Is the iPhone a viable gaming platform?
That depends on how you define gaming.
Casual games are a booming business for iPhone developers. Games like "Tap Tap Revenge," a rhythm game, and "Trism," a block-matching game with a twist provided by the motion sensor in the iPhone, are incredibly popular. So are the unique offerings of tilting games that the iPhone offers, like "Rolando" and "Dizzy Bee" - or the overly hard-to-play "Super Monkey Ball."
For the most part, these are casual games. They don't fall into any of the old time-honored categories that "core" gamers tend to prefer to play. One problem with the iPhone is the almost total lack of buttons. Even the few the device has are not meant to be used for anything but core functions of the iPhone OS.
It's incredibly difficult to play a game like "Doom" using only a touch-screen. The controls are clunky, and the inevitable problem of one's fingers covering up the action rears its hideous head.
That doesn't mean that fun non-casual games are impossible on the iPhone. "Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicle" looks like a blast from the gameplay videos on YouTube. But it looks like it took an inordinate amount of work to get the controls - which, mind you, still cover up part of the screen - to work properly. "Altair" seems to have some problems with jumping. It's such an old problem for side-scrollers that it's almost a tradition.
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The amount of work that went into that game is a big reason hardcore gaming will never get more than a tenuous foothold on the iPhone. The iPhone market is willing to bear a $10 cost at most. Games that you would find on the Nintendo DS usually retail for $30. If anyone ever wants to see some good non-casual games on the iPhone, the consumers are going to have to pay up.
In the meantime, casual gaming is selling like hotcakes. "Tap Tap Revenge 2" is something people would be willing to pay money for, but they don't have to. Tapulous, the creator of the "Tap Tap" series, sells advertising space in the menu screens, allowing it to give away one of the most popular iPhone games for free. The music licensed is starting to get pretty broad, too. Unlike the first game, "Revenge 2" has some songs that people might have heard of.
Besides the prices being too low for hardcore games to be viable, there is also the problem of prominence. It's too difficult to search out the decent games while browsing the App Store, to sort the wheat from the chaff, as it were. Apple needs to open a section of the App Store exclusively to the large video game publishers. Have them set a minimum price of at least $15 to $20, and pretty soon, the hardcore games will start rolling in. Until then, iPhone owners are doomed to play another round of "Trism."
There are worse fates. One only has to imagine what it's like to own an N-Gage in order to feel grateful for what one has.
