As the editor-in-chief of Gamervision, I know the pressure and difficulty associated with getting people to frequent a website. Marketing, search engine optimization, and old-fashioned luck all factor into whether you'll attract and keep an audience, or if you're destined to be another casualty of the bubble. Just because a strategy was successful for one website does not mean it will work for everyone, and all over the world, editors and code-writers alike are trying to carve out their own niche. For me, this constant struggle is a fact of life. For iPhone developer TechPad Agency, it is a game. An iPhone-based board game to be exact, one called iNetMania.

In iNetMania, players assume the role of a website CEO, starting off with $50,000 in the bank and 4,000 visitors. The object of the game is to collect the most money and visitors before crossing the finish line. Once all players do cross the finish, the number of users are converted into cash ($20,000 for every 1,000 visitors). Controls are entirely handled with the touch screen, with the exception of rolling the die, which is accomplished by shaking and turning over the iPhone (using the phone's internal accelerometer).

There are various spaces along the way that will either help or hurt your effort to become the richest website owner in the world. These include the standard "Move Ahead/Back 3 Spaces" boxes, "Visitors" spaces which add visitors to your total, "PayDay" spaces, which give your your weekly salary every time you pass one (or double it if you land directly on the box itself). the "Slump" and "Spikes" spaces, which prompt the player to draw a card from the respective pile (think Chance and Community Chest in Monopoly), the "Stuck" spaces, which force players to either pay $50,000 or roll a three or less to get out of (think Jail in Monopoly), "Website Maintenance" spaces which cause players to lose turns, "CEO Bonus" spaces, which give you a cash prize based on how much money is in "the pot", and finally the "iNetMania" spaces, which give you a new number of users based on a single die roll multiplied by 1000.

The gameplay is very straight forward, with each player taking his or her turn and doing whatever the landed-on space dictates. There is an interesting little game mechanic introduced- at the beginning of each turn, players have the option to either roll the die, or "Pay Marketing". Choosing to put $50,000 into marketing acts as a bet; if the player pays marketing, and their game piece lands on the "Marketing" square, that player's number of visitors is instantly doubled.

Putting aside the ridiculous conceits of the game ($50,000 per week paychecks for start-up CEOs, unrealistic "events" in the cards, et al), as a board game, iNetMania works. However, the presentation and overall feel of the game leave a lot to be desired. The iPhone's graphic capabilities, although not HD, are certainly better than what iNetMania delivers. The entire game looks like a high-resolution image that has been compressed and squashed down, creating an aesthetic that seems to encourage squinting more than replay. The game's animations, although solidly rendered, are slow and very repetitive. When playing against a CPU character, one gets the impression that the game is somehow running at half-speed. The lag between the beginning of the turn, the rolling of the die, the movement of the game piece, and the action of the space seem to take a needlessly long time, and on more than one occasion, had me tapping my foot and rolling my eyes. Another problem I had was with the use of the accelerometer for the die. Although I've seen iPhone applications that use the accelerometer on a near 1:1 basis, iNetMania seems only to recognize up, down, left, and right. So "shaking" the cup with the die in it is a misnomer; the die appears to be as bored as the player.

iNetMania offers support for up to 4 players, in any combination of human and CPU. However, without online support, if you're playing with three of your friends, you'll all be passing the phone around to one another. The game also offers an Achievement System (described by the developer as "similar to Xbox 360 games"), but again, without online support, including leaderboards, the only people who will see these achievements are the other people you hand your phone too.

Overall, iNetMania is an okay game, it's just very dry and boring. Better animations, a more finished look to the overall game design, and online support would have gone a long way to making this a fun and diverting escape for iPhone owners and wannabe Mark Zuckerberg's alike. As it is, I can't see who would find this game to be a good investment, even at $4.99. Unless maybe you're making $50,000 per week...