Despite Rumors, a Gaming iPhone Needs More Than New Silicon

Image: Wired.com

Our friend and colleague at Wired’s Gadget Lab, Brian Chen, has an interesting post up about the potential for the next iPhone to really make a credible challenge to the Nintendo DS and the Sony PSP. He cites a lot of potential factors, including that the iPhone already has 1,500 games, which is five times as many gaze as the DS, and more than double that of the PSP. All that, and it should have measurably better 3-D graphics once it implements hardware from newly acquired PA Semiconductor.

The post’s sources — and Apple — do not, however, address the elephant in the room with iPhone gaming: the controls just aren’t that good. For certain types of gameplay, such as those that don’t require pinpoint touch, or those that can work well with tilt to manage directionality, the iPhone is great. For anything that is best managed with directional controls, however, it’s kind of a disaster. The clearest example of this is the hugely disappointing Katamari for iPhone, which has dreadful tilt-based gameplay that just doesn’t work.

I’d love for iPhone to mature as a gaming platform — and today’s rumors of $20 premium games is actually a signal in the right direction — but some more basic things need to be fixed before we get too concerned about how sophisticated the texture capabilities of its graphics chips are. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be seeing people attempting to bolt a directional pad and action buttons onto existing iPhones.

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