Because it forces you to recall cocktail ingredients quickly and rewards you for getting things in the right order, I thought ICE might also be a nice learning tool for aspiring bartenders--kind of a boozy set of virtual flash cards, I guess. I ran my theory past a friend of mine, a certified bartender who's throwing away his once-promising career behind the mahogany for the degradations of journalism, and he was decidedly less enthusiastic about ICE's potential as a teaching tool. For starters, the game has a heavy European influence--measurements are in centiliters, not ounces, and some of the drinks are ones you won't hear ordered too often on this side of the Atlantic. (Indeed, one of the 50 recipes in ICE is something called Panther Milk--a combination of gin, condensed milk, and cinnamon that sounds so vile, I can't imagine any human being ever ordering one unless if they were on the business end of a bayonet.) More to the point, some of the recipes are off--ICE's take on the mai tai, my bartending chum point out, calls for two kinds of Cuban rums that you will have a hard time finding in the United States, what on account of that pesky embargo. Bottom line: ICE may be a fine diversion as a game, but if you're looking for a source of cocktail recipes, you'd be better off turning to something along the lines of .

ICE has a few other shortcomings. The music is repetitive and awful, though, thankfully, you can turn it off; doing so, however, will also turn off the neat sound effect that lets you know when a drink is properly shaken. You can save scores to the app or to the Internet, but not to both--and saving high scores on the Internet quits the app and launches the Safari browser on your mobile device.

I'm not sure Interactive Cocktail Entertainment constitutes a good casual game--if all the pouring and shaking don't draw unwanted attention to you, the shouting out of random cocktail ingredients certainly will. (Though in the Michaels household, we're decidedly used to people mumbling cocktail components under their breath.) Still, I find ICE curiously addictive. And I wish more apps put in the same amount of effort to make the most out of the iPhone's unique capabilities.

[]