iPhone News Updated

iPhone casts a hex on games consoles

As multiplayer games for the Apple devices take off, the reasons for buying a traditional gadget withers

For most shops on Regent Street, 9am on a grey Monday morning is a time for dusting off displays and putting change in the tills. Not in Apple’s huge London flagship store: it is already packed with buyers, and of all the devices on show, the one drawing the most attention is the iPhone. Which makes it the perfect place to meet Greg “Joz” Joswiak, Apple’s vice-president of iPhone and iPod product marketing.

Joz has left California on a rare visit to London to evangelise about the rapidly expanding number of games for the iPhone and its hardware-sharing partner the iPod Touch (in effect an iPhone with the camera and telephone bits left out). He’s demonstrating some of the Christmas releases that will join the more than 20,000 games already available to download.

Games represent one in five of the programs that have made it into the Apple app store in the 16 months since its launch. “We never predicted these numbers,” he says. “It blows me away.”

It is no coincidence that three of the four games Joz is showing involve several people playing at the same time over wireless networks. This has been a surprising omission in most app store games to date, given that both the Touch and the iPhone have internet access, so gamers could play against one another. It’s one area in which Apple’s rivals have an edge. Sony’s PlayStation Portable (PSP) and Nintendo’s DS family are wi-fi-enabled, and many of their games allow up to 16 players to go head to head — though it can sometimes be a fiddly process to get going.

At last, iPhone multiplayer gaming is taking off. Most impressive of the new titles is one released last week, Harry Potter: Spells, which includes the option for a pair of players to duel. It utilises two technologies not found in the PSP or DS: Bluetooth, the short-range wireless connectivity that is far easier to set up than wi-fi, and the motion sensors built into every iPhone and Touch, which are used here to turn them into wands.

Players square up to each other at distances of up to 15ft, then trace shapes in the air to cast any of 14 spells and launch them at their opponent with a flick of the wrist. If you’re too slow to cast a blocking charm, the handset lights up and emits a crackling sound, as your in-game energy takes a hit. It’s so immersive that Joz nearly drops his Touch in the excitement. Perhaps a Wii-style wrist strap should be built into the next-generation iPhone.

Skies of Glory, scheduled for launch next month, involves players equipping second world war fighter planes then battling over southern England or the Pacific Ocean. Unlike in Spells, flyers do not have to be in the same room and connected by Bluetooth, or even on the same wi-fi network. Instead, up to four players can dogfight over the internet, wherever they are in the world. An update — unlike with DS and PSP titles, new features can be sent out to users of previously purchased app store games without charge — will allow players to taunt rivals with shouts of “Tally-ho!” and the like over their phones.

Touch Pets: Dogs, out now, uses the iPhone and Touch web browser to good effect. As younger players build up a clan of cartoon pooches, from within the app they can “invite” each other’s mutts over for play dates and have them form friendships and romances, or post messages to friends in a chat room — think Facebook for virtual-dog owners. Granted, both the PSP and DS have browsers of their own, but the software is far more clumsily implemented than Apple’s Safari browser, which would account for it being so rarely used in their games.

Both Skies of Glory and Touch Pets come from companies with multiplayer pedigrees. Skies was written by the Social Gaming Network, which pioneered multiplayer flight gaming on Apple devices with FAST (Fleet Air Superiority Training), a jet fighter simulation that took $1m (£600,000) in its first six weeks on release earlier this year. Ngmoco, the developer of Touch Pets, also runs the Plus+ network, on which you can post high scores for all its titles. These include Eliminate, a multiplayer first-person shooter that doesn’t even need wi-fi — it can be played over the iPhone on a 3G network.

For Warner Bros, which owns the Harry Potter franchise, Spells is typical of the direction it wants to take. “We’ve just added a multiplayer mode to another of our games, Ninja Assassin,” says Isabelle Bertrand, a director at Warner Bros Digital Distribution. “This allows you to throw a shuriken [a pointed weapon] from one iPhone to another. Social network integration is also becoming more common.”

Successful multiplayer apps from other developers include Galcon, an intergalactic version of Risk in which games take about a minute; Real Racing, a track game in which as many as six players’ cars can compete at once; and Real Football 09, in which the teams of two players can face off in impressively rendered stadiums. Then there is Modern Combat: Sandstorm — the iPhone version of the bestselling Call of Duty: Modern Warfare games — which gets a multiplayer update next month.

These examples aside, the vast majority of existing app store games do not include multiplayer modes. The first reason for this is financial: PSP and DS games can cost £30 each, and for that money buyers get larger, more complex games with multiplayer modes; Spells, by contrast, is just £2.99, and even that is pricy by iPhone game standards. Skies and Touch Pets, for instance, are free (although both will make money from in-game purchases).

The second reason is that most apps are developed by bedroom coders — one-man-band operations with neither the skills to write multiplayer software nor the funding to buy and run the hardware needed to support online play. Finally, the sheer number of games available in the app store can make it hard for a single title to rise to the top of the pack and, in the process, gain so many users that players can always be certain of finding an opponent online.

As bigger developers such as Warner Bros release more games, that situation will change. It is a huge problem for Sony and Nintendo, whose handheld players cost the same as a Touch — a device that also includes class-leading music and browser software, not to mention games that cost a fraction of the price, are available to download on a whim in seconds and come with free updates too.

“If you look at devices such as the DS and the PSP, in a lot of ways they’ve defined the past in handheld gaming,” Joz said earlier this year. “I look at the iPhone and I think it has the opportunity to redefine the future. Everything about it suggests where we are headed. I think a lot of the other guys are trying to scramble for what they do in response.”

[Thanks: http://technology.timesonline.co.uk]