I Love iOS Gaming
I've recently picked up a couple of decent iPad games, and have decided to write a little love-letter to iOS; the third mobile gaming love of my life.
3. Game Boy
My first was the Nintendo Game Boy, a treasured possession from my childhood. I still remember playing through the ache in my wee thumbs. I played Super Mario Land, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins, Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: Return from The Sewers and, of course, Tetris. There may have been others, but if there are I can't remember them.
The Game Boy was amazing, there was nothing like it at the time, it was the very first handheld with graphics and audio of that calibre, but the most astonishing thing about it was the catalog of games. A couple of other handhelds came out in the five or six years I played that thing solidly, and they were much better for the most part, they were in colour, had much bigger screens etc., but they didn't have Mario, or Tetris, or any of the other awesome properties Nintendo had attracted.
I fell out of love with my Game Boy when I discovered PC gaming. It just couldn't quite compete, though I'd still pick it up now and then for long car journeys or any amount of boring waiting (this was before smartphones, remember). The only major bummer for a kid was that it chewed through AA batteries. Rechargeables were a solution, but they stopped holding their charge after a couple of months, and it's tough for a boy of seven to keep up with those kinds of running costs.
2. PSP
The years went by, and then, around early 2005 a friend of mine came back from holidays in New York and handed me a package. "That'll be €280". I was baffled. I nodded and opened the box; a PSP (not yet released in Europe) with a couple of games (Wipeout Pure and Metal Gear Acid) and a memory card. Shit. I'd totally forgotten that he'd offered to pick one up for me.
I talked myself into being pleased on the walk to and from the ATM, and that feeling stuck; the PSP is a gorgeous machine. It had some brilliant games on it (like Star Wars: Battlefront II, Echochrome, Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories), and though I rarely pick it up anymore, I did play it a lot for the following four or five years, a couple of lifetimes for electronics. It was a lifesaver on flights, and with built-in wifi, actually came in handy on holidays for tapping out short emails and checking websites.
1. iOS
Like most people, my first iOS device was an iPhone, in my case an iPhone 3G. I had been waiting for someone to make something like this for my entire life, it was perfect as far as I was concerned.
The first games I remember getting hooked on were things like Drop7, Papi Jump and Solitaire and Breakout clones. Then "real" games started to seep in, games like Myst, Plants vs. Zombies, Peggle and even apps that facilitated text adventures. Then game the other big IPs making scaled-down games, Worms, Sim City, Civilization: Revolutions and then the board games like Monopoly and Cluedo. iOS classics began to emerge, like Flight Control, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, geoDefense and Osmos.
About nine to twelve months ago, I started to notice a shift in the calibre of games coming out, and I have to assume that it is a combination of a critical mass of developers and audience being on iOS, and the fairly big advances in mobile hardware by Apple. Serious, full, big games like complete ports of older GTA games, as well as near-concurrent releases alongside PC/Mac and console versions. Games like The Walking Dead, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Frozen Synapse, Bastion, Deus Ex: The Fall, Gemini Rue, LIMBO, Plants vs. Zombies 2, Shadowrun Returns and Temple Run.
I have bought and played all of these games on mobile platforms, every game mentioned in the post, and I have to say that the platform I'm most excited about is iOS. Looking back, every other mobile platform I've used, not just owned, made serious concessions on the quality and scope of the games on offer. iOS is the first platform I've used that doesn't do that. The version of The Walking Dead I play on my iPad is the same as the one you play on your Xbox. The graphics mightn't be quite as spiffy, but they're more than good enough, and on another iteration of hardware down the road, can be very quickly and painlessly patched in.
These days I wonder, when looking at a game, whether to buy it for my mobile platform or for PC/Mac. I loved playing (iOS exclusive) Deus Ex: The Fall on my iPad, it was like carrying a good book around with me; ditto XCOM, which has a surprisingly strong narrative and is near-identical to the PC/Mac and console version.
These days it's not uncommon to hear that now is the best time in a long time to be a gamer, that it's all coming up Milhouse:
The foreseeable future is looking particularly bright for iOS. I'm excited to own the hardware because I know that it's going to get better in the short term, when game controllers start to hit the market, and in the long term, when Apple and developers start to take advantage of the 64-bit architecture they've been investing in. Hopefully that all adds up to longevity. Add in support for future products like Apple TVs, and I'm, well...
