Well, I have been using Apple machines for 12 years (not counting Apple II 20+ years ago), PowerPC 9600MP, Pismo, Titanium PowerBook 15inch all for personally and PowerPC G5 , MacBook Pro 15inch and Intel MacPro for professionally. Loved the products. Recommended Mac to many friends and relatives for past 10 years. (not anymore though)
I did not like the Mac vs PC ads from the beginning. As a software engineer, I have million different complaints about Windows AND Mac. Neither are perfect. I just use them for my work. Why the ads had to be so childish? Can’t you focus on your good things only?
Now, why am I talking about this in my gaming blog? Because of this picture.
This is a shot of Apple presentation the other day promoting the iPod touch/iPhone as a gaming device. The presenter explains that PSP/DS has no features like iPod touch/iPhone. I am fine with thier promoting products but do they have to do like this? As far as I see, the iPod/iPhone games are more or less comparable to the flash games on the web. Yes, they have some cool 3D stuffs but the point is that the most games designed to be casual/snack type games. One quote from the event is “There are 21,178 entertainment titles in the App Store.” Wow. 21,178. How many are worth more than 5 bucks? or 5min of my time?
- No Multi-Touch user interface – the current games are not geared toward to multi-touch. Joypad cannot replace multi-touch AND multi-touch cannot replace joypad. What is the point of saying that “ooh, they do not have this fancy multi-touch for gaming”?
- Games are expensive – yes they are. I want to have cheaper games all the time. However those games are expensive for the reason because some games really do have some high quality production values. God of War, Crisis Core, Castlevania… Again, out of 21,178, how many games are worth more than 5bucks? Metal Gear Solid Touch (iPhone) vs Metal Gear Portable OPs (PSP). One has clearly more value and is expensive than the other. But comparing them is idiotic.
- No App Store – good. you have the nice lock-down on how to sell games only through your store. It is convenient for the consumer. I guess nobody wants to download gigabytes worth of game data through the wireless LAN. However, most good games on PSP/DS are fairly big. I am sure they certainly more than 100MB or even 1GB. App store is perfect for small games but not for big games.
- No iPod – this is a completely different point. Gaming machines tend to not play MP3 (except they do as a secondary function). This is more like, “PSP/DS cannot play music you download from iTunes store because we do not allow. and they cannot be synced to iTunes because we do not want, just like Palm Pre“.
I get it. The games for iPod/iPhone are cheap, plenty and easily accessible. So is the MacDonald burger. PSP/DS games are geared toward to a different market. The gaming has been one of the weak point for the Mac. Nobody made a fun of it (okay, maybe some people) because that’s like making fun of a handicapped kid. I used/use Mac because of many good things about it. I will buy iPhone (someday) and buy all those wonderful snack type games from the App Store if I want to play those snack type games. If I want to play some epic games I will still buy games for the PSP and DS. Apple, don’t be an asshole dissing other devices from other industry (I think Apple is not in the gaming industry. yet.) and do your job of making a good platform for the casual games.
