Don't think there are that many people interested on this forum, but Epic Games took the stage at the Apple event earlier today to help showcase the iphones game centre. They showed a tech demo and almost immediately after, it was released on to the app store absolutely free and blimey, it doesn't half look nice.
Epic Citadel is a wee castle town... thing... that's free for exploration. It runs smooth on my iphone 4. These are some screenshots i took.
They look pretty good. But do you think this heralds in a new era of iphones being taken seriously as gaming devices? Probably not, but let's hear your thoughts.
indeed that is pretty, but how does it look on an iphone screen? obviously it would contain the same detail as in the screenshots but i imagine theres lots of squinting involved when on the iphone
also, how does it play, is it a 1st/3rd person jobby that you controll a character walking around? or is it just arrows at the side of the screen that you press and it switches between prerendered areas?
less impressive if its the latter. although could mean for some nice looking point and click type games
You can move around in a few ways. You can tap a destination, maybe a few feet in front of you, maybe to the top of a hill and you'll walk there. You can use dual virtual analogue sticks in much the same way you'd move in a console fps or you can use one virtual stick to move and swipe the screen to move the camera. Swiping feels most natural to me because i'm used to the accuracy of PC controls. It's all first person and all 3D. No pre-rendered anything.
Haven't really used it for any extended period yet. The iphone 4's battery is better than the 3GS, but i'd say it'd use up about the same as streaming a big movie.
I couldn't give a flying fuck about the iPhone or any other smart phone being used to run game engines.
However, what I am impressed about is how scaleable they've made these new engines (id Software have already done this with tech 5 a few months ago), as it should mean the games will run on a very large set of systems (in terms of processing and graphics power).
It also strikes home a piece from John Carmack I recently read regarding how releasing old tech isn't going to harm him because all his competitors will have created something similar around the time of its original creation anyway so they've nothing to gain.
buzzmong wrote:It also strikes home a piece from John Carmack I recently read regarding how releasing old tech isn't going to harm him because all his competitors will have created something similar around the time of its original creation anyway so they've nothing to gain.
I think he overestimates his competitors.
While part of me is pleased that phones might now have decent games as all the ones I've tried are shit, the other part remembers that I have a DS and a PSP for the very rare occasions I want mobile gaming - and I mostly play very old games on those.
I'm also not a fan of smearing my grubby mitts all over my screen, but that's a criticism of touch-screen devices in general.
FatherJack wrote:I'm also not a fan of smearing my grubby mitts all over my screen, but that's a criticism of touch-screen devices in general.
I haven't been sold on any of the new controller interface thingys, a mouse and keyboard/game pad will do just fine thanks. I'm holding out for total immersion video games.
The only thing bad about this tech demo is that you can't invert the look control when using the virtual analogue control sticks. However the point and swipe method feels better on the platform anyway. Everything else is amazing; steady frame-rate and lovely detail. I did initially think "this screen is too small" but I got used to it soon enough.
