A couple of major titles hit the iPhone/iPod Touch this week. Mass Effect: Galaxy and Doom: Resurrection and I bought both of them. They are really good games, especially when stacked up against other mobile phone games. Mass Effect: Galaxy feels like a high end Game Boy Advance game, and Doom: Ressurection is almost PSP level in quality. You will also notice by their colons that they are offshoots of established properties. Not as original as say Rolando, but they are technically impressive. The games are both fun(Doom more than Mass Effect, but that’s a topic for another time)but that’s not my problem. I think they mark the beginning of deep immersive gaming on the iPhone.
So what’s wrong with that? Well the problem is that I’m playing them on my phone. So more than likely I will be playing these games while waiting for life to happen. A phone call to come in, waiting at a restaurant, in a waiting room, etc. Times when I don’t know when the play button will be pushed on my life again. Both of these games especially Mass Effect are hard to just stop. Mass Effect has long drawn out dialogue portions between bouts of combat(kind of like it’s big brother)and if you stop the game when you pick it back up you start at the beginning of one of the dialogue portions of the game. It’s incredibly frustrating. Doom: Resurrection uses a checkpoint system, but there are times when the checkpoints are quite a ways from each other. So after killing a few enemies if you have to stop, when you pick it up again that progress is lost.
I’m all for deep gameplay I’m just not sure I want it on my phone. The games are both great, but I almost would rather be playing these games on a handheld system. One dedicated to gaming, but even handhelds dedicated to gaming are going the way of the buffalo(they are turning into steaks?). So what’s the solution?
I’m not sure, Rolando has an amazing save system. When you hit the Home button on your iPhone/iPod Touch it somehow knows how to save exactly where you are and you can pick up right where you left off. It even displays the number of Rolandos you have left to save on the icon for the game. Games need to adopt this system, being able to save exactly where I leave off. Not a close approximation of where I left off.
iPhone gaming is in it’s infancy and we are going to see missteps like this, but we are already seeing lengthy deep games. The time is now to make sure that these are complete packages with save systems that complement the lifestyles of the people who use iPhones. There is one other problem, I’ll talk about that tomorrow.