iPhone as a gaming platform

Posted by Gary in Apple, Articles, News, Portable | 5 comments

Aug 18, 10

Ah the 90′s! Seal was in the charts and everyone wore grunge clothes! I was a typical youth and on my birthday I was given a red Nintendo Game Boy with Killer Instinct as a present from my parents. Yeah, I’m old, I know! This day started my fascination with hand held gaming. The games were so simplistic but it worked! Later on I got Super Mario and if I still had it, I would still play it now. And that is kind of what started me on this post.

Hand held gaming has had its ups and downs. For me it started on a high. Hours and hours playing Pokemon Red and Blue. The game didn’t look or sound amazing but the concept was astounding. That is the target all hand held games should have in their sights. However in the last few years, it has become a little trickier to find the gems that lay in the seas of the hand held gaming market. The PSP is a good console, with amazing graphics for the platform. The DS created a new range of portable games, and with the addition of the 3DS it just got more unique. However some of the games released have become complex. The detailed graphics for PSP or the utilisation of the two screens in the DS mean some games don’t have the much needed “Pick up and play” quality. Its not all but some. I don’t use either of them as much as I could.

But last year, portable gaming hit another high! (Well, for me anyway). I got my hands on an iPhone 3G. The iPhone as a gaming platform is an interesting concept. I started off with the popular games at the time like Darts and Paper Toss which I reviewed before. They are games you can pick up, play for ten minutes on the bus and then just put away. It was perfect. Even the slightly more advanced games like Fieldrunners, which takes a while to play a full level, still has that pick up and play quality I require in portable games. However, when Team17 released Worms for the iPhone and Rockstar released GTA I felt like we were on the way down again. Games taking forever to load and too intensive to pick up and play.

But this did not happen, well not really. The 3G wasn’t as powerful as the 3GS and now the iPhone 4 also. So some of the bigger titles didn’t play properly, especially on iOS4. But thats besides the point. The games loaded in the reasonable time and didn’t effect the battery all that badly. So we had a viable gaming platform. I loved it, easy to pick up and play and rather addictive (as you Plants Vs Zombies and Angry Birds players will know!). The iPad released HD versions of the more popular iPhone games. Angry birds running on HD with the A4 chip handled amazingly! I had so much fun with the extended view. Even the racing games are more playable on the the larger screen. Then why did I not do this post before you ask? Because of the iPhone 4!

The iPhone 4 (which I queued for 4 hours to get btw!) with the A4 chip, the gyroscope  and multitasking make for one hell of a console. For the last week I have been playing Plants Vs Zombies, Fragger and Nin-Jump all at the same time. With the multitasking I can literally just leave mid game then come back to it at any time (with instantaneous speed!) to the exact same spot. No delay, no loading, just instant gameplay regardless of its intensity or complexity. Even the GTA-esque Gangstar: West Coast Hustle lets you jump in and out of stealing cars and running over peoples in an instant. It is the ultimate in portable gaming speed.

So that is my reasoning for this post. I am addicted to games on the iPhone 4 and with some of the bigger games I’ll throw an aul review up here. For the moment I want to ask you this one question:

Would you drop your PSP or DS for an iPhone?