My PS3 died this week. After having two 360s red ring on me over the years, it came as  a bit of a shock- a red ring of death is normally preceded by a few weeks of crashes, popping in textures and fan sounds resembling an asthmatic jumbo jet.. It gives you time to be slightly more pragmatic when the thing does pass away into after service (or bottom of cupboard) limbo, reflecting on how at least it isn't in any more pain. The PS3 meanwhile, was dead in the blink of a yellow LED, the electronic equivalent of a sudden aneurism, frustratingly refusing to let go of the Rock Band 3 disc it had in its death clutches.

So, while that gets fixed, a process lengthened by ongoing power cuts in the Tokyo area while our power situation gets sorted out, I've been given pause to look at other formats. My 360 is itself experiencing emphysematous Boeing syndrome, so I'm wary of investing in some epic game for it- if I don't turn the thing on, it can't possibly break, the 21st century Schroedinger's Cat that it is. I like my 3DS, but it is purely being used for Street pass whoring at the moment while I wait for a game to come out that takes longer than two hours to complete to 100 percent.

 So, then, to the Wild West that is the App Store, and the trudge through trash to find nuggets of greatness. One of those nuggets is possibly the most mature game I've played so far this year.

Now, that's not 'mature' in a gratuitous, blood 'n' tits Duke Nukem way. Nor is it 'mature' in a heavy handed allegorical narrative Enslaved way. Forget-Me-Not shows its maturity by making heavy reference to 30-plus year old games with hardcore followings, elbowing you in the ribs with each one and ensuring the youths can play and enjoy it, while only adults will have the background knowledge to love it.In short, the subtle title could be replaced by the more literal Ancient Videogames:The Videogame.

The core concept behind the game is Pac Man through and through- collect all the flowers on the map before grabbing a key and exiting to the next stage. This Pac like is Champion Edition-ified with a combo based score system and encourages grinding against walls to squish enemies, while in a more original twist, your character can shoot, automatically spewing a hail of bullets that can pass through warp gates and easily shoot the uninitiated in the back.

A retro infused arcade romp however, is made all the more more enjoyable by a steady stream of old school influences. Maps are randomly generated, meaning not only an almost infinite number of challenges, but also a tip of the hat hat to old school ASCII dungeon crawler Rogue, a reference accentuated by the fact each play session is dubbed an 'quest'. Enemies in the mazes are no simple ghosts, but a hodge podge of gaming nostalgia. Segmented enemies bring forth Centipede flashbacks. Stay too long in a map and Evil Otto of Berzerk fame shows up, except disguised as Mario's Boo.It's all capped off by bright sharp neon lines and the sort of sounds that can only be put into words with a 'beeeyooouuuuuuu-wip-wip-wip' and tears of joy from anybody who has played Defender or Robotron. It's a wonderful celebration of the fact that games are grown up things, and so are you.

Showing maturity in a more narrative sense is Perfect Cell. A challenge that most games still can't overcome is in telling a story through gameplay rather than cutscene based exposition. Narrative in phone games has to be undertaken with even more care- play sessions are as short as five minutes or less, and you can't necessarily rely on players wearing headphones and listening to your crafted dialogue instead of other music, podcasts or whatever (pet peeve side note, developers- adventure games and experiences where sound is essential get a free pass from me, but if your sports, puzzle or cutesy platform game doesn't let me listen to ipod audio in game, it gets kicked off my phone and given a one star review. Of course by that point you've already got my money, but it's the principle of the thing). 2009's Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor did a good job of telling a morbid and compelling story incidentally in game, and so does this.

Perfect Cell casts you as a weird B-movie inspired amorphous floating blob  with trailing tentacles. Predictably, the sole, brief introductory cutscene explains how you have been 'discovered' by scientists who are keeping you under observation in a high tech lab, and predictably the game tasks you with escaping to freedom. What this amounts to is some stealth based puzzling in a Shadow Complex style environment. So far, so familiar, but when things start to go a bit Half Life, and marines ostensibly trying to contain the situation start a bloody cover up before your eyes, an interesting morality factor creeps in. Do you sneak through levels without directly harming another soul, even if it means the death of 'innocent' scientists? Wipe out all in your path, innocent or otherwise? Or play an avenging angel, saving the boffins and offing the SWAT teams?

There are Game Center achievements designed to reward all three approaches, and each path encourages its own play style- the stealth approach is obviously more cerebral, despite disappointingly robotic AI. The destructive approach is maniacal fun, especially when your blob gets powered up over the course of the game to wreak more havoc. Play between the two, meanwhile, and you can be deliciously creative, splitting your blob in two to distract troops, then darting from a crossfire into shadows, leading soldiers to inadvertently shoot each other. Not only is this rewarding from a gameplay perspective, but also from the point of view of the fiction- with so little set-up given to you by the game itself, the story is all in your head, giving you far more agency than a straightforward narrative would. In my mind, I can be a maniacal creature of unimaginable horror, or a sympathetic, beautiful creature, unfairly chained. This is Super Mega Worm with a social conscience and it is to be applauded, especially as it's on sale at the time of this writing.

Both the above games are can''t really be labeled with the oft derided 'casual tag. The continuing resentment of casual experiences is often a topic of discussion when it comes to phone based games something that I find rather baffling (heaven forbid videogames are exposed to and accepted by a wider range of people), especially as some 'non'games are actually really good. 

iAssociate is a word association game that would be comfortably at home in an English as a Foreign Language classroom. From one word, associations are made to several, and connections built into an ever expanding spider diagram. It has a few features that seem designed to make the hardcore gamer's blood boil- this is also a Facebook game and encourages the spamming of Facebook news feeds to ask your friends for help when stuck. It also has the oft derided 'freemium' model of content delivery that relies on in app purchases to make money, leading to prompts of the 'want more? GIMME CASH NOW' variety. But this is smart, simple, enjoyable. There's enough there to enjoy for free.

More importantly, as it relates to the two games above, it's all very grown up. And it works. Unlike my other gaming hardware- until I drop my phone down the toilet, that is.