Month: January 2009

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Gaming 2008: The iPhone

A year ago, if you had asked me what platform I was going to be doing most of my portable gaming on in 2008, I wouldn’t have said my iPhone.

But not only has the iPhone replaced my standalone iPod, it’s replaced my DS and my PSP on the train, late at night, and during life’s lulls. Sure, there’s a lot of junk on the store, but there’s also more than enough great games. Gamers who scoff at the iPhone should be weary that they may, in fact, be missing out on something.

I am constantly asked what apps people should buy for their new iPhone and/or iPod Touch. Through sale sniping, testing games other people have bought, and a lot of Coinstar redemption, I’ve tested a lot of games. But I try to avoid clutter on my phone, so I’m limiting myself to two pages of games at any given time. This is a list of what’s staying on my phone after six months of iPhone gaming.

**2 Across** – every phone needs a fantastic crosswords client, and this one has a polished UI and lots of puzzle sources.

**Doctor Awesome** – ngmoco’s first masterpiece. Qix with tilt controls, crossed with Phoenix Wright, Trauma Center, and your address book. No one should be without this game.

**Fieldrunners** – a great Tower Defense game, with intuitive controls and great polish. Very easy to pick up and put down.

**I Love Katamari** – I have ties to Namco’s mobile gaming division, and I remain a huge fan of Katamari Damashii. The recent patch fixed the performance issues you may have heard about.

**Marple** – I had played a different version of this called Einstein on my Mac a few years back, and the iPhone version is better. If you like logic puzzles, try this one.

**MazeFinger** – ngmoco’s free Flamin’ Finger play-a-like. Quick, maze-based fun.

**mondo solitaire** – Ambrosia’s solitaire title remains the most flexible one I’ve found, although I wish the performance was better.

**Pajatzo** – a hidden gem pointed out by the GAF iPhone Games thread, Pajatzo resembles one of those arcade machines where you use tokens to win other tokens. It’s a pretty fun way to burn a few minutes, and it keeps lots of statistics.

**Pass the Pigs** – it would seem like a digital version of Pass The Pigs loses something, but I disagree. Very odd graphical style, though.

**Pop** – the same game that’s on Wii Ware. I think it works better with you having to actually touch the bubbles than waggle at them. Pretty relaxing.

**Rolando** – ngmoco’s latest masterpiece. It looks like Loco Roco. It’s better than Loco Roco. Listen to the critics: this is the most fully-realized game for the iPhone right now.

**Samurai Puzzle Battle** – I grabbed this after hearing about how shoddy the Puzzle Quest port was. It’s complicated, but it’s a Match 3 puzzle crossed with Risk. If this doesn’t sell you, there’s a lite version available.

**Scrabble** – EA’s having a great year on the iPhone too. Their Scrabble port still sets a very high bar.

**Snail Mail** – a tilt-based racer with really smooth cel-shaded graphics and fun gameplay. I am horrible at it, but I can appreciate it’s genius.

**Space Deadbeef** – the best free game you can get for the iPhone. A twist on the shmup genre, it’s a fantastic little arcade experience. Give it a try, it’s free!

**Space Ninja** – a very recent release, but a brilliant bullet dodging game using tilt controls. Really well implmented – Touch Arcade has more gushing.

**Space Out** – I can only describe this as a mashup game. Space Invaders is crossed with Breakout for some kind of wonderful retro experience.

**Star Trigon** – another Namco title, this one a little known title from the Mr. Driller team. (I wasn’t even aware it existed until the iPhone version came out.) Really simple controls, really enjoyable play experience. Perfect for the phone.

**Strategery** – it’s Dice Wars. On your iPhone. RUN TO THE STORE QUICK.

**Texas HoldEm** – Apple’s Poker implementation is still the best.

**Trism** – best block-slidy color-matchy hair-pully game in town.

**Wordabble** – (still) my choice for best Boggle-style game, featuring a daily ranked game that everyone who owns the game can compete in.

