Features
Universal Feature
by Craig Grannell (October 1st, 2010 at 3:14 pm)
Due to reviewing a lot of iOS games of late, I now have an RSS feed that spits an overview of every new iOS game into Google Reader. And, my word, there’s an awful lot of utter crap out there. While I remain of the opinion that iOS is the greatest gaming system to date, it probably also has the worst ratio of good to bad games.
Ironically, much of the problem stems from Apple’s openness. Yes, you read that right. People bitch about the App Store approvals process, but it’s a hell of a lot easier to get a game on to the App Store than, say, make it for the Nintendo DS and get it on to store shelves. Apple recently in its review guidelines made a plea for quality, saying professional developers didn’t want their apps surrounded by ‘amateur hour’; from what I can tell, they already are.
So, if you’re planning on releasing an iOS game, I’ve provided some helpful tips.
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Feature
by J Nash (October 1st, 2010 at 2:59 pm)
The exciting mystery match where a plucky contestant chooses a theme then tries to pick six consecutive decent games in that vein without landing on something fatally unendurable. Today's theme: zombs.
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Universal Feature
by Craig Grannell (September 30th, 2010 at 11:39 am)
I receive an early preview of a game on the App Store. It has a great concept, but is insanely difficult, to the level that it makes Squareball seem forgiving. (And if you’ve played Squareball, you’ll know it’s forgiving in the same way that iOS games are expensive—i.e. not at all.)
I email the developer, outlining my gripes in full and making suggestions. I get an email back, thanking me, and after a brief to-and-fro about some specific points, I don’t hear anything else. About a week later, I get a polite thank-you and am told some of my ideas have already been integrated into an update. Today, that update went live and the dev name-checked me in the update notes. It remains to be seen whether they improve things (I’ll review the game during the next fortnight at some point), but it looks promising.
With the exception of the name-check, this isn’t the first time this has happened to me. And while it’s not the kind of thing that happens with major publishers (otherwise Scrabble would have an online turn-by-turn mode—c’mon, EA!), it’s relatively commonplace with indies. This kind of feedback—in terms of something actually happening and something happening quickly—is almost unheard of on other platforms and certainly on other mobile platforms. However, it’s something that hugely improves both the user experience and the games themselves.
Feature
by RevStu (September 6th, 2010 at 8:25 am)
…is when even the most grown-up and respectable of publications, such as The Guardian, let completely gormless idiots do them, devaluing the whole concept and embarrassing all concerned in the process.
DoDonPachi Resurrection is in fact one of the finest games ever released on the iPod/iPhone, but subjective opinions on quality aren’t the issue here. (Although so far DDPR has an average App Store review rating of 90%, and it’s only that low because some tool couldn’t run it and gave it 1/5.)
What’s more important is the complete ignorance with which someone has been allowed to denigrate a tremendously well-executed game, while implying – entirely inaccurately – that they have some idea what they’re talking about.
The Guardian’s review of DDPR opens with the fact that the DonPachi series has been running since 1995, a trivia snippet clearly nicked from Wikipedia but designed to give the impression that the review’s author is at least modestly knowledgeable in the field of shooting games.
(Something which he immediately undermines by suggesting that a game so unimaginably old as 1995 is “one of the longest-running shoot-em-up franchises in Japan”, neglecting to mention several current shmup bloodlines going back a mere 15 years further than that. But the intent is still there.)
It’s not until the second paragraph, though, that things REALLY start falling apart under a barrage of stupid. According to our hero, the game “offers both an optimised iPhone mode and a straight-up port of the arcade version – though the difference between the two is fairly negligible”, an appraisal of the two modes which is accurate in so far as it would be hard to tell them apart if you were, say, blind and locked in a bank vault.
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Feature
by RevStu (August 28th, 2010 at 8:34 am)
Whenever we’ve previously examined the contentious issue of App Store pricing, people have always tried to find excuses to dispute what seems to be a pretty inescapable conclusion from the evidence – namely the simple fact that selling apps dirt-cheap almost always generates far more money (not just more sales) than charging higher prices.
I’d love to see anyone try to make the argument after today.
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Feature
by RevStu (August 26th, 2010 at 8:38 am)
I should be annoyed about this – because I had the idea about six months ago and hadn’t got round to doing anything about it – but I’m too pleased to care. Because the screenshot below will look very familiar to fans of Stu’s Excellent World Of Pocketeers.
And the reason it does is that, fantastically, someone else already appears to be converting all the Pocketeers to iPod games.
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Feature
by RevStu (August 25th, 2010 at 8:18 am)
Unfathomably, not everyone always agrees with Podgamer’s informed and thoughtful assessments and analyses of the economics of the App Store.
In the Podgamer tradition of scrupulous balance and fairness, then, let’s give some of those who hold opposing (trans: wrong) views a platform for a change.
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Universal Feature
by RevStu (August 1st, 2010 at 8:45 am)
It’s one of the most-observed truths of videogame reviewing that the entire concept of scoring is, as practised almost universally in all forms of current print, broadcast and online media, fundamentally broken.
Everyone knows that the marks awarded in game reviews – whether out of five stars, ten points or 100% – are not in fact sequential numbers as we were taught them in arithmetic lessons, but abstract ciphers whose true value is heavily encoded. In videogame reviewing, 4 isn’t any bigger than 2, 6=7, and 10 is more than twice as many as 9.
And therefore – since the sole and entire point of scoring is to attach an instantly comprehensible numerical summary of the reviewer’s opinion to the text – videogame review scores are functionally almost meaningless.
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Feature
by RevStu (July 5th, 2010 at 7:26 pm)
Over recent months, we’ve railed on more than one occasion about the sort of idiots who constantly try to force App Store prices higher, because they don’t understand the people who buy stuff in the App Store. But it’s always been hard to definitively refute the argument that cheap apps make less money, because there’s rarely been an opportunity to properly compare oranges with oranges.
There is now.
Pac-Man has every possible advantage in terms of trying to charge a higher price. It’s arguably the best-known videogame of all time, and along with Space Invaders it’s certainly (in general videogaming terms) the best-known one that you can buy in the App Store. Anyone buying Pac-Man knows exactly what they’re going to get (and in the unlikely event that they don’t, there’s a free Lite version), so there’s no element of being put off by the unknown, rather than by the fact that it’s (relatively) expensive.
Another pertinent fact is that in App Store terms as well as absolute ones, Pac-Man is ancient. It’s been in the App Store for almost two years (launching at an ambitious $9.99), and has maintained respectable chart placings for most of that time. So if – as we’re often told by stupid people – customers judge pricing in absolute terms (rather than in the context of what competing apps sell for), Pac-Man hasn’t been hampered by its premium cost.
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Feature
by RevStu (June 19th, 2010 at 9:20 am)
Cinematronics‘ 1983 laserdisc coin-op Dragon’s Lair (on sale this weekend in the App Store for 59p) is the most successful videogame in the history of the world that nobody will admit to liking.
For over 20 years, Dragon’s Lair games have been coining in cash hand over fist, while drawing nothing but sneering bile from press, critics and “hardcore” gamers. And they’re all wrong.
This isn’t some flash-in-the-pan phenomenon like Rise Of The Robots, where big initial success was followed by disaster as consumers with burnt fingers pointedly ignored the attempted sequels and the franchises died a death – Dragon’s Lair has been doing exactly what it always did for over two decades now, and yet the name’s still a moneyspinner. So how come nobody’s got a good word to say for it?
Well, I have a confession to make. I like Dragon’s Lair. There, I’ve said it.
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