Apple Games

The iPhone as a serious gaming device? Think about it and it actually starts to make alot of sense. Steve Jobs, at a recent Apple presentation, showed off the Software Developers Kit (SDK) which enables third party developers to create games for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Videogames were not the sole topic of the talk but did take up a significant chunk of the time.

The first game showed was named Touch Fighter, a game made in-house by Apple as a sort of demo showing off the what type of thing could be accomplished on the hardware. Touch Fighter is an arcade style shoot em up set in space. You control a spaceship through space blasting and avoiding enemy ships.

What was most impressive was that the game made use of the iPhone's tilting recognition, this means that you play the game by tilting the phone away from you or towards you to move up and down, and tilt it to the left or right to change direction. The only control other this was a tap any on the screen which would shoot your weapon. While the game was only a test for the hardware it seemed to work very well and the graphics were fairly good.

As well as this game, EA and Sega also showed up to the event to show off a couple of games they have been developing using the SDK. Sega had a version of Super Monkey Ball, which of course made excellent use of the tilt recognition to control movement. Super Monkey Ball in particular had some really neat looking graphics, the Nintendo DS would find it difficult to match them.

Perhaps most ambitiously, EA showed up with a version of Spore. While graphically not on par with the upcoming PC version, this version seemed almost as good in all other areas. When i first saw that EA were showing this game, i expected some sort of heavily simplified, almost mini-game-esque port of the PC game, but i was pleasantly surprised to see this wasn't the case.
The release of actual games like these is probably same way off yet, but these signs are very encouraging for a video industry needing just that little extra push to go fully mainstream. Check out the whole video here. Also the SDK program itself can be downloaded for free here, if there's any one out there who fancies giving it a try. I believe you have to buy some sort of license if you want to actually apply for your program to be considered for release, costing $99.