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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Diablo 3 Doesn’t Look Right, Dev Says Yes Sir!Diablo 3 Doesn’t Look Right, Dev Says Yes Sir!

There has been many debates on the graphic level of Diablo 3 and how it should be different. Finally a developer comes out and says “um, no.” Their reasoning is fairly simple, it’s one thing to photoshop up a screenshot with some filters but it’s another to get the texture and lighting to run at that detail on a standard computer.

How do you argue with that? Personally, I think the graphics look wonderful, brilliant, vibrant and professional. Diablo 3 game designer Jay Willson said:

“The key thing to remember here is that this has been Photoshopped. This isn’t created by the engine. Though it looks really cool, it’s almost impossible to do in a 3D engine because you can’t have lighting that smart and run on systems that are reasonable. If we could do that, we probably would in a few of the dungeons.” (slashdot)

Non-developers seem to forget that the colors, cameras and lighting don’t come free on a video game. Everything has limitations and, although the limitations change over time, today’s graphics for a standard machine are capable of running Diablo 3. Blizzard isn’t making a game that only hardcore PC gamers can play, this game is for everyone.

Building a video game is a lot of smoke and mirrors to make a virtual object look “real” to normal gamers. Immersion and definition is important, grainy dark graphics do set a mood, but they also frustrate many players. Remember DOOM 3? Some people could barely see the “epic graphics” of the last DOOM sequel, it’s time to mature and show off true colors.

Darkness usually is used to hide imperfections, Diablo 3 has nothing to hide.

(For a high resolution photo, checkout MTV Multiplayer Blog)

Final Fantasy XIII – Xbox 360Final Fantasy XIII – Xbox 360

Yoichi Wada of Square Enix has let the cat out of the bag. The cat is Final Fantasy XIII for the Xbox 360 and it will be simultaneously released with the PlayStation 3 version. This may be an end to an exclusive era for Sony as all their big brands jump to non-exclusion.

This is probably a result of gamers slow adoption of the PlayStation 3 hardware for various issues, one being cost. Personally I think Sony’s move to say “no price cut” in our near future is a grand mistake. It is well understood that they want profitability over quantity but you’re losing your exclusives to a broader audience.

Each generation of consoles brings new industry trends and, for now, exclusive games from third party developers is too risky when you look at overall cost to produce a block buster title like Final Fantasy XIII. Consider the sales of GTA IV, although they were in the millions, imagine how low it would have been if they only released on the PS3. They’d might have actually lost money on the game.

Square Enix can see the writing on the wall, that writing says “ship on as many mediums as possible.” Gamers are split between consoles with a huge segment on Wii and Xbox 360, if you can at least ship on one of those consoles along with the PS3 you’ll do better financially.

(Thanks, Kotaku)

Sierra’s Franchise Titles Fade Into HistorySierra’s Franchise Titles Fade Into History

One of the great downfalls of an acquisition or merger, in the game industry, is the loss of great franchise titles. Sierra, or Sierra Online, once stood on its own as a company with great gaming titles but later fell into the depths of Hades under many different company names.

Sierra’s last stop on the acquisition highway was Vivendi, years after much of Sierra’s steam had slowed. Now, they’re part of Activision Blizzard so we had high hopes they’d find a great use for some of the old Sierra properties long since collecting dust. Space Quest, Kings Quest, Leisure Suit Larry and especially Gabrielle Knight were some of our favorites, but times have changed.

“We are retaining only those franchises that are a strong fit with our long-term strategy including Crash Bandicoot, Ice Age and Spyro, as well as Prototype and a second game that has not yet been announced. We will not publish any other titles that previously were part of the Vivendi Games portfolio and we are currently reviewing our options regarding those titles,” says Activision Blizzard (joystiq)

This is unfortunate news, Activision Blizzard now has a large set of franchises on their hands, many of which have collected dust for years. Those dust collecting franchises could rise from the dead and reinvigorate their old fan base… or be dropped to the earth as unwanted scrapes after a big hunt with the vultures awaiting their take (sorry, too much watching of Animal Planet)

A reworked Kings Quest or Gabriel Knight could have seriously awesome potential in this time and age, imagine a dark comedy version of Gabriel Knight or a huge scaled world in King Quest using todays graphic engines. Although, these titles could also go the way Atari has gone and taken a well remembered franchise and made mud of its great name (*cough* Alone in the Dark).

Unfortunately, we’ll probably never know the distance an old franchise could go in this new world. We’ll have to pull out an old copy of our prized posessions and remember just how great they once where.