Why doesn't the iPod touch get recognition as a handheld gaming console?

[Danpascooch]

I'll make this short and sweet.

Why else would you go to great lengths to point out all the reasons why I'm wrong?

Because you are wrong. Notice that people who make well reasoned explanations aren't getting the same kind of reaction out of me.

Well reasoned explanations like shooting down my arguments with:

"You pulled that out of your ass"?

If you want to be taken seriously, I suggest you actually start listening to the people you asked the opinions of by making this thread, and when you think they're wrong, clearly explain why, instead of shooting everyone who doesn't agree with you down with broad "one size fits all" generic statements like the above that actually don't mean anything except "I'm going to ignore what you just said because I don't like it"

 

[Jack Nettle]

I'm currently replying to this topic on my iTouch. This is the only good thing that my iPod can do. There is no actual buttons, and the on screen buttons are terrible when trying to play a game. Like most iPod games, the most money you could make off a high quality game is ( maybe ) up to 5 dollars; the will to make a game that won't make as much money as on a regular console is very low. I don't think there could ever be a "hard core" iPod gaming audience anyways.

In laymans terms: you no makey teh monee!

 

[Miles Tormani]

I'll make this short and sweet.

Why else would you go to great lengths to point out all the reasons why I'm wrong?

Because you are wrong. Notice that people who make well reasoned explanations aren't getting the same kind of reaction out of me.

You mean aside from claiming that you are 150% certain that Furburt is lying, despite there being a very real possibility that he isn't?

You go on and on about all the various reasons why they are wrong. Why I am wrong. You can't even agree with something that makes sense in your mind, just because the general message is disagreement. Instead, you have to twist it in such a way that says "Oh, that's exactly what I was saying, but you're trying to turn it around."

News flash. I am turning your own argument around. That's exactly what I was trying to point out in the first place. You said that people zig-zag only if they're using a standard analog controller. I said that people will zig-zag on roads regardless of control input, simply because they are inept. Granted, my way of saying it was somewhat flawed, since I simply used an example of how I am a living counterpoint to what you said, but the general point stays strong. Instead of addressing that properly, you took a shot at my English comprehension, with some stupid school-regurgitated phrase about how not all rectangles are squares. The irony is that while you were using that to claim that my comprehension was lacking, you failed to notice that was exactly my point.

I could go on and on why, for example, I find DualShock controls to be superior to WASD and mouse for a first person shooter, citing things like how people using WASD can't make the precision jumps, and how mouse controls are inherently limited by a lack of real feedback, as well as potentially limited desk space. I could go on about how accurate I was with the Sniper in the Xbox and PS3 versions of Team Fortress 2, a game that may I add has no aim assist in any version. I could link to various videos showing that Halo 1 does not have aim assist, therefore proving you wrong on that front. I could describe in stunning detail how I kicked my friends' asses in Super Smash Bros. Brawl using the Wii Wheel (true story).

The thing is, I don't have to justify my points, because they are simply my own opinion. (Except for Halo 1 not having aim assist.) That's what everything I said so far was. I felt that the controls in the iPhone FPS games was lacking. I find that having your thumbs on the screen you're trying to look at is detrimental to gameplay. I find that a shitty player will be a shitty player, regardless of control input. These are my preferences, and I don't need validation from a group of anonymous people who usually disagree with me anyway.

You on the other hand have been trying to rip apart everything I'm trying to say, as if my opinions can somehow be wrong by virtue of them not being shared by you. Your last post exemplifies this stance you take. I happen to love Dynasty Warriors, and get excited whenever a new game in the series comes out. I learn all the little quirks about every single iteration, and understand the different feel of every single one. Yet, I don't go jumping on people who claim that every game in the series is identical save for graphics and general level design. It's their opinion, and they're entitled to have it, especially since I'm aware that the story in every game is literally a rehash of the previous, and I can see where they're coming from.

It's also why I don't, for example, make threads on some forum that I already have differing views with, going "Oh my god why does no one else like Dynasty Warriors? Am I the only person with actual taste in video games, or am I a freak?"

Besides, G4 talks about the iPhone all the time, especially the new games that come out for it. What, is that not good enough? Does IGN have to display Apple's latest gadgets on full display on the front page for you to be satisfied? That's the general vibe I get from you.

 

[Akalistos]

Those are all big franchises, but their Itouch versions all suck horribly.

You're pulling that out of your ass. They work very, very, well.

When it has some good games and not just crappy versions with the same name as good games on other platforms, I'll be interested.

You're moving goal posts, but I didn't take you seriously from your first post so it's not like this has really damaged your credibility.

This, sir, is the worst... the most hateful... the most stupid way you can make your point across. You didn't addressed anything or counteract his argument with anything beside attacking him directly.
@Danpascooch: You win sir. You have proven your point and didn't insult the guy. Good Job.

As for you Miko: If you can't argue like a civilize man, why don't you go inhabit 4chan's forum.

 

[sumi66]

Because it's a music player.
That would be like calling the DSi an MP3 because it CAN, not because it's any GOOD at it.

Also, it's a Mac. Macs got no game, brah.

 

[migo]

A good question would be "where did all of those developers go after the early PPC days?" By the time that Mac OS 9 had come along, the Windows-running x86 PC had taken pretty much all of the market share for personal computer gaming, with these exclusive Mac developers either dying out or moving to other platforms. Bungie is obviously the most prominent of these developers.

They're both still here. Ambrosia has branched out a bit and makes productivity software as well as games. Pangea was one of the earliest iOS game developers, and they still make games for OS X and iOS. You're right that most of the market had died out, but they're still around, they made some of the best games on any platform (and some less good games too) for Mac OS, and one of them transitioned to iOS. It wasn't a big pedigree, but it's a pedigree nonetheless.

