Kairosoft iPhone games are like crack; cheap and easily addictive. It all started (for the US at least) with Game Dev Story, a game I wrote about for Geek Shui Living here. Simple, cute graphics, easy to follow, tremendously addictive.

Since then, I’ve picked up Hot Springs Story, Pocket Academy, and now Grand Prix Story. The games are similar (run a spa/school/racing team) and my enjoyment of them has varied, with Grand Prix being my current favorite (also the most recent one I’ve picked up). They also have Mega Mall Story, but at $4 it’ll have to wait until it goes on sale – and they often do.

The games are translated from Japanese (Kairosoft being a Japanese company without much of a English website – click here if you know kanji, or here for their tiny English site) so they have that weird Japanese feel to them with characters having auras and culture things like that. But for 8-bit gamers who were into some of the less mainstream Nintendo titles like I was, this won’t be a major thing.

As for more games on the horizon, Kairosoft has a ton of them waiting in the wings, just waiting to be translated. Pocketgamer has a peek at their wishlist of games they’d like to see next, and some look quite interesting.

I’ll get back to baseball stuff later. I just wanted to share what else was sucking my time away.