Putting aside the argument of whether classic games like Pong are still fun to play, Ball & Bat Retro – Pong Included has a few features that take advantage of the iPhone technology. For starters, the touch screen controls work well – simply use your finger to control your paddle. You can play one or two player versions of each game and choose a small or large bat size. You can also elect to change the background color and the color of the ball. The most appealing feature of Ball & Bat Retro – Pong Included is the ability to set any picture in your camera roll as the background.

There isn’t a great deal to say about Ball & Bat Retro aside from the obvious. If you’re not into new games, but want an easy to figure out, easy to play, somewhat unexciting game to help you pass the time, then Ball & Bat Retro is a good place to start. I sort of figured out that I could set up Squash to play and position my paddle so that I could actually walk away and the game would stay in progress, simply batting the ball back and forth at nearly the same angle so that moving my paddle was unnecessary. True, I couldn’t score any points this way, but I just wanted to see if the AI player would respond by changing the position of its bat.

Ball & Bat Retro – Pong Included isn’t for everyone. It’s a decent revival of the classic ball and paddle games and at least it operates cleanly. I found it more entertaining to come up with different photo backgrounds for the playing field than actually playing the game for any extended period of time, but to each their own. Still, in all fairness, Ball & Bat Retro wasn’t designed to be a new take on a classic, it was intended to be exactly what it is.

• rating: 7/10
• price: $0.99
• app_name: Ball & Bat Retro – Pong Included