Now, I think it's time to finally deal with that great big anomaly that is the Sony PlayStation, because as you correctly point out, Sony only had dealings with Nintendo and hadn't produced any games consoles itself beforehand. However, the PlayStation had a distinct set of technical and commercial advantages that can't quite be replicated by the iPod Touch today;

Not at all, in fact a lot of the things are replicated, just in a different fashion.

it was less expensive than its rivals using CD-ROMs,

This was a benefit for developers primarily, and the investment cost for iOS developers is $100/year, digital distribution means that products can be sold for much cheaper, giving iOS devices a huge advantage over the competition. They also don't have the extra costs associated with submitting each game for ESRB/PEGI/etc ratings, which further keeps game costs down. Less cost for the developer, less cost for the consumer. Digital distribution has even more of an advantage over the traditional store based distribution model than CD-ROM distribution had over cartridge distribution.

had the graphical edge on anything before the Nintendo 64

The iPhone and iPod touch came out of the gate with better graphics capabilities than the PSP and DS, and it's only improved since then. The 3DS will sidestep the issue since it brings in actual 3D, but with yearly refreshes, it'll be hard for Sony to keep up in that department.

and had firmly implanted itself into the market by the time the N64 came along.

iOS is firmly implanted into the market right now too. In fact, it's rather like Microsoft. They had a nice lead with DOS, and firmly cemented themselves with Windows 95. While Nintendo and Sony do a dance between first place with a massive lead to third place that might as well be dead last, Windows stays constant with a much larger install base and never losing their first place lead.

Conversely, the iPod Touch and iPhone may be substantially more powerful than their rivals in the handheld gaming market, but they'll always be held back by the first-generations of each, with their slower 412MHz ARM11 processors - the vast majority of games will be designed to target all of the iOS devices in existence, and take account of those foolish people who were early adopters of an Apple device.

PC Gaming isn't held back by this, games scale with support for multiple versions of Direct X, with a certain minimum, and across different resolutions. Some iOS games are the same across all platforms, while others have different versions with increased graphical features for newer devices, as well as increased resolution for the iPhone 4.

This is what has happened to Symbian and a contributing factor to why Nokia will be phasing it out on its Nseries devices;

No, what happened with Symbian is they threw away a major advantage that S60v1 and S60v2 had - a single form factor with a fixed resolution, and no installation requirements.

With S60v3 they started supporting multiple resolutions, which required multiple versions of software to be released, but Nokia would throw in one resolution, use it for one device, and never use it again. Symbian signed was also a huge problem. On top of Symbian being a difficult platform to develop for, Symbian signed was an expensive and arduous process, devs worked on a lot of proof of concept stuff, but every user was expected to self sign devices, or hack them. They also on an internal level wouldn't use hardware. The N95 came with an accelerometer, but it was never activated with initial firmware, so no software was developed to make use of it, until after the iPhone 3G. The N95 also came with built in GPU, but the N96, N85 and such all did away with it, so rather than S60v3 being held back by older hardware, the newer hardware was regressing in capabilities. S60v3 devices never got FP updates either. If you had 9.0, you were on that forever, and to get an update for a simple feature like having the screen fully turn off rather than just the backlight in order to conserve battery life, you needed to buy new hardware. Even across the same system, like Symbian 9.4 with S60v5, software written for one phone wouldn't work on another one, despite the same OS, revision, series and feature pack.

iOS is very different, older hardware gets new OS updates, at least until it just can't handle it anymore. Now while Apple is being dickish in not including multitasking and custom backgrounds for the iPhone 3G and iPod touch 2G in iOS4, they do otherwise support the major upgrades. That means if you design for iOS 3, it will work on any device, unless you make use of specific OpenGL ES 2.0 features. It avoids the ridiculous degree of fragmentation in Symbian, and in fact has less than Android and Windows Mobile, which can both at least be upgraded with custom ROMs, something that wasn't possible with Symbian until very recently.

With the smartphone market becoming more and more competitive in terms of hardware, there are soon going to be rivals who aren't as held back by their "legacy" devices - even if the iPhone 1G/iPod Touch 1G only date back to 2007.

Most countries have 2 year contracts for upgrade cycles, anyone who got an original iPhone can by now very easily get an iPhone 3GS on a new contract for $50, and most likely already upgraded last year. It's not going to be that much of an issue.

iPod touch would get hit harder as it isn't subsidised, but it's pretty easy to sell it on craigslist for a reasonable price to defray the cost of upgrading, and anyone who buys an older model second hand would be doing so for increased jailbreak capabilities or at least be willing to deal with less access to new software.

Says somebody with admittedly anatomically small hands. My fingers and thumbs aren't particularly slim, and it's difficult without a point of comparison - brought far more easily by buttons, including D-Pads and keyboards - to tell where the centre of my finger is at any time. On something with a 3.5" screen, that can remove a substantial amount of precision because I don't have a piano player's fingers. This is why I have tended to use the tip of my finger for resistive touchscreens, but there obviously isn't enough electrical impulse coming out of there, so I can't use the tip of my finger to control a capacitative touchscreen.

You can use the tip, as long as you cut your fingernails. I do it all the time. It's also not even necessary, if the software is well designed, it doesn't need an exact placement. Flight Control and the like do a very good job of determining what you mean rather than what you did exactly. The well designed games also make good use of reading the change in coordinates rather than the specific coordinates, so you don't need to know exactly where your finger is, you just need to know how much you're moving it.

Not on something like RACE On or Grand Prix Legends. Without driving aids, these games are literally impossible to be good at without analogue acceleration and braking by virtue of the nature of the games. Some of the cars are far too powerful to be driven off the starting line with full throttle, and the brakes will lock up under too much pressure, a particular problem in GPL. All of this points to the suggestion that handheld consoles aren't really appropriate for driving simulators.

