Gizmodo posted an article about former Xbox exec Sandy Duncan predicting the death of gaming consoles in 5-10 years. While on the surface this seems to have nothing to do with mobile gaming, bear with me. Duncan suggests that consoles will be dead because of cluster computing, which is the idea that consoles will become little more than a box with a broadband connection to some heavy-duty servers. These servers handle all the graphics and the number crunching, then simply send the resulting video back to the console to display it.
Continue reading ‘Clustered gaming in 5-10 years?’
Monthly Archive for March, 2008
Recently, Ottawa hosted a seminar called “Doing Business in Japan” where President and COO of Capcom Interactive, Midori Yuasa, gave a lecture entitled “Mobile Gaming - Challenge and Reward in North America and Japan.” Although we were unable to attend the seminar, we got in touch with Yuasa shortly after to discuss Japanese versus North American mobile content.
Continue reading ‘Midori Yuasa on Japanese Vs North American mobile content markets’
Gameloft has announced that they’ve signed a multi-year agreement with Ferrari, reports Games On Deck. The first game to be developed as part of the partnership will be Ferrari World Championship, which should be released any day now. While there are no details available, it’s safe to assume that the future games will be racing games as well.
Paul Farley is a gaming industry veteran, having worked on the development of the Grand Theft Auto series and State of Emergency, as well as spending time at I-Play as Head of Design before founding Tag Games. He posted a guest editorial over at the Mobile Games Blog, speaking about the impact that the iPhone has had on mobile gaming. Farley draws many comparisons to the Wii and the Wiimote, and points out that Tag Games’ experience with the Zeemote gives them an edge up on the competition when it comes to designing for a new interface paradigm (such as the iPhone touch screen).
Continue reading ‘Grand Theft Auto developer speaks about iPhone’
Paramount has announced that they will be taking a much larger role in the creation of games based on their movie titles. The company will either develop the game and then publish it themselves or allow another company to publish it, where before they simply licensed their IP to other developers. Their first batch of titles will likely be released sometime later this year, but what movies they’ll be based on has yet to be revealed.
Good news for iPhone gamers: Innaworks is developing a tool called alcheMo to ease the porting of Java or J2ME games onto the iPhone. The iPhone doesn’t natively support Java applications — although steps are being taken to change that — so the software instead automatically converts Java code into iPhone code. This kind of automated code conversion is somewhat hit-or-miss, but it does ease the process or porting considerably. This first release is a beta, and there’s no word on an exact release date, but hopefully they’ll finish it up before the release of the AppStore in June.
The tech team over at the Sydney Morning Herald posted an interesting editorial on innovation in mobile phones. They point to Neonode, who showed off a new phone design back in 2002 by painting a carved block of wood with an image that will seem very familiar these days: a compact phone dominated by a touch screen.
Continue reading ‘The Sydney Morning Herald on mobile innovation’
It seems that Motorola has unveiled the Mobile TV DH02, a new mobile TV device with a touch-based UI. The touch screen allows them to do away with any buttons, leaving the whole front of the device available for the high resolution WQVGA display. The DH02 also features PVR options like timeshift, live pause, and frame grabbing, with a buffer of up to 5 minutes, as well as automatic channel scan. They’ll be demoing the device at the CTIA Wireless show next week, where we’ll hopefully get a few more details like release date and pricing.
A really interesting article from BusinessWeek: is the iPhone a DS/PSP killer? Or, at least, a strong competitor? The article springs from a lengthy and rather tech-heavy post by blogger Daniel Dilger. In it, he gives a brief history of the console and handheld gaming wars and talks about where, exactly, the iPhone might fit.
Continue reading ‘iPhone a better gaming platform than DS/PSP?’
Government officials in the UK have signed off on a new plan to allow mobile phone use while on planes, reports Pocket Gamer. Previously, a “flight-safe” mode, support by relatively few phones, was required to use the device while in the air. If the new plan — which still has a few levels of approval to go through — goes active, phones will be allowed to be active as long as the plane is above 3,000 meters, or just shy of 10,000 feet. This includes voice calls (and, presumably, smartphone functions like email), but more importantly will allow you to spend your interminably boring flight time gaming away.