The iPhone and iPod Touch devices from today have orders of magnitude more computational power and for a modern game to be successful it has to feature fancy graphics, action and 3D. Or does it? I had a look at two games that like to be correlated to the “Retro” category while at the same time claiming to add “a new twist”. I was intrigued by such a bold statement and thus I am reviewing both apps in this article.

Have a look at those two candidate games and let me know if you think that Retro can be a viable category of games on the store. Or is it the past and should we be glad that it’s over?

Radial 50 – 360 Degree Brick Breaker

The mother of all brick breakers has to be Arkanoid, now Radial 50 takes the concept of ball versus bricks and makes it circular. But before you can get to play you first have to jump through a couple of hoops to create a profile or skip it. When I started the game the first time my impression was not a good one because it crashed two times, each time at a later stage. Also when submitting my user name there is no visual feedback so I hit several times and got the message that user “Drops” already exists. Still I got into the game.

Which is way more polished than the non-game screens. You get into it rather quickly as the simplistic game mechanic involves rotating the bar at the radial outside of the game by means of sliding upwards and downwards. If you don’t bounce back the ball you loose energy which is shown as bars next to the score. Thankfully this bar recharges after a while of juggling the ball.

I had one problem with the controls because my iPhone 3GS screen does not permit good gliding because of the fat repellant coating. With experimentation I found that the tip of the index finger tends to get stuck which the part where your fingerprint is located tends to glide much better. Older iPhones’ screens probably glide much better.

The graphics are polished to the max and the background rotates together with the bar which makes for an amazing visual effect. I also give extra kudos for the rockin’ soundtrack which has a sort of trancy quality to it and fits perfectly with the style of the app.

Gameplay: Easy to get into. Great style and suitable soundtrack. Does not pretend to be an adventure game, but is a diverse and original variant of the brick breaker theme. Sometimes I got often confused by the direction the ball would get reflected by the bar, because it seemed more random than physically correct to me. But I guess you have your hands full anyway rotating it around the screen with only the up/down on one side. Fans of the genre have something fresh worth trying out.

Technology: I hope that the makers will soon fix the bugs in the profile setup screen and when first (and second) loading the game. But that’s fixable if they take quality serious and analyze the crash reports. From the point of view of the game itself you see great layering, snappy and responsive animation, A+ sound and music and generally great production value.

According to Applyzer ranking data the app is being widely sold with Slovenia, Vietnam, Venezuela being the current top three in Games/Arcade. But apart from a couple off-mainstream countries it seems to quickly loose ground.

Radial 50 (iTunes), Radial 50 Lite (iTunes)

Great Leaping Lambrettinis

Here I totally salute the makers because their effort to make an iPhone era “Game&Watch”-style app is just as daring as the leaping of the Lambrettinis themselves. The makers of the game assured me that the design and everything about the game is brand new. Only the style of the graphics aims to be a salute to era of LCD based pocket games. Even the sounds effects fit the style they are the sort of beep you got from such a device. And

I already explained the general game mechanic in the introduction of this article, control generally happend via some early form of plus-shaped D-Pad and maybe two buttons similar to modern Gameboys the grandfather of which those where. That’s another area where a straight “conversion” simply does not make sense. Instead of simulating a D-Pad on screen you control the Lambrettini family via direct touch.

Touch the artists on the boards to make the switch sides. Touch the people towers to make the top artist jump to the left. The only thing that was not immediately clear to me was that you have to make room for the constantly new artists jumping from the tower on the right by having the artists on the leftmost tower jump. For this there was a 2 page instruction leaflet, which looks as if it would have been found inside the box that came with the game.

When playing I found my brain drifting into sort of an automated trance state formulating strategies that would make possible a new high score with the least accidents. In the end I had the most success (see screenshot) by tapping the towers left to right 1,2,3 and then the boards right to left 1,2,3 which the new artist jumping off the tower was still in mid-air.

Gameplay: Once you have studied the “leaflet” you immediately get into the game and you are pulled in. Like a juggler having to keep track of multiple balls in the air you get sort of a brain-hand-coordination high by relaxing into a blank mind state that is necessary to control 7 moving Lambrettinis at the same time. Playing the game I found that true retro LCD graphics give it a unique charm that’s missing from most other games on the store.

