Also, the people bashing the iPhone as a gaming device need to actually play what's there or shut up. There is a lot of really good stuff there; it can be really hard to find among all the crap, but it's there.
I own Nintendo Handhelds and have owned Ipod products from the 2G to the current Touch, so I think I can speak up here.
My favorites are Tiny Wing and...okay, just Tiny Wing. It's pretty much a mistake to buy anything that has been ported from elsewhere (Dead Space, SSF4, Mirror's Edge, etc.) because of the crappy controls. They look pretty.
But Tiny Wing is awesome, mainly because it takes a fairly simple mechanic, and only 1 single control input (touch the screen to make your bird go down) and makes an exhilirating experience out of it.
With that said, I've probably put a grand total of 50 minutes into this game, and I'm almost tired of it. It has the life expectancy of the spinning-top dungeon in Twilight Princess, or the bird gliding level in Galaxy. The only reason I play it is because I can do so with one hand, while I am rocking my newborn daughter to sleep. If you have never played a 1st party Nintendo game, pretty much ever, then you would probably think Tiny Wing is the sh*t, because its controls are very tight, possibly the tightest and most accurate on IOS.
But I also think Tiny Wing, and other games like it, are the reason why the 3DS will never sell as much as the DS, not even close. The casual gamers are gone. You can't even call them gamers, because while they played Nintendogs and Brain Age, they never bought Phantom Hourglass. Or maybe they bought New Super Mario Bros, but they probably didn't finish it, much less get to the bonus levels. They're all playing on the IOS, because they were never that into games in the first place. There's a complex language, an intuitive lexicon that's a part of gaming, and even more so in Nintendo games, that represents a ridiculously high barrier of entry for these casual consumers. You see a boss in Zelda at the end of a dungeon, and you know how to use visual clues to figure out how to kill it. You know that you have to hit the boss 3 times. You know that you have to use the item you discovered in the dungeon. You know that there will be some trick which is not immediately obvious.
With Tiny Wing, this isn't the case. You just touch the screen to make the bird go down, gravity and inertia do the rest. That's it. So not only is this game simple and incredibly accessible, it costs just 99 cents. And while you're only going to get an hour worth of enjoyment out of it, if that, a casual consumer would have gotten to the 1st temple in Phantom Hourglass, said "WTF am I suppose to do?" and given up.
For better or worse, the casuals have gone to Apple and will probably never come back.
Topic: Nintendo vs Apple: FIGHT!!! (Read 23354 times)
