If you’ve poisoned your ears by listening to me rant on the Aeropodcast, you may be aware that I am not a big fan of the current state of iPhone gaming. Compared to the lengthy, polished productions I’m enjoyed on my Nintendo handhelds for years, the entire iPhone game library comes off as one of the those gimpy 100-in-1 LCD junk gadgets to me.

But that’s not to say that there’s no good games among all the $1 farting apps and weird ports of Pac-Man.

For more than a few weeks I’ve been playing a pre-release review copy of bitFLIP. The fact that I have been coming back to it every couple days – another iPhone puzzle game in an endless sea of iPhone puzzle games – means I like what I see.

bitFLIP is more or less an amped up Panel de Pon. You have a playfield with 25 circular “BITS” in multiple colors and shape icons. You have to swipe with your finger to line up three in a row, using a two-BIT cursor that should look familiar to Tetris Attack players. When three or more BITS line up, they pop into points. More BITS fall down onto the grid, creating stacks that must be cleared out before they get too high. Depending on your game mode, you can play for three minutes or you can run an endless game that can last for weeks and generate a truly ludicrous high score (which is mainly what I have been doing.)

Rather than just cloning Panel de Pon, Chicago-based developer Metamoorephosis Games has added tweaks and bonuses that update the classic video game puzzler concept. The most obvious twist is that you can flip the BITS as well as swap them. Each BIT is two-sided, maintaining specific color pairs. For example, if you flip an orange BIT, it turns blue. Swapping uses a sliding motion on the touchscreen while flipping requires a quick double-tap on the cursor. Your path to clear the grid will have you sliding and tapping like nuts… and happily, the game keeps pace with you. bitFLIP doggedly animates that cursor flying around to whatever you touch, in the order in which you touch it, and I have never seen it skip or take shortcuts when I hit a mad tapping spree.

Black BITS will occasionally appear that are easily cleared out with a tap. Most of these have distinctive icons, but some come with an obnoxiously invasive TAP ME! inscribed on them. Clearing out black circles fills up a blue meter at the top of the screen. When that meter is ready, you tap it to activate a power-up. My favorite power-up is Bubble Pop, which spins random BITS for you to eliminate with a single tap.

Other power-ups initiate an impressive rendering trick by tilting the entire grid to one side in 3D space. Generally these bonuses add a little gravity to the mix, allowing BITS to fall in one direction and clear themselves out should three or more happen to line up. But I still like Bubble Pop way better. The tilt scenes are the only time when I felt like the game would occasionally mis-read my taps… and I imagine that’s largely due to the tappable screen size getting necessarily smaller as the board tilts backward. And my huge fingers.

As the game progresses, it adds in more color combinations. Then, to make things really tricky, you start getting BITS in the same color but with different matchable shapes. Now you’ll find that you’ll have plenty of unmatched BITS left over as you clear the grid, and suddenly the threat of the stacks getting too high becomes worryingly real. You can adjust the difficulty in the settings menu, and you can even start with a 7×7 grid!

Incidentally, there is a separate icon that shows up onscreen that helpfully and obviously illustrates when you have a dangerously tall stack. You do not have to rely on counting the layers of circles in the grid itself.

At times, I found it unclear what was going on in terms of advancement through the levels. Like, why would one session let me clear out the grid while another kept it continually filled? In the end, it hardly matters. But I did feel some confusion over specifics as I picked through the various modes.

The only real sticking point with the gameplay is that, power-ups aside, bitFLIP does not automatically clear out matching lines when they occur naturally as the grid fills itself. This never fails to throw me off because I instinctively expect it to do that, based on a lifetime of playing similar puzzle games.

One very hip addition is an Achievements/Trophies system that bitFLIP calls iComplishments. Make one hundred matches and a cute iComplishment message appears onscreen. Plus, you get a bonus to the current game’s score! Unlike the way Achievements are handled on the 360 and PS3, many of these iComps can be triggered every time you meet the requirements. This gives iComplishments an even greater purpose than the usual Gamerscore saber-rattling, because they can be used to repeatedly buff your score. The little “TM” behind the iComplishments logo tells me the developer has plans to include the concept in other releases. It would be nice to be able to publish an iComp announcement to Facebook.

The iComplishment list even has a few hidden items, just like on the consoles. The whole thing suggests that Metamoorephosis has roots in the modern gaming scene… and that they aren’t just an iPhone Flash-porting house with no gaming experience, out to crap up the Store with Sudoku clones for grandmothers.

Something I absolutely must point out is the crazy-cool spinning effect that signals a transition to a new challenge threshold. The screen will tell you that you’re graduating from level 2-1 to 2-2 or whatever, and the entire grid will quickly rotate 360 degrees several times. At first I just sat back, enjoyed the spin, and figured this was just a fancy-pants visual into a new level. But then I realized that the board is still playable during the few seconds of the spin. Tapping and sliding is still in effect! So don’t pass this opportunity to keep the score climbing! I’m fairly dazzled by this.

Speaking of the visuals, bitFLIP’s backgrounds remind me a lot of indie darling Everyday Shooter. In a good way. It’s a slick retro look that oscillates from 8-bit to vector lines and back again. (Oddly, the title screen eschews this style for a paint splotchy vibe that doesn’t match up with the rest of the game. I also do not like the barebones lower-case text on the menu buttons, which looks like my first HyperCard creation back in the early 1990s.)

To go along with the imagery is a surprisingly deep set of mellow techno tracks by musician Robert Clouth. bitFLIP – again, as in games such as Everyday Shooter and Flower – adds in little game noises that complement whatever music is playing.

In the end, what I really like about bitFLIP is how it evolves a familiar concept. Just because a game is simple enough to fit on an SNES cart, that doesn’t mean it has to look like it fell out of a time warp. The soundtrack, gameplay visuals and iComplishments prove that bitFLIP is far from a no-frills iPhone puzzle game. I give it a 4 out of 5… and just for framing’s sake since I know we don’t offer a ton of iPhone reviews around here, I’d place Metal Gear Solid Touch for iPhone at a 2, Tower Bloxx Deluxe 3D at 3, and We Love Katamari at 3.5.

For well-choreographed, inventive puzzle action, but with occasional mode confusion and some bad font choices… bitFLIP on iPhone gets 4 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.

bitFLIP was released October 2009 on iPhone App Store. The game is 36 MB and currently sells for $3. This 1.0 review used an iPhone 3GS.

Check out the iPhone and other game reviews at Test Freaks.