Apple fails BlackBerry test - Financial Times
Like one million other eager beavers around the globe, I have now been playing with Apple s new third-generation iPhone for a week much to the chagrin of my four 20-something children who all believe it would fit better in their technology
THQ Wireless’ Brad Pitser talks to TUAW about iPhone development
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Gaming, iPhone, App Store, SDK
I’m here at E3 in Los Angeles all this week (come say hi at the Joystiq meetup tonight if you’re in town!). Yesterday, I got to sit down with Brad Pitser, the Director of Global Production for THQ Wireless, a company that makes games for mobile platforms like the iPhone. Pitser has helped oversee two iPhone games so far: De Blob (now on the App Store) and Star Wars’ Force Unleashed (coming out later this year — Joystiq has my impressions of both). He said that developing for the iPhone so far has been “a dream.” They’ve partnered with Apple to publish on the iPhone and iPod touch as much as they can. “Apple was interested in our brands,” Pitser said, “and we were interested in their platform.”
One concern he does have about the App Store so far is the pricing — “everyone thinks $9.99 is too much,” he told me. THQ released De Blob at the $6.99 price point. He says THQ has a lot of licensing fees and costs to pay for every game they make, and when those games compete with software that sells for 99 cents, they don’t necessarily have a money-making proposition. But at the same time, he’d rather let the market figure things out — the App Store has a lot of settling down to do, and Pitser is sure that companies will find their place in the price plan soon enough.
I asked him what he thought of what he’d seen in the software that wasn’t his, and he said he really enjoyed the iPint visual gag, the UrbanSpoon restaurant finder, and Aurora Feint (all very nice choices). It’s great to have a bigger company like THQ interested in getting some good licenses on the iPhone, and hopefully we’ll see more come out of Pitser and the division he oversees.
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iPhone, Meet Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
We couldn’t think of any better combination of Gizmodo’s stereotypical interests than checking out Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on the iPhone (…iPhone Lego Star Wars would of course be the Holy Grail, but we only speak of the possibility in hushed voices). After a brief hands-on, we’re left even more excited about the capabilities of the iPhone gaming platform, though a bit skeptical of the game’s unique control scheme.
Force Unleashed really is a pretty game. Crystal clear 2D backdrops give the levels a lot of pizzazz despite that they are, you know, 2D. And lightsabers glow properly on the screen.
But where we’d hoped to run around and slice our foes with laser swords, the mechanics never gave us a chance. Much like the classic PC series Rebel Assault, you don’t actually move your character through rooms. Instead, you reflect your foes’ laser shots with properly timed/angled swipes of the finger and activating force powers (like throwing baddies or electrocuting them) by drawing out symbols on the screen.
As lame as this may sound on paper, the battles can grow enjoyably hectic as you block fire and toss your enemies aside. And it’s all promised to be backed by the same soundtrack we’ll hear in the Xbox/PS3 versions of the Force Unleashed (we just heard placeholder music during our hands-on).
Oh, and something really cool. You can rotate the game between portrait and landscape mode. Neither gave the characters the stretched look.
In addition to all of that, THQ promised us an uncharacteristically rich storyline for a mobile game and 2 1/2 to 3 hours of gameplay. For a cellphone game, it looks extremely good. But compared to something on the PSP/DS, it’s going to be a tad disappointing. So depending on your expectations of the iPhone, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed may be worth checking out when it hits this September.
LiveJournal 0.2.0
Native Application to post journal entries to the LiveJournal website (http://www.livejournal.com) LiveJournal is a native journal entry application. Overall, it’s a fairly simple app, however its power lies not in the interface itself, but in its associated website online. When you first load the application, it will advise you to enter your LiveJournal login ID and [...]
New iPhone is the Apple of their eyes - Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel
MOSCOW - In the Soviet days, Russians asked their American friends to bring blue jeans, rock records and other Western goods into the country. Today, Russians can buy almost anything they want here but they are still begging for one item: Apple’s
