I do fear for Americans who come to Ireland (specifically Dublin) to hear fiddley-aye music and watch us dance around with shamrocks…

Now, engadget (and other) outlets have posted shots of a proposed PlayStation phone under the Sony Ericcsson brand. It has analogue buttons and multi-touch trackpad functions for gaming, which pits itself directly at the iPhone and DS.

All of this plays neatly into the notion that 2011 will be a year of much PSP love, as yesterday we reported on a supposed PSP 2 in the works.

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!

A key stat from Jesus Steve Jobs was that their iOS-powered devices now outsell anything Sony or Nintendo have on the market – combined. That’s a staggering number of handheld gaming devices out on the market. They sell 200 apps per second, which is another remarkable number considering such a huge number of those are games (just look at the top 10 games).

So, what have we to announce?

Game Centre

Apple are launching a veritable Xbox Live clone for iOS, which will run as its own app to feature achievements and multiplayer content. It’ll allow you to get in touch with friends, compare games, challenge each other and do everything you do on XBL, but while on the move. The huge advantage here over XBL on Windows Mobile is that Apple has a huge install base already there, and if they move this idea into Mac in future, they could conceivably kill XBL on the desktop.

A4-powered iPod

The iPod touch is now smaller, but more powerful. It’s powered by the same powerhouse ARM-architecture A4 chip Apple themselves designed. This chip is unreal for a mobile device chip, and is delivering content on a par that is generally on-par with the PSP, and far above the DS graphically. Bringing it to iPod Touch means gaming is now available without needing a contract (on iPhone 4) and at a cheaper rate.

Unreal

At QuakeCon we caught a glimpse of idTech5 running on iOS. It ran smooth, beautiful and marvellously at 60fps. Not to be out-done, Epic games came on stage to show off a sword-slashing game due later in the year which runs on Unreal, which will be available for developers to make their own game creations. This is two huge studios getting behind iOS, years after Sony and Nintendo entered the mobile market. Neither of those companies have paid much attention to the aforementioned companies’ portable offers. That’s how huge this is. Not only that, Unreal Engine on iOS looks gorgeous. Arguably moreso then what Carmack showed us.

Carmack, interestingly, made a comment on twitter to say Apple asked him to go on stage, but he declined because the caveat was that he wouldn’t be allowed to demo his content at QuakeCon.

This is the first bastion of Apple’s entry into gaming. With Steam doing excellent business on Mac and Blizzard reporting high sales of Starcraft II on the platform, with iOS, Apple is just getting started with gaming. It’ll be fascinating to see where they go. Remember, you saw it start… who knows how big they’ll make it in future?

What do we think of the event? Let us know in the comments!

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.

Rather then battle to the death, setting up 100% natural defenses in the way of the Jackson estate lawyers, PopCap have decided to remedy the issue by doing an update which removes the dancing zombie. Be warned, though, the update apparently makes the iPhone 4 version crap out.

The leaked shots can be taken with a grain of salt, but given the anticipation it’s not unlikely that shots could be leaked before the rumoured June launch date. Keep in mind last time we saw such leaked shots, they accurately depicted the iPad!

Check engadget for the full scoop and pics!

You wouldn't be far off the mark comparing this to a happier version of Streets of Rage

In case you didn’t spot Chris’ post yesterday, we now have a Game Deals section of the site where we’ll list deals and offers for you to get your grubby mits on. Being Easter, it’s a bumper weekend for sales with everyone having an extra day to game with. So, if you’re mobile and want some bite-sized gaming experience you could do worse then the Simpsons Arcade iPod Touch/iPhone app store title. 80% means the game is now worth a mere 79c to you. Given it has such lush graphics, it’s worth the price of admission already.

The app store update lists EA as saying there are other titles going cheap, too, but so far nothing seems to be at a discounted rate. Other EA titles include Tetris, Sims and SimCity.