Around the Horn: 1 Button Games, Bogost on Cobert, iPhoneNES etc.
ITEM: Bogost on Cobert
Ian Bogost will be on the Cobert Report tonight. This is cool. Ian’s style of rockstar academics should have some interesting chemistry with Cobert’s interview style. I’ll link the Youtube video when it shows up.
…image borrowed from Joystiq.
ITEM: 1 Button Games
I got some interesting responses to my 1 Button Games rant (mostly from the Northern European mobile community). First of all, everyone needs to remember that the US mobile industry is a joke compared to Europe and Asia. I’ve gotten a lot of “You should really look at [name of game].” Sadly, I can’t. I’ve found a couple of cracked J2ME versions of suggested games, but for the most part a lot of these games just can’t be found in the US.
Of the games I’ve gotten a hold of, I’ve devoted most of my attention to what I’ve been calling multi-session games. Generally speaking if I invest 5 minute play sessions here and there into a game, I would like those investments to amount to more than me quiting the game during the second Space Invaders or Pac-Man board. Most of the RPG-ish titles I’ve looked at require around 10-15 minutes to do anything meaningful in the game. Mobile games need streamlined gameplay as well as streamlined interfaces.
Remember not necessarily casual games, but games that can be played casually.
Here’s a couple links:
- One Button Games @ Forum Nokia Blogs
- One Button Games @ Gamasutra (nice flash prototype here)
- GDC: Success Factors of One-Button Casual Mobile Games @ Gamasutra
ITEM: iPhoneNES
I’ll admit I’m eagerly awaiting Apple’s official response to the #iphone-dev people. They’ve asked that blogs not link to their wiki, so I’ll take you 1/2 way there. Maybe Apple will take the nice approach that Nintendo has taken with DS Homebrew (more on DS stuff in a sec) or maybe we’ll get security update after security update.
iPhoneNES is a native NES emulator for the iPhone. Although early, the project certainly looks promising. Aside from optimizing code, the project’s owner admits that control is the biggest problem. If you do an usability evaluation strictly based on the Youtube video, the first thing that I would do to improve the control interface would be to have the emulator run in landscape mode and orient the controls in more of a PSP-esque configuration.
ITEM: NDS Motion Pak
Slightly older news, but I just saw a demo and was floored. The NDS Motion Pak is a combo accelerometer/gyroscope for DS Homebrew projects. If you’re a Homebrewer, this one is really worth it. Now I need this combined with a DS GPS in order to design a few crazy appropriative games.