Mobile Game of the Week - Heads Up! Hotdogs

Key Features

• Developers - Emmett Butler and Diego Garcia
• Publisher - Adult Swim Games
• Format - iOS
• Device tested - iPhone 4
• Price - 69p
• Release date - Out now

Heads Up! Hotdogs

It's hard to explain Heads Up! Hotdogs. If we tell you it comes from Adult Swim, the same TV station that brought us Tim and Eric Awesome Show and Aqua Teen Hunger Force that might help things make sense.

Basically, you balance hotdogs on people's heads. So like, they walk past the screen - they being businessmen, joggers, hipsters and cops - and you drag a hotdog with your finger and place it on their head. You get more points if the dog stays on while they walk off, and a lot more points if you can put two, or three hotdogs on the same guy's head.

Three Second Rule

Locations vary, from "Philly" to "Big Apple", London and Beijing and the types of people you come across get harder to be-hotdog. Take the businessmen, for example, who stroll along with their briefcases and stop to look at their watches. They're the easiest, since they're slow moving - drop a hotdog on their heads and they just plod on, looking disgruntled while it barely wobbles on top of their stiff, Brylcreamed hair.

But then there are joggers, who go a lot faster and easily knock your hotdog off with just a few steps. Getting one bun on their heads, let alone two or three is extremely difficult.

You start each level with five lives. Hotdogs fall from the sky and hit the pavement, giving you three seconds (as per the Three Second Rule) to pick them up and put them on someone's head. Take longer than that and the dog and one of your lives disappears. As hotdogs fall with increasing frequency, levels get harder, until eventually you're flicking like a madman trying to juggle hotdogs so they don't vanish.

It's a hard game, actually, especially the later levels - Heads Up! Hotdogs does a great job of recreating just how difficult it is to balance a hotdog on a policeman's head.

Dumb oddity

Other than that, it has a nice colour scheme, replete with neon blues and yellows and pinks. It's responsive, too, with hotdogs reacting to every tap of the iPhone screen.

The best part is probably the music, dopey 8-bit silliness that goes hand in hand with the game's absolutely ridiculous premise.

Other than that, it's kind of hard to describe Heads Up! Hotdogs; you really have to play it for yourself. It's exactly the kind of dumb oddity that the App Store is perfect for, a quick, cheap belly laugh that you can giggle at when you're drunk.

Heads Up! Hotdogs is a neat drag and drop game with a great setup, that's both challenging and very funny at the same time. If you're bored of playing something normal all the time, go and download it for 69p from the App Store now.