Chu Chu Rocket for the iPhone and iPad RELEASED!

If you own an iOS device, buy this awesome game NOW! The iPhone/iPod Touch version sells for $4.99 and the iPad version sells for $6.99, adding HD visuals and local multiplayer. Still not convinced? Check out my first impressions.

I downloaded the game this morning for my iPod Touch and played it for a good thirty minutes on the ride into work. Upon booting it up, I was greeted by the classic “Sonikku Chimu” intro. Awesome. Graphics and music are much more in line with the Dreamcast version than the Game Boy Advance version, which really makes the game feel like the real thing rather than a portable approximation.

Controls are surprisingly better than the Dremacast original and the GBA version. Rather than moving the cursor to a spot and pressing the arrow buttons, one can simply tough and swipe a square in the direction they want an arrow to go. Fast, simple, easy and I’m amazed that a ten year old game has actually found a control method that beats the original. I’d assume things are even slicker on the iPad, as the squares themselves would be larger. Even so, I never found myself tapping a square that I didn’t mean to tap.

The game features online multiplayer via wi-fi, 100 puzzles, 26 challenges (think real-time puzzles) and a few cool unlockables (pians and chao return). The one omission is a puzzle edit mode, which may turn away some fans. However this is not to say that SEGA couldn’t release this mode in a free update, as they did in releasing additional mini-games to Super Monkey Ball 2. I’m sure that if the game proves popular, SEGA will introduce puzzle creation and trading to increase the lifespan of the game.