Cybersaurus Comes to iPhone

by Eric March on June 16, 2008 at 8:54 pm

Mobile developers Darxun have made an appearance on the iPhone to port their 3D shooter Cybersaurus to the iPhone. First released on the Palm platform two years ago, and later ported to Symbian devices, Cybersaurus pits cybernetic dinosaurs called Robosaurs, who have come back to reclaim the galaxy that was once theirs against you, a lone gunman who also happens to be piloting a human-guided robosaur. Fight onslaughts of metal monsters, find energy and powerups and try and stay alive.

Darxun chose to forgo the usual polygon 3D approach to first person gaming and instead opted to use the less common voxel (VOlumetric piXEL) approach to level design. Voxels are a bit technical to explain in layman’s terms because they don’t behave like their half-brothers, pixels, do, but I can say that the upshot to voxels is that they allow programmers to design landscapes that are dynamic and smooth without the boxy, planar appearance of ordinary polygon-based landscapes. They are ideal for dynamically generating procedural or fractal landscapes that can be different every time you play, and are perfect for objects and landscapes that can be arbitrarily deformed. The down side is that voxels have never to my knowledge been supported by 3D hardware acceleration, so they must be rendered by the main CPU, which can be pretty demanding on the system. If anyone remembers the Windows-based Infogrames flop called Outcast just before the turn of the century, then you know what I’m talking about.

Cybersaurus does not have dynamically generated landscapes, nor can they be deformed, so the only reason I could ever fathom for Darxun’s choice of 3D technology was that they just maybe looked a little nicer than polygons. At least they’re supposed to anyway, as the visuals in Cybersaurus are average at best. The landscapes are drab and largely featureless, making you feel like you’re playing through an endless Martian dune, though it is occasionally broken up by small, voxel-generated structures. The rolling and undulating hills look nice from a technical perspective, but the novelty fades pretty quickly.

The performance hit for using voxels is fairly steep, too; at the best of times Cybersaurus might manage 20FPS in an area with no other objects, enemies, or a particularly complex landscape, but most of the time it seems to clock in at about half that, and while it doesn’t make the game unplayable, it certainly doesn’t contribute to the adrenaline-pumping sensation of fast action a game like this is supposed to engender.

The virtual control pad is laid out effectively, with buttons that are large enough for most thumbs to mash on, but the performance of the game seems to make the controls a bit twitchy and unsure of themselves. This is compounded by the forward motion of your character, which is subject to inertia. You don’t start off walking straight away. Instead, you need to build up some steam before you’re running at full-tilt. Similarly, you don’t stop right away, instead coming to a rolling stop. This might make sense if you were in a vehicle of some sort, but you’re a bipedal metal dinosaur, so it doesn’t seem to make much sense. There’s no “back” key either, just forward, turn left, and turn right.

It’s nice to see commercial games making their way to the iPhone through the jailbreak scene, no doubt — and yes, this is a commercial title, so you have to pay if you want to play — and while this is clearly more than a freshman effort, it just doesn’t have the chutzpah to stand up to most of the other games we’ll be seeing the App Store churn out. (I am presuming that this will eventually be released through the app store once it goes live.) It’s fun for a short while, but the performance issues, lackluster visuals and repetitive gameplay won’t have you reaching for it in your spare moments very often. It wasn’t particularly enjoyable on the Palm when it was new, and despite a more powerful platform in the iPhone, it’s still not particularly fun.

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(Source: Installer)

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