Here's the thing though, if you port a game exactly to any device with different controls you'll run into a problem. You can see this quite clearly with SFII on arcade vs SFII on SNES. It doesn't work quite as well. If the game is ported exactly, it might not work as well, but if it's built from the ground up with iOS in mind it will work quite well. Descent is another perfect example of this, it will only ever work with keyboard and/or joystick. Playing it on a control pad just doesn't work, so iOS will also never have Descent in any workable fashion, but once you have a flying game where you can't slide, and only accelerate, and only tilt controls are used (which will be improved with the gyroscope), the game works well. There's a limitation in what you can include in a game, but if you work within that, you get a very good experience. This is always a consideration for handheld consoles as space constraints reduce input options. The NeoGeo Pocket makes great use of having an 8-way digital joystick and 2 buttons, with the games differentiating between long and short presses for different moves, and combining presses with joystick moves to give more variety. Obviously having 6 buttons with an arcade stick is better, but given the constraints, if they rebuild it, with graphics suiting the smaller screen size and controls suiting the avaialble space for input, it works very well.

Well, you have to tell me where all of these people who play games on their iPhones are hiding, because they don't seem to be living in Ireland.

US and Canada most likely. Apple does have a bigger presence over here.

Over here, along with the rest of Europe, Symbian OS continues to be by far the most substantial mobile operating system in terms of units sold.

Yes, I'm aware of that. It's the opposite here. Symbian has a very small presence thanks to Nokia not very often releasing NAM versions. It comes up in the single digit percentage of "Other" in smartphone marketshare breakdown for the US. I see more Symbian devices in Vancouver than you would elsewhere thanks to all the immigrants here. I also have more S60 devices myself than you'd get combined on average from 50 random people you pull off the street.

And if these best-selling games for iOS are casual games - Tap Tap Revenge certainly sounds like one, as does Bejeweled 2 - you've just answered your question: the people who play games on iOS devices care little for the classification of games in general, and don't really care if the iPod Touch or iPhone is classified as a handheld gaming console or not.

These best selling games are games like Assassin's Creed and The Sims 3. Tap Tap Revenge doesn't sell, it's free.

Coincidentally, a lot of us don't routinely play games like Tap Tap Revenge (I rarely play them at all - as I said, my "casual" game is a notoriously difficult and complicated text-based RPG dating back to the 1980s), and wouldn't classify iOS devices as games consoles for having these games. Other phones have had casual games long before the iPhone; Nokia's Snake games come to mind, and the most substantial difference between those games and the ones on iOS devices is that there's a lot more of them.

Depends on who you ask, I know people who only play guitar hero and rock band, and have a PS2 just kicking around for that.

A problem immediately arises when you compare iOS devices and the PSP in terms of games sold. The best-selling game on PSP has sold 3.5 million units, and the total number of games sold is 251.6 million, which suggests either that there's a huge number of download-only games not being taken into consideration, or that there's a massive spread of games which are netting large amounts of sales. On iOS devices, the application market is decidedly top-heavy, with the vast majority of applications barely selling at all. OK, it might cost very little to get your application made and approved on the App Store, but that isn't exactly great consolation to the people who have made hardly any money from it.

That's skewed a bit though, because with the massive size of the iOS library, the "minority" of games that are pulling in money on iOS still vastly outnumber the PSP's total library.

Considering that the PSP has a notoriously low attach rate anyway, perhaps a more suitable comparison would be versus the Nintendo DS, which is really what Apple would be aiming at. Now the iOS games sales figures don't look quite so impressive.

You're moving goalposts. The PSP is considered a handheld games console, and iOS compares very favourably on all counts against it. The DS of course is the clear leader, and the 3DS will make that even more pronounced - I'll certainly be holding out for it rather than getting another iOS device, and I may not ever get another one, depending on how well Microsoft does with XNA4/Silverlight on Windows Phone 7/Zune HD2.

Since I don't seem to have any of the ergonomic problems that you've claimed with the Nintendo DS - and I still use my large-model DS dating back to the launch in 2004 - perhaps that's a good explanation. What is certain, though, is that while the screen may pick up the centre of my thumb or finger, if I can't work out where that centre is, my thumb ends up overlapping things which it shouldn't.

That again comes into poor game design. It's less of an excuse in the case of emulators, but since I've played iOS games where this was a problem (and quickly deleted them) and played other similar games for which it isn't a problem, I'll file it under "not a problem" categorically. There are enough games for iOS that you can reasonably choose to only consider the good ones.

I don't seem to understand where the "you're looking at the screen anyway" argument is coming from either; you don't look down at the gear-lever when you're driving a car, or at the buttons when you're playing a game on a traditional controller. Why would you want to be looking at the on-screen buttons instead of focusing on the action of the game itself?

You're seeing it anyway, unless you have an extreme case of tunnel vision that I'm not aware of....

Except that I could at least play Doom using a D-Pad, and I can't - at least with any efficacy - on a touchpad. Yes, the touchpad allows me to play in three dimensions, but overall, it's going to lead to about the same precision as a dual-analogue layout, and I don't typically use that layout for playing FPS games anyway.

And what would you do for a DS or a PSP? It's not like you have any better option for aiming on either of them. I'm not saying it's even remotely perfect on iOS, but it works better than the competing handheld consoles.

I'm not sure if you recognise the functional differences between the MIPS processor architecture in the PlayStation Portable and the ARM processor architecture found in the Nintendo DS and the iPod Touch,

Not really, no, but it's beside the point. The point is the actual battery life. The DS gets over 9 hours, the iPod touch ~6 hours and the PSP <3 hours. 6 might not be enough for everyone, but it's adequate for a number of people, and certainly beats out 3 on the PSP.

My criticism of the battery life in iOS devices is more targeted towards the iPhone, because you sometimes want a phone to last more than a day before it's tethered to a power socket.

I wouldn't recommend the iPhone for gaming either, I rather like my phones to have battery life for calls, which is why I lean between S40 Nokias or BlackBerries (although the 5230 has impressive battery life thanks to the screen off function. I've had enough hassle playing pinball on my N95 only to have the battery warning indicator come on and forcing me to turn it off to have enough juice left to make outgoing calls if I need to.

However, what constitutes "good enough" for you might not quite make it for me - by comparison to the PSP, the battery life of the iPod Touch is good, but considering that the PSP is underpinned by a substantially more power-hungry architecture, this comes as little surprise. I criticise the PSP as much for their peculiar processor choice as I do the iOS devices for having an ARM processor and still chewing down batteries.

