Over the last few months, we’ve been developing a game for iPhone under our indie label SMASHWORX which has gotten me thinking about the hoopla surrounding the platform.  I love my iPhone, and honestly I can’t picture myself going back to a regular phone but I wonder if Apple’s “game” platform can ever replace  a real gaming platform like DS or PSP.  Spec wise Apple has the far superior machine but specs do not make great games, Wii is a shining example of the underpowered platform kicking the proverbial behind of its over-muscled competitors.  There is actual video footage of me saying that PS3 will be a colossal flop right before the launch, looks like I was right.  

So what’s my beef?  In a word: input.  How many tilting games can I actually play? More importantly, how many will I pay for?  Dragging games like Gal-Con show a lot more potential for growth, and that is the direction that I find interesting as a designer.  However, in the long run I can’t help but feel that there are whole genres of games that are literally impossible, or at the very least impossible to implement in a satisfying way.  There’s something about actual buttons that can’t be duplicated with a “virtual” joystick.  Go ahead, try playing Miss Pacman… it’s terrible, you just can’t get a good feel for it, though it is just an emulated version of the old game.  

The closest a  ”virtual joystick” game came to a somewhat satisfying experience for me has been “Hero of Sparta” by Gameloft a somewhat obvious rip off of “God of War”.  It’s a fun little game, and though their implementation is a little better I can’t help but feel that clicking on an arrow to jump just doesn’t feel as good as hitting a physical button with actual springs like on my old reliable PSP (1000 series thank you very much).   The act of having to constantly look away from the action to see if my finger had slid too far off the joystick, is annoying at best.  So as designers, I believe this is our challenge:  to make games that actually feel good on iPhone, instead of trying to reproduce the feel of buttons on a glass pane.  A tall order I know, but no more daunting than the poor slobs who tried to make a dot be a knight and a blob be a dragon on the Atari 2600.

That said, iPhone has one great thing going for it, and it has nothing to do with what kind of processors are in it. It’s the distribution mechanism.  iPhone has caused a renaissance in small game development.  Apple totally got it right, they take a percentage and developers get to put more or less any content they want on it at the price they want to sell it at.  Players get a really really easy way to download and pay for a game.  No cartridges or tiny proprietary discs, no warehouse shortages, no having to deal with Walmart demanding that you lower the price of your game, in a nutshell, no million middlemen between your game and the player.  

Could you imagine developers having that kind of freedom on DS or PSP?  It would be awesome.  To me this is the natural progression of mobile gaming.  So Sony, Nintendo, what’s the hold up?  Make it easy for developers to put games on your platform, as easy as Apple has.  It’s ridiculous that Sony says it may get out of the hardware business, and do what?  Your problems are easy to solve, just give the players what they want… An inexpensive clamshell device that has ergonomically placed buttons that don’t make your hands cramp up on extended play and oh yeah how about two analog sticks that are as good as the one on my Pocket Neo-Geo?  Add that to an army of developers who would kill to put their games on your platform by having a ridiculously low barrier to entry and you could at least give Nintendo a run for their money.  Nintendo are you listening?  No one cares about having a terrible camera on their gaming device or a terrible web browser either.  Guys, please remove your heads out of whatever orifices they are trapped in, and maybe just maybe, you could beat Apple at what used to be your own game.