To understand any gaming system, you should ferret out the games best suited to the system. This is true of any platform, but it's particularly true of innovative approaches finding their way, such as the DS and the Wii. And, yes, the iPhone. But when I ducked into a random message board discussion and picked out four iPhone games being enthusiastically discussed, I hardly ended up with a representative cross-section of games. Instead, I got a few flavors of the month apparently past their sell-by date (or, in the case of Battle of Wesnoth, not yet ripe). Mea culpa for making assumptions about the iPhone based on these four games. I was rightly taken to task by folks in Fidgit's comment section. To them, I am grateful. Because of them, and because of a long weekend in bed with some sort of ass-kicking flu that kindly waited for the Thanksgiving holiday, I am now fifty dollars poorer and a little wiser.

This week, I'll detail what I discovered. Suffice to say my DS and PSP are not happy.

After the jump, I'll tell you about my first epiphany.

By the way, did you catch the monetary sum up there? Fifty dollars! When things are ninety-nine cents there, two dollars here, and maybe the odd six bucks from time to time, you don't think much about pressing that "buy" button. Yeah, sure, I'll buy it. It's less than the cost of a cup of coffee! A demo? Nah, no need. Not when it's this cheap!

You know how it works if you're an iTunes junkie. And Apple knows how it works. And now I know how it works. However, for fifty dollars, no other platform has given me the breadth of experiences I got on the iPhone. Granted, probably half of these games I'll never play again. But among the fifty dollars were some wonderful finds that - and here's where I'm going to happily eat a little crow - rival what you can get on other handheld gaming platforms. More on that later.

Because the central fact of the iPhone is that it's unlike any other handheld gaming platform because you have to smear your big fat finger around the screen whether you like it or not. Every single iPhone game has to come to terms with this fact and it's my contention that this is a huge - huge! - liability. However, my first realizations that the iPhone has some pretty cool games come from a handful of titles that actually benefit from the unwieldy fingerpainting interface. For instance, steering little ships around in drunken patterns in Harbor Master. It's a dippy little game that wouldn't feel quite the same with a stylus. I don't mind the sense of manually pushing these hapless boats around with my finger. It gives it a little extra charm. It's not a precise game and it doesn't need to be. It's not even much of a game. But it's a great bit of finger diversion that I'll happily visit from time to time just to push those poor doomed boats around for as long as they'll survive.

But where the fingerwork really came into its own was in a game that also has lovely artwork and an intentionally twitchy protagonist. Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor has the sort of lovely evocative 2D artwork you'd see in a game created by a big Japanese studio designing for Nintendo hardware. The dusty run-down Bryce Manor looks great as I, the titular spider, scuttle around, snaring and grappling the insects that preside over its decay. I have no idea what the secret of Bryce Manor is or if it's something I'm even supposed to care about, much less solve. But I've certainly noticed a few clues pointing to some human heartbreak. Being a spider, they're just part of the scenery, slightly haunting and funky, like the soundtrack. As I pass these secrets, I'm mostly enjoying the occasionally tricky but entirely clever web gimmick, working my way along and curious to see what awaits me at the end.

Oh my. I seem to have reached the end already.

And this brings me to another central fact about iPhone games. They're, uh, modest. Downright small. Sometimes even itsy bitsy. Spider doesn't have a lot of content. It supposedly gets longevity by letting players compare high scores on Facebook, but I'm not really interested in perfecting my finger-swiping web-slinging and I'm even less interested in proclaiming my prowess on Facebook. Spider's Bryce Manor is a cool place to explore and the game allows me to do so using unique mechanics, but once that exploration is over, I'm pretty much done with the game.

But the irony of some other iPhone games is that even though they're small, they're effectively never-ending.

Up next: Boy, was I wrong about one of the game I didn't like at first!