I don’t know why I buy games for my iPhone. Maybe I get suckered by the advertising. Maybe I want to have fun. Maybe I like being stuck in the repetitive skinner box mechanics of gameplay. But what usually happens is that I complete the game in a matter of hours and then delete it from my phone.
Game Dev Story is a weird one – in it, you run a small game studio, and using a small budget you create games for several consoles. The whole game is deeply steeped in the history of gaming, and operates a as sort of parody of that world – but the only thing that really made me laugh was when the new “Playstatus” console was announced.
The aim of the game is to create hit games. You do this by training up your employees, who then work hard to create a game that will get good reviews. After a certain point, you have trained your minions employees hard enough so that success is guaranteed, but the game is still somewhat enjoyable.
It’s cartoon style and lack of seriousness make Game Dev Story an OK game, but there isn’t much replayability and it’s got a few glaring errors – for instance, you can’t skip any of the repeated scenes, the grammar and spelling are weak, and there was a persistent bug in the program which ate up the memory on my iPhone.
In the end, I only deleted it because I wanted my iPhone to stop being a bit weird from low memory. I could have replayed it once more, but I’d done all the major achievements in the game, and after playing for an in-game length of twenty years a pop-up screen told me that the game had “finished” although I could keep playing if I wanted to. Uh… no. As entertaining as it was, it was not a game with the longevity or complexity that would convince me to keep going.
I don’t know why I buy games for my iPhone. Maybe I get suckered by the advertising. Maybe I want to have fun. Maybe I like being stuck in the repetitive skinner box mechanics of gameplay. But what usually happens is that I complete the game in a matter of hours and then delete it from my phone.
Mirrors Edge stands out as one of the worst games I have ever played on my iPhone. It was a terrible waste of money that gave me nothing to show for it. It was made by Electronic Arts, a game company that has existed for so long that they seem to have become a fundament of computing now.
On other gaming systems, Mirrors Edge is a considerably different beast. It won awards for its new slant on the traditional platform game, turning the familar mechanics of running/jumping into a sort of first-person-shooter parkour game. So, for the iPhone, Electronic Arts decided to strip away all the innovative bits and hand out a standard platformer.
This might not be so bad – the graphics are fairly good, and there is a story – but the problem of the touchscreen really baffled the team of programmers who put this together. Perhaps they didn’t have fingers and programmed the game with some sort of hand simulator, because I found it almost impossible to get the main character to react quickly. This was not a problem in the early levels of the game, but later levels which were harder and involved more conflict were infuriating.
I’d give this game two out of five, because it’s shiny and pretty. But it’s too short, and relies on the idea of uploading scores to F***book and Time Trials for it’s longevity. If you find both those things boring – as you should do – you should save your money and buy yourself a pint.
As the following post shows, I’ve been messing around with my iPhone a bit. I left a huge comment on a Guardian article on Jailbreaking, relating my experiences, and I thought I’d republish a tweeked version of it here.
I don’t do anything that weird with my phone normally, but in the past few days I got so fed up with iOS4 on my old 3G iPhone that I decided to roll back the operating system to 3.1.3 using the howto on Lifehacker. This took two pieces of software (one program and one download) and it made my iPhone much quicker.
And I mean really frustrated. I used the new operating system for at least two weeks, and I thought I was going to have to buy a new phone. The damn thing was useless – slow, laggy, bad at doing the things it used to do par excellence. I don’t think it was some sort of high-level Apple plan by evil men in turtleneck sweaters to force me into buying new phones, I just don’t think they properly tested it on the older generation of iPhones.
Above: Youtube user Adam Burtle‘s parody of the new operating system. As several people have noted, including Daring Fireball, it’s pretty accurate.
Several times, I reached such a point of frustration and anger that I had a mental image of ripping the phone apart with my bare hands, shattering glass and bending metal. Prior to the iOS4 update (the new operating system that goes hand-in-hand with the new iPhone 4) my iPhone had been a gadget that I never failed to be impressed by. To go from loving a gadget like that to picturing it’s demise is really weird, and perhaps a sign of some internal imbalance in me… but what can I say? I followed all of Apple’s rules, and ended up with something worse when they promised something better.
