Yesterday’s lack of posting was due to a long awaited phone upgrade — to the 3GS. My former phone was a plain old phone that I’ve had for years, did calls great but nothing else. Now? Gaming, lots of gaming. And books.
My last portable gaming system was the Gameboy Advance SP several years ago, so it’s been awhile. The first thing I really noticed about using the phone for gaming is that the controls do indeed suck — for most games. Most would cite the phone’s design for these flaws, and in some ways it is its fault, but I think the problem lies elsewhere.
UI design. Of the games that I really notice problems on, Sonic the Hedgehog stands out as a great example. This is a straight port of the Genesis game (one of my childhood’s favorite games) and is designed for a system that has separate controls… not so with the iPhone. The result is small, transparent buttons on the game screen that cause much of the viewable world to be taken up with your thumbs (or, my big ol’ thumbs, at least). For a fast paced game like Sonic, this is horrid. It is playable, after getting use to the differences, but no where near as fun as it could be.
The next example is Doom Resurrection. I feel this game actually gets it right — the controls and the game play. For those that don’t know, this version of Doom is similar art-wise to Doom 3 and it is a shooter… on rails. You don’t control the actual movement of your character, just the weapon aim (accelerometer) and firing/reloading/dodging. The buttons are around the screen and small enough to not take up much space and the thumbs stay on the edges — mostly out of view. Just following along with the story and kill anything that pops up (there’s a lot of killing). Having the game on rails does make it seem more story driven than Doom 3, at least I notice the story more, and the enemy encounters are a bit more scripted — no running away when zombies come to gnaw on you.
Really thinking about Doom, I think Time Crisis or House of the Dead — it’s more similar to that than Doom 3.
OK, so gaming on the iPhone isn’t terrible, but it’s far from perfect. What I think needs to happen is a shift in design… for the UI used by games. Interaction with the iPhone is different from any other system and thus needs a different approach to using it. We haven’t gotten there quite yet. Once this does happen, I think the iPhone will be a very solid portable gaming device.
Oh, and Aion beta was this weekend. Only played a bit of it though, for some reason I was getting more lag than I do on the Chinese servers. Crazy.
And, for those that care, the third part of the Necropolis campaign is going to be posted sometime tonight/tomorrow morning.
