Oh No!

Oh No! will look instantly familiar to you. Created by Oasys Mobile Games, let's just say the game it mimics involves 4 colors, wild cards, and rhymes with....um..."schmUno." Thaaat's right! It's Uno by another name, with a few minor changes for legal reasons. If you're price conscious, this app may be a decent substitute for its name-brand rival, but you get less than what you pay for (sad, considering the app is 99 cents). Still, the gist of UNO (or crazy eights if you'd like) is present and done well. Everyone starts with 7 cards, there are wild cards, draw two cards, wild draw fours, "jump" cards, and "flip" cards. You even have to tap the "Oh No!" button when you're down to one card. No, I'm not joking.

Oh No! is a mixed bag when it comes to presentation. Card graphics are crisp and there's no confusion as to which card you have selected. Controls are really good too. Simply slide your finger along your cards and flick your finger up to play it. Animations look good, but take too long and are accompanied by high-pitched, excited, cartoon chipmunk-type voices. Also, every time I won, the winning fireworks animation crashed the app. Then, when you try to reopen the program, it asks you if you would like to start off where it crashed. Hit yes and it will take you through the winning animation and then proceed to crash AGAIN! Every. Time. Maybe they called the game Oh No! because that's what you yell after hurling your iPhone across the room. I know Oasys is a smaller player in the world of iPhone apps, and I really appreciate business competition, but unless they're going to start giving it away for free, Oasys needs to step it up a bit.

The options for Oh No! are similar to the graphics: decent, but unimpressive. You can choose classic or house rules, which is nice. The house rules force you to keep drawing cards until you can make a play and you can "stack" special cards, passing on punishment to another player. You can choose to play one game or several games until someone reaches 500 points. Another nice addition was the option to make calling UN....er Oh No! manual or automatic. An odd option was to turn vibration on or off. I never noticed vibration at all while reviewing. One thing for certain is that you'll definitely want to turn the sound off. It would also be nice to change the number of games or points needed to win, but that just adds to the list of things to update.