Today ustwo has released their latest iPhone title into the App Store.  Following the same pattern of fashionable style seen with Steppin’ and MouthOff, .™ brings a whole level of simplistic curiosity to the table.  What was the title you say? .™, yes, .™

The story behind .™ is perhaps as interesting as the app itself. The team set forth to conceptualize, design, develop, and submit the a unique game to Apple in 48 hours flat.  Accomplishing this was no doubt a difficult challenge, but at the same time, it expresses how inviting a development platform the iPhone is.  Within the allotted 48 hours .™ was born.  After submitting the .™ to Apple for approval, the ustwo team went to work generating anticipation for its release.  Like everything coming out of “the studio of dreams” this campaign proved to exude creativity.  Its tag line “Have You Seen the .™?” was quickly plastered on Twitter and other blogs across the internet.  The culmination emerged as a Flickr slideshow of .™ in the wild where anyone could contribute pictures of everyday objects resembling what would become the game’s main character .™  After the sluggish Apple approval process, .™ is finally in the App Store and ready for consumption.

Launching .™ for the first time, you might not know exactly how to proceed.  All you are presented with is a white pulsating dot on a gray background with a black hole.  Soon you’ll see that your accelerometer is activated and the white dot responds to your movement.  Drop the white dot through the black hole and the game begins.

Simplicity is key to .™ However, simplicity actually compliments the experience instead of detracting from it. You are .™, a white dot struggling to survive in a dark world.  Your goal is to eat all the blue dots possible -- this prevents shrinking to nonexistence.  You must also avoid the red triangles at all cost.  These will promote massive shrinkage putting you on the teetering edge of certain doom.  Last as long as you can in the free-for-all. Upon elimination your score will display momentarily.  Your score is the number of seconds you remain alive.

We love to see this kind of ingenuity coming out of ustwo’s London headquarters and can’t wait to see what surprises are next.  The team has eluded to a future release of five more designer apps along the lines of .™  On sale today for $0.99, .™ might be the quirkiest, simplest, AND most addictive game you’ve bought in a long time.  Plus it’s kind of neat to own the “first” 48-hour app!

.™ gets our AppSmile 5-Dimple rating: