I haven't played Flashback in almost 20 years. The iOS port is burdened with a control system so faffy and unintuitive that I had to sit through the entire intro sequence three times in the first 15 minutes (including one full shutdown and reboot due to a particularly cretinous oversight on the developer's part*). Now I'm here, which experienced Flashback players will recognise as being roughly six seconds from the start:

HOW IN THE HOLY NAME OF THE POPE'S TINY WITHERED COCK DO YOU GET BACK OUT OF THIS SCREEN?

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Phoenix HD is a high-def remake of the original Phoenix (69p), which is itself one of the App Store's finest shmups, adding Retina graphics, Universal support and an array of very pretty additional background scenery.

Obviously, now that it's a substantially better game, it's gone free forever.

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Free today: the inaccurately-named 8 Bit Rally. I actually paid money for this a couple of weeks ago, like some sort of chump, and had been waiting for a spare moment to write about it. I still haven't really got one (I'm so busy lately you wouldn't believe it), so I'll be quick.

It's Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge 2011.

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Alert viewers will doubtless recall a recent piece in which we praised the toweringly magnificent gameplay engine of Evolution Tennis for iOS, while savagely attacking its awful, unbelievably user-hostile metastructure.

As ever, though, WoSland's nudging has managed to secure tangible and thrillingly awesome results where others merely flail around impotently.

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Back in June we forecast that it'd take about a month for the three-game downloadable content pack for Galaga 30th Collection to drop from a frankly optimistic £5.49 to an entirely more reasonable £2.99 price point.

In fact, I got it wrong yet again – it was six and a half weeks.

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In one screenshot.

(From the lovely The Rainy Day 2, free.)

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This has been quite an unsettling week, one way and another.

(A troubling scene from Creatures & Castles, free today.)

If you don't want to know the unexpected, tragic but ultimately life-affirming and deeply moving storyline of Zookeeper DX Touch Edition (which is revealed on completing Normal mode), look away now.

(By which we mean, "don't click on that picture".)

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Trust me, you didn't see this one coming.

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1. Because the difficulty has been tweaked so that the normal mode doesn't take forever to get going (which also mostly mitigates the absence of Time Attack, since you'll rarely last more than six minutes anyway).

2. Because you get both iPhone/iPod and iPad versions together in a single purchase for the absurdly low price of £1.19.

3. And most importantly, because they've taken out Quest Mode.

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(From the Angry-Birds-meets-Peggle Cow Trouble, free today.)

(From the all-consuming Tiny Tower, free.)

One of the least welcoming and most unfriendly games I've ever been totally unable to stop playing, Evolution Tennis (today reduced to 59p) is so spartan it barely even qualifies for the term 'half-baked'. If we're being generous, there's half a game here. But it's a heck of a half a game.

A front end that's a piece of exhibition-level brutalism leads you swiftly into a tennis tournament. You can't even enter your name (you go by the title PLAYER), the tournaments comprise fixed three-set matches (no quick game here), and once you're playing there's no way out other than to win, lose or press the Home button – you don't even get pause or quit options.

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(Brought to you in association with Free-App Hero, natch.)

Star Keeper, which is free at the time of writing, is 60 (or 90) seconds of sheer design genius. The simplest of premises (it's a little bit reminiscent of Qix, and not just in the fact that you draw boxes – the way risk grows the bigger the area you try to "capture" is conceptually very similar, as is the simplicity of the gameplay) conceals a game of extraordinary beauty and compulsiveness.

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