Unsurprisingly, last week was dominated by a certain mobile phone launch, a subject I'm tackling in my Technology column this Thursday. For now, though, I'll just mention that mobile game publishers were determined to get in on the action, firing out press releases about their iPhone gaming round-ups.
At the moment, it seems most are playing it safe, working on simple casual titles - partly because they're not sure about the technology (wah! It's got no keyboard!) and partly because casual titles have been going down well on iPod.
Gameloft, for example, is bringing over a few of its 'Platinum' range of puzzlers including Platinum Sudoku and Platinum Solitaire as well as a couple of cheeky takes on familiar classics, Bubble Bash (Bubble Bobble) and Diamond Twister (Bejeweled). Both of these add support for the accelerometer, though - Bubble Bash lets you move the bubble-shooting cannon by tilting the phone, while Diamond Twister, lets you rotate the phone in order to choose from which edge the diamonds fall. You can see videos of the games here
EA, meanwhile, has Tetris ("The touch screen allows players to pinch, drag, tap, and shake to clear rows and rack up points in a whole new way"), EA Sudoku and, only in the US and Canada I'm afraid, Scrabble. The latter lets you shake your phone to mix the letters up at the beginning of the game! Sadly, it doesn't seem that you can do it mid-game, thereby allowing players to have a virtual strop.
Naturally, Popcap is porting ultimate gem-shifting puzzle legend Bejeweled (or rather Bejeweled 2) over to the platform. The press release says: "Tuned specifically for the iPhone, Bejeweled 2 offers touch screen support with intelligence to determine which gem a player meant to touch (select), even when the player hasn't used precise finger strokes to "hit" the second gem perfectly. Additionally, the game will use the accelerometer to detect orientation and automatically shift between vertical and landscape modes depending on how the user is holding the device." But of course, iPhone already has its own gem tumbler in the shape of Trism, which has been drawing excellent reviews for its imaginative implementation of the motion controls.
Elsewhere, Capybara has shoved its brilliant title Critter Crunch onto iPhone, while Glu has launched Space Monkey, which involves spinning a simian around trying to grab rubbish as it floats through space. Okay.
You may also be weirdly interested in Freeze Tag's Etch A Sketch conversion which uses the phone's multi-touch technology, allowing you to twiddle both drawing knobs at once - just like the real thing! But on iPhone!
Finally, it's worth noting that mobile ads company Greystripe is providing an iPhone SDK so publishers can implement the company's in-game ads system into their titles (more info here). Which means lots of free games. Unless you doubt the veracity of the term free when used in conjunction with advertising. In which case, you're too smart and cynical to be caught up in all this iPhone 2.0 excitement anyway. Right?
