Sega’s Super Monkeyball made news this week for racking up the most sales among paid apps in Apple’s first month of business with the AppStore, a tsunami of consumer love amounting to $30 million in new business for Apple and its third-party iPhone application developers. But a report at Gizmodo says “the best implementation of iPhone tilt control is conceptually identical to a seven-year-old Game Boy title, which itself was based on the old wooden marble-in-a-labyrinth puzzles that have been around since, well, who knows?”
After all the novelty and hype have settled on the iPhone gaming front, will we continue to see the platform as something as revolutionary as Apple’s cadre of evangelists would have us believe it is? The Gizmodo report points out that, as least with respect to games that rely on the iPhone’s accelerometer to make things interesting, “A portable gaming device that…can make sensitive games like Crash Bandicoot Racing and Monkey Ball almost unplayable” isn’t truly portable and in fact may be little more than an impressive, elaborate gimmick.
Via Gizmodo
Lonnie Lazar is a writer-musician-web designer-attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie’s photos on Flickr.