What it comes down to is where you live really. I always found it noteworthy that Nokias that often just didn't have adequate battery life were made by a European company, with very small travel distances, while BlackBerries that had excellent battery life were made by a Canadian company. While living in more sub-urban areas with poor transit and therefore long wait times, I had a need for a full day's battery life. After moving to a downtown core, it's not even a concern for me. People who drive cars would also find it a non issue as they'd likely have a dock with charger in their car.

Certainly for some people only the DS is an option (or even more extreme the GBA SP or NGPC), but for a significant portion, the extra 3-5 hours of the DS doesn't really amount to a significant benefit, so the choice between DS and iPod touch depends on other factors, while only very few people will find the PSP to be enough, and will often resort to getting a weird lump for the 2200mAh battery cover (almost broke down and bought one of those for my N95 8GB too..) and likely find the need to install CFW to take the UMD drive out of the battery drain equation. Even though by and large the PSP is completely inadequate in terms of battery life, people still consider it a handheld console, so you can't say the iPod touch isn't one simply because it's not as good as the DS in that department.

 

[migo]

You mean aside from claiming that you are 150% certain that Furburt is lying, despite there being a very real possibility that he isn't?

I didn't say he was lying, just that he was wrong. There is no possibility that he was correct. I'm sure he thought he was, but no person, anywhere in the world has had experience with anything even remotely close to a majority of iOS games. Everyone who has used an iOS device has only seen a small fraction of the games for it. There's certainly nothing wrong with making a judgement based on personal experiences, but I will correct someone who thinks that they've seen pretty much all there is to see.

News flash. I am turning your own argument around. That's exactly what I was trying to point out in the first place. You said that people zig-zag only if they're using a standard analog controller. I said that people will zig-zag on roads regardless of control input, simply because they are inept.

If they're drunk, sure, but there wasn't any precedent to suggest we were talking about anything other than sober people.

Granted, my way of saying it was somewhat flawed, since I simply used an example of how I am a living counterpoint to what you said, but the general point stays strong. Instead of addressing that properly, you took a shot at my English comprehension, with some stupid school-regurgitated phrase about how not all rectangles are squares. The irony is that while you were using that to claim that my comprehension was lacking, you failed to notice that was exactly my point.

By saying that you can do a smoothe turn with an analog stick you are not simultaneously saying that people with a wheel zig zag.

I could go on and on why, for example, I find DualShock controls to be superior to WASD and mouse for a first person shooter, citing things like how people using WASD can't make the precision jumps,

You'd be pulling that out of your ass. If rocket jumping around a corner with a single shot isn't a precision jump, then what is?

and how mouse controls are inherently limited by a lack of real feedback,

If you really want feedback, they make force feedback mice. Rumble is a gimmick feedback though, so it's not as if the DS3 offers anything worthwhile there.

as well as potentially limited desk space.

That's easy enough to fix by cleaning up

I could go on about how accurate I was with the Sniper in the Xbox and PS3 versions of Team Fortress 2, a game that may I add has no aim assist in any version. I could link to various videos showing that Halo 1 does not have aim assist, therefore proving you wrong on that front.

You were silly to even bring that up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjp7c6tGYlg

It's even there in the PC version.

You on the other hand have been trying to rip apart everything I'm trying to say, as if my opinions can somehow be wrong by virtue of them not being shared by you. Your last post exemplifies this stance you take. I happen to love Dynasty Warriors, and get excited whenever a new game in the series comes out. I learn all the little quirks about every single iteration, and understand the different feel of every single one. Yet, I don't go jumping on people who claim that every game in the series is identical save for graphics and general level design. It's their opinion, and they're entitled to have it, especially since I'm aware that the story in every game is literally a rehash of the previous, and I can see where they're coming from.

No, you really don't get it. You can go through this thread, and see where people have brought up opinions which are quite clearly hypotheses, and I agree with them (sometimes only partialy). In other cases, people just type something that's based on ignorance that they haven't bothered to do the slightest bit of research on. If someone posts based on their personal experience without being specific, I ask for more clarification. I don't jump down their throats. On the other hand, if they post something completely and blatantly wrong, I will.

Besides, G4 talks about the iPhone all the time, especially the new games that come out for it. What, is that not good enough? Does IGN have to display Apple's latest gadgets on full display on the front page for you to be satisfied? That's the general vibe I get from you.

You're overlaying something completely different to be getting that vibe. iOS is a gaming platform, that's a fact. The iPod touch is a handheld game console. That's a fact. The vast majority of gaming sites don't recognise it. That's also a fact. A, B and C don't add up, so I wonder why.

 

[migo]

Those are all big franchises, but their Itouch versions all suck horribly.

You're pulling that out of your ass. They work very, very, well.

When it has some good games and not just crappy versions with the same name as good games on other platforms, I'll be interested.

You're moving goal posts, but I didn't take you seriously from your first post so it's not like this has really damaged your credibility.

This, sir, is the worst... the most hateful... the most stupid way you can make your point across. You didn't addressed anything or counteract his argument with anything beside attacking him directly.
@Danpascooch: You win sir. You have proven your point and didn't insult the guy. Good Job.

As for you Miko: If you can't argue like a civilize man, why don't you go inhabit 4chan's forum.

There's nothing to counteract. He didn't know about those games in the first place, then when it's pointed out, the first he hears about them, he says they're horrible. There's nothing to say. He entirely made that up because he couldn't rely on any real facts to back up his demonstrably false opinion.

 

[Akalistos]

Those are all big franchises, but their Itouch versions all suck horribly.

You're pulling that out of your ass. They work very, very, well.

When it has some good games and not just crappy versions with the same name as good games on other platforms, I'll be interested.

You're moving goal posts, but I didn't take you seriously from your first post so it's not like this has really damaged your credibility.

This, sir, is the worst... the most hateful... the most stupid way you can make your point across. You didn't addressed anything or counteract his argument with anything beside attacking him directly.
@Danpascooch: You win sir. You have proven your point and didn't insult the guy. Good Job.