Technology: The artwork is beautifully handcrafted, technology becomes transparent to the user and thus permits immersion into the idea of the game. Outside you have a couple of animations but again those don’t destroy the illusion of having a new “Game&Watch” game on your iPhone. You basically have a static colored backdrop and black images that are made visible and invisible at the right time.

Looking at the Applyzer ranking data I can say that D/A/CH seem to “get it” while it’s being largely ignored in the rest of the world. It only sells a fraction of what Radial 50 manages to move.

Great Leaping Lambrettinis (iTunes)

As we know in IT, training costs money and those dogs need lots of it. About 29.000 AU$ to be exact. That’s approximately the price of 10 luxury MacBook Pros… kind of puts my own financial challenges into a different perspective.

Now Roel has published his first app, an Australian slang dictionary dubbed OzSlang. This is a fun and essential tool for everyone who likes to brush up his OZ Slang skills to not stick out like “such a tourist” or to generally sound more like “Crocodile Dundee”.

I think you can see that the maker put a lot of love into it, it is very well made. Roel tells me that 100% of his proceeds (minus Apple’s cut) go to the above mentioned organization so that eventually the cost for a dog for his son can be covered. The details can be found on Paws 4 Roel website.

It was especially disheartening for Roel when he learned that his app had been pirated. The sales dropped and prospects for an AAD for his son deteriorated. Who can now still argue for piracy as a means of getting “trialware”? Very few (if any at all) of the people who download OzSlang from warez sites would eventually contribute to the cause.

In my book you don’t rip off charitable products especially if they are at the lowest price possible. That’s simply bad karma. If you burglarize the donation box, don’t complain if your future projects fail. That’s how karma works.. On the other hand if you want to get karmically ahead or even, it’s as easy as purchasing a copy of this app.

With his next app, which is currently under review by Apple, Roel will try a different approach. Make the app free, but include a charity button. We know that Apple does not like to see money is moving where they don’t get their 30% share. But I’m keeping my fingers that they won’t mind a donation button for charity.

You can do something good by either donating directly, contacting Roel about sponsoring opportunities or purchasing OzSlang via iTunes. If your contribution is a sizable one I will throw in an hour’s worth of iPhone Development consulting for free to be used any way you like. Good Karma anyone?

It was for this surgery that I researched and discovered the method of Target-specific Headers and many of the techniques in this article about compiling for 2.x and 3.0 from the same project. Now he can happily concentrate on just collecting artwork and information for new sets and can keep 95% of his code unchanged.

Andreas Heck is doing beautiful work on the contents of his apps, you can purchase them by clicking on the images above. Now that his first 4 “Super Trumps” games are live on the app store I checked up on them on Applyzer because I was interested which geographic preferences could be gleaned.

All Super Trumps games share the simple yet fun gameplay. From 32 cards you receive half. When it’s your turn you can choose which feature you think is the best. This is then compared to the card of the computer player and who has the better card wins. The game ends when time runs out or when one player has accumulated all the cards. The major strength of those games is the beautiful pictures combined with easy to get into gameplay.

I added all four games to the list of my subscribed apps on Applyzer, which you can currently do for free until the BETA ends. Then I made a screenshot of the first 5 countries for each game to see if there are any surprises.

Top Trumps Cars

UK and Germany are known for their interest in beautifully manufactured cars. An effect that seems to infect neighboring countries like Austria and Ireland as well. Slovenia has a strongly growing economy and because of that it is one of the most recent new member countries of the EU. With prosperity comes an interest in cars … and iPhone games about cars.

Super Trumps Bikes

Germany is one of the biggest markets for the iPhone as well as motorcycles, but I could not have predicted the strong interest in Bikes in Egypt and Chile. Isn’t there too much sand in those places? No wait, the Egyptian desert is the place of choice for many bike crazy people who have fun hopping over dunes on their motocross machines. Switzerland and Finland have interesting and varied landscapes which make biking all the more fun. Here we can see their hidden interest in beautiful bikes.

Super Trumps Aircraft

Again we could have predicted Germany being top 5, but all the other countries express a longing for flying machines that you would not necessarily attribute to them at first glance. Well, except maybe Taiwan. Isn’t that where most of the electronics parts in modern aircraft are coming from?

Super Trumps Guns

Finally the Guns Trumps have always been the wild card in the deck. Andreas Heck originally targeted those at the gun grazed US market, but found almost immediately that the Americans seem to prefer first person shooters to card games about guns. Super Trumps Guns is doing extremely well because of it’s high rank in UK and Germany. Who would have thought that the peace loving Swiss care for guns? Latvia and the United Arab Emirates are also a surprise. Latvia might be influenced by the Russian mafia, while now we know what those sheikhs might be carrying beneath their long clothes … an iPhone with Top Trumps Guns.