**Yahtee Adventures** – while I was originally leaning towards Five Dice, EA’s licensed Yahtzee game has a lot of extra game modes and just generally feels like a fuller experience.

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Gaming 2008: The Multiplatform Games

It was a good year for multiplatform games. Actually, let’s be honest – it was a good year for EA, among others. EA suddenly woke up and, for the most part, had a clue as to how to make accessible yet satisfying games.

Meanwhile, Activision – well, I didn’t buy any Activision titles this year. Insert joke about not exploiting my wallet.

## A Tangent About GTA

Here’s my biggest surprise of the year: In April, I finally welcomed Grand Theft Auto IV into my arms, and was met with what was essentially a series reboot. It makes sense, in a way. GTA3 was a new engine: revolutionary, but fairly light on the meat of the gameplay. The games that trailed after it on the same engine (Vice City and San Andreas) enhanced it, adding new functionality and depth. But now, GTA IV is a new engine, and so much of those enhancements had to be ditched. And so the game, while absolutely a GTA game, lacked the free-world fun of its immediate predecessors.

On Wednesday, I picked up Saints Row 2 on the slightly cheap. I’ve clocked maybe six hours on it as I write this, and in those six hours I’ve had far more fun than the probably 24 hours I clocked on GTA4. The experience is smoother, more polished, and just filled with little refinements that make me wonder why Rockstar didn’t think of them. (For those of you who haven’t played it, here’s one: both GTA and Saint’s Row feature car collection side quests. But Saint’s Row lets you put a picture of one on the screen, tells you in which part of town you’re most likely to find them, and *puts them on your minimap if they’re nearby*. The result is that I want to collect cars in SR2 but not in GTAIV.)

So here’s the surprise: GTA IV averaged a 98 on Metacritic. Saint’s Row 2, an 81. GTA IV is effectively the best reviewed game of the year, but I’m having far more fun with the “rip-off”.

If you like sandbox-y crime games, and you like fun, please go buy Saint’s Row 2. Call it my Underdog Of The Year. They deserve the sales.

For emphasis, Yahtzee:

## High Points & Surprises

The game I spent the most time with on any platform this year is, undoubtedly, Burnout Paradise. Criterion really nailed how to do an open-world car game, have supported it lovingly with content across this entire year, and provided some of the most chaotic, crazy online gaming. It’s getting a re-release in 2009, and it’s completely worth buying if you haven’t enjoyed it yet.

Rock Band 2 has replaced Beatmania IIDX as my primary music gaming fix. (This may not be a shock to some of my friends.) While there’s still more Harmonix can do with the engine, they’ve really nailed the ability to license great content, create fun charts, and really make a fun end-to-end experience.

The first time I heard of Fallout 3, I was frightened for dear life, like all great fanboys who know something they love might get ruined. But my fears were for nothing, and the game ended up great. Easily the best FPSRPG since my beloved Deus Ex.

Dead Space is the best example of EA waking up. It is tense, it has atmosphere, and it honestly did make me jump a few times. It was nearly my best survival horror experience of the year.
After a few false steps, Capcom cleaned up with downloadable titles this year. Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix and Bionic Commando: Rearmed set really high bars for how to remake games with love and attention. Age Of Booty was a great action board game.

I had missed it in 2007, but The Simpsons Game was much better than I expected. I’ve been waiting seemingly forever for a proper Simpsons title, and it finally happened in 2007. Shame on me for missing it.

## Low Points & Disappointments

Devil May Cry 4 did nothing for me. I need to stop buying this series because it keeps not hitting me in the right spot.

I was excited for Mirror’s Edge, but the final product left me wanting. EA can’t get them all right, I suppose.

## Curiosities

Every year I buy a handful of sports games – MLB: The Show, Madden, sometimes Winning Eleven – and every year I enjoy them for about two weeks. I wish sports games were cheaper, because they always end up being very disposable.

