I've said in this space before that I'm not always an enthusiastic gamer, but lately some really cool games have appeared that use the iPhone's capabilities to the max.

A good example is First Contact [App Store link], a new game for the iPhone/iPod touch. The game is US $2.99 and certainly packs a few bucks worth of enjoyment and excitement. The scenario involves protecting your colonies on a distant planet from UFOs, incoming missiles and other dastardly space hardware.

The game is rendered in beautiful 3D and the inferface takes some cues from Google Earth. You can rotate your planet and zoom in or out with finger gestures. You'll need to be doing that, because the incoming nasties can hide behind your planet and you have to keep things moving to protect your colonies. You touch all the targets, and your defense system launches missiles to prevent them from finding their targets. Of course, as the game progresses, you'll be moving pretty fast to keep up with the increasing threat.

You can also shake your iPhone to detonate some screen clearing nukes, and you can post your high scores online to see how you are doing against other players.

A couple of small nits to pick: The instructions were quite hard to read. The text is too small. Another issue is that the pause button is on the lower right of the screen, and frequently while tapping to mark targets, I inadvertently paused the game. On the plus side, if you bail out of the game, you are given the option to resume from where you left off. You'll use that feature a lot, I suspect.

I think you'll get hooked on this game pretty quickly. The aliens get more numerous, and increasingly more aggressive. It's always a nice day when you can save a planet.

Here's some images from the game: