Let’s TAP: Gem Game

Rainbow balls.

Prope’s Wii collection of games are in your iPhone! The Let’s Tap series, famed for its vibration-based controls, now have you putting your iPhone on a tissue box so you can tap-tap-tap away. Lacking a tissue box on your morning commute, you can select the Touch mode that allows tapping on the screen or the Free mode that lets you tap any part of the phone. Having tried out all three methods, I’ll save you some time: you will want to keep a tissue box handy. With the Let’s Tap series broken into five small games for the Apple devices, we will serve up our analyses here in bite-sized reviews for each.

Gem Game is deceptively titled, as so far as I can tell it is not a game. At least, not a fun one. Better described as some kind of visualizer, you tap to make orbs bounce and get them to land in cylinders. Filling the onscreen cylinders may result in a gem orb and occasionally turns all the onscreen orbs into the same color. You get a ruby ball for three balls of the same color, a sapphire ball for three ruby ones, and finally a Rainbow ball for Sapphire. The “game” is won when all the orbs are Rainbow orbs. I would shoot my hands off long before that ever happens. I got tired of tapping trying this one out and had more fun holding my phone and jerking it upward, repeatedly.

I try to contextualize games by considering things like their goals and audience. Gem Game frustrates me. I just don’t get it.