Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
Which is, in itself, lolsome as that's still about a quarter of the street price of a new DS game. I'm coming around to Penny Arcade's thinking:
I've been banging that drum for years now, but I think most people don't get iOS until they're quite heavily immersed in it. It's pretty amusing watching what's happened over at Retro Gamer. The editor had the balls to do a massive iPhone feature when the App Store wasn't that old, featuring tons of retro-oriented games. The mag admittedly made one mistake, in not making it obvious that the games worked fine on the cheaper iPod touch, but it nonetheless got it in the neck from a ton of readers. Over the following months, people raged about the dedicated mobile DPS (which was about 75% iOS) and it eventually got removed.
Naturally, a lot of the nay-sayers subsequently started picking up iPhones and iPods and getting thoroughly addicted to iOS games—even some of the biggest critics. Now, the mag has barely any iOS coverage and a lot of people want more. (Mind you, its iOS coverage is often inconsistent, with some great games getting marked down over control issues that I just don't see.)
I think my latest moment related to the kind of thinking in the Penny Arcade strip came with Sega's All-Star Racing. Most kart games on iOS are poor, and I figured Sega could potentially create something along the lines of MarioKart. ASR
isn't as good as Nintendo's DS MarioKart, but it's close (and, frankly, a much tougher game). The thing is, MarioKart cost me the best part of thirty quid, whereas ASR (which is universal and therefore works with my iPhone, iPod and iPad) costs three quid and is regularly discounted by 50%. MarioKart is still better, but not ten times better, and that sums up a lot of iOS gaming. Then again, there are also games that are demonstrably better than versions on competing platforms
and cheaper too, such as World of Goo and Osmos.