The State of iPhone Gaming

What's the latest on this new handheld platform?

It's the wild west of game development. A large, budding, expanding, primed audience with the power to buy at any time at any place on any whim. Tales of riches stemming from short dev times, low cost of entry to developers and few restrictions on quality or content. A device touting one billion downloads in nine months.

I've played on this thing more in the last four months than I have my PSP, Wii and 360 combined. Not because the games are higher quality or better but because I love using it, it's always by my side as an almagamation of utilities, entertainment and communication. Whether on the toilet, walking down the street or waiting for an elevator, there's always time to break out What Bird NZ or do a quick calculation.

To understand why it's a burgeoning gaming device you must first understand the allure of the device itself and the rapidly expanding user base. But that's not very interesting. It is by no means a perfect gaming device. Sometimes the screen looks like a communal finger rubbing expo. After ten minutes of stroking your finger can get warm. Friction comes into play. Children start shrieking. Not to mention the App Store, where everything has coalesced into a gaming library full of ports, cash ins, budget gaming, clones of yesteryear and trash. Like the paintbrush-drawn-animal sound-sequencer. Which could actually be considered awesome.

Traditional developers have been slow to capitalise. Too slow and cumbersome to appreciate the potential, too busy formulating cost benefit analysis, too busy tied up in long console titles eeking out the margins. Content to sit and watch it expand before they dip their toes. Meanwhile, agile indie devs have poured in through the gaps, quickly introducing copies of popular franchises, rhythm games, word games, physics games, ported games, match three games. New publishing empires are being born. Chillingo and Gameloft are emerging as iphone gaming powerhouses, quickly amassing small libraries of quality titles.

The point is, the door to easy monetization for game devs has been flung wide open. Everyone is invited. High volume, low price point, easy access is the order of the hour.

Amongst all this is a warm nurturing placenta of short, original, quality titles that bespeak of the iPhone and its strengths. I want to take the time to point out a few of the new breed and keep in mind the price of these titles, most of them were picked up on special for the fine price of $1.29 (prices listed below are at time of writing).

Eliss - $5.29

A late entry to this list. IGF nominee Eliss is a game that truly lives on the iPhone with its multi-touch gameplay. You will feel like Tom Cruise, but taller and without gloves, rearranging items on a three-inch screen sitting on a table. Or your lap. This game does not translate well until you actually play it. Graphically, sonically and game-wise it's one of the best.

TNA Wrestling - $6.49

Turn based wrestling. I named my wrestler Science. Science is ginger. He wears black undies, black singlet and white gloves. I've started fights in the changing rooms, scored hot b*tches, learnt new moves, and cussed some bros/hoes down something chronic. Admittedly this game sounds perfect on paper (to me), but in reality the gameplay is somewhat hokey but cant help being drawn in by the artwork and amusing dialogue that harkens back to the times of adventure gaming. Only without the adventure. So just the gaming.

Geo Defence - $5.29

iPhone developers to tower defence games are like moths to photons. My first experience was with Field Runners, a commendable tower defence game. Zombie Attack! (http://www.toybotdiaries.com/zombie.html) was the second. Quite good. There've been a few other floozies to grace my library, but the stand out is Geo Defence. It has graphics and a name inspired by Geometry Wars yet with some unique twists of its own. For example, gravitational vortexes which suck debris from fallen creeps and pump power back into your turrets. You can even link two vortecies to create a kind of tesla-type electrical coil utilizing some strange properties of physics. This game has a tough learning curve, but that's ultimately what is so rewarding. Experimenting, combining, upgrading, stacking towers like it twas the apocolypse in neon.

Geo Defence Vortex Tutorial

Uniwar - $4.19

I was silently lamenting a dearth of good turn based strategy games for many a month. Last week delivered Uniwar. It's a somewhat standard turn based strategy game. What makes it non standard is the iPhone. In your pocket is a turn based strategy game with a fully fledged campaign mode, eight-player multiplayer, three races and over 50 maps. Play up to twenty multiplayer games at once. This sits in your pocket. You can take it out of your pocket to engage in 'war' (uniwar), with your 'friends' anywhere you have cellular telephone access. Which is nearly anywhere.

Graphically it's not winning any awards. The tiles appear top down. The units appear isometric. The animations point in the wrong direction (because they are isometric on top down tiles). The Kraelean race have some dubious looking units. There's a mixture of tree ents, sea slug walrus's, scorpions and zerg, so not much cohesion to be had. But it is what it is, and what it is is a portable and easily playable mutliplayer turn based strategy game for four dollars. It's a culmination of technology, portability and the science of the future.

Edge - $6.49

The award winning Edge. Escheresque cuboid puzzle game. Original content, original music. Hot UI. Hot graphics. Slightly above average game. My body wants to use the word 'charming' but my mind says no.



What Bird NZ – FREE

This is my wild card pick. Sometimes I walk in the bushes with this game app and play bird sounds hoping to attract birds to my iPhone for mating. Other times I recline on the couch, select a random bird sound and see if my lady can pick which bird it is. Great fun for the adults. Not strictly a game, but we are talking about NATIVE BIRD SOUNDS. An American colleague wanted this app to show his American family. Apparently our birds wax some sweet lyrical tunes. Well, guess what, it's all captured digitally on the this device. Ready for you to download. For free.

RPGs

I want to briefly mention action RPGs. In the short life of the iphone this genre seems squalidly empty. iDracula has emerged as a sprite-based graphical beauty in the vein of Diablo. It feels like a vertical slice of a decent action RPG. It's lacking character persistence, story and expansive maps, but it's full of combat, weapons, mobs and perks. This game feels like a harbinger of what is yet to come on the iPhone. Perhaps when the dev budgets, audience and prices escalate.

iPhone gaming is rapidly emerging from its infancy as developers embrace the platform driven by stories of quick riches in an easy market place. The App Store is punctuated by low cost, quick development, short play time games tailored to the mobile device has become the home of a new gold rush in gaming. With iPhone 3.0 there will be an additional surge as push notification makes its way into the mulitplayer gaming scene. Not to mention that with in-game transactions it's going to be easier than ever to for devs to monetise their software. This may spawn a swath of annoying micro feature purchase games to wade through; it may also trim down the size of the App Store as free games can be combined with paid titles. Whatever happens, the future of this platform is already an interesting one.

-By Jamie Churchman

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