Since getting my iPhone 3G I’ve bought and installed two games: Wurdle, and Asphalt 4 Elite Racing. They are at extreme ends of the gaming spectrum; Wurdle is a very casual 5 minute game, whereas Asphalt 4 is targeted at more serious gaming (IGN say it’s a must have for any serious gamer). I thought I’d give my opinions on both, and also discuss how the iPhone fits in the handheld gaming market in my opinion.

First, a bit of a story. I’ve always been a Nintendo fan when it comes to handheld gaming. I had a GameBoy, a GameBoy Colour, a GameBoy Advance, and a Nintendo DS. They seem to just get it right, and I think that’s because they learnt such a valuable lesson with the original GameBoy: At the time, companies like Sega were trying to push out handheld consoles that had were basically consoles, shrunk. Sega made the Game Gear, a portable Master System with a lower resolution and a 5 hour battery life on 6 AA batteries. It had great graphics, a beautiful backlit screen, and was powerful. But you can guess why it wasn’t successful. It’s competition (the GameBoy) had a monochrome screen (and not black and white, it was grey and green, and smeared all the time), no backlight, and was very underpowered. But it had two things going for it: It only took 4 AA batteries that could last around 35 hours, and Tetris. Everyone knows what Tetris is, it’s a woefully simple puzzle game with addictive gameplay, and it sold the GameBoy. Nintendo showed the world that you didn’t need the fancy graphics and the backlit screen and the powerful hardware, you just needed something that would get by, and had great gameplay.

Nintendo have stood by that; the Nintendo DS isn’t the most powerful handheld, it’s not got the fanciest graphics, but it has an intuitive control mechanism and great gameplay such as Nintendogs (the Tetris of the DS), New Super Mario Bros, Phantom Hourglass, Animal Crossing, and more. Sure they’re not hardcore games, but they sell the console and they take advantage of the handheld. The DS’s competitor; the PSP; is making the same mistakes as the Sega Game Gear, and then some, and that’s why it wont be successful.

So what’s this got to do with the ‘Touch’ platform? (’Touch’ because technically, all of this applies to the iPod Touch as well as the iPhone)

It’s my belief that handheld success lies firmly in the more intuitive, gameplay heavy, and sometimes casual, area. That’s why Tetris succeeded; people wanted a game they could pick up and play for a few minutes while waiting in line, not a game that has to load for 10 seconds, head through a bunch of menus, make you sit through some story dialog, and you have to play for 10 minutes before really getting anywhere. That’s what console games are for. This is where my two examples - Wurdle and Asphalt 4 Elite Racing - come in.

So, Wurdle. Wurdle is a simple puzzle game where you have 2 minutes to make as many words as you can from a grid of letters. You do this by dragging your finger across adjacent (horizontally, vertically, and diagonally) letters to make a word. The bigger the word, the higher the score. Shake your Touch, and the grid reshuffles (docking you points in the process) giving you a chance if you’re ran out of words. There’s options to change the grid size, grid colour, play time, minimum word length, sound effects, and dictionary. Standard game time is 2 minutes, and you have the option of submitting your score online (though I can’t find a way of viewing the online high score within the game). The game loads pretty much instantly and starts a fresh game straight away. It’s very addictive, great for passing a couple of minutes of time, but not dull and monotonous because you’re having to think and spot words. I’m having great fun playing it, and it was definitely worth the £1.19 I paid for it (a bargain!).

Asphalt 4 Elite Racing is a street racing game with 4 (apparently 5 so I guess I haven’t seen one yet) different race modes. A simple race, a cop chase, ‘Beat ‘em all’, and some sort of cash race thing. The only one that seems very different is cop chase, where you have to ‘Takedown’ the lead of the race, the other 3 are all quite similar (with just slightly different focuses). Asphalt 4 is meant to be targeting the more serious gamer, so let’s treat this seriously:

Graphics - Probably around Nintendo DS level, except I think the Nintendo DS would pull off a more decent framerate. The game stutters a lot, and sometimes takes a while to recover. When you’re playing using the tilt sensor, this is really annoying. When it’s smooth it looks quite pretty, and the car models are good enough that you can tell what they are (the car models are real licensed models).

Sound - The music is OK I guess, but the screeching when you drift is terrible; it seems to be so much louder than the rest of the game. The braking is the same, and is also a very obvious short loop. Not nice. Also, sometimes the game seems to glitch, and the sounds are played at a much higher pitch than normal for no apparent reason (unless I’m missing some sort of gameplay thing).

Gameplay - The modes are all quite similar apart from cop chase. The environments are varied, which is nice. It’s nice to have 3 different control styles - you can touch left or right of the screen, tilt, or spin a wheel with your finger left or right. There’s no accelerator, only a brake, so this isn’t very advanced controls. But that’s nice, it makes it more approachable. I noticed however that tilting forward to get a nitro boost is rubbish, sometimes it counts one tilt as three, and sometimes when you’re just turning it thinks you’ve moved it forward. And this is me trying to keep it really steady. There’s a huge array of customisation for your car, but I think it’s unnecessary, and very hard to navigate around (or tell the difference between the parts, as you can only check by applying them to your car) the tiny menus - whether portrait or landscape. There’s a wide array of cars and bikes and that is more than enough without all the customisation rubbish.

Presentation - There’s an intro video at the start, which is a nice touch. You can play the game in either portrait or landscape - equally a nice touch. The menus are somewhat fiddly, but manageable. The game features lots of real-world cars, and they’re recognisable. It even had my favourite - the Nissan 350Z, which instantly gave it bonus points.

Lastability - I’ve played a bunch of races and the game tells me I’m about 12% through, so I guess it’s gonna be a while before I unlock that tempting Bugatti Veyron that’s in the video and on the graphic for the game. There’s multiplayer, which I haven’t tried, but I can only imagine that will improve lastability. Of course, the game can only last as long as your battery (unless you’re on charge), which wont be very long if you play this a lot.

Overall, as you can see, while it tries - and succeeds in some areas - it’s littered with issues. How IGN could give this game a 9/10 I don’t know, especially when they give something like Spore an 8.8/10 (as an example). According to them, Asphalt 4 is a better game than Spore, yet it fails at basic things like smooth framerates, varied gameplay, and solid controls. All of which Spore had plenty of. I’d give it a 6/10.

In conclusion, I think developers need to forget the idea of making ‘hardcore’ games for the iPhone or iPod Touch for a number of reasons that Asphalt 4 demonstrates: It doesn’t have a ‘hardcore’ control system, It doesn’t quite have the power (though it clearly is powerful, and it’s early days so developers may improve at getting great performance out of the device), it doesn’t have the battery life, and it’s not dedicated to gaming. However I think the potential for casual games is oustanding and definitely a growth market, but I don’t think it ever has the capacity to become the next Gameboy, no matter how many Tetris clones it has developed for it.