Last week I noted the release of Bloom, Brian Eno’s first generative music iPhone app, which — to say the least — is beautifully done. Less accessible, perhaps, than the anthropomorphic charm of the lively Electroplankton, but as duly hypnotic and engaging as you would expect. It’s safe to say, though, that less than a week out of the gate, Bloom’s stint as the iPhone’s musical vanguard has been lapped, beat, and trounced by an app that, under the right conditions, could herald a minor audio revolution.

That app is RJDJ, from what appears to be a team of mad European sonic scientists with a good amount of credibility behind them: team co-founder Michael Breidenbruecker was one of the original staff behind last.fm before its $280 million sale to CBS, who explains that the idea for the app had actually come previous to that company’s founding, but needed the near decade of technological progression to catch up to his foresight.

Then what is RJDJ? Pick apart the acronym — Reality Jockey, as much as Disc Jockey– and it shifts a bit more into focus: it’s a compilation-album-like framework divided into song-like “scenes” (each with its own cover art and individual composer), but as opposed to passively listening to each, RJDJ acts as a reality-altering real-time audio processor that modifies and enhances your surroundings.

Frank Barknecht’s Gridwalker, for instance, generates harmonious bleeps not entirely far off from Eno’s Bloom, but modifies their intensity based on the volume of the input. Sit quietly and Gridwalker slowly drips out its subtle tones, but move into a noisy crowd and it responds in kind with a more hyper pitched composition.

What’s genuinely surprising is just how potent its comparatively mild hallucinogenic powers are, particularly the ’scene’ from New Zealander (and former Sidhe staffer!) Damian Stewart. I’m (mostly) sure it’s not just the latent techno-hippie in me that’s suddenly shot into full bloom, but taking it for a test drive with a late night cigarette break was a revelation: his ‘Eargasm’ transformed every exhale into a glittering swirl of reverberating air and distant suburban dog barks into sudden colorful bursts. Essentially, if you’ve ever wanted to live directly inside that warm nostalgic analog echo that molasses-drips from every Boards of Canada album, your magic key is a $2.99 App Store download away, as witnessed by this demo video.

Beyond that mood altering gimmickry, though, the company’s intentions are as noble as they are lofty. Apart from the six scenes that come with the first RJDJ ‘album,’ the group has at least 10 more waiting in the wings for both free and paid future release. Interestingly, not all are simple sonic modifiers — many will introduce motion-controlled elements like turntable scratches, what appears to be a bit Generations-esque audio-ping-pong game, and phase shifting ala Reich.

The company fully intends to get new artists in on the aural action as well, hoping to evolve RJDJ from proof of concept into a true platform for new audio experiences, somewhat similar to how Harmonix is challenging the idea of passively listening to a band’s music as opposed to participating in it through Rock Band or Phase. As intoxicated as I currently am with the app, it’s admittedly too early to tell whether the company’s “sprints” will continue to churn out scenes as magical as their initial release, but even half as good would be 100% better than what we’ve never heard before.

Right, sorry for that title. Today’s news will have been dominated, of course, by the announcement of a new model DS, most notable for bringing the WiiWare concept down to size with downloadable games of its own, though no solid word has come quite yet whether it’ll herald in the same minor indie revolution as as its console counterpart.

Just how important WiiWare has been to helping indies find their voice has been fresh on my mind lately for a number of reasons: primarily as I’ve just this past weekend completed 2D Boy’s World of Goo for an upcoming print review, a game I predict will make quite an oil-slicked splash even more so on its eventual WiiWare release than on PC. There’s a lot I could (and am itching to, frankly) say about the game, but I’ll let the 300-some ultra dense words I wrote on it do the talking, when they finally comes out, and you wouldn’t want me ruining the best bits ahead of time, anyway.

Suffice it to say, I’ve had sustained a healthy man-crush on 2D Boy lead Kyle Gabler since the days when his Experimental Gameplay Project output made frequent and reliable Edge Online output, and even though WoG has moments that nearly drove me to book tickets to California to personally set fire to his car (he only has a bike, it turns out), from Chapter Four to the staff roll the love wholly came back anew. Be excited for this game full stop.

