I've loved the banner-style notifications ever since they were introduced in iOS 5. An alert that pops down from the top of your screen and then vanishes, leaving you doing what you were before? Awesome. Sometimes, though, you can't reach a screen element that appears behind the notification until it goes away, and that's less awesome.
Yeah, that's OK, text message. I didn't need to actually play my game.
Luckily, there is a way to dismiss those notifications immediately. If you swipe right to left across them, they vanish, leaving you all the screen real estate you need.
(This doesn't work if you swipe left to right.)
The only thing that I don't like about this feature is that dismissing a notification will often pause a game you're playing, but hey, that's better than the zombies getting into your house because you couldn't use one of your killing tools. Stupid zombies.