As for you Miko: If you can't argue like a civilize man, why don't you go inhabit 4chan's forum.

There's nothing to counteract. He didn't know about those games in the first place, then when it's pointed out, the first he hears about them, he says they're horrible. There's nothing to say. He entirely made that up because he couldn't rely on any real facts to back up his demonstrably false opinion.

He did say the game aren't very good and then you just mock him and his credibility. You couldn't even name game that were good or even blame the it on the fact that it's brand new, making it hard to make big release like Super Street Fighter 4 to work on it. He made a point, you attack him. You fail.

 

[Miles Tormani]

You want to do quote trains? I can do quote trains.

I didn't say he was lying, just that he was wrong. There is no possibility that he was correct. I'm sure he thought he was, but no person, anywhere in the world has had experience with anything even remotely close to a majority of iOS games. Everyone who has used an iOS device has only seen a small fraction of the games for it. There's certainly nothing wrong with making a judgement based on personal experiences, but I will correct someone who thinks that they've seen pretty much all there is to see.

So I suppose that you wouldn't have knowledge that the majority of iOS games may very well be shovelware, then, would you?

If they're drunk, sure, but there wasn't any precedent to suggest we were talking about anything other than sober people.

You have not seen people in Chicagoland drive. Especially newbies. Or idiots. People have a variety of reasons for underperforming. Go right ahead and blanket it into either "inferior controls" or "intoxication." You're only fooling yourself.

Granted, my way of saying it was somewhat flawed...

By saying that you can do a smoothe turn with an analog stick you are not simultaneously saying that people with a wheel zig zag.

Nice job picking up on what I just clipped out and put in bold. Can I say that your English comprehension is lacking? I admitted I made a mistake, and you still jump on it as if I didn't. Completely oblivious to the very first thing you put in this quote line. Classy.

You'd be pulling that out of your ass. If rocket jumping around a corner with a single shot isn't a precision jump, then what is?

This is starting to sound like a typical counterargument to something you have no real counterargument to. Therefore I have no reason to argue it. Anything I say here, you'll respond to by a claim that I'm pulling it out of my ass. If you're trying to make a point that I'll listen to, you're failing quite epicly.

If you really want feedback, they make force feedback mice. Rumble is a gimmick feedback though, so it's not as if the DS3 offers anything worthwhile there.

There's more to feedback than rumble. For example, feeling just how far I'm pushing the analog stick. That's not something I get with a mouse. Besides, you seem to be missing the point of that entire paragraph by picking it apart bit by bit. I'll get to that later.

That's easy enough to fix by cleaning up

Spoiler: My desk space is perfectly fucking clean, thanks for asking. Click to see

Unfortunately, the design of the desk prevents large mouse movements.

How about you stop pulling shit out of your ass as well?

You were silly to even bring that up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjp7c6tGYlg

It's even there in the PC version.

Wanna skip the Team Fortress 2 part again? I'm pretty sure TF2, being such a quarter-assed port from PC to PS3, did not gain any new features. Least of all, aim assist. Go ahead and use a singular example to prove the rest of it wrong. So I made a single misstep. It doesn't invalidate everything else I've said.

Now I'll get to the point that I said I was getting to later. Did you fucking not notice that I said that everything I said in that entire paragraph was opinion? As in, not a universal fact? Something not everyone is going to agree with? I pointed these out to say that I have very extreme opinions on various things. Not to say that they are true. You stumbled through that completely oblivious, and still tried to prove my opinion wrong. A true mark of a fanboy.

No, you really don't get it. You can go through this thread, and see where people have brought up opinions which are quite clearly hypotheses, and I agree with them (sometimes only partialy). In other cases, people just type something that's based on ignorance that they haven't bothered to do the slightest bit of research on. If someone posts based on their personal experience without being specific, I ask for more clarification. I don't jump down their throats. On the other hand, if they post something completely and blatantly wrong, I will.

Kind of like how you think my opinions are completely and blatantly wrong. You really are prodigal in your hypocrisy.

Although I find it kind of funny. The only reason I posted in the first place is because seeing all the responses you made set off my bullshit alarm. Now every time you keep replying, I see more and more bullshit with what you say. You failed as soon as you claimed that I am simply wrong, when my opinions are valid as long as they are my own.

By the way, you know how I brought up that I don't go parading my love of Dynasty Warriors around to people who are generally expected to not agree with me? That was meant as a not so subtle suggestion. Topics like this are about as silly to bring up in the first place as saying that Half-Life 2 sucks on the Steam forums.

You're overlaying something completely different to be getting that vibe. iOS is a gaming platform, that's a fact. The iPod touch is a handheld game console. That's a fact. The vast majority of gaming sites don't recognise it. That's also a fact. A, B and C don't add up, so I wonder why.

Maybe because you're of a very small group of people who play iOS games as if they were "hardcore." Most people don't give a shit, so most websites simply don't talk about it, because their core audience will skim right over. A, B, and C add up in that regard.

 

[Zer_]

Those are all big franchises, but their Itouch versions all suck horribly.

You're pulling that out of your ass. They work very, very, well.

When it has some good games and not just crappy versions with the same name as good games on other platforms, I'll be interested.

You're moving goal posts, but I didn't take you seriously from your first post so it's not like this has really damaged your credibility.

This, sir, is the worst... the most hateful... the most stupid way you can make your point across. You didn't addressed anything or counteract his argument with anything beside attacking him directly.
@Danpascooch: You win sir. You have proven your point and didn't insult the guy. Good Job.

As for you Miko: If you can't argue like a civilize man, why don't you go inhabit 4chan's forum.

There's nothing to counteract. He didn't know about those games in the first place, then when it's pointed out, the first he hears about them, he says they're horrible. There's nothing to say. He entirely made that up because he couldn't rely on any real facts to back up his demonstrably false opinion.

He did say the game aren't very good and then you just mock him and his credibility. You couldn't even name game that were good or even blame the it on the fact that it's brand new, making it hard to make big release like Super Street Fighter 4 to work on it. He made a point, you attack him. You fail.