The Future holds … Even More Trumps

Having such great success Heck tells me that he is working on several more card games. With the newly unified project he can now concentrate on content rather than coding. We’re thinking: how about a couple of adult-themed trump games. What other whacky or interesting themes can you think of to see in a trumps card game?

In any case I must congratulate Michael Dorn who does a fantastic job with Applyzer. This top 1000 ranking information allows for amazing insights into the workings of the iPhone app market.

Here are all the apps I had a look at so far. Sorry guys for taking so long, but my US iTunes account is on my Windows PC which I avoid to turn on whenever possible.

MyMemoryMad

Gameplay: The objective is to remember more and more flashing lights plus their distinct tones. This is simple and fun to test your short term memory, but you probably lose interest after having found your limit. Probably a less steep progression of the difficulty would increase long term fun. Like have the same number of flashes for several levels, only with increasing speed.

Technology: Very simple app, only a few screens. The game screen uses a fading effect for the flashing plus well selected sounds.  Unfortunately the German translation is done poorly, sounds like Google Translate. You could have called me to do a proper German translation. I could have done this app in less than 2 weeks. Then again, it’s very first app of this developer, so congrats on getting this done and into the store!

(iTunes Link)

Magnetic Block Puzzle

Gameplay: Addictive! The game mechanic is original, I’ve never seen it before. You get into it very quickly, only one page of instructions. Also you can play with swipes or the accelerometer. The objective is to get colored boxes attached to each other as if they where magnetic, but most of the time you have to plan ahead because otherwise to attached boxes might block the path between two to-be-attached boxes.

Technology: A touch of 3D, probably Open-GL makes it stand out. The game engine itself works in 2D, but going the extra mile of having display in 3D gets extra bonus points. Also the dialogs are all designed beautifully. The sounds are fitting, though there is no real soundtrack. He gets full marks on all my scales.

(iTunes Link)

Bird & Snail

Gameplay: It’s clearly for kids. Haunted House has taken the same artwork and created a multitude of variations of it which you can either purchase by themselves or in the one dollar higher priced deluxe version which bundles all of them together. You get two versions of a coloring book, a story with active parts, story just to listen to and a memory puzzle. The latest (and only free) app is a sliding puzzle in the same style. The artwork is the definite strength of the set and also makes it unique.

Technology: A tip of the hat has to go to the beautiful integration of graphical art and synchronized sound effects and/or narration for the book variants. Having so many different editions probably has marketing reasons. There cannot be a technical limitation as there is a deluxe version with all the parts combined. Apart from this it is not a technological marvel, but a solid translation of multiple childrens books into the iPhone realm.

Deluxe (iTunes Link), The Book (iTunes Link), Paint Lite (iTunes Link), Memory Match (iTunes Link), Paint Full (iTunes Link)

Astronomy Picture of the Day Viewer

Usability: Search for pictures, add them to your favorits, get the picture of a specific day or a random one. No clutter, you get what you expect. I cannot imagine any other way to access this publicly available source of fabulous astronomy-related images.

Technology: Nice UI, rotates to make use of a wider screen in landscape. Makes good use of the tab bar. Nice effect of making the picture description larger with the touch of a button. Why does he abuse badges as counters instead of notifications of something new?

APODViewer (iTunes Link), APODViewerLite (iTunes Link)

Wake!Simply & Wake!Gently

Usability: A settings page and the clock, rotatable between landscape and portrait. That’s all there is. The Gently variant also has slowly increasing volume for the alarm. Why there are two versions of essentially the same app can only be explained by marketing.

Technology: I know from my own experiments with the built in LED-font how difficult it is to properly place the letters because they are proportional. You either have the letters as graphics or you have right-aligned lables for all the digits. Makes also great use of implicit animations for flashing the colons. Kind of minimalistic if you ask me.

Wake!Simply (iTunes Link), Wake!Gently (iTunes Link)

Dodgers & Red Sox & Yankees

Usability: There is one app per team, a marketing ploy? Or do Americans generally only root for “their” team? Then this seperation might make sense. You have a couple of pages with baseball related stats and news. Something only an avid baseball fan might find useful. That’s why those apps came out when baseball season started.

