6,200 Reasons To Buy iPhone/Touch Games

The iTunes App Store is jam packed with video games! There are 6,200 games in the App Store to take advantage of, with 23% of those games for our puzzle gaming friends with arcade following a distance second place with 13% App Store market share. In that bulk of games, 1,485 are free download games but we’re not sure how many are “lite” versions of pay-for-games in the store, with limited game play. If you too are looking for ways to optimize your phone, see here the plans available at Circles.Life mobile.

chart-app-store

Apple could cut down on that clutter if they let developers publish one game with a demo/shareware release and a full release, perhaps than we would be able to wade through a realistic amount of game titles. Of course, Apple isn’t exactly the most friendly of companies when it comes down to allowing us to share our thoughts and opinions of their closed box products.

Unfortunately for the new game developers, they’ve got a few games to compete against in the App Store space. While great games should rise to the top like cream in your coffee, it’s obvious that 6,200 items can clutter up an otherwise friendly space. iTunes tends to have a very unintuitive interface and isn’t really built for great online game shopping experiences, we’re sure they can exploit many of the great games in this archive of titles if they had a bit of a re-design.

You’ll find plenty of educational games in the 6,200 titles, matching if not exceeding that of the strategy genre.
(Thanks, kotaku)

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Sony’s 10-Year Vision: Graphics or Games?Sony’s 10-Year Vision: Graphics or Games?

Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo have great visions for their consoles, they all strive to stand out from their competitors. Nintendo’s key initiative is to get non-gamers on board and provide the world with something a little different while Microsoft’s concept is to get a 360 into the hands of all gamers and build a huge community. Sony’s selling point? Graphics.

When it comes to standing out amongst the other consoles, Sony cannot compete with the Wii‘s quirky cuteness and Xbox 360‘s one-year lead on sales, games and overall functionality. They were late to the game because of technological advances in Blu-Ray and overall graphic horsepower. They’re providing a console that will still look “teh awesomes” ten years down the road, similar to the attack plan of the PS2 product which still sells today.

Sony’s Scott Steinberg, Vice President of Product Marketing for SCEA had nothing but great things to say about the console he’s marketing…

“I think that we’re seeing, graphically, PS3 games starting to create some distance and some of the other competitors are going to feel that they’re getting long in the tooth, looking quite dated, because they haven’t created that ten-year vision from a horsepower standpoint” (psu.com)

Really? Does anyone look at the Xbox 360 and say “this thing looks dated.” Each new title release continues to look more advanced and more graphically appealing than the last. Sure, Resistance 2 looked graphically epic, but the title isn’t on the shelves yet. As a matter of fact, very few PS3 titles are on the shelves when it comes to graphically appealing titles everyone wants.

As Nintendo has proven, it’s not always about the advanced graphics but the fun value and access to many titles across many genre’s of gaming. We’re happy about a nice 10-year vision but there is a reason classic games like Pac-Man, Missile Command and Galaga are still talked about and played by gamers: simple and fun.

Microsoft may not have a ten year vision, this is true, but I’d rather have a hot console I can play for the next six years than own a more expensive console with few games until its third year of life. The PlayStation 3 has been beating the Xbox 360 sales in 2008, is this too surprising given the fact that the Xbox 360 was out a year ahead? Sales aren’t always going to be rosy and over the top (unless it’s the Wii).

Rather than concentrate on how many more consoles the PS3 has sold compared to the 360, look at how many Wii consoles have sold to the graphically superior PS3. Perhaps Sony should speak less to the gamers about how awesome their console is and speak more to the developers so we can get titles worth buying for the console. Gamers only win when a console has games for them to play.

Users Pwn MetaCritic Review SubmissionsUsers Pwn MetaCritic Review Submissions

Although we’ve found Metacritic a userful resource for game reviews, many folks have gone on a user submission rampage to discredit games that haven’t even launched yet. Their first attack was on LittleBigPlanet followed by Resistance 2, now their hitting Gears of War 2.

While Gears of War 2 has a Metacritic score of 94/100 the user’s have reviewed it to be a 3.5 out of 10, with a bright red box around the user review due to its low nature we’re sure. Although users are free to give their own honest representation of the game from their perspective, Gears of War 2, as of the review dates, hasn’t been released yet – these reviews are bogus.

This style of attack was popularized in Spore, when Amazon got nailed with poor reviews of the game because Spore’s “Draconic” DRM made people angry. However, it’s more reasonable for people to voice their opinion on a known issue with a game; Gears of War 2 review spamming is just mean.

We use Metacritic as guidance when we do our gaming podcast to understand what games are rated in the industry, but we don’t use user reviews as our main guide. There are plenty of folks out there that may utilize these reviews in more seriousness because they may feel journalists reviews are tainted by advertisers or “the man” and want the common gamers opinion.

The common gamer cannot possibility be reviewing Gears of War 2 before the title has arrived. This is bogus. Metacritic has this to say:

“My advice for our faithful users is to focus your attention on the Metascore for this game and not the thousands of user votes, most of which have been submitted before said users have played the game. This is a gaming community, and if people want to stuff the ballot box, there’s not much I can do at this point. When we upgrade the registration requirements for participation on the site in the near future, this type of thing won’t happen. We’ll post the full legitimate user reviews upon the game’s release. As always, thanks for using the site.” (1up)

So, to those looking for holiday gaming gifts, keep this in mind while you start hunting down games you’ll want to buy.