The London Games Conference surveyed 1000 professionals asking them who they thought had the most influence on the industry and drove the most innovation. 46% of those polled agree’d that Apple was top trumps in that regard, especially when considering their push with mobile gaming.

The top five products to have shaped video games are, apparently, iPhone (17 per cent), Wii (seven per cent), Xbox Live (three per cent), PlayStation 1 (three per cent) and Steam (two per cent).

In recent times, with a team of young and talented people around him, Apple have been pushing the gaming agenda harder. Even this week at the iPhone 4S keynote Epic Games stood on stage to talk about Unreal engine and Infinity Blade 2 on iOS.

There’s not much I can say beyond what I put on my own personal blog, so I’ll simply quote that verbatim and hope the message makes sense here.

I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to write about the passing of someone who carried such great weight of inspiration and genius. Obama commented “There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented”, which covers the superfluous stuff elegantly.

No one else affected the world quite the way he did. Only Jobs could have built Apple and Pixar by routinely ignoring the norm and bending/breaking rules and boundaries to push out new experiences.

The mere fact that the passing of a CEO can garnish such an outpouring of love says it all. People are laying tributes at retail stores worldwide and the flags for America, California and Apple are at half mast outside One Infinite Loop in Cupertino.

I’m literally lost for words so the only thing left to say is R.I.P. Steve. Remember to stay hungry and foolish.

The brash developer put a game into Apple’s iOS app store called “Phone Story” which tells the tale of a giant fruit-like corporate entity developing a phone. The app was then pulled from the app store by Apple because of it’s mini games, which include a mini game where you have to catch FOXCONN (the Chinese company that develops hardware for Apple, Sony, etc.) employees that drop from the roof in suicide attempts.

There’s also a mineral mining level where children are used to mine resources to build your phone. On top of that, once your phone is made there’s a level to horde punters in your front door to get them to buy the device.

Apple banned it under the following rules:

15.2 Apps that depict violence or abuse of children will be rejected

16.1 Apps that present excessively objectionable or crude content will be rejected

21.1 Apps that include the ability to make donations to recognized charitable organizations must be free

21.2 The collection of donations must be done via a web site in Safari or an SMS

Kotaku have a video of the game in action. All-in-all the developer did what they set out to do, get acknowledgement from Apple (it’s a surprise it was approved in the first place) and then to go on and get worldwide press coverage.

Videos like below were inspired by, and created by the mod…

Of course there was once a time when Garry offered his code for free – but given the success of it, a nominal fee for playing was added (€10). Still well worth the price of admission. Now consider Mac users have access to Steam – so the next logical step was to give them (us) dirty heathens access to the code. But not only that, in Mac tradition, the game is going cheap – half price, actually. So pick up Garry’s mod for a fiver, and tell us what you’ve done with it!

While Halo:Reach is there, the focus is on old school games like Donkey Kong, Space Invaders and Pacman. The irony of seeing a giant Sonic the Hedgehog on the roof of the venue (The Ambassador Theatre, O’Connell Street) when I couldn’t find Sonic to play inside was delicious, though.

More recent titles were available to play too, mostly spanning the PS1 and Xbox era with the likes of Tomb Raider and the original PES.

Artwork and storyboards from GTA III & others are on show too

The amazing amount of controllers is worth seeing alone. Getting your mits on an Atari 2600 Stick and then holding a Wiimote shows just how far we’ve come with computer-human interaction. Even the original PlayStation controller was remarkably weedy compared to the comparatively similar PS3 controller!

Mac heads can have a gawk at an Apple II (not turned on) and an original IBM PC (also not turned on) too, to get a bit of perspective on how their iPad or netbook is working.

There’s also a massive Mech Warrior control bay to sit into and enjoy the 1990′s again, but with a horde of kids nearby shouting racial epithets while playing Halo.

