Mobile platforming is typically a fairly substandard affair. It's not always the fault of game designers, though. Most cell phone screens simply aren't set up to let you see enough of the surrounding action. This is one area where Danger's Sidekick comes in handy, as it sports a large, landscape-oriented screen. To add to the list of games available for the Sidekick, Danger has developed and released a bouncing ball platformer called Bob. Bob hops over the technical hurdles of putting a platformer on your phone quite well, but some of the game's level designs may have you attempting to snap your phone in half.

Since blind jumps went out of style back in the early 90s, you could call Bob a bit of a throwback. Or you could just call it annoying.

Bob is a round ball with a face on it, and he's lonely. He sort of looks like the sad bouncy ball from the Zoloft commercials, only he must have a more upbeat take on life, because he's constantly smiling. In search of his long-lost love, Bob sets out across nine levels to find his soul mate. Unlike most platform games, you don't do any running here. Bob is a ball that constantly bounces, which is a cool twist that puts more emphasis on landing safely. You can bounce off of the heads of your enemies, and collectable hearts also let you catch a little extra air once you're already off the ground. Your control is limited to moving Bob back and forth. There is a jump button that you can use to pull off double jumps, but you can only double-jump once on each bounce. You must hit the ground in order to be able to manually jump, and the heads of enemies and power-ups don't count. The screen also scrolls on its own, so you'll have to keep moving.

The basics of Bob's control are nicely done. You can use the scrollwheel to move left and right, but Sidekick II users are probably better off using the phone's D pad for left and right movement and pushing in the scrollwheel for jumps. It takes some getting used to, but before too long, you'll be hopping around with the best of them.

One of the key points to making a classic side-scroller is to have thoughtfully designed levels. Here, Bob sort of falters. The game is highly dependant on blind jumps. It seems like you'll constantly be hopping off the edge of a high platform and sort of hoping for the best. Some of the potential frustration is muted by the fact that the level designer seemed to make sure that there's almost always some platform to land on when you go bailing over the edge, which means that you'll probably attempt to memorize certain sections of levels in order to properly proceed. Every third level in the game is a boss level of sorts, and these are much more vertically oriented than the others. That also makes them the most frustrating.

How frustrating? Break your phone frustrating. Fling your phone off the Golden Gate Bridge frustrating. Fashion a sharp object out of an eating utensil and go on a stabbing rampage frustrating. When you add in the game's occasionally questionable hit detection, which likes to claim you didn't quite land on an enemy's head when you obviously did, it's enough to make you invent your own curse words. The catalog page for Bob claims that it offers around five hours of play, but just know going in that this means you'll be spending about four of those hours navigating the last level, futilely trying to master the timing required to bounce your way past a giant, floating, three-eyed hamster-dog thing. Oh, and it also shoots lasers out of its frickin' eyeballs. It's enough to make you cry.

It's 2005, and cell phone technology is rapidly progressing, yet most games still don't have both music and sound effects. Bob, thankfully, bucks that trend, though it's still pretty sparse. You'll get a nicely digitized ditty to accompany your bouncing, and little speech samples and other sound effects while you play. The music loops a little too often and gets slightly grating, but technically speaking, it's well done.

Bob is constantly bouncing. Try to stop him. You can't!

Bob looks great when it's standing still, but in motion, it doesn't look so hot. The game runs at a variable speed. When your phone isn't doing anything else, it tends to run just well enough to play. However, if you're attempting to load a Web page or do any other multitasking, the game will often slow to a crawl.

While Bob may have plenty of moments that will make you want to smash your Sidekick into bits with a ball-peen hammer, it still has some neat things going for it: it's a larger platformer than you'd expect from a mobile game; the ball-bouncing gameplay is interestingly unique; and the bright, colorful characters give the game a good sense of visual charm. It's an interesting technical achievement, but once you've beaten its diabolical final level, there's really no reason to ever go back to it, which makes it a fairly short-lived thrill.