The iPhone has apps for reading the news, checking bank accounts, and streaming music. Now it's got one for exacting revenge on overpaid CEOs and Ponzi schemers.

Squash the $treet, a creation of Last Legion Games, lets you "watch the shady bankers, creepy fraudsters, and corrupt CEOs flee their gilded offices, sprinting for the nearest escape vehicle," as the creators put it. Once they're out on the street, in the "festering heart of the city where all the thievery and greed began," you can "squash and flick the snarky scoundrels."

The app is a testament to the status of videogames─and iPhone apps in particular─as pieces of cultural criticism. Talented developers who want to make a pointed criticism of our collective economic mess (and, they hope, a wad of cash) can code a game in just a few weeks, putting it on the market while tempers are still simmering.

The game came out July 4─note the symbolism there─and had a modest number of downloads in its first few weeks. But the backlash after last week's earnings reports was a godsend. After Goldman Sachs announced a profit of $3.4 billion, and Citigroup, JPMorgan, and other banks announced similarly strong results, bank antipathy caused sales to triple. (It also helped that Gizmodo, a popular blog for videogames, mentioned the app.)

A stroll through the iTunes store yielded at least a couple of other anti-banker apps─including What a Fall, in which the player catches bankers swan-diving from skyscrapers so they'll still be around to "recover the world economy," and BonusHunter, in which you play a greedy banker snatching bonus money ("Surprisingly enough, there are rules!")─but Squash the $treet seems to be the first professionally made game.