A super… a monkey… a ball. A Super… a Monkey… a Ball. These are not three different games!
Does the above phrasing sound familiar? Steve Jobs used this same kind of phrasing when first introducing the iPhone waaaaaaaay back in January 2007. Much has happened since then! We finally have the iPhone 3G and, even more importantly (in my opinion), we have iPhone 2.0 and the Apps Store!
You may have heard of a little game called Super Monkey Ball from SEGA? It’s only just the top app at the iTunes App Store. It’s only $9.99. We got a taste of it several months ago at the last WWDC during the keynote and there has been salivation, hand-wringing and garment-rending ever since. Finally, with the release of iPhone 2.0 and the App Store last week, the venerable Super Monkey Ball is available for download from the iTunes App Store via your desktop or right to your iPhone.
Does it measure up to the hype? The answer is — (suspense killing ya?) Full review is a click away!
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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!
