App of the Week: Girls Like Robots

Image credit: Popcannibal

App Name: Girls Like Robots

Price: $0.99

Available Platforms: iOS 5. 1 or later, iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch

What does it do? My friend Bob is kind of a nerdy guy who used to have a sci-fi movie poster of a robot heroically carrying a woman in its arms. We used to joke that this was how he got away with having a half-naked women on his living room wall. He would laugh and say, "Women like that poster because robots are awesome."

Game designers at Popcannibal might agree. Their recent puzzle game, "Girls Like Robots," by Adult Swim Games, released earlier this month, lets players arrange square-shaped tiles representing girls, robots, nerds and even pieces of pie together according to mood. In this imaginative land of forests and volcanoes, townships and bus rides, the goal is to make the characters happy.

Place a girl next to another girl, and the icon remains neutral, slide a girl next to a nerd and she will frown. Why? Because girls don't like nerds, although the nerds like girls. Place her next to a robot and she will smile because girls like robots, but put too many girls next to a robots and the robots will freak out. Once you complete the challenges within a level, or "act," you progress to the next location, from nuclear physics class at Four-Corners University, for example, to the Chickenbomball.

Instructional tiles appear throughout each puzzle offering hints to help you along. Buttons on the bottom right let you undo each move step by step or return to the main menu. Press the "love" button to find out how characters feel about each other: a blue glow around a character means "like" and a red glow means "bite me."

Is it easy to set up? Once you download the game, you can launch and go.

Should I try it? The brightly rendered backdrops and environments of this game, as well as the wacky story line, make playing "Girls Like Robots" an absolute giggle to play.

Let us know if you have any app of the week suggestions on Twitter at @TechThisOutABC.