This breaks an implicit contract that Apple make with iPhone users. “Let us control your computing,” Apple says seductively, “and you’ll have a fantastic experience.” With the new update, I feel like they broke that covenant, and in fixing their mistake I had to go and download software that is semi-legal.
Having done this, it occurred to me that I should now Jailbreak the phone. The new method (released this week) seemed easy, and I had little to lose because I’d just wiped my phone in the process of downgrading the operating system. So I did it, it worked first time (over 3G) and I logged into the Cydia store with mounting excitement…
… to find a load of useless applications. Change the font of my iPhone? Have five icons on the bottom instead of four? Have a different background? Install an SSH application? Hungarian spellchecker? NES Emulator? No wonder these applications can’t be got via Apple, as they are either useless or worthless (depending on how much Hungarian you speak).
There do seem to be three useful applications, only two of which are legal: a tethering app (to use the 3G connection when out and about – of which I think O2 might have something to say), a wireless syncing app, and a bluetooth keyboard app. None of these applications are free, and seeing as they aren’t mission critical for me I don’t think I’ll chance paying for dodgy software.
Am I glad I jailbroke my phone? Not really, it was pointless. But I am glad I rolled back the OS to the last generation – that really made a difference. Of course, by making it so hard for me to do that, Apple pushed me into a state of mind where I no longer want their “curated computing”; I just want something that works. Maybe Jailbreak will grow up and be something useful in the future, but right now it’s just for the nerds.
I had Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars on my iPhone for about 72 hours before I deleted it.
GTA:CW is supposed to be one of the best games out there for the iPhone. It offers an immersive world, with full sandbox features, and it’s a continuation of one of the best game franchises around. So why is it so terrible on the iPhone? It’s not a straight port of it’s earlier incarnation on the Nintendo DS, but a well-crafted rejigging of the game for the iPhone’s particular aesthetic.
What it fails to do is to take into account the situation it will be played in. The most successful iPhone games offer the chance to step out of whatever mode you are in (say “waiting for the bus” mode) and indulge in some frantic button-bashing. Nobody can resist the simple charms of Canabalt (also available online as a free flash game), but GTA:CW is a far more complex affair. And, as a more complex affair, it suffers from needing more complex controls.
It’s been mentioned in other reviews that GTA on the iPhone suffers from control issues. This is true. It’s almost impossible to control the game “in the heat of the moment”, and I struggled to drive cars around corners when not being chased by the police. It was like playing whilst wearing gloves, and led to a lot of aggravation when trying to complete some of the missions.
This game cost me six pounds, and unlike nearly every other game I’ve brought (on any platform) I realised it was a lemon. I think what really did it was the inclusion of mini-games, something I’ve always found annoying. Why would I want to break the flow of one activity I’ve committed to to play another, smaller game? This was an essential flaw in all of the later Final Fantasy games following FF7 – if I wanted to play cards, I’d play a card game. Quit wasting my time. Similarly, if I want to buy molotov cocktails, I will resent any time spent playing the “make molotov cocktails” game. Particularly the little stroking motion required to stuff the rag into the bottleneck.
This is a game that demands attention, but this is the wrong format for that. iPhone games are about distraction, not immersion, and GTA:CW requires you to log in some long hours, focusing on a (simulated) life of crime. If it had an adequate control system, allowing you to rampage across the city (as the earlier console versions did) then I could forgive it and utilise it as a cathartic release. But it doesn’t, and I can’t.
GTA Chinatown Wars might be the iPhone game most likely to appeal to hardcore gamers. For everybody else, it’s a bad introduction to what gaming can be.
Noah: “So there was this Chinese guy who had the new iPhone, and then he lost it, so he killed himself.”
Andy: “Yeah, it’s that whole ninja code of honour thing”
Me: “Wait! IPhones are made by ninjas?”
