The Second Generation of iPhone Gaming Is Here
by Eric March on December 1, 2008 at 12:12 am
It’s a given that any new platform goes though its initial stage of growing pains. Developers, new to the platform, struggle not only with learning to program on it, but ultimately with learning the finer points of programming on it — the little tips, tricks and secrets that can turn a mediocre project into a fantastic one. The iPhone SDK debuted at the end of March of this year to great fanfare, and experienced developers like Pangea, Sega, and others, were able to churn out some pretty good stuff — oh hell, let’s face it, we were all looking for the drool bibs before the App Store opened for business.
But with time and experience, developers get better as they learn the ins and outs of the SDK, explore its nooks and crannies and churn out better, tighter, more efficient, and certainly further-reaching code than they did the last time in order to squeeze even more out of the platform now that they know more about what they’re working with.
Couple that with the timely, celebrated death of Apple’s NDA so that developers could finally communicate freely with one another and offer each other assistance, and you’ve got the primordial soup from which the next generation of games will emerge. And emerge they will. They’re starting to emerge now.
One thing that I can’t help but have noticed over the last week or two is that better and better games have started appearing on the App Store, and still better games are in their final stages of development, ready to emerge and show us much more of what the iPhone and iPod Touch are capable of. Some of my recent reviews on Frapstr have shown a trend of late towards better development leading to better gaming. Impressive titles like Ducky Derby, Snap! and Animal Snap!, Darts, 2079, Powerboat Challenge, Spawn Illuminati, Armado, and more, are showing that developers are starting to come into their own with regards to more seasoned game development.
But these are only just the start of the next generation of iPhone and Touch gaming. Take Pangea’s recently released Antimatter (video, App Store link), for example. Where Enigmo was just a port of their PocketPC game for Intel 2700G-enabled PDAs, Antimatter is their first ground-up effort exclusively for the iPhone and Touch, and it is absolutely stunning. The sheer number of objects and particles floating around the screen at any given time, which exceeds even Enigmo’s impressive engine, is astounding, especially given that the frame rate is kept way up there. It shows that Pangea have gained a much greater understanding of the hardware and the SDK and thus are able to create games with much more detail.
Then there’s Handheld Games Corp.’s TouchSports Tennis ‘09 (video, App Store link), a 3D tennis title released a couple of weeks ago that sports gameplay and graphics that rival the Sony PSP — in fact, it looks and plays rather like a scaled-down, handheld version of Sega’s Virtua Tennis for Dreamcast.
Then there’s ngmoco, who’s hotly anticipated title Rolando (video) still isn’t out yet, but who have already been working on two other games, Dropship (video) and Dr. Awesome (video), all of which are due to come out within relatively close proximity of one another. While Rolando shows that they had their chops from the start, Dr. Awesome, and particularly Dropship, show that they’ve managed to become even more seasoned before they’ve so much as released a single game.
And need I mention Fastlane Street Racing? (video, App Store link) This evolutionary racer features details and gameplay that have outstripped every other racer to come before it.
This is also to say nothing of many other existing games that are of top-notch quality, as well as very impressive forthcoming titles like EA’s Need for Speed, Gameloft’s Heroes of Sparta, Brothers in Arms, and Ferrari GT Evolution, Maxis’ Sim City 3000, and more. Those who doubted the iPhone’s success as a gaming platform must be finding it harder and harder to deny the capabilities of the device in spite of the complaints when faced with a growing plethora of titles that undeniably show off more of the platform’s potential for some serious video game action — especially with such rapid growth of both the platform and the number of titles available for it. I’ve never seen a gaming platform take off as fast as the iPhone — and it’s not even designed primarily as a gaming platform. It just so happens that it’s turning out to be a very good one.
There is no doubt now that the next generation of iPhone gaming is here, and if I do say so myself, it’s looking might, mighty fine.
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