Game: Eliss Infinity

First released back in March 2009, which was literally like the prehistoric ages for the mobile gaming world, Steph Thirion's Eliss has often been considered by many to be the first truly great mobile game. After one playthrough of the newly refined and expanded rerelease, Eliss Infinity, it's hard not to see why. But what's so amazing about the experience is that not only was the original Eliss such an innovative game for 2009, but the challenging mix of arcade and puzzle gameplay has managed to stand the test of time and remain insanely relevant and accessible even today in 2014.For those new to the world of Eliss, the gameplay is deceptively simple: you'll be presented with a number of different colored planets that slowly materialize in the vastness of space. You can touch and drag any planet to move it around the screen, and combining any two like-colored planets will create a new larger one. Conversely, stretching two fingers apart on any one planet will split it up into two smaller ones. As time goes on, several color-coded portals will begin popping up around the screen, and it's your goal to maneuver your different planets in order to fill each one (keeping in mind that the portal and accompanying planet must be the same color and size)."Things start to get tricky early on, as you realize that different colored planets are not allowed to touch. If they do, a green health bar at the top of the screen will quickly start depleting, and if it empties all the way then you'll have to start over. It seems easy to keep the colors separate at first, but once new planets start spawning over already-existing ones of a different color, or when some planets get so big that it becomes hard to maneuver them to the portals without banging into the edges of others, you'll quickly understand the game's immense and rewarding sense of challenge. And that's without even mentioning the various hazards like moving red vortexes which only complicate things even further.