Why does Rock Revolution even exist? Not that I bought it, but nothing about this game ended up being a good idea. If nothing else, we can learn one thing: always have your press events staffed by people who can play games.

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Gaming 2008: The PS3, PS2, and PSP

With my 360 still on life support, and the Wii not meeting my needs, the PS3 remains the *de facto* platform I did much of my “real” gaming in 2008. The PS2 provided my usual fixes (long RPGs and IIDX titles), while the PSP gradually shrank into nothingness.
I still maintain that PSN is the best download service across all the consoles – not just for a lot of compelling, full-blown titles, but because of a good UI, fair DRM principles, and the lack of space bucks-style currency.

## High Points & Surprises

While I can understand the frustration from those wanting a tight platformer, LittleBigPlanet is the best full-blown platforming experience I’ve had since Super Mario World. The community features are just icing on an already delicious cake.

I have bought nearly 100 songs for SingStar. It is one of my fall-back games, something I can always play to unwind.

I’ve only just started it, but kudos to Sega for Valkyria Chronicles. This – along with Disgaea 3– means I have a nearly endless supply of strategy gaming in my future.

My favorite studio this generation is PixelJunk. Every PS3 should come with PixelJunk Monsters and PixelJunk Eden. (And if you’ve played those two but not played Racers, you really should.)

Metal Gear Solid 4‘s campaign was exactly what I wanted it to be. As someone who played through the previous three games multiple times, it had the same level of absurdity and over-the-top story telling I have come to expect from Kojima Productions. It was worth waiting in line for 9 hours for.

Echochrome has the best soundtrack of any downloadable title I played this year. It provides the right contrast to the brain-rupturing puzzles.

I could sit and start at the WipEout HD UI all day. It reminds me of the best of the IIDX themes, only…you know, actually HD.

We imported Sony’s Afrika once the Chinese/English version came out. I can understand why Sony is hesitant to bring it out in the US – but this game pierces me at the core. It is the ultimate photo-geek game. I can only hope I have enough money for a zoom lens soon, because I’m tired of scaring the animals away. (I also hope they patch in an Export To XMB function, so I can upload my photos to Flickr.)

Almost all of my RPG cravings this year were filled by a game that started with the word “Persona“. All of my button pushing/disc spinning cravings were filled by two more IIDX titles. The PS2 is still good for something, I suppose!

Patapon was the sole shining point on my PSP this year.

After 10 years of playing Gran Turismo on a Dual Shock, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue convinced me I needed to buy a wheel. It’s a different – and much better – experience. Now I just need the final version.

Buzz! Quiz TV finally became a reality, and all other quiz games pale in comparison. Having had a handful of parties where I pulled out the controllers, I can only describe this game as a crowd pleaser.

## Low Points & Disappointments

Hey, Konami – way to bog down the Metal Gear Online with a needless registration process and a completely separate store!

After being a huge proponent of the first game, I had high hopes for Resistance 2 – but ended up feeling let down. It’s not bad, it’s just not gripping. It’s very middle-of-the-road and currently lost in my pile.

Had it been released last generation, SOCOM: Confrontation would have been fine. But with the current expectations of the basics for online play, it is broken garbage. Until it gets patched to a working experience – any day now, supposedly – it is the quintessential “shitty peripheral pack-in” title, and indefensible as a standalone release.

Who greenlighted Jeopardy!? Even at the new reduced $9.99 price point, it’s still $20 too expensive given the horrible presentation.

Final Fantasy: Crisis Core was mindless enough to keep me entertained but a little *too* converted for a portable gaming experience. Is it too much to ask for a proper Final Fantasy game? I’d take a remake of FF8 over Crisis Core.

## Open Questions

Does Sony know how to advertise? Buzz! Quiz TV, Singstar, LittleBigPlanet – do non-core gamers know these titles are out and absurdly fun?

Will anyone still be using Home in a year?