Oh Apple, how ever did you think you could keep developers from breaking down iPhone’s backdoor. Hmm? Not only have developers managed to find their way inside, knocking over lamps as they stumble in the dark, but one developer created a rather illuminating piece of software. meniacal laugh
Lights Off is the first, that we know of, “unofficial” game for iPhone. The first of many perhaps. The goal of this simple puzzle game is to switch off all the little blinking lights in order to advance levels. Installing this code isn’t for the faint of heart. It involves a bit of rubber chicken swinging and poking through iPhone’s hidden file system. Full instructions are on the site.
Don’t forget to turn out the Lights! Heh heh. Get it? Lights? Turn out…with the…oh never mind.
Figure 1: A family-oriented Disney-themed multiplayer iPhone Game where you use laser-shooting iPhones to burn forests and kill Bambi.
I’ll admit, it’s a wholly speculative article. There really isn’t much in terms of content. It should probably be on Page 2 of Macrumors, the place where speculative rumors go. But it’s not there. It pits Apple against Nintendo, when there could just as easily be a partnership.
the presence of strings about gaming (perhaps slightly less exciting are the strings about voice memos and Nike+iPod, no one is reporting about those) in a localizable.strings file found by download squad. But what do those localizable strings really mean?
Well, as Engadget notes, strings like that are all over the place. A lot of it is just copy-and-pasted code from other devices, as noted by Arn of MacRumors. Arn checked his history, and noted that the same text appears in the Apple TV localized strings, from iTunes 7.1, way back in March, and you know what? Still no games there either.
The following is taken from a June 29th post on Apple Insider:
/* ===== Mobile Phone Strings ===== /
...
"4301.136" = "Sending workout data to nikeplus.com…";
"4301.137" = "Downloading Nike+iPod voice kit…";
"4301.138" = "Installing Nike+*iPod voice kit…";
"4301.079" = "The mobile phone “^1” contains new voice memos.
Would you like to move these voice memos to your
iTunes library?";
"4320.300" = "iTunes has detected a Macintosh-formatted iPhone.
You must restore this iPhone before you can use it
on Windows.";
/* ===== iPhone Game Item Strings ===== */
"4329.001" = "Are you sure you want to remove the selected game
from your iPhone?";
"4329.002" = "Are you sure you want to remove the selected games
from your iPhone?";
This isn’t to say that I hope games don’t arrive on the iPhone. Au contraire, mes freres et mes soeurs, I dearly hope they arrive. But I don’t expect their arrival based from programmer strings in a localised file. I’ll wait for them, and hope for high-profile leaks and actual product announcements instead.
figure 1: the meat of the interface. run support, it’s always nice.
Though there aren’t any applications you can install on the iPhone, there are a lot of web apps that can be run. One of those finer web apps of which I’m fond is Pickleview. Pickleview is a web app that gives you real-time updates on what’s going on with your team, or any of the games that are playing, and in real time.
Get your gaming finger ready (no, not THAT one), iPhone fanboys. Word on the street says Apple is prepping the iPhone for gaming support. This coming from DownloadSquad in the UK, while perusing the latest update to iTunes looking for hidden gold, uncovered these two curious strings buried in the code…
/* ===== iPhone Game Item Strings ===== */
"4329.001" = "Are you sure you want to remove the selected game from your iPhone?";
"4329.002" = "Are you sure you want to remove the selected games from your iPhone?";
Interesting, no? Don’t go running outside in your boxers just yet, because we don’t know exactly what kind of games these might be. Are they native applications, fully hardware optimized, or lamo Flash-based games made possible by future Adobe Flash plugin support? We still won’t know that until Apple plays its hand.
Web Duck Hunt. It’s a bit slow, you have to lead it a fair bit on the iPhone, maybe a duck length or so and hope it doesn’t turn. Via iPhoney, though, it works great. If you want to see a lot of the dog giggling at you, though, go ahead and start it up. The above results were done with iPhoney; there’s no way a person could get their web high score of 150,000 from an iPhone without it. No way.
Update: I take it back. This web application is fully data-url-able, which means you should be able to run it from your iPhone bookmarks (i.e., it supports boonies mode). I still have a few card games to review, but this is by far the most impressive web game I’ve seen so far.
Those crack heads at Gizmodo have taken a close look at the recently released NES emulator for iPhone, which promises to be a credible gaming environment…once it bakes a bit longer that is. Right now the project remains in the early stage of development and lacks even some rudimentary functionality – audio support being one.
Jesus Diaz calls it “A good start and a good promise of things to come.” Oh really? But will it blend?
The hacking community continues to delight and amaze. Hacker stepwhite has ported the InfoNES core over to the iPhone. It’s not ready for general consumption; the controls apparently suck (as quoted by stepwhite), and it runs too slow to be playable… yet. Other important emulator functions like saving states and cheating outright also not supported, but at the rate that the hacking developer community has been moving, we’ll be playing Xbox 360 games on it by next week. The code is available at Google Code. [via]
GameDaily reports that PopCap Games has released a free web based version of its popular Bejeweled puzzle game for iPhone. Users can access the game by visiting www.popcap.com on their iPhones – Bejeweled loads automatically. I tried it out myself and found the experience to be incredibly disappointing. It’s nearly impossible to precisely select a specific jem, and often my taps weren’t recognized at all.
The developer of Diamenty had ported a version of PopCap’s popular Bejeweled game for the iPhone browser, and it is now the official version of PopCap’s Bejeweled game. To play, point your browser to popcap.com in your iPhone browser. If reading press releases is your thing, there’s a link. [via]
