One of the reasons I decided to get drunk a few months ago and hack out my kidney with a steak knife was so I could use the profits from selling it on the black market to buy an iPhone. And one of the reasons I wanted an iPhone so badly was the promise of gaming on the thing: I like my DS and all, but I hardly carry it around everywhere, and the idea of having some legit games on hand wherever I go was a pretty alluring prospect.

But then Super Monkey Ball had seriously busted controls, and I couldn't bring myself to pay $9.99 for anything with the phrase "Crash Bandicoot" in it, so I've been left with the simple block-busting of Aurora Feint, the retro charm of Cube Runner, and the occasional venture into Tris. But none of those games have really held my attention for very long--which meant I gave Spore a spin when it came out for the iPhone earlier this week.

This isn't the "real" Spore (Nex has a review of that right here). The iPhone's version of the game is a dumbed-down, simplified one, but it still manages to be quite a bit of fun. I wouldn't want to play it for hours on end, and it's hardly a substitute for the actual Spore, but as a pick-up-and-play sort of thing to mess around with on the MAX or before a movie starts? Not bad. Hit the jump for a few more details.

While Spore on the PC and Mac allows you to control species from their earliest single-celled organism days to their eras of interplanetary warfare, Spore on the iPhone is significantly smaller in scale: Focusing on the rudimentary organism stage, you start out controlling a hungry little blob in some primordial ooze. By tilting the iPhone, you can swim around, and the goal is to eat organisms that're even smaller than you, harvesting their DNA and growing bigger each time. As the game progresses, you're able to modify your creature--adding eyes, beaks, feelers, tails, etc.--and your creature gets bigger and bigger and eats more and more. Eventually you move from primordial ooze into more hospitable climes, though the gameplay more or less remains the same throughout. I'm currently on level 18 out of 30-something levels, and my four-eyed, beak-snouted fish-thing (which is named "Henrisus," because I'm a narcissist, and because the only thing I know about science is that sometimes animals have names that end in "us" and stuff) is currently terrorizing a peaceful kelp forest. While it is kind of wack that there's not much more to the game other than swimming around and trying to survive, the gameplay is also fun, intuitive, and addictive enough that it's hard to complain.

I've also been won over by the game's tone and production values: The music is atmospheric and unique, the visuals are pretty and nuanced, and, for such a rudimentary game, there are certain elements that really stand out (being able to choose a picture from the photos on your phone and use it as the skin for your creature is a particularly smart touch). True, one could argue that $9.99 is too much to pay for such a simple experience, but I don't quite get that argument--honestly, there's a ton of stuff out for the Wii that isn't half this fun or deep or personable, and that shit costs significantly more. Maybe I'm just used to feeling ripped off on videogames by paying $60 for console games, but $9.99--even for a dumbed-down, portable version of a larger game--seems like a comparative bargain. And shit, now I've got a game that I really enjoy, and will probably play at least fairly regularly, on my phone, wherever I go. That's worth 10 bucks.