GALCON DEV DROPS IPHONE ARCADE GAME COSMIC NITRO

Cosmic Nitro [iTunes link] wears both its influences and its premise on its sleeve. As you can tell by the video above, putting it any other way than “it’s survival mode Missile Command x insanity” would be doing it a disservice.

The game’s the latest from Phil Hassey, creator of IGF Mobile innovation award winner Galcon, and, despite appearances, its greatest weakness might be that it’s too easy: I managed to survive the three minutes of even its 9th maxed-out level at first touch.

Though it sorely lacks any connectivity — even a simple online leaderboard would give subsequent runthroughs of its levels more purpose, and its ‘apocalypse mode’ (which counts the timer up rather than down) begs for worldwide ranking — it’s probably the best take I’ve played of the arcade classic on the device, and is easily today’s best 99 cent distraction.

Cosmic Nitro home [Phil Hassey, iTunes link]