Gaming On The iPhone Comments

I agree entirely. I downloaded a free game called I believe Tic Tac Toe and was literally dumbfounded by the sumptuous 2D graphics and gameplay depth which made the Mariana trench look like a small dip. If McCormack and co can work some 3d magic with a processor punishing version of Snakes and Ladders then I'd be more than willing to cough up.

Hmm I hear a rumour that you can EVEN make telephone calls on the iPhone ;-)

So how well do the accelerometer controls work aboard moving vehicles?

I love how you think that 128MB of RAM is amazing!

The only reason it's at all useful is that the iPhone doesn't allow multitasking (apart from very low level system processes) and so most of the RAM is available to game in.

Modern hardware such as the Touch Diamond, Raphael, and Blackstone all have hardware accelerated 3D graphics, much more RAM, and faster processors. Are these not "the future of mobile gaming"? (They're also cheaper, and have greater pixel density for better graphics)

The thing about a gaming platform is that it has to stay constant to ensure compatibility. What happens when Apple release the next iPhone and the specs allow for more advanced games. Assuming devs take advantage of this wouldn't the existing (much larger) user base be stuffed for new games. I guess the alternative is that the hardware remains static, which I can't imagine being an option.

Or is my thinking totally misguided?

The only reason why iWhatever games work so well is because there's only 1 hardware platform to code for.

Take Nokia's NGage. Or Windows Mobile. Both of them are widespread, with Symbian being the most widespread out of all of the smartphone OS. While some people claim incredulously that the iPhone is a smartphone, the fact that only some applications can run in the background makes it no different from SE's feature phones and Nokia's S40 series.

Were S40 to be counted as a smartphone OS as well, Nokia's marketshare would be staggering.

Back to the topic at hand, taking S60's NGage 2.0 for example, while I personally feel that the level of graphics look similar, and on some occasions, better on NGage, the widespread range of Symbian toting phones don't really allow the programmers to efficiently optimize the game for say, the N85, as it may result in a less optimal experience on the, say, N95. (Yes yes, N95 is on S60 9.1, while N85 is on S60 9.2, but they're very similar.)

The iPhone and the iPod Touch share similar hardware. Sure, they're different, but the core components are similar. While if you looked at Nokia's S60 phones, and the wide range of WM phones from differing manufacturers out there, the core components differ, and differ greatly in some cases.





In case it was too long for you to read, summarizing it, the only reason why iWhatever gameplay can work so well is because of the consistant and unchanged hardware. Which, on occasion, loses out to Nokia's/WM's varied hardware, if we're only talking about graphics.