Sixcess said:
I want to play a game called Rocket Cat.
Why does this bring to mind Doomsday arcade for me...
Oh, that's right, because the game one of the Micheal's had made was called LaserCat.
Hmm... Odd.
Anyway, I don't really know what to say about Iphones; I don't like apple, but the devices themselves are probably quite good.
Unfortunately, as gaming devices... I find them a little suspect.
Now, presumably multi-touch compensates for things a little bit, but Yahtzee has pointed out how traditional control schemes don't work very well on a touchscreen.
And, it's quite true. Much as I like the
idea of touchscreen devices, experience has shown me that they're horrible for most game designs.
I have an admittedly cheap touchscreen phone, but it fails at 'virtual' buttons, and fails just as badly at anything that equates to a virtual mouse.
It doesn't help that it often starts to get the location of where you're touching the screen wrong when it has fingerprints on it.
Anyway, from a design perspective, I've learnt that there is only one gesture that feels relatively natural on a touch-screen, and that's sliding.
You can comfortably slide your finger across a screen and it usually works quite well, but as soon as you start dealing in buttons, or pretending there's a mouse, you get stupid problems.
Of course, this isn't helped in the case of a phone like mine with the interface designers thinking it's acceptable to have tiny buttons.
Basic logic should tell you that given how big people's fingers are, the minimum size for a button on a touchscreen is about 1 square centimetre.
Anything less, and the whole thing becomes very fiddly, and difficult to use without a stylus.
Anyway, I'm rather surprised on the whole that Yahtzee doesn't complain about the controls on Iphone games.
Especially considering the amount of whining he devotes to Wii controls, which, frankly, are much less likely to be stupidly annoying.