He quoted a lot of good iPod Touch / iPhone games in his original post. And in several subsequent posts beyond that. :/

I do actually consider the iPod Touch to be a gaming platform, but it's not a portable console by any means, it's much more than that.

 

[Willwillwritehiswill]

I consider it, and the iphone a viable gaming platform. The apps available for it range from two minute timesinks like the wildly popular Angry Birds to the Fantastically polished JRPG Chaos Rings.
I have a slew of games on my iphone, some of which are either fantastic ports of already brillaint games (like Street Fighter 4, Grand theft auto chinatown wars, Plants vs Zombies and Monkey island) to original titles that really shine on the iDevice (Warpgate, Chaos Rings, Real Racing, Hook Champ and N.O.V.A).

Plus, a quick jailbreak and there are emulators for gameboy, snes, nes, and even (i think) playstation and N64.

In a similar way that the nintendo DS and Wii game charts have become a sea of casual titles aimed at the 9 year old market, so too has the app store got its fair share of mirror apps, "lie" detectors, vuvuzelas and (i'm not joking about this next one) hand heaters. Look through all that and you'll find hours of satisfying gameplay.

 

[Willwillwritehiswill]

Plus, a quick jailbreak and there are emulators for gameboy, snes, nes, and even (i think) playstation and N64.

In fact, because you have to jailbreak the device, that could be counted as a slight disadvantage over other smartphones.

A jailbreak tool like Spirit takes less than a minute and is pretty much 100% pain free. Much easier than, say, hacking a PSP.

 

[migo]

He did say the game aren't very good and then you just mock him and his credibility.

Because he never even played them nor knew anything about them.

You couldn't even name game that were good or even blame the it on the fact that it's brand new, making it hard to make big release like Super Street Fighter 4 to work on it. He made a point, you attack him. You fail.

I could go and say that they're actually very good games, in fact I enjoy GTA Chinatown wars very much, and it's a similar, but better, experience to GTA2 with the same top down perspective, but the map actually rotates. That would be pointless though, he just made up that they suck, so saying anything further is pointless.

 

[migo]

So I suppose that you wouldn't have knowledge that the majority of iOS games may very well be shovelware, then, would you?

I know they are, that's why I asked which games people had experience with first before continuing further.

You have not seen people in Chicagoland drive. Especially newbies. Or idiots. People have a variety of reasons for underperforming. Go right ahead and blanket it into either "inferior controls" or "intoxication." You're only fooling yourself.

I live in Vancouver. We have a lot of bad drivers. It's a wonder they're even licensed. They don't swerve.

Nice job picking up on what I just clipped out and put in bold. Can I say that your English comprehension is lacking? I admitted I made a mistake, and you still jump on it as if I didn't. Completely oblivious to the very first thing you put in this quote line. Classy.

That wasn't just a bad way of saying it, it wasn't saying it at all.

There's more to feedback than rumble. For example, feeling just how far I'm pushing the analog stick. That's not something I get with a mouse. Besides, you seem to be missing the point of that entire paragraph by picking it apart bit by bit. I'll get to that later.

If you have issues with spatial relations, that might be a problem. There's always getting a joystick though which gives the same type of feedback, but more control options. Dual Analog isn't even second.

That's easy enough to fix by cleaning up

Spoiler: My desk space is perfectly fucking clean, thanks for asking. Click to see

Unfortunately, the design of the desk prevents large mouse movements.

Spoiler: My desk space is perfectly fucking clean, thanks for asking. Click to see

Up the sensitivity. Trackball. It's even better than a mouse irrespective of the desk space issue.

How about you stop pulling shit out of your ass as well?

I've had my share of desk space shortages, it doesn't get in my way of using a mouse.

Wanna skip the Team Fortress 2 part again? I'm pretty sure TF2, being such a quarter-assed port from PC to PS3, did not gain any new features. Least of all, aim assist. Go ahead and use a singular example to prove the rest of it wrong. So I made a single misstep. It doesn't invalidate everything else I've said.

I wasn't talking about TF2. I was talking about Halo, to make it even viable for a console they had to put aim assist in, and they set up the ports to not allow a mouse and keyboard to keep it fair for people who just had controllers.

Now I'll get to the point that I said I was getting to later. Did you fucking not notice that I said that everything I said in that entire paragraph was opinion? As in, not a universal fact? Something not everyone is going to agree with? I pointed these out to say that I have very extreme opinions on various things. Not to say that they are true. You stumbled through that completely oblivious, and still tried to prove my opinion wrong. A true mark of a fanboy.

If an opinion is wrong, it's wrong. Something being an opinion doesn't suddenly make it not wrong.

Kind of like how you think my opinions are completely and blatantly wrong.

They are.

You failed as soon as you claimed that I am simply wrong, when my opinions are valid as long as they are my own.

Not the case at all. That's new age BS.

Maybe because you're of a very small group of people who play iOS games as if they were "hardcore." Most people don't give a shit, so most websites simply don't talk about it, because their core audience will skim right over. A, B, and C add up in that regard.

Well there's an actually reasonable argument, and several people have already pointed that out on the first two pages, and I acknowledged it as a good point.

 

[migo]

One word: Bandwidth.

WiFi.

Or to elaborate, we don't have enough of it. Downloading several hundred megabytes of application over the slow wireless connections regularly found in Britain and Ireland is usually not my idea of a fun time, and that can only be considered to be an advantage if your idea of an advantage is "causes untold irritation and frustration". The whole "not having to go to the store" thing is nice, but it isn't open to everybody - the costs of having an iPhone with a 3G contract are outside many people's reaches, and the iPod Touch is more limited to WiFi - where fast speeds are also expensive. I don't buy games through digital distribution, and I utterly decry paid DLC.

Mind linking to Ireland's most popular ISP? I just don't see how that could be the case that even using WiFi is expensive. I've had my share of crappy and nonexistant WiFi access, but never to the point where downloading iOS games would be unviable.

