RAKtheUndead said:
That's a question with a very simple answer: It really, really sucks at gaming.
A simple answer yes. Simplistic too. And absolutely, completely,
wrong.
RAKtheUndead said:
A lot of the use of the iPhone happens to be internet surfing, or games playing, or other little toys which seem to be designed for distracting one from the poor overall telephonic abilities of the device, but it seems that they didn't have a look at the other products in the portable games market to investigate one of their biggest problems. Nintendo have always held the high ground in the portable games market, not because of the processing power of their systems, but because they realised that battery life is an important aspect, and gave it an accordingly high amount of attention.
The iPod touch doesn't have the same stellar battery life as the DS, but it gets a solid 6 hours of gameplay out of it, while the PSP is lucky to get 4. If the PSP is considered a valid handheld gaming console, then based on battery life one can't disqualify the iPod touch.
The Game Boy held top position in the market even when far more advanced systems made its monochrome screen look like an archaic remnant - because it could keep going when other systems were completely drained. In a comparison with the DS and the iPhone, one would almost draw parallels between Apple's device and the Game Gear, but that would be unfair to Sega - at least they aimed for a market who wanted games more advanced than some 14-year-old's weekend programming project.
iDevices combined have been selling at the exact same rate per year as the DS. While obviously not all purchases are for gaming purposes, it's outselling the PSP at a rate of 2-to-1, and is selling far, far, better than the GameGear ever did. The PSP is far more analagous to the GameGear than the iPhone.
Anyway, why are we giving Apple the benefit of the doubt in the computer gaming market? It isn't like they haven't tried entering the market before - and failing hard when they did.
That's quite irrelevant. I hate Apple and I find that to be a stupid argument.
RAKtheUndead said:
Out of those applications which have become popular, many of them, inexplicably, are games. Some people seem to think that this represents a new competitor into the handheld market, but I'd like to ask them something: Are they actually aware of the history of a) Apple and computer gaming and
Irrelevant.
b) the mobile phone in the context of handheld games?
As for the second part, we have to look at another major flop in the games market, this time introduced by the biggest mobile phone company in the world. Enter the Nokia N-Gage, an ergonomic disaster which proved exactly why mobile phones and gaming weren't meant to mix.
I thought you might have something interesting to say, but given your non-sequitor about the Pipin, that makes sense. The N-Gage had some very serious drawbacks yes, but they're not drawbacks shared by the iPhone.
Putting these two things aside, the focus on games from the iPhone platform is still perplexing. Conventional logic would suggest that the iPhone and iPod Touch are unsuitable for any sort of moderately complex games, for a simple reason. The iPhone has just about the worst ergonomic design of any modern gaming platform, because against all common sense, nobody bothered to put any proper buttons onto the phone.
Common sense evidently isn't that logical then. Not having buttons allows a great deal of flexibility, as I've already talked about with a number of game categories where iDevices are superior to the DS and PSP.
At this point, I'd like to have a look at one of the games in particular on the iPhone, one that's maintained a lot of popularity over its lifetime. This game would be Doom, the famous title by id Software. Now, I find myself quite experienced with the game, having played it on several operating systems and platforms. While I mightn't be a "speedrun Nightmare" player, I'm certainly familiarised with Ultra-Violence difficulty at least.
Pointless, you're picking one game out of the thousands, one game that you've cherry picked to make your point.
I've tried playing Doom on a platform with a touchscreen before, using my Palm T|X to play the game.
Oh, you've done one worse! You're making an assumption based on how the game played on a different system.
The experience is simply horrible, and not just because the resistive touchscreen isn't particularly responsive. It's because the touchscreen buttons lack tactile feel, and they're ergonomically badly placed. The T|X has a considerable advantage over the iPhone, though - at least it has a directional pad and a set of proper buttons on it.
You overrate the importance of the D-Pad on the Palm given the placement of it. Since the iPhone has multitouch, you can place a virtual D-Pad where needed, rather than having to stick with the sometimes unideal placement of a physical one.
Things get a lot worse when you try to translate that to the iPhone. On-screen buttons are loathsome for gaming in any circumstance, and when you have to use them to control the entire game, it soon becomes apparent that the hardware developers haven't had any experience in computer gaming themselves. I can only imagine how much worse it would be for even more complex games, and it's an utter case of design failure.
They're not loathesome at all, and you clearly haven't played many games on the iPhone at all. In a lot of cases they work out better than physical buttons, and in other cases they work out worse. Every input method has strengths and weaknesses, but if we used your rather narrow and faulty logic, the PS3 is an unviable gaming platform because the dual analog stick control method is unsuited to first person shooters and the DS3 simply doesn't have enough buttons to properly play a game like StarCraft II or Civilization V.
For this reason, many of the more popular games are simplistic and arguably childish in their appeal. Excuse me if I sound elitist,
You don't, you just sound completely uninformed.
but these games seem more like some 14-year-old's Flash game that they're doing for a weekend programming project, and I largely set aside these games a couple of years ago. I see why a bunch of "casual" gamers might want these sorts of simplistic games, but once again, I ask, if it's the applications you're after, why not just buy an iPod Touch? The hardware is essentially the same, except that you're not trying to rely on this device as your phone, so you don't have as many issues with the battery life, and the poor quality of the OS doesn't matter as much because the iPod isn't competing in a market with multitasking OSes with more sophistication and extra in-built features. As for me, I'll stick with my Nintendo DS, with Super Mario 64 DS and Chrono Trigger.
Wow, great job doing a copy and paste for the iPhone when the thread title clearly states iPod touch, and then go and recommend getting the iPod touch instead. /facepalm
RAKtheUndead said:
...The tilt functionality is highly overrated, and makes it hard to focus on the game itself. It's a gimmick. As for the touchscreen point, that is one of the most pertinent reasons why a device built for gaming requires some dedicated buttons.
It's not a gimmick, it's a far superior method of input for racing games and flight games. You can tell who's using traditional controls in online racing games by how they keep zig zagging around corners since they can't pull off a proper steady turn.
Anyway, as a matter of interest, I went back to my Palm T|X to see how my Doom performance was on it versus playing it on the PC.
Yeah, ruining your credibility once again, you're judging the iPhone based on your Palm device.
So, based on the evidence I've amassed so far, the list of most comfortable set-ups goes as follows, in order of preference:
It's not evidence at all, and even if it were evidence, it's completely irrelevant.
PC, WASD and mouse > Game Boy Advance > PC, directional keys > Palm T|X, d-pad strafe > Palm T|X, d-pad turn > iPhone, any setup.
Except you haven't played it on the iPhone, so you're totally pulling this out of your ass.
Doesn't turn out too well for the iPhone, and adding insult to injury would be that if the stylus sensitivity could be increased on the Palm T|X, it would probably beat the Game Boy Advance. Somehow, I don't think resistive screens are through just yet.
Resistive screens are poorly suited for multitouch, which is something of a necessity for gaming with them.
I think this sums it up quite nicely.
No, it doesn't at all. It's completely without merit. You're talking about the pipin as if it has any relevance. You're basing your entire judgement on the controls based on one game you played on your Palm TX. You have absolutely no basis to actually be making the claims you do. Now if someone has an iPhone, tried some games on it and didn't like it, at least their opinions would have some validity based on the fact that it's based on experience. Your statements have no validity simply because you clearly have no experience with either an iPod touch or an iPhone, and that's made blatantly clear by your continued referral back to your Palm.
The only thing that sums your post up is:
