The Quest and all of it's awesome expansions I Dig It Warship Samurai Zenonia Gangstar Space Invaders Infinity Gene And of course Enviro-Bear. (just kidding)
Just played RE4, and wow! I'm amazed! Gotta love sales! Also touchgrind, still play it very often and love it!
Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor in terms of creativity and good gameplay. Hero of Sparta in terms of visuals and music.
It's pretty amazing that they were able to capture the essence of RE4 and reach an approximation of it's visuals on a mobile device. At this rate, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect a scaled down version of Gears of War on the iPhone 4G
The very first app that made me realize iPhone/iPod Touch gaming was amazing was Blue Attack. Since then there have been countless other amazing titles that make me excited to have an iPod Touch, like iDracula, Flight Control and Rolando.
That are out: •Minigore •cs.one •SIIG •AFII: The Arena •TS3 Upcoming: •Ravensword •GTA: Chinatown Wars •Eliminate •iBlastMoki
Real Racing RE 4 Sandstorm Spyder FAST these are the ones I'm just recalling right now. I know there's more. I mean were getting GTA:CW. The iPhone and iPod touch have to be treated as gaming devices as well as mp3 gps etc.
I'm probably gonna get a negative response on this one, but Gangstar mainly showed me what wasn't possible on the iPhone. Yes, it works pretty well for what it is, but it's one of the games that clearly shows the limitations of the device with the draw distance, AI complexity, number of objects on the screen etc... and while it's impressive in a way to see an open world game on the iPhone I also found it disheartening to know that bar some technological breakthrough, we'd already reached one of the heights of possibilities, and it wasn't even that fun.
Dark Raider S (3GS only) is doing stuff that even PSP can't (it has no pixel shaders). I'm waiting for more games to do this...
Pretty soon we will be talking about Gangstar and MC:S as the most technically accomplished games of the 1st generation of the iPlatform. Once the new iPod Touch becomes available you will start to see more and more developers shifting towards the next generation devices, and the kind of technical limitations you mention will be a thing of the past. Bad AI, however, is not a technical limitation: it's a financial one. Considering development costs and potential returns on the AppStore, publishers like Gameloft need to choose between eye candy and smart gameplay -- and eye candy sells better than smarts. This not necessarily (or always) the case: Real Tennis 2009 combines both pretty well. But as long as the average game price skews towards $.99, you will most often see developers choose one or the other. The good news is that as games become more tecnically accomplished, publishers will be able to sell them at higher prices (6.99 is getting to be a new sweetspot, at least for Gameloft), which should increase budgets and improve less-tangible features like AI, storytelling, and originality. Then again, perhaps I'm being too much of an optimist.
Honestly, it was games like: Super Monkey Ball PapiJump Dizzy Bee Soul Trapper Enigmo Trace Eliss That formulated and raised my expectations of what was possible on the iPhone/touch platform as far as gaming was concerned. The first three (Monkey Ball, PapiJump, Dizzy Bee) showed me that accelerometer controlled gaming on a mobile platform can be fun. I was somewhat skeptical at first, but those games sold me on the idea. And Monkey Ball showed me what a "big" company with large assets could help pull off when given just a little time on this platform. A lot of people forget, but if not for Monkey Ball we most likely would not have even the Gangstar's of this platform. Sega was the first "big" company on iPhone/touch...too bad they forgot what power they wield (what happened to the Sega of my youth?). The latter three (Enigmo, Trace, Eliss) showed what could be done with just the touch screen, particularly Eliss with the multitouch usage. And Soul Trapper showed me that a high quality game working primarily using audio only could be possible on this platform. People can point out the Gangstars and the Modern Combats and whathaveyou that Gameloft is putting out, but Gameloft's value is in that they cater to a niche market on this platform and are NOT the norm. If they were, this platform would be no different than a portable game system like PSP or DS, and as a multihardware owner, the value I find in iPhone/touch gaming are the games of the sort that I either cannot play or cannot play in the same manner on any other platform.
I agree with you to a certain extent: games like Monkey Ball and Eliss opened the door for sophisticated gaming using the iPhone's inherent controls, and it is certainly those kinds of games (see Samurai for a recent example) that will distinguish the platform from the PSPs and the DSs. Still, just as the PSP didn't strike anyone as an essential platform till Lumines and Locoroco (both of which would have seemed more at home on a DS or an iPhone), Gameloft is helping to make the iPlatform a viable one for a wider range of games (and development budgets). I cannot imagine that GTA:Chinatown would be coming to the iPhone if it had not been for Hero of Sparta (which was the one of the first games that got people talking about the iDevice as serious gaming platform). For better or for worse, there's a whole host of gamers who need both innovative, platform-specific games and more traditional console games to take the iDevice seriously.
