Of all the games that have rolled out of Apple’s new App Store, the best of the bunch just might be a totally free-of-charge one: Cube Runner from Andy Qua:

Cube Runner is a game for the iPhone and iPod Touch where the aim is to fly your ship across a terrain littered with Cubes. No-one knows how the cubes got there but you need to get through them.

Features
- Fast 3D graphics
- Intuitive controls – use the built-in accelerometer to fly across the terrain
- Downloadable layout packs – create your own layouts and share them

As you can tell from the screenshot, the graphics aren’t going to win any beauty contests. And the object is not that complex — you just have to tilt-and-whirl your device (the iTouch in my case) to negotiate blocky obstacles on a barren terrain. It very much comes off as an early-stage wireframe test for a more fully-rendered videogame.

But it’s that bare-bones simplicity that’s got me hooked. I’ll take ease of playability over flashiness any day, and the accelerometer use alone fills the feature-rich quota. The lack of polish means the gameplay value has nowhere to hide, and it comes through marvelously. I’m only on the Easy level, and I’m getting a challenging thrill out of it. It’s also neat to switch between portrait and landscape modes, and having to subsequently re-calibrate the playing field each time; all that really highlights the gaming potential of the iPod/iPhone platform.

It’s already picking up plenty of accolades. I would have installed it last weekend, had there not been an update problem that temporarily knocked it offline. I snapped it up this afternoon, as soon as it reappeared.

I can see this little time-waster eating up plenty of iPod battery life…