Overall the event is well run and absolutely worth the €10 admission. There are competitions being run in-house in a top gear challenge style with a GT4 kit hooked up to a cinema projector and time board, which is a lot of fun. The ambience in the room is like an old school 80s arcade, so it’s well worth visiting to get that kind of vibe before you see Tron later in the year (if you don’t get the reference you’re a disgrace).

Check out the gallery of poorly lit iPhone photos below!

DVD.co.uk are offering select titles on all consoles for 2 for £25 and 2 for £30, while handheld games are 2 for £18 and 2 for £30. They are also offering  up to 70% off select titles on all platforms. The gmaes most worth of mention are Left 4 Dead 2 for £12, The Witcher Enhanced Edition for £12 and Bad Company 2 for  £14.

PS3 2 for £25 list can be found here. PS3 2 for £30 can be found here. PS3 deals can befound here.

XBox 2 for £25 can be found here. XBox 2 for £30 can be found here. XBox  deals can be found here.

Wii 2 for £25 can be found here. Wii 2 for £30 can be found here. Wii deals can be found here.

DS 2 for £18 can be found here. DS 2 for £30 can be found here. DS deals can be found here.

PSP 2 for £18 can be found here. PSP deals can be found here.

PC deals can be found here.

Gamestop.ie are offering the Multi-Threat armour and a Halo Reach hoodie when you purchase the Halo Reach Standard Edition, online only. Get a free Mario Wii Skin with any Wii Mario game you purchase or you can get a free Gamestop NDS bundle pack if you purchase any Mario game for the DS. Get a free copy of Sports Champions when you purchase the Playstation Move, online only. Preorder FIFA 11 for €25 if you buy a 3PAY mobile phone.

CD WOW currently have a sale of up to 85% off select titles. List can be found here. They also have games for sale on clearance, list can be found here.

GAME.co.uk’s weekly sale can be found here.

Smyths.ie are having a weekly sale. Sale can be found here. Enter this competition while on their site to win a voucher for €250 to spend on your gaming goodies. (ROI only)

Argos.ie are having a clearance sale on some games and older models of current gen consoles. List available here.

Xtravision are offering a free copy of Scarface on dvd and the Vegas DLC when you purchase Mafia II (PS3 & 360 only). Also if you preorder Halo: Reach, you get 800 MS Points, downloadable Spartan Recon Helment, Variant and UA Multi-Threat Mjolnir Mark VI Armour. Deals only available instores and not online.

Game.ie are offering free one month dvd rental with any purchase.

Mighty Ape’s New Zealand store are having a large sale on 336 games. List of games can be found here.

Mighty Ape Australia are also having a large sale on 500 games. List can be found here.

Play.com are offering up to 20% off all console bundles and up to 15% off of all preorders. Up to 50% off their Hot Picks of the week.

Gamesnash.ie are currently having a sale on select titles. List can be found here.

HMV are having a sale on over 200 games. List can be found here.

Rollercoaster Tycoon  3 Deluxe is currently 30% off at gamesload.ie.

Direct 2 Drive are offering 75% off 2 different games every day until the end of the month.

Steams mid-week sale can be found here.

Youda Safari is currently 50% off at Boonty.

Impulse are having a sale of up to 50% off  select titles. List of available games can be found here.

GamersGate are having a sale of up to 60% off  select titles. List of games available can be found here.

Purchase an Intel Solid-State Drive and get a free Ubisoft PC game worth up to $49.99.

One argument for why Apple don’t want Flash on their devices (iPhone, iPad, etc.) is because they don’t want flash developers competing with the app store. Well, that can go out the window now with this, as HTML5 can clearly showcase game development talent, and the developer of Biolab Disaster says he’ll be releasing an SDK for developers to use themselves soon.

Check the game out via phoboslab.org!

Thanks to multi-tasking, all of this makes it a seamless experience. At least, I assume so. I assume, because of course no games I own actually work on it yet, which is odd as Apple managed to show a plethora of them in press shots and at the press conference last week. I own all of the main popular ones, but have yet been able to challenge a friend at a game. Only look at their status updates, or become friends. The tune to which you become friends is a medieval horn type noise to ring in your new buddy request, which could become rather annoying if spam manages to get a grip on the system.

