You might not be a believer in the iPad. I understand that. I respect that. As it stands, the device is pretty lackluster, and it’s certainly lacking in the gaming department. PopCap believes in it, though, or at least one of the co-founder’s does.

John Vechey recently talked with Eurogamer about the future of Apple’s newest gadget and the role it would play in PopCap’s development. “The iPad’s important,” he said, “but I think it’s going to be more important in three years … it’s probably going to take the second generation to make it really, like, ‘Wow!’” I’d say at least the second. Unless Apple’s initial release was the worst tease of all time, the iPad has a long way to go before it becomes a must-have item.

It’s not just the device Vechey is attracted to, it’s the accessibility to new content. “Here’s this new device that gets to more people with a really great e-commerce model attached to it … it’s really easy to buy on the iPhone — that’s part of what makes it successful.”

Read the full interview at Eurogamer.

Someone needs to sit down with John Koller, Sony’s hardware marketing manager, and give him a quick lesson on cause and effect. He seems to think the iPad, as with the iPod Touch and iPhone, will drive PSP sales for customers looking for “deeper, richer console.” Personally, I think he’s nuts.

The numbers look good – the PSP and PSP Go have tripled in combined sales since the launch of the iPhone. But that doesn’t make the two related. My guess is the price of the PSP has gone down so much and the units have been hacked so many times that it’s become accessible enough to encourage a lot of gamers to buy.

I talk a lot on Gadget Teaser about the death of dedicated devices and the future of the all-in-wonder. I think handheld gaming is following the trend toward multi-purpose machines. Apple has simply put together a better system for supporting that kind of platform. If Sony doesn’t make some changes, I wouldn’t be surprised to see PSP sales plateau in the next 2 years.

Source: WSJ

Reuters ran an article on Tapulous the other day, you know, the guys responsible for the iPhone/iPod Touch game Tap Tap Revenge. Obviously the game has seen crazy adoption rates, but I couldn’t believe just how crazy things have become. The game has been installed more than 20 million times, generating sales of nearly a million dollars per month.

The kicker? Tapulous has just 20 employees. That’s it. The report says the company is profitable, which is as unsurprising as things get. Can you split almost twelve million dollars between 20 people? I know I could. As to the future of the company, the CEO has stayed quiet. There has been speculation that someone like EA could acquire them, but for now that’s not really news. EA has been picking up social gaming developers lately like Playfish, which was bought for a cool $275 million.

Source: Reuters

If the success of Virtual Console titles tells us anything, it’s that gamers love their nerdy past. Classic titles sell like mad, and I know I practically flip when I find out something I loved is coming to a new console. One developer’s been paying attention to the classic game frenzy, and it’s turned a childhood classic into a serious moneymaker.

To find the game, you only have to look at this weeks’ top-grossing iPhone OS games. At the top of the charts, yes all the way at number one, is Where’s Waldo: The Fantastic Journey. This isn’t just a fluke, either. The game beat out Call of Duty: World at War Zombies and Dragon Lair to take the top spot.

Among other games Waldo has pushed out this week are Super Monkey Ball 2, The Sims 3, and Tetris. It’s quite an achievement, really, and something developer Ludia has got to be happy with.

Android may finally be on the handset of your dreams, but it’s too late for mobile game developer Gameloft. The french developer said it has significantly cut its investment in the Android platform due to underwhelming revenues.

“It is not as neatly done as on the iPhone. Google has not been very good to entice customers to actually buy products. On Android nobody is making significant revenue,” said Gameloft’s finance director, Alexandre de Rochefort. There must be a bit of meaning lost in translation of the word “neatly” from french to english because I would hardly call the App Store neat. That’s not to say the decision doesn’t make sense.

According to Rochefort, Gameloft is selling 400 times the number of apps on the App Store as on Android devices. Obviously there are a lot of factors to consider, market share being prime among them. But even if market share were closer I’d imagine Gameloft would struggle with the number of different devices Android runs. With so much different hardware it’s just easier to design apps for the iPhone/iPod Touch and support them.

