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Let your fingers do the gaming
Cell phones used to deliver as much fun as a calculator, but today the newest games can be downloaded as easily as 50 Cent’s latest ringtone

• Tiger Woods PGA TOUR 07 (www.eamobile.com, price TBA) brings you to Pebble Beach and five other hot links. The visuals pack the same punch as the Wii version. Each round begins with a course flyover, followed by the traditional 3D behind-the-golfer view to swing. The 5 key starts the swing and the decent, which makes it easy to control your power, and other keys provide helpful backspin. The only thing missing is a multiplayer mode, but the long Tournament mode will keep you plenty busy.
• Lost (www.gameloft.com, $3.99) takes more after the classic Pitfall than the ABC’s cryptic hit series. Playing as lead character Jack, you must save party members, find crucial items and, most importantly, avoid the smoke monster. You’ll use your noggin, but this title is more about quick hits than quick wits.
• Scene It? Movie Edition (www.namcogames.com/sceneit, price TBA) is like those trivia games you used to play at the local bar. A continuous lightning round, Scene It? fires multiple choice questions at you and up to three “friends.” Points based on speed, winning streaks and, of course, accuracy, and you’re ranked accordingly from Studio President to Best Boy (hint: You don’t want to be ranked Best Boy). The questions are surprisingly current as they’re downloaded on the spot from the game’s server. It’s a great road-trip title.
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Vegas (www.gameloft.com, $3.99) isn’t a sophisticated military sim like its big brothers on the Playstation 3 and XBox 360, but it has a great old-school aesthetic. The action/adventure is broken up into arcade games like 2D run-and-gun missions, Duck Hunt-style sniper modes and bomb-dismantling puzzles. No multiplayer here either, but the fast pace and variety is good for on-the-go mayhem. -Damon Brown

Shouldn’t you be spending more time with the classics?

Today’s games brim with high-polygon-count beasties, but we’re still floored by what the creators of Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Battle Zone were able to squeeze out of eight measly bits of processing power. Despite severe limitations, they produced compelling and addictive games that ate a generation of children’s quarters and birthed a billion-dollar industry.

Now your home computer has more processing power in its on-off switch than the machines of yesteryear had in their wildest electric dreams, and with a few quick downloads you can play the classics for free. To do that you need an emulator, a downloadable program that creates a virtual version of those old arcade machines inside your computer’s memory. Find the code for an old game online, plug it into the emulator and you’re on your way to a showdown with Wizard of Wor, only this time with endless free plays.

MAME (mame.net, macmame.org) plays thousands of old games, with the RAINE (rainemu.com) emulator supports late-1980s titles such as Ninja Gaiden, along with more than 100 others (including many sleeper hits). Capcom ruled the arcades of the 1990s, and Callus (bloodlust.zophar.net) is dedicated solely to its games – just having all the Street Fighter versions is worth the (free) price of admission.

The catch? Well, there is one pesky legal issue. Emulators themselves are legal, but the game files (while readily available) are usually not. We can say this, however: Google is a singularly impressive search engine (nudge, nudge).