Tap Tap Revenge for IPhone

It only makes sense that one of the most popular games to be developed for "jailbroken" iPhones would see life anew as an official App Store release. That's the story behind Tap Tap Revenge, the first offering from Tapulous, and which iPhone hackers may recognize as the successor to Tap Tap Revolution.

Tap Tap Revenge is a rhythm game similar in concept to games like Phase for the iPod, or the console titles FreQuency and Amplitude, all developed by Harmonix, which also makes Guitar Hero and Rock Band.

The goal in Tap Tap Revenge is to tap at the bottom of the screen in time with bubbles that descend from three colored beams of light that snap and crackle with energy. The more bubbles you can pop in time, the higher your score. You'll also get points for shaking the iPhone or iPod touch left and right or up and down in time with arrows that descend down those light beams.

There's a two-player mode that pits both players at either end of an iPhone or iPod touch (and changes the string geometry a little bit to make more sense); you can also turn off the shake feature.

The game includes only a handful of music tracks and offers no way of linking to a resident iTunes library that may be on your device, so the music selection gets very old quickly. But Tapulous says that more tracks are coming very soon. (The game can use new tracks as soon as they're available.)

Four difficulty levels keep your fingers tapping--and kept mine tapping enough to wear out my wrist. I need to ice it.

Tap Tap Revenge is compatible with any iPhone and iPod touch running the iPhone 2.0 software update.

[Peter Cohen is a Macworld senior editor and Game Room columnist.]