Source: Washington Post

Zodttd, the intrepid developer behind the Game Boy Advance emulator on the iPhone, says he’s working on an N64 emulator for the 3GS and the new iPod Touch. Just imagine playing GoldenEye on the iPhone. Just imagine trying to strafe!

It sounds pretty cool, but really the controller could become a problem. Where do you put the Z button? And the C buttons? It’s a lot to try to cram onto the iPhone’s screen. I’m impressed, though, that the 3GS is fast enough to run most of the games. Zodttd did say that the higher-end games won’t run just yet, but that sounds to me like he’s got plans for them in the future. Now if someone would put together a standard controller accessory, everything would be just fine.

If it weren’t for Red Alert 2 I probably would have done a lot better in high school calculus. As it was, I spent most of my time worrying about when my next paratrooper drop was coming in the computer lab. This week EA released an iPhone version of the classic strat game with an extra map pack and the promise of more DLC down the road.

The game’s a little pricey at $9.99, but it’s got a full campaign for the Soviets and the Allies, 12 skirmish maps, and a map pack with another six skirmish maps. EA’s also promised that a future update will bring multiplayer over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth along with additional content. That’s more features than just about any game in the App Store, so maybe the ten bucks is worth it this time around.

The next patch is for the Empire of the Rising Sun and will add a third faction.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes! The popular board game has finally been submitted to Apple in iPhone form and now awaits approval. For those of you who don’t know – and have been sorely missing out – Settlers of Catan is a resource based board game with several victory conditions. The game has a huge following and even has a couple expansions.

Though there’s no word on pricing, you can almost guarantee I’ll be buying this game. The one big failure? There’s no online system (?!?). That really makes no sense. The game is best enjoyed with friends, so why not give support the iPhone has had for several firmware iterations?

In the ever-increasing deluge of iPhone games, I’m glad to see titles I’ve waited for aren’t slipping past my radar. It’s not so far-fetched to think they might. After all, even major releases can take up to a week to show up in app searches.

As the popularity of the iPhone and iPod Touch as a gaming platform continues to grow, developers are throwing serious amounts of time and money into creating games for the App Store. That doesn’t mean those games are anything new, though. A lot of them have roots in more established parts of the gaming industry. Hell, some of the best titles are coming from big studios like EA. Others, though, are capitalizing on the platform by selling simple knockoffs.

If you’ve played Gangster you know what I’m talking about. Or Modern Combat: Sandstorm. The two titles from Gameloft are completely transparent spinoffs of games like Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, they’re actually making some money. Gameloft had a chance to show off their latest creation at Apple’s media event today: NOVA. The game puts you in the suit of a space marine, where you’ll be blasting your enemies with futuristic looking battle…er…assault rifles. Yes, assault rifles.

Obviously Gameloft’s latest spinoff is a Halo clone, but it actually looks pretty decent, and there’s a multiplayer feature. NOVA will have both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth multiplayer support so you can frag your friends virtually anywhere. Imagine jumping on the subway and hopping into a game CTF. There are worse ways to pass the time, right?

Just a day after it was approved, C64 is once again off the app store. The developer foolishly left the feature that got the app rejected in the first place, the BASIC interpreter, in the application, just hidden like Yelp’s “monocle” feature. A few keystrokes and the interpreter was back up and running, and, of course, Apple heard about it.

So the app is back off the App Store until further notice. Why the C64 developer thought he would get away with it is beyond. Yelp got away with “monocle” because it didn’t allow you to do anything prohibited by the developer ToS. This, on the other hand, is strictly forbidden, whether it’s hidden or not. The developer issued the following statement:

Unfortunately Apple this night pulled the C64 App from the App Store. We had agreed with Apple to remove basic from the application, but as we believed it would be possible to convince Apple to let it in later on, we left it in the app to be activated remotely by us when we had “go” from Apple.

Clearly it wasn’t going to be remotely activated. It was activated by the user. Think this one through next time guys. It’s not that complicated.