The Best Games To Get For The New Verizon iPhone

 StephenTotilo — The Verizon phone is out, and you just might be getting one. If you are, you'll need some games. We know games, and we have recommendations.

The Best Dozen

Plants Vs. Zombies, Infinity Blade, Words With Friends and 9 others (Free - $10) There are many good iPhone games, most of them very cheap and crafted for gaming sessions that last as long as a stoplight. We pulled a list of our favorite dozen, each the best of a different style of game, from racing to karaoke to even an excellent Tomb Raider. [Check out our top 12 iPhone games]

The Confusingly Named Duo

Colorbind and Colorblind (Free-$1.99) Some nefarious iPhone game developers intentionally name their games similarly to others, just to trick you into buying the wrong one. Others do it by accident. A mistaken purchase of Colorblind led to two two fantastic iPhone games. [Read about Colorblind, then read about Colorbind.]

The Funniest One

QWOP ($1.99) Buy this one for a laugh. You're controlling an Olympic runner, or at least you're trying to. [Watch us stumble through QWOP.]

The Least iPhone-y

Dead Space ($6.99) We're still marveling that Dead Space is an iPhone game and not something running on, say, an Xbox 360. This is one amazing glimpse at the future of iPhone gaming. [See what's amazing about Dead Space on iOS]

Our Latest Obsession

Legendary Wars ($0.99) We already have some new favorites that came out in 2011. This one tops the list. [See what's great about Legendary Wars.]

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Are these not the games you're looking for? You can find impressions of new downloadable games, some for iPhone, others for iPad, Android and Windows Phone 7 five days a week. Just go to our Gaming App Of The Day page and scroll through our sidebar for more recommendations, warnings and video of the games in action. (And if you made a great game for those platforms, let us know.)

Rhythm Control Is Big In Japan

 Brian Ashcraft — This is not your typical story: an American and a Swede meet over the Japanese language and decide to make a video game. That game then takes the Japanese iTunes charts by storm.

Dubbed Rhythm Control, the game has players touch bubbles that appear on screen. It's simple and fun, and in Japan, it's the number one music game on iTunes. The highest it's reached on the overall paid Apps charts is number six. Impressive, indeed.

"Yeah, we got surprised over how popular it got," says Said Karlsson, one of the game's developers. He first got the idea of making a music game a few years back while working at a game company in China. Fast forward to the current day. When he met programmer Matt Scott in Tokyo, they created Daikonsoft and moved forward with the game.

Some of the twelve songs were made by a friend of Scott's, while Karlsson, who used to DJ in Sweden, was able to approach artists he knew for licensing. "Basically I asked some artists I knew from back then if we could use their music in exchange forthem getting their bio and links to their homepages and iTunes," he says.

Part of the game's success is no doubt due to the fact that it's an enjoyable game, but also, it's done to the care Daikonsoft took in its approach to Japan, even translating the menus if the iOS device is set to Japanese. Also, the game's character, Maru-chan, might have helped the game's appeal.

Maru-chan was designed by an artist who made the rest of the game's graphics, Karlsson says. "She was supposed to appear in several places in the game, but since he suddenly got a full time job he couldn't complete everything we planned," he adds. "She's currently just on the title screen and in the tutorial."

Well, there's always the sequel.

Rhythm Control [iTunes]

Minecraft...On The iPhone?

Until it was removed from the App Store yesterday you could, for a short while, get what was basically Minecraft for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Only difference was this game was called Minecrafted.

Despite proclamations that Minecrafted was "built without code or content from the original", it looked like Minecraft, played like Minecraft and by all accounts essentially was Minecraft, only without credit or approval from the indie smash hit's creator.

Minecrafted let you play the "free" mode of Minecraft, which lets you wander around an island building stuff. If anyone of you were quick enough to grab it, how did it stack up against the original?