Congratulations Gamers, Mobile Gaming has arrived! In the interest of full disclosure I am an Apple Fan boy and the Steve distortion field probably hasn’t worn off just yet. I am a big propoent of the single device to rule them all, and I think Apple is working towards that as well.

Incase you didn’t know Apple announced the details of the iPhone/iPod Touch SDK last thursday. You might ask yourself, why is this chump talking about Apple on a Video Game blog? Because Sega, EA, and ID have either already produced games, or have announced producing games for the iPhone. As well as various smaller mobile gaming studios. So you might ask yourself, is this another N-Gage? Maybe, but I don’t think so. Will this kill the DS or PSP? Probably not, but it will create a whole new type of portable games much like the Nintendo DS did when it was released.

What does the platform offer that we can’t get out of our existing protables?

Always Available

I am not sure about you, but I don’t carry my Nintendo DS with me everywhere, but I do carry my cell phone everywhere. So when I need to kill a few minutes, waiting in a long line, or sitting in a waiting room, I can pop out my phone and play some monkey ball.

Multi Touch Pad

The DS introduced what a single touch pad can give to a gaming platform. Clones of the popular DS touch heavy games are sure to be ported so look for iPet and iBrain. There is a difference though, there is not a traditional d-pad or buttons, but you do get multi touch capability and an accelerometer. This will cause game developers to think outside the box, and hopefully come up with interesting control schemes. Some will be good, some will be bad, and this is where the potential disaster will come in.

Accelerometer

Much like the Wii Controller, the iPhone has an accelerometer. So games like Super Monkey Ball make a lot of sense, maybe that is why Sega already made it! But the accelerometer makes for an interesting control in other ways, like a steering wheel for a racing game, or reset for a drawing game. I am not a game designer, so I will not pretend to know all the ways this control can be used.

Microphone

I am not sure if the SDK allows access to the phones microphone, especially since I don’t think the iPod Touch has one, but this can make for an interesting control.

Online Distribution

This an interesting point all around. The games will be distributed through the iTunes Music store, or purchased in the App Store right on the iPhone/iPod Touch. This allows beginning developers to push out their work to millions of potential gamers without a traditional publisher. So like we discussed in our last episode, this is another avenue for the independent developer to create and publish his/her game idea and distribute it to the masses. And the exciting part about this environment is you get 70% of the profit from whatever price you set. So if you decide to sell the game for $10 you get $7 for every sale. If you decide you want to give away your game for free, then it costs you and your user nothing.

So where can this go wrong? This can go wrong in a lot of ways. I believe the touch screen has fixed the game control schema that apple tried to push on us in the iPod classic. Someone was kidding themselves when they thought they could make a good game with a scroll wheel. Even Mrs. Pac-man was horrible! The controls however, are where the device can fail as a gaming platform as well, unless creative and inventive people develop for the platform. We need a developer or group of developers to take the controls and use them to their best abilities, instead of trying to apply old game styles like FPS, or Platformers to this new control device. Those kind of games still work on the DS because there are standard controls. The iPhone/iPod touch don’t have that luxury, so instead new game types need to be developer, or old ones need to be re-imagined. For instance an RTS could work really well with a touch screen with some inventive controls. Turn based RPGs could work really well, if a clever exploring control was created to navigate the world in-between battles. Even action games could work if they emplored a game mechanic like Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword.

All in all I think this is good news for the mobile gaming market. Hopefully with some creative minds we will see some neat games come out of it.

UPDATE:Namco, PopCap and THQ have joined in to the iPhone fun announcing plans to release games for the platform.