Speaking of great video games, Spaceteam is the kind of genius concept you usually only see accompanied by Seamans or maracas-shaking monkeys.
The premise is that you and the rest of your Space Team, each equipped with an iOS device with a control panel, have to guide your spaceship through dangerous territory. Instructions come through on your device (e.g. “Set Kinetic Flow to Maximum!”; you can follow the Spaceteam Autopilot on Twitter for more periodic nonsense). The instructions are (usually) intended for the other players’ control panels. That results in a lot of yelling back and forth. If you can complete the instructions, you advance to the next sector. Mess up, and your ship runs into asteroids, wormholes, magnetic distortions, and lots of other mayhem.
I’ve never played Space Alert, but from what I understand, Spaceteam would be somewhat similar, if you removed everything from Space Alert that was orderly or made sense.
It’s a purely social game — while it doesn’t exactly encourage people to look up from their cell phones, it at least gets us back to the old days where friends would scream random nonsense at each other. It’s also exactly the kind of thing that makes independent game development a good idea.
Spaceteam is free on the App Store, but you can (and should) buy “Upgrades” to support the development. As the latest update notes say, “You can now Frog Blast the Vent Core.”