Technology: A navigation view with 3 screens, plus some code for loading the stats and news from a site. Somewhat barren I should say. Nothing that has not been done before. Retrieval of data is rather slow, but beggers can’t be choosers. Most likely the data is scraped from an official site.

Dodgers (iTunes Link), Red Sox (iTunes Link), Yankees (iTunes Link)

London JamCams

Usability: Simple interface, make good use of the tab strip. Though the icons on the tabbar could be improved. But the retrieval of a random cam was very fast and convenient. So fast, I was astonished to already see an image.

Technology:  Though I don’t think it is regular UI practise to have 0 on badges, only values greater than zero make sense there. Also badges are meant to show something NEW as to alert the user that there is new content. In this app this concept is abused for counting the content. This is a minus for otherwise flawless execution.

(iTunes Link)

Hot Field

Gameplay: This game mimicks a vertical scrolling shooter like you have probably played on in arcades. But several twists make it more playable on the iPhone. You don’t need to worry about shooting, you have auto-fire. Otherwise the plane follows your finger and combined with additional fingers you have special abilities. Easy to get into, though the boss battles last maybe a tad to long.

Technology: The author visibly mastered several basics needed to create such vertical scrolling shooter. Sprite Graphics, Collision Detection, Power Ups, Auto-Fire, and many many more. There is a slight 3D effect but obviously the developer wanted to retain the retro style with sprites. The maker has all right to have this in the “Game” category of the app store unlike many other wannabes.

HotField (iTunes Link), HotField Lite (iTunes Link)

You and me and lots of other iPhone developers have strenghts and weeknesses. Some of us can code really well, others are great at design and there are also some people who excel at marketing iPhone apps. There are some commonalities amongst us as well, besides of 99% having a physical iPhone and 66% using twitter to build their network. We all have Internet, as benign as this may sound. We all have websites that have some information on the apps we have in the app store. We are advertising ourselves to the world. Hoping to get noticed. Looking for help. Or simply looking to make as much money as possible with the jewels they have polished in endless hours.

Static, non-machine-readable HTML. Sometimes even worse: Flash! Looking great, but achieving nothing except a good feeling for the person who created it. But that’s just Web 1.0. 

A few of us took the next evolutionary step and started to write in forums (the official one as well as the largest non-official one) and get business-centric profiles on facebook or Xing. That’s Web 2.0.

But still those are information silos, you don’t own your posts, you don’t own your content on “social networks”. I say “That’s passé!” Here I am proposing Web 3.0 and all participating iPhone developers will benefit.

The fundamental need that I am trying to address with this proposal is to create a way for iPhone developers to find their peers. Find someone who talks their language, or is close enough geographically to meet and discuss ideas with over coffee.Starbucks, anyone?

My first thought was to create an online DB with a web form to allow people to enter their details, but then it hit me: that’s < 3.0 and I have sworn an oath to my coding god to never touch anything that does not adhere to the fundamental law of web 3.0: “RAW DATA NOW”. I would have created yet another silo and you would not have owned the data you had entered there. 

They say that web 2.0 is about user-generated content, but you can claim content as being your own only if it is on your own blog and you can modify or even erase it at a whim. I believe that the benefits of web 2.0 can only be truly realized when you make your properties machine-readable. The same goes for any other information about your apps. There are countless websites out there which scour the iTunes XML data for information about apps. But just as countless they are useless. Very few add value, most use this as free content that is their substrate on which they plant their tradedouble links. That’s the modern form of spam: repurpose other people’s content with your own pay-per-clickthrough links and make 5% on every app sale.

I propose to wholeheartedly step into Web 3.0 by creating an XML schema or protocol that allows every developer or development company to publish meta information about themselves on their web site root. This schema would be similar to RSS or FOAF in that it would be present as link rel=”alternate” in your HTML pages. So I might have an XML file on my blog like this: http://www.cocoanetics.com/iphonedev.xml for example.

The schema of such an XML file would have to be defined reusing as many previously defined xml modules as possible. For example I would put in ICBM information into the file so that you could find developers who are close to you. 

I think it’s best to think of developer and app entities as objects non unsimilar to Cocoa classes. Only difference would be that URLs are the pointers, the class definition would be an XML schema and class methods would be endpoints of XML-RPC, SOAP or REST based scripts.

