Lawrence Ingraham’s Blog

I’ve been an iPhone user since the price drop last year. No I wasn’t lined up at launch, I’m in a contract with work that I couldn’t get out of. But everything aligned with the price drop, and I can’t look back. I always had my iPhone jailbroken, just my nature I guess, so I’ve been playing games on it far before the app store was announced. I’ve had a fun time with Labyrinth but there hasn’t been a game I could say I really liked. Until Trism was released, of course.

Trism is available on the app store for $5, and I’ve probably logged a good 10 hours of play since purchasing it last week. The idea behind the game is simple, line up triangles on the board so you have three or more of the same color touching. In a sense, it’s very similar to Columns, Meteos, or even Dr. Mario. There’s the usual special blocks which pop up, a Rainbow if you get 5 matching triangles which can take the color of any block, a bomb which will end your game if you don’t destroy that block in the allotted number of steps, etc. This makes for a really fun, pick up and go game I can play while waiting for a chicken sandwich at the cafe, or for the wife to choose between the black shoes or the brown.

What’s unique about Trism is the use of the iPhone’s accelerometer to control gameplay. After you clear blocks, the holes that are left get filled in with other blocks nearby. You control which way the blocks slide by tilting the iPhone. That means you get to look like a fool flinging your phone around in public, which is always a good conversation starter.

There’s three different play modes in addition to the tutorials. The timed version throws bombs and locks if you take too long to get matches. The infinite version lets you play forever, so long as no bombs blow up. Finally the tilt version is more of a puzzle than a game, requiring you to tilt your iPhone to line up blocks in the least amount of moves. I usually play the timed version, it’s the most challenging for me.

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