I like Donkey Kong: King of Swing on my GameBoy Micro. The game is basically a platformer and you have to swing Donkey Kong from one branch to another and use a charged-up swing to leap and hit enemies.

Well, take away the bananas, the trees, leaps, and all the other fun bits, and replace Donkey Kong with a stick and you’ll have SpinGuru on the iPhone. You can probably tell that I don’t really like the game that much.

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In fact I find it an exercise in frustration. The premise of the game sounds simple, you have guide a spinning stick, latching on through a series of points from the start point to get to the end point. It’s King of Swing alright, or Spin, for that matter, sans gorilla.

Players are supposed to press a button at the right time in order to attach the stick (it’s spinning all the while) to the next point. But for a game that demands fast reflexes, the controls are really sluggish to the point that it doesn’t register at all and you may end up latching to something else.

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Hitting obstacles deducts precious time from your countdown timer (you are given a finite amount of time to complete a course), and since obstacles do not disappear, it’s possible to hit an obstacle (with the stick) multiple times while you are struggling with the sluggish controls.

All these problems detract from an already distilled experience, and I really can’t recommend the game to anyone but masochists. If you are in that category, go ahead and download this 99 cent app from App Store over here. Just don’t say I didn’t warn you when you are hurling your phone across the room while trying to pass the TRAINING LEVELS.