The Ephemerist

I’m not much of a gamer – my favorite games are those little ditties that I can grasp in no time, that don’t take hours to boot up and configure, and that I can play whenever I have like five minutes. Lately, I’ve become quite addicted to Lazrhog’s iZoo, which is essentially a Bejeweled or Zoo Keeper clone for the Iphone and Ipod Touch. Gameplay is simple : just line up three animals and they disappear; a level is complete when you’ve made a specific number of animals disappear.

A nice touch to this game is the fact that it’s skinnable. So far, skins have been published using elements from similar games, like Chuzzle and the aforementioned Bejeweled, next to the original one (which is shown above on the left and, in all honesty, is a plain Zoo Keeper clone). They all follow the same path, with gamepieces that are easily identifyable by color and shape.

The Simpsons skin (shown on the right) is another matter – normally you would expect a typically branded skin of a good game not to add anything to gameplay. However, thanks to the fact that all Simpsons characters very much look alike (they are all yellow, they all have big eyes), finding three similar shapes in a row becomes just that nice little bit trickier