Super Monkey Ball and Moonlight Mahjong Lite

One week after the 2.0 firmware update, the iPhone is the new gaming platform everyone is talking about. Many of the news coming out of E3 are about it, for example.

Since the opening of the App Store, I have tried a few of the free and of the paid games available and am very pleased. The graphics, the sound, and the touch and/or accelerometer controls all work very well. I downloaded also a couple of other free games that managed to find a spot in the top 25 in the early days but were really just proof-of-concept kind of demos. I have quickly deleted those from my iPod and from my iTunes. Below is a screenshot with the games I have on my iPhone.



For me, the paid game that better illustrates the capabilities of the platform is Super Monkey Ball from Sega. It's a game at the level of something you would find on a Wii system. Carefully tilting the iPhone or iPod you guide a ball through several obstacles trying not to fall off the platform. It reminded me a lot of Rub a Dub (PS3), a game we like a lot here at GamerConnect.




As for free games, I am having the most fun with Moonlight Mahjong Lite:



90% of the fun comes from the Mahjong game itself, a game I first saw on the PC sometime in the late eighties. 10% comes from the touch controls. This is the application I have seen on the iPod with the most "multi-touch gesture" interactions. Besides tap to pick tiles, no less than four different gestures are available to position the board on the screen: "single finger drag" (moves in the XY plane), "two finger drag" (rotates on the X and Y axes), "two finger twist" (rotates in the Z axis), and "two finger pinch or expand" (zoom in and out).



If I wanted to get really fancy, the only thing I would add to Moonlight Mahjong Lite is the ability to reshuffle the board by shaking my iPod...

Just a few days old, the iPhone as a gaming platform is already fulfilling pretty much all the expectations and predictions of those who were waiting for it. I am, however, still kind of waiting for a Pac-man controlled by accelerometer. For some reason, the two Namco titles on the App Store seem to have preferred the use of a virtual touch D-pad.