The system looks presentable, but breaks the mould from Apple apps quite a bit, so needs a bit of adjusting. It doesn’t quite fit into the ethos and philosophy behind the companies design from the past, but that’s not to say it’s not worthy or doesn’t work. It also seems to take itself after classic board games, rather then the cool (albeit retro-tastic) top sellers in the app store like Angry Birds or Doodle Jump.

Once the system properly kicks in we’ll give it a full review, but for now be content that it works well, and as a social experience is probably more integrated then iTunes Ping, which also launched after last weeks press conference for music fans. Check out the gallery below…

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?

Today, though, with the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad running through the app store, gaming is a multi-billion dollar investment for the Cupertino-based computing giant. They claim more mobile gaming market share then the DS and PSP in terms of both games sold, revenue taken and handsets out there. Let us not forget that using an iPhone on the bus to play a game is a lot less worrying and nerdy then using a PSP or DS. Not only that, the same device allows you to listen to music, browse the web, etc. Something neither Nintendo or Sony can compete with.

You cannot deny the facts & figures behind the app store-powered devices. Apple owns mobile gaming. And more & more developers are flocking to the format to develop interesting games. Even our old friend, the FPS and third person shooters are making an appearance on the machines. And as each generation of device arrives, we see better hardware capable of running more complex games with better graphics.

What about the home, though? About 10-15% of all computers in the world are Macs. An unimpressive figure on the surface of it, but when you peel away the millions of medium-powered Dell computers running XP in offices globally, the home computer is a bit more dominated by Apple then first thought. And this market share isn’t just growing, it’s ballooning at a huge rate. As people buy iPhones and iPads, they’re also buying Macs – which is delivering quarter-on-quarter growth of epic proportions.

The new Macbook and iMac range all feature i5 and i7 processors, with nVidia GT330M graphics chips (soon to migrate to ATi exclusively, too) which means they’re more powerful then most in-home machines and despite costing as much as a home-made gaming PC, run a much more stable operating system and the hardware is always high-end caliber.

Let’s also keep in mind OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) runs complicated back-end architectures such as Grand Central Dispatch, which allows the GPU and CPU to sync up (in a sense) to share resources and more effectively number crunch. This kind of technology and speed (the basic config on most new Macs involves 4GB of memory) is a match made in heaven for gaming.

Match this with Valve releasing Steam for Mac and a continued push from companies like Activision, Blizzard, EA, etc. to push gaming titles to OS X, you get a pretty potent combination for gaming bliss.

So, while PC gaming is dying a death, Steam is growing. Valve also reports about 10% of all sales being on Mac since launching on the platform – and with a meagre selection of games to start off with, that’s a huge number that shows the captive audience Apple computers provide. Digital distribution is key here, and Apple know it with the App Store.

So how can Apple grow the market? Well, they need to work with developers. It’s rumoured Apple worked with Valve, and provided about $1million to help with the platform getting developed and ready for OS X. Apple spend quite a bit of time helping developers with their objective-C work on the iOS mobile platform and the app store. The app store is likely to be replicated in the next iteration of OS X (which is likely to launch next year, or at least get announced), which will help push games direct to your Mac without needing to go buy a disc. Furthermore, the iTunes platform has evolved from merely a music store to an all-round entertainment platform with music, movies, tv shows and books. All it’s missing is games.

So while Microsoft blunders it’s way out of the Vista mess, leaving expensive PC builders with sub-par software to go on top of top notch hardware – Apple have quietly toiled away on systems that, in fact, are probably the saviour of gaming outside of the console market. It could also be suggested that Apple might jump into the console market given how well their foray into gaming has gone thus far, but let’s not jump the gun here! The numbers prove it, Apple could well be the saving grace of PC gaming.