iPhone OS 3.0 & The True Mobile Gaming Revolution
Mega Man 2 w/ iPhone Virtual Controls
What’s that you say? Gaming is already the most successful category in the App Store? Well, you see, it all has to do with Megaman 2…
In case you aren’t familiar with the franchise, IGN offers a pretty concise summation:
For those of you who haven’t been paying attention to the gaming scene for the past two decades, Mega Man is probably the most tried-and-true side-scroller out there. The basic formula: Players guide our hero through a series of stages, each one lorded over by a boss robot whose power you gain once you deeat it. Each power has its strengths and weaknesses over other adversaries, requiring players to carefully choose the sequence of which bosses they face.
At its best, the Mega Man series is also notoriously difficult. While some contemporary game designers might argue that this is bad design, an equal number of industry veterans would argue that this is actually very good game design. Tokuro Fujiwara, the franchise’s chief designer, was trained in a culture where the act of designing a game was to be interpreted as the designer issuing a formal challenge to players. If a player were to beat a designer’s game, a certain level of respect for the player by designer was to be expected. I can’t really say that is the case today.
I wouldn’t go as far to say that Mega Man 2 is the most difficult title in the series (it is probably the third hardest with 9 & 5 in front of it), but it is no walk in park either. Furthermore since the game boils down to simply running, jumping, and shooting in specific sequence, controls are unequivocally paramount to any true port of the game. So when it was announced that an iPhone version of Mega Man 2 was released my first thoughts were, “I have to see how they pulled this one off.”
ENR Technologies' Bluetooth Game Controller
Capcom’s proposed iPhone control solution? Well as you can see, it is a virtual arcade stick and buttons. Now I haven’t played this version, but I am of the mindset that any version of Mega Man 2 that is playable via the known in-exacting nature of non-haptic virtual controls, probably should be considered a true port of the original. This does however, illustrate, the main probably facing designers who are working to port existing titles to a touch screen environment- How the hell do you replicate haptic/tactile controls?
Chances are that not too long after version 3.0 of the iPhone OS is released, designers won’t have to worry as much any more. While much has been made of the update’s other functionality, from a true gaming persepective the 3.0 standout should be app accessory support:
Using the new External Accessory framework, your application can now communicate with “Made for iPod” hardware accessories attached to iPhone or iPod touch through either the 30-pin dock connector or wirelessly using Bluetooth.
“What does this mean,” you ask? It means that we will soon have support for a 3rd party iPhone game controller accessory. To be honest, I’m surprised that there hasn’t been an announcement already. While working with Georgia Tech’s Mobile Technologies Group, I briefly played around with ENR Technologies’ Bluetooth Game Controller. Despite a few obvious engineering shortcomings, the controller was a welcomed device augmentation- even in several non-game applications.
iControlPad
I wonder what the first accessory to market will be… Will the previously “Made for Jailbroken” iControlPad get the official stamp of approval? Or will the long-rumored Belkin gamepad finally come to light?
I think one thing is fairly certain. Given the horrific reviews that Mega Man 2 is getting, and it is otherwise considered on of the best games of all time, publishers will likely hold off on releasing would-be AAA titles until a more suitable control paradigm is in place.
posted by Dakota Brown on March 27th, 2009 at 8:27 am Permanent link to this post