It will be difficult for Sony to keep up, which will probably show the folly of the PSP, but having Nintendo - a company who has regularly had less powerful machines than its competitors in the market, yet maintained massive success - with a more powerful machine is a rather major embarrassment to Apple.

The 3DS won't be more powerful, at least not obviously so. It still runs with OpenGL ES 1.1, while the last generation of iOS devices support 2.0. The 3DS has physical buttons and 3D, but it's not going to have very clear graphical advantages. And, even though the N64 had more horsepower than the PS1, it didn't damage Sony's rep.

That would be the same Microsoft which got involved in system software back in the 1970s, and managed to establish their market lead with MS-DOS thanks to the strength of the IBM name and the easy reverse-engineering of the x86 BIOS? I think that's somewhat different to a mobile operating system, developed by people who only had experience with mobile devices with embedded operating systems, which still hasn't taken second place in the smartphone market, let alone first place.

Symbian only has marketshare because of the number of devices oth there, but the lack of 3rd party software shows people just don't use their S60 smartphones as smartphones. The lead RIM has is also different, while BlackBerries are excellent messaging devices, they're more in the dedicated category, having a very small 3rd party software library, and it's not changing. The competition there is Android, webOS and eventuaally Windows Phone 7 (and who knows, MeeGo will hopefully succeed too). Android is incredibly weak in the gaming department, despite the Odroid, and is really only viable for emulation right now. webOS is held back badly by poor hardware, which HP might fix next year, but their reputation is already damaged. WP7 and MeeGo aren't out yet. Apple is the only player in the 3rd party software market for mobile devices, just like for all intents and purposes Microsoft was. It's not as firmly entrenched as Windows, but it has a lead, and it's not going to lose it any time soon. I certainly hope they don't have a massive lead, but it won't simply be enough to put out a better product - that's been demonstrated quite clearly.

Actually, PC gaming is held back by this, at least graphically thanks to the less powerful consoles. A game like Dragon Age: Origins has decent graphics on the PC, but not spectacularly ahead of the consoles, despite the considerable extra power at the PC's disposal. You need to install fan-made texture patches in order to make the game look like it really should on a platform with the additional power at hand.

If your PC is powerful enough, the graphics look even better than they do on a console. Plus, more enthusiast PCs are sold than all consoles combined, with a much higher attach rate too.

Just because PC games have the technical ability to scale doesn't mean that people will purchase it if it acquires a reputation for slowing computers to a halt. Crysis actually has surprisingly low minimum requirements, and yet, playing the game like this compromises the graphical standard of the game enough to make it barely playable on 640x480 resolutions.

iOS has an edge there, since there are only a few configurations, and each generation gets progressively more powerful, you can just set the minimum requirements as a system that runs the game well, and not allow it to run on older hardware.

This is the Nokia E50 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_E50], a phone also using S60v3. It has a weedy 235MHz ARM9, and is indicative of the Eseries phones of the time - which made up a substantial part of the Symbian sales. If you were to target your development for the N95 and its built-in GPU (or for that matter, the E90, which also had its own GPU), you'd be unable to scale that program down for the rather less powerful Eseries phones of the time, and cut out a lot of your potential sales.

The massive sales of the N95 muted that though. When the iPhone 3G was released I was choosing between the N95 8GB and iPhone 3G. I settled on the N95 because my carrier would have taken away my rather sweet plan for upgrading to an iPhone (at the time you would have had to have been sheep to agree to that), but also because at the time the N95 was seeing some sweet software development. There was a gesture based system using the cameras, effectively giving the N95 touch screen controls. It never saw final release, as everyone skiddaddled from S60 once another, more friendly, development platform showed up.

Let's be fair also; before the iPhone came onto the market, very few people paid any attention to mobile phone gaming. The N-Gage, with its notable flaws, had done a good job in keeping people away from the market, afraid of a high-profile failure. In March 2007, when the N95 was released, I don't think that it was expected that the iPhone would take so much of a "mobile computer" approach.

Certainly not, iPhone OS 1 wasn't even a real smartphone OS. It was a running joke that the S60v3 browser could run all the web apps that you could use on the iPhone, in addition to having a better camera and supporting UMTS. I don't think Apple really planned it, but they're notoriously bad at efficient programming, so for the rather basic UI effects they were going for they needed a powerful CPU and GPU. Hackers saw the potential and started coding programs for it, and rather than let the iPhone become something like the PSP, they decided to release the App Store (which already had iTunes as a distribution platform). They're lucky really.

This was actually sensible commercial logic for phone developers before the "mobile computer" stage of things. It's an embedded operating system, probably held on ROM inside the phone itself; requiring hardware updates guaranteed them more sales in the long run. The same applied to PDA developers before the smartphone became prominent. The software incompatibility between two phones with the same OS is stupid, though, a real shot in the foot measure.

PalmOS allowed for upgrades. I couldn't up my m125 past 3, but I also had a Casio BE-300 which while having a custom OS could be upgraded to Windows CE 4. My HTC Touch which officially didn't go past 6.1 (and was released with the absolutely horrible 6.0 - if that's what the iPhone was up against for touch screens it's no wonder it took the lead), could be upgraded to 6.5 thanks to custom ROMs. Symbian wasn't even set up to support custom ROMs. I looked everywhere for them, but the best was HelloCarbide and ROM Patcher. I couldn't even get the integrated IM services that were on unlocked phones sold directly by Nokia back with debranding. Microsoft was at least smart to let the community pick up their slack, Nokia tried to shut down hacking efforts that made their devices still desirable.

However, you do say that as if the iPhone hasn't required hardware updates itself; iOS 4 doesn't work at all on first-generation iPhones and iPod Touches. That sounds to me like you'd need a hardware update.

While some of the inclusions of the updates are pretty artificial (copy and paste), there's 3 major revisions. That's like having an N95-1 and getting to upgrade it to S60v3FP2.

I think that Apple are being dickish in not including proper pre-emptive multitasking on the iPhone 4 - it's all done through APIs, apparently. There is, of course, no hardware reason why the iPhone and iPod Touch from previous generations shouldn't be able to multitask apart from the firmware being extremely heavyweight or the battery life not being up to the job. But I digress.

