Although Editor Emeritus (and Phone different podcaster) Mike Overbo lost his mind when over the Spore demo during the iPhone SDK Keynote, but yours-truly was much more excited over Super Monkey Ball. Why, well, for many of the same reason that developer Ethan Einhorn gave to GameCyte: you can pick it up and play it without having to think about the interface. I’ve whiled away many an hour directing little crystal balls down checkered ramps towards that little flag. Also: monkeys.
In any case, the above video is a bit of a recap of what we we saw during the keynote. However, there’s one bit that bears repeating:
When we started on that two-week trek to get Super Monkey Ball up and running on the iPhone in demo form, it was incredibly easy to work with the SDK. We were working with the development team that had not worked with Cocoa and OpenGL, and it’s pretty astonishing that they were able to make that level of performance happen that quickly. That bodes really well for what we can do in the future on a device like that.
Developing apps for the iPhone is easy and therefore we can and should expect all sorts of great games popping out. So we won’t be limited to Quake on the iPhone, because porting fun games like Super Monkey Ball is easy enough that a developer would be crazy not to do it.
What casual games are you hoping for on the iPhone? Answer here and be entered for a chance to win a $100 iTunes Gift Card!
Remember that Quake III video running on jailbroken iPod Touches a couple of days ago? Engadget hunted down the developers and wrung us out some more:
According to developers Cameron and Marcia Tofer of Hermitworks managed to get the game up and running on the touches in, “Between eight and twelve hours,” using jail-broken units, no official SDK, and modified code that added basic accelerometer support. The game in the video is being hosted on one of the devices and played over a local network — and the Tofers claim that running a full 64-player match wouldn’t be out of the question.
A couple of developers? 8-12 hours? Without the SDK? Scaling up to 64 players?! Holy FPS! If that’s what a couple of devs can churn out in a day, what can Carmack and the id software team come up with given months and offical SDK goodness? The mind boggles. Boggles and explodes.
While we’ve speculated about the huge potential for iPhone/iPod Touch gaming, is it possible we’re still underestimating it?
Pre-SDK, Engadget brings us word — and video — of Quake 3 absolutely shredding Apple’s little hand-hand revolution. Tilt-to-move, touch-to-fire, wi-fi to multi-player, it looks beyond sweet to me, and this is almost certainly still an early-stage, pre-app launch demo. And I’m not even sure it’s coming officially from Carmack and id Software at this point!
But words don’t do it justice. Check out the video after the break!
Read the rest of this entry »
