Tag: iphone games (Page 3 of 4)

Gameloft’s Making Bank With Franchise Knock-offs

September 9, 2009 / Jeff Morgan

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?

Mobile Gaming

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C64 Is Off The App Store Again

September 8, 2009 / Jeff Morgan

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.

Mobile Gaming, News

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Commodore 64 Emulator App Gets Approved

September 7, 2009 / Jeff Morgan

The latest in Apple’s string of backtracking and approving formerly rejected apps comes to us in the form of the officially licensed Commodore 64 emulator app. I’m sure you’ll remember the app making headlines for being initially rejected because it contained its own executable runtimes for the ROMs of classic C64 games.

Well Apple has given the app another chance, and its already live in the App Store for just $5. The reason for the approval is that the 3.0 SDK makes allowances for in-app purchases, which probably means there’s now an infrastructure in place that keeps the ROMs and the app in the same location, one that doesn’t require access to any other parts of the phone. Purchase of the app includes Dragons Den, Le Mans, Jupiter Lander, Arctic Shipwreck, and Jack Attack.

Mobile Gaming, News

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Portal Coming to Your iPhone?

July 16, 2009 / Jeff Morgan

I can’t say whether or not this video is real, or whether or not that’s actually Valve’s Portal you see running, or pretty much anything about this video other than, “Please, suh, I’d like some moah.” The port could be real, particularly considering how terrible the controls look, though I can’t always match what his fingers are doing to what’s happening on screen. At any rate, take a look and dream a little.

And when you’re done, go grab some cake. I hear it’s delicious.

Mobile Gaming, Video

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iPhone Gamers Love New Games, Want Them Less Than $2

July 12, 2009 / Jeff Morgan

The folks at PocketGamer.biz recently took a look at the iPhone gaming situation to come away with some cold, hard data about what people are buying and why. I’ll spare you the full report (really I just don’t want to leech all the credit here) and focus instead on some of the more interesting details.

For standards, PG took a snapshot of the top 100 applications and then broke down the results by price, price by rank, games by publisher, and source (new IP, console port, music, movie, etc.).

Pricing was actually different than you might think. While most of the top 100 came in the $.99 category (36 titles), second place went to the $4.99 bracket with 20 titles. But that’s just number of games for each price bracket. Obviously since they are top 100 these are games that are getting downloaded a lot, but how much do the games get played after downloading?

If you look at price by rank, the top 10 games average just $1.89/download. At 11-20, the price drops to $1.19. Of course there are a load of factors that could contribute to the rankings. Are people really playing these cheap games more or are they just deleting them more often and so being prompted to rate more of these games?

Perhaps the most useful statistic, at least to industry developers, is the rate of new downloads and the desire for new IP. Of the top 100 games, 40 were released in June or July (this likely includes a few updates). Another 22 were April or May releases. As for IP, 52 of the top 100 are fresh content, designed just for the iPhone.

If you’re downloading games, where does your allegiance lie? Are you a bargain shopper, only buying apps that are cheap or on sale? Or do you look for the best IPs from hot developers, regardless of price?