WiiWare this week has also been the blessed recipient of the revitalization of the bit Generations series, Nintendo’s oft-forgotten attempt to sex up the release of the Game Boy Micro with a boutique collection of low-bit art games from Skip and Q-Games, each of which devoted a massive amount of cartridge space to partnering with various electronic outfits (just as Q would go on to do with their PixelJunk series), most prominently Cornelius’s soundtrack for Coloris, which resulted in this delicious end-game video.

The re-release of Skip’s bitG title Orbital (that soundtrack!) as Art Style: Orbient marks the first of what Nintendo has alluded to as a series of at least two more, and its first official introduction to the West, after pulling an appearing-disappearing-reappearing act for a solid year, debuting at E3 2005 as ‘Digitylish’ and on ESRB lists in 2006 as ‘Digiluxe.’ While I can’t say I agree with the Art Style brand over bitG’s, that NoA has finally found its long-overdue confidence to give the games a stateside debut deserves credit nonetheless.

Finally, buried in Nintendo’s post-conference press release were two simple lines that Pixel’s certified freeware hit Cave Story (pictured in the header above) would be coming to the service by this holiday season. Cave Story’s another game that I’d tirelessly talked up in print and elsewhere on its original translation, and spent a good deal of time re-playing when it popped up again on the grey market tip for PSP. Easily the most polished freeware platformer of the past three years, again, it should go without saying that its eventual WiiWare release — which will feature new content — should be fully on your radar.

But WiiWare’s been only a fraction of my gaming plate lately — from PixelJunk Eden, with its Baiyon soundtrack seeing a downloadable release via the PlayStation Network today (at a significant discount from its import CD price), to Newtonica, the iPhone’s equivalent of a 22nd century Game & Watch game, from Chibi-Robo creator Kenichi Nishi with music by former Warp dark horse Kenji Eno (with my first submitted score now in free-fall [search for 'B00' with zeroes]) — these are exciting times indeed.

While everyone’s attention has been turned to the wild frontiers of its touchier big brother, a number of major publishers have been covertly sending out small bursts of genuinely excellent material to the runt of Apple’s litter — the now somewhat neglected original iPod/Nano.

I’ve already written at some length about Phase, Harmonix’s grossly underappreciated iPod game that gives players the freedom to turn any song in their mp3 archives into a game — no need to wait for the developer’s crack squad of dot-placers to do the same in Rock Band.

Square Enix then made a surprise debut on the platform with Song Summoner, a Final Fantasy Tactics-alike strategy RPG that uses your songs to generate your troops and your listening habits to strengthen them, and, most recently, EA’s long-awaited Spore made its debut on the iPod (albeit an accidental disappearing-reappearing one) ahead of its PC release.

I haven’t yet had the time to delve into Spore Origins here, but suffice it to say that, with the main game completed, there’s actually considerably more depth than meets the microbial eye, in the form of an arena-mode metagame of which I’ve only just started to (somewhat humilatingly) scratch the surface.

All of that’s a bit of a windy prelude to say how genuinely surprised and delighted I was to stumble onto the iTunes Store tonight and find that Namco had very quietly released a portable version of its long-lost cult arcade game Star Trigon.

Originally released to essentially no acclaim in 2002, Star Trigon is a spin-off of Namco’s Mr. Driller franchise that sees players using planetary gravitation to hop from star to star, forming triangles to rescue abandoned “Uchujin” (a.k.a. “those little blue guys from Mr. Driller”), as demonstrated in the video above which compiles Paleface’s original off-screen missives — Paleface being one of very few people who’s sung the game’s praises in the intervening years.

I’d always half wondered if Namco would trot out the original in the form of a Driller unlockable or arcade collection, but the iPod is essentially the perfect platform for a game which staunchly and proudly touted its one-button play from the beginning, where it suffers from none of the awkward downgraded control schemes of d-pad reliant titles.

Find the game on the iTunes Store here, and proudly add it to what should be your Nano’s growing library of overlooked b-side classics.