Off the top of my head this is the information that I think would be useful:

• A permalink to the master Xml. If somebody makes a copy he should preserve this link and treat is as the primary key. This link will also be the source from which to refresh the data from.
• Name or Nickname of the developer
• if this is a developer or corporate entity
• Link to the developer’s blog rss feed
• A .profile or .project where the developer can write in freeform text what he is currently working on
• Several ways of contact: e-mail, twitter, etc.
• Artist ID of the developer to be able to directly link to all his apps on the store
• Languages understood
• App IDs, Names and Icon.png of all your apps on the store. This could be used to automatically construct a signature that has your apps’s icons with links to the store. Maybe even more meta information if it’s useful to trade it, like the release notes for the latest versions. Thinking about it, maybe in the developer XML there should only be links to XML files that would represent the individual apps the URL of those XML files again will be the permalink.
• if the dev is interested in: partnering, specific resources, training, providing training, etc.
• and then links to other such XML files of other developers. If a process is retrieving this developers XML file it should also provide him with at least another developers key URL. Also there should be sort of an approval or ranking scheme to such outgoing URLs so that I can say e.g. developer A I have successfully partnered with or developer B I know personally or developer C I don’t know
• You should also have a possibility to specify if you purchased another developer’s app and how you liked it. The app information would contain a link back to your review or rating which is still on your web server, so every dev could validate that a statement about your app is really coming from the person you say it does. If you write up your reviews in your blog, then the review’s permalink should be present here.

Having a basic XML structure will enable most people without web development capabilities to participate in the network and their information will get seeded. I expect for people to start spidering these XML files to create searchable databases of developers which could also be searched for local peers.

Developers on a higher level will also be able to create or use open-source solutions to provide instance methods for their online objects. For example to aggregate links that are presented to other XML iphonedev files. So one web server should be able to ping a certain number of known developers to inform them when there is a new peer. Also if there are significant changes this peer-to-peer network should pass on such information.

I absolutely invite your ideas or expertise in web apis so that we can collaborate on establishing the best, most useful spec. Who thinks this is a good idea? I invite you to share your thoughts.

Can this benefit a great number of iPhone developers who currently struggle to get their solo-projects done? Or do you think that this would only increase the number of people sticking around and preventing the self-cleansing process of the iPhone developer community?

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to get into the app reviewing business. I rather leave this to my friends, like Crazy Mike. But I see that there is a niche somewhere between the consumer-oriented review sites, the in-store iTunes reviews and the internal secrect review process inside of Apple. This niche is providing unbiased opinions of a fellow developer.

That’s something only somebody can provide who themselves keeps going through the long and painful development process. Those who not just develop apps, but also develop themselves.

There is one thing that I cannot get out of my head, I have a memory of an Apple presentation that I cannot prove actually happened. This memory says that Apple announced the apps will be reviewed by peers in a fair manner. But such a peer review process was never established, most likely because of the sheer amount of new apps and updates that are going through those secretive hands at Apple. But wouldn’t that be much more useful to have developers review other developers’ work?

Steve Jobs only mentioned “Porn, Privacy, Bandwidth Hog, Malicious, Illegal and Unforeseen” as reasons to be rejected. Actually there are many more reasons that should keep apps out of the store  to prevent this current flood of Krapps. And some overdrawing reasons should be removed altogether to allow for competition to happen on a higher level.

While I’m at it I will also drop a comment in iTunes, as honest as I humanly can. These will be much less technical. A general problem seems to be that very few customers will actually send those few seconds to rate an app. Even less will write an opinion. On the other site you can easily imagine enterprising developers paying people to give them fake reviews so that they have a higher rank.

I was hoping to establish a Peer Reviewing Network where participating developers can trade promo codes and write their honest opinion on their own sites, just like I am doing here in this new category “Peer Reviews”. Still looking for blogging devs to partner on this one. The general idea looks like this:

• Developer uploads a number of promo codes into an online database
• In exchange he gets (at random) the same number of promo codes of other devs
• He will download those free apps
• He will peer review those apps, note technical innovation or tell if there are technical shortcomings
• Then for each he will post his honest opinion on his blog and ping the database
• Also he will rate and comment in-store at iTunes, optionally mark his review as [peer review]

The main advantage would be that you have a central place where you can offload a certain quota of those 50 promo codes you get per version and you can be certain that you will get some honest exposure around cyberspace. Also in this meritocracy that is iTunes if your app is really good then your peers will give it a much needed visibility boost for free.

I invite your comments.