GearWERKZ TechBlog

Convergence. I have only succumbed to this global trend on an occasions or two. I finally capitulated to not carrying both a phone and a PDA, and just went with a smartphone(s). But in general, I prefer a dedicated device that does its specific function well. I do not worry about carrying too many devices. No one said that I had to carry them all of the time. This has remained true for me in the gaming arena. While there are multiple game systems on the market and arguably a lot of consumers are satisfied with one, I retain more. The 360 and PS3 have advanced to a point where they can pull off a lot of things that a PC can do, but there are still some gaming genres that are best played on a PC. And in no way am I going to compromise even more and shoe-horn myself into an iPhone and attempt to call it a gaming platform.

Follow up:

The iPhone (and iPod Touch) are great devices for the things they do. They represent a technological revolution vice the evolution that most of the rest of the electronics marketplace plods through. But it is the goofy control scheme that keeps either of these devices from being viewed by me as reasonable gaming platforms.

I think that the primary reason the the iPhone has taken off as a gaming platform is that it is being employed as an idle time tool. While people are standing around at bus stops, waiting on friends to show up for dinner or a movie, or standing in line for something, it makes sense to whip out this device and get in a few minutes of Lode Runner.

From this application, I can see the iPhone's attractiveness for its gaming utility. And when I was a primary iPhone user, I had a few games installed just for that purpose. But when it came time for my scheduled game time, there was no way in the world that, sitting at home, with other game systems available, I would ever reach for the iPhone to play a game instead of my 360, PS3, a PC, or even the PSP.

All of these systems are dedicated gaming consoles, designed for that purpose from the ground up, and they fulfill this function better than the iPhone.

Between my time spent with the Nintendo Wii and (painfully) living with the PS3's Six-Axis controller for its first months on the market, I have also come to realize that "innovative" control schemes are not my personal cup of tea. Over the last year, in my workday life, I have noticed many customers insisting on hard-wired controls as well as a software interface. In those instances I have questioned the need for this redundancy. The software UI should be enough. I now realize that it is in some part analogous to the view of motion-based controls over hard-buttons on a controller.

How many times have you been playing Madden NFL and stared at the screen, mouth agape, firmly believing that you had hit a button to avoid whatever was actually unfolding on-screen. You have wondered if the game was cheating, or if there was a problem with your controller. In more recent years you have wondered if there was a problem with the wireless signal getting from your controller to the console. Now magnify that 50 times as you are left wondering if you did some goofy motion with the exact kinesthetics required to result in a turn of a car, a stiff-arm in football, or to swing from one building to another. No thanks. Legacy control schemes can get frustrating enough; I do not need to invite the added inaccuracy of my arm or tilting movements into the equation. I quickly tired of the Wii. My first action whenever booting up a new game on the PS3 was to disable whatever 6-axis controls were implemented. And I almost never played anything on my iPhone that was based on me tilting the phone in any direction.

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