Snake 97: iPhone app review

Snake 97 for the iPhone faithfully recreates the original snake of Nokia fame. Even a decade later, it's still fun and is definitely w...

Snake 97 for the iPhone faithfully recreates the original snake of Nokia fame. Even a decade later, it's still fun and is definitely worth the purchase.

Remember the days when having a Nokia was the coolest thing in town? Back before the day of mobile Internet and the app store, bored people had to make do with Snake, a game pre-loaded on virtually every Nokia phone sold in that era.

You can relive the addictive simplicity on your iPhone with Snake 97, whose tagline is, suitably, "Play snake like it's 1997."

For $0.99 on the app store, the game accurately recreates four of the most classic Nokia phones down to the the keypad, back lighting, and snake sound effects. The game is still simple and fun, and allows you to try to beat your high score from all those years ago.

Unfortunately, the lack of physical controls makes it difficult to feel what you're doing. It is also difficult to turn your snake around so that they're parallel to each other - an essential maneuver when your snake is long and on higher levels. The keys don't respond to sliding your finger left, down, right, meaning you need to actually lift up your finger from the screen to make a course correction.

While the simple controls do place a rather large arrow pad on screen for you to use, it suffers from the same problems as stated above, and more often than not, you may accidently press the options menu, stopping the game.

Despite a few control kinks, it's still a fun game and definitely a long, nostalgia filled snake-walk down memory lane.

Rating: 4.5