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Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata loves his MacBook and his iPhone, and firmly believes Nintendo and Apple aren’t competitors (they appeal to different customers), and any talk of it makes him uncomfortable.
Yet Apple is most assuredly aiming at gaming (even if John Carmack thinks it’s between clenched teeth), especially with the funner iPod touch ever, and its game-heavy marketing.
With Nintendo profits down 52% for the first half of the year, and Apple selling record numbers of iPhones and reporting 100,000 apps and 2,000,000,000 downloads (with games weighed heavily among them).
Even with a dedicated gaming device like the DS (and perhaps a new platform on the way next year?), and a high-profile set of first-party properties like Mario, Metroid, Zelda, Pokémon, etc. those are tough numbers to look at. And Nintendo isn’t kidding themselves about that:
“If we can’t make clear why customers pay a lot of money to play games on Nintendo hardware and Nintendo software and differentiate ourselves from games on the mobile phone or iPhone, then our future is dark.”
Still, there are no plans for a WiiPhone (no matter how cool that might sound to us!), though an Amazon Kindle-like model, where the end-user doesn’t see any of the cell network bills, does appeal to Iwata.
Likewise, we can’t hold our breath for even older 1st party GameBoy titles to show up on the iPhone either. At least not anytime soon.
[Wall Street Journal -- thanks to everyone who sent this in!]
John Carmack has written an update on his Doom port for the iPhone, and he’s continuing the same candor he began with his Wolfenstein 3D post. What are we getting? A classic in almost every sense of the word:
Before I actually started coding on the project, I had visions of adding a lot of modern tuned effects to the core gameplay experience. It would certainly stay a sprite-and-sector based game, but there are many things that would be done differently with the benefit of a GPU and the wisdom of hindsight. Once I began actually working on it, it started to look like a bad idea for a number of reasons. I am trying to not be very disruptive in the main codebase, because I want it to stay a part of prBoom instead of being another codebase fork. While I can certainly add a bunch of new features fairly quickly, iterating through a lot of user testing and checking for problems across the >100 commercial Doom levels would take a lot longer. There really is value in ” classic” in this case, and there would be some degree of negative backlash to almost any “improvements” I made. There will still be a couple tiny tweaks, but nothing radical is changing in the basic play. It would be fun to take a small team, permanently fork it, and make a “Doom++” just for the iPhone, but that wouldn’t be the best first move. Maybe later.
Check out the full post for more on his experiences with iPhone game development.
[Thanks to Icebike for the tip!]
Every week I will be bringing you what I think are the week’s biggest stories and articles. Let’s get started, after the break! Read the rest of this entry »
Speculation on the 3rd Generation iPhone, plus: Just can’t get enough of that tasty iPhone 3.0 Beta! Listen in!
There’s so much going on in iPhone gaming right now, it’s almost as hard to keep up with that as with iPhone 3.0. Two large industry shows bookend much of the current news, iGames Summit and Game Developers Conference (GDC). With multiple awards, great discussions on the future, and a slew of upcoming product announcements, we figured we’d take a moment and round things up…
Waaaaaay back in the early days of the iPhone, word spread that legendary creator of 3D first person shooters like Wolfenstein and Doom, John Carmack was eager to develop games for the iPhone. Well, hopefully good things come to those who wait, because Carmack has just posted news that Wolfenstein is on its way, and there’s more to come.
In a monstrous blog post, Carmack explains what took so long, the pros (graphics more capable than Nintendo DS) and cons (driver overhead is far, far worse), design notes, and programming.
Must read for anyone interested in iPhone development and id games. For those who just want to play, Wolfenstein is coming, Doom is coming, and undisclosed but hopefully uber-cool new id-goodness is coming.
So, who’s loading their chain guns?
Thanks to those who joined us today for TiPb’s Live Meta-Blog of Apple’s iPhone 3.0 Preview Event. It was a great event, with great features like Cut/Copy and Paste, MMS, Stereo Bluetooth, Spotlight, Landscape Keyboard, and quite literally everything every fanboy wrote on their wish-list.
For our full transcript, read on after the jump! Read the rest of this entry »
You see, there is this little event on December 12th in San Jose called the ADC (Apple Developer Conference): iPhone Tech Talks. Engadget says that John Geleynse, Director of Technology Evangelism at Apple, made some interesting statements Including:
It’s a gaming console
It’s not a phone, it’s a console experienceWow. I have to admit, with some of quality games of late showing up in the App Store, I cannot disagree with this statement. After all, John Carmack, speaking at QuakeCon 2008 back in August said that the iPhone was akin to Sega’s Dreamcast console and almost on par with the PlayStation 2 and the original Xbox. If you think back to the early days of the PlayStation 2, the graphics look very similar. Now, you look at the PlayStation 2 with games like God of War and you can really see where gaming on the iPhone might be heading.
I have personally been enjoying the gaming on the iPhone. But I have to wonder; is Steve Jobs plan to penetrate the market with games in order to conquer all? The same method he has used by getting consumers to use Macs, then demanding them in the enterprise? Only time will tell. In the meantime, I plan on enjoying all the gaming the iPhone has to offer.
We love it when a plan comes together. What plan? How’bout Apple buying super low-power fabless chip design firm Palo Alto Semiconductor (PA Semi) back on April 23, which Steve Jobs later said would make “system-on-chips” for the iPhone and iPod? How about PowerVR graphics cores reaching a mega-licensing deal with an unnamed company? (Which might just rhyme with Snapple…) And how about now, a Mr. Wei-han Lien, formerly of PA Semi, updating his Linked[In] profile to read: “Senior Manager Chip CPU Architect at Apple”, and more specifically, “ARM CPU architecture team for iPhone”? (ARM having reportedly also reached a long term licensing deal with an unnamed company)
Put them all together, and what do we get? A scary hardcore look at what will drive the next (and/or next after next) iPhone v3. And according to Macrumors:
By developing its own ARM variant, Apple could create a processor that meets the specific needs of the iPhone and iPod, building support for functions such as the touch screen or scroll wheel into silicon and possibly savings on costs by reducing the number of processors needed in each device. In addition, Apple’ will be able to maintain tighter controls on who knows what about its future products by disposing of an outside chip supplier.
Wanna bet Steve calls them “screamers”? And Carmack claims PS2-class gaming?
(Not one, but two premiere game reviews on TiPb today. If you haven’t already checked out the review of Spore for the iPhone, go get your evolution on!)
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (Mobile) for the iPhone by THQ Wireless is available for $9.99 via the iTunes App Store. Alongside Spore, it’s one of the highest profile games released so far for the “funnest iPod (and iPhone) ever”.
Now, Star Wars was the first movie I remember seeing in the theater (which, yes, makes me old and tells you something about how big a deal actually going to a movie theater was in the days before PPV, torrentz, and home cinema!) I had a lot of the toys. I played a lot of the video games, from the early Nintendo fare that drove the sound track so far into overuse I still cringe when I hear Jawa, to the truly epic Battlefront II on the original Xbox. I even have had the prequels Jedi-mind-tricked out of my consciousness (”not the Star Wars you were looking for…”)
So yes, Star Wars is in my DNA every bit as much as Apple. Put them together and — even absent Megan Fox — and The Force Unleashed pretty much had me at announce. But would it hold me? Does THQ deliver Empire-class sizzle, or Phantom-style fizzle?
Check out the review, after the break!
