I’m in love with an iPhone game. The Incident is an 8-Bit blast that could easily have owned me for months on the Gameboy Color. It’s simple mechanics, beautiful 8-bit graphics and fantastic score make it the perfect pick-up game for the iPad, a platform where sometimes a gaming session can be measured in seconds.

The premise is simple. Aliens have attacked and sucked up the earths inhabitants and all of their stuff. Now they’re dropping them on our hero and he has to dodge and jump his way to the freedom of the occupied earth. You know, that old chestnut.

Basically you move from left to right with the motion controls and tap to jump, crap will get dumped down on you and you must not only dodge it, but also scale the pile of ever increasing junk to make it to checkpoints on your way into outer space to defeat the evil invading force.

The graphics are pure NES, with 8-bit looking sprites, layered backgrounds and no aliasing of any kind to be seen. The animations are great and the physics are pretty solid, with little glitching even though the entire platform that you play on consists of objects that are interacting with one another. I found the difficulty to be fair, with it ramping up as the levels went on and more powerups became available and the rate of item drop increased.

The deaths are handled cleverly, awarding you a trophy each time you’re killed by a unique object. You can review the trophies later to have a laugh at being killed by “An ancient curse”. There is a checkpoint system in place so that you don’t have to start a level over after each death. I found that this actually worked to rack up the tension as you approached each point, trying to cross the line before you got bonked on the head with a bus.

If you’re an old school gamer looking for an original game to sink your teeth into that still gives you that old feeling, The Incident will hit the spot.

Now where’s my Scott Pilgrim on the iPad??

You can snag The Incident for $1.99 as a universal app on iTunes.

The Incident was purchased at full retail price in the App Store. The version reviewed was v 1.0.