It lends itself to stability. Since there's no multitasking, devs can write a program assuming nothing else is on the device, it takes having a single piece of hardware to develop for to the extreme. If multitasking is allowed, there would be conflicts. There actually is an advantage to it, and in fact for gaming it's really good (whereas actual productivity I'll stick to real multitasking, and is why I still haven't gone for an iPhone).

You pointed out in your last point that Symbian had some major failings that could have really used OS updates, and that's true, but perhaps iOS wouldn't require so many OS updates if they'd got things right the first time around. Do you recall the lack of cut/copy/paste commands in iPhone OS 1 and 2?

In all fairness, iPhone OS 1 wasn't supposed to be a smartphone OS, they were trying to make a simple phone with an engaging interface, really to follow up with the RAZR. It only came into the smartphone category with OS 2. Also looking at copy and paste in S60v5, I can see why it was removed - a good copy and paste system interferes with kinetic scrolling. I don't use it all that much - it's really useful when I need it, but it doesn't come up that often. Again, if we're talking about a game device, it's not a serious ommission.

Not all countries have populaces who stick to the contract model, though. Britain and Ireland predominantly use pay-as-you-go sales models, and contracts are usually used by businesses rather than individuals. This would make upgrade cycles quite a bit more difficult, and it may be short-sighted on Apple's part to not recognise that the USA is not the whole world.

I'm sure they are that short sighted. It is Apple after all. The US market is what they're trying to conquer, and with their iPod division their mobile device revenue is bigger than Nokia's, so they're probably not going to change. The US market is big enough to sustain them, and since the iPhone 3G was the first device to be officially released outside the US, we're not going to see this issue kicking in for another year in Europe and Asia. On the flip side, it gives MeeGo, webOS and Android a good shot of taking up the majority outside of the US, and since a lot of Euro phones are coming with AWS support, and I hate contracts, that benefits me nicely.

I do as well, but then, I don't tend to talk to these people about games, because I immediately want to launch into a serious discussion about them, and that's more than a little bit nerdy. That said, these people still don't seem to be the sorts of people to play games on their iPod Touches, if they have one at all.

If they happen to have one, it's not hard to get them going just by showing some games to them.

I think if you limit yourself to the games that work well under the control schema of iOS devices, you're going to be left with a lot of genres knocked straight out of consideration - some of them being ones that have been cornerstones of success on mobile platforms before. Platform games, while being possible on iOS devices, tend to be more appreciated when you get a good D-Pad/analogue stick control schema behind them. There are a lot of other genres not usually played by people just entering the world of computer gaming which may not be compromised on iOS devices, but because of muscle memory, people prefer traditional controls. I'd include RPGs in this category.

RPGs work better on iOS I find. The only genre that's clearly knocked out is traditional platform games, but even there I find games specifically designed for iOS work well - Pix'n Love Rush being a good example of solid gameplay, even if it doesn't have very involved level design.

For the DS, I'd use the Metroid Prime: Hunters control schema. I'm a firm believer that the problem with Metroid Prime: Hunters wasn't connected to its control scheme, but instead to the fact that there wasn't enough information given in-game on how to proceed. Then again, I've completed Call of Duty 3 on the Wii using that flawed control schema, so maybe it's a case of me just looking for anything that resembles WASD.

I doubt that'll work well for kids though. The iPod touch is at least small enough to accomodate their hands, and is a rather highly desired item among children.

I've found my Nokia E71 to have superb battery life; I've only once run out of battery with it, after leaving it on standby for a week. The E72, with a more powerful processor, is supposed to have even better battery life.

Nokia S60 devices with good battery life are the exception rather than the rule. Recently they've gotten better with power management, if the 5800 and 5230 are any indication, but up until about 1.5 years ago it was pretty hard to get a Nokia with good battery life. I hung on to my E62 for as long as I could, but even as good as it was, it was put to shame by the Pearl 8100 I replaced it with.

A lot of this is down to screen size; the N95 has a large screen and a battery with a rather small charge capacity, while the E71/72 have small screens and rather large 1500mAh batteries. I've always found it odd that the iOS devices have, until recently, gone for batteries with such low charge capacity. Perhaps that has something to do with the battery explosions that happened on some iPods in the past...

More likely Apple's fetish with really thin devices that has coincidentally cropped up since Steve Jobs started looking like the grim reaper. Having the iPod touch be as thick as the iPhone would be nice for A) accessory consistency and B) having a battery twice the size stuck in there.

 

[migo]

Plus, a quick jailbreak and there are emulators for gameboy, snes, nes, and even (i think) playstation and N64.

You don't need to jailbreak PalmOS to get emulators for the Game Boy, NES, SNES, Sega Master System, Mega Drive or many other platforms, and that's a now-obsolete single-tasking operating system that was first made in the 1990s. I'm sure that Maemo/MeeGo, if the open-sourcers are really let loose on it, can port over the already-extant Linux emulators available on desktops.

I think that the N900 already has a PlayStation emulator, although it's still work-in-progress. Nevertheless, emulators have been on mobile operating systems for a long time, and this can't really be counted as a major advantage of iOS in general. In fact, because you have to jailbreak the device, that could be counted as a slight disadvantage over other smartphones.

Certainly the need to jailbreak iOS devices is a significant drawback to the platform, but the slew of platform native titles makes up for it. It's the first mobile device after the PSP and DS that doesn't require emulators to be a viable gaming platform. Microsoft will ensure that Windows Phone 7 will also have native game support, but Android's incredibly weak in that department, webOS only has enough to factor in for extra games to play on a smartphone rather than coming in as a viable dedicated gaming device, and MeeGo.... well I've got high hopes for it but it remains to be seen if Intel and Nokia can pull it off and get it widely adopted.

Right now if you're talking emulators and not jailbreaking or anything of the sort, webOS is the strongest platform, and last I checked PS1 emulation was stronger than on iOS devices.