Cell phones lend themselves to puzzle gaming. Think about it: you have an eminently portable, ubiquitous device with little to no audiovisual firepower, short battery life, and teeny controls (at present time, of course). So I'm kind of surprised that there aren't more really killer puzzlers available for mobile; I think I can count them on one four-fingered hand, actually. Fortunately, the illustrious Hungarian polymath Erno Rubik (or his massive puzzle think-tank, anyway) has stepped into the breach, creating with Phone2Play and Digital Bridges a thumb-sized puzzle game to complete the canon. Rubik's Mobile Pipelines is an engrossingly complex, nicely polished puzzler that will absorb hours of your life and prep you for a PhD in high-order math at the same time.
Pipeline is played on a grid upon which a series of differently colored, numbered, paired circles are located. Your task is to connect these dyads using lengths of pipeline, which only bend at right angles and can't cross each other. That's it. Simple, right?
Well, maybe on Novice or Easy mode. There are five difficulty levels, and as you proceed up the challenge gradient Rubik and his cronies will start expanding the grid, increasing the number of circles, and varying their placement. This will send you into fits. I consider myself an educated man, but I started having to reset the boards regularly once I hit Medium. Try Master mode only if you want to destroy all of your personal illusions and run your ego out of town on a rail. There are 999 puzzles in total, more than enough to reduce any Stephen Hawking wannabe to tears. Pipelines looks just fine graphically, if a little on the utilitarian side. I took umbrage at the slightly clunky control scheme, which makes you switch back and forth between a navigation and an editing cursor, but it's easy enough to adapt to.
Download Rubik's Mobile Pipelines if you have any interest in puzzle games whatsoever. That way there'll be plenty of schadenfreude to go around.
