Not content with overturning its own once dwindling fortunes, Nintendo single-handedly reinvented the games industry with its UI. Does the same thing needs to happen in mobile games?
This is not the place to discuss the true origins of the games industry. Let’s just say that home gaming started to rise to prominence in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and in those days it was an exceptionally simple affair. Many people’s first home games machine was the Atari 2600, a unit that shipped with a small, black, unassuming joypad boasting a single, bright orange button.
For others, the Nintendo Entertainment System or even the Sega Master System might have been their first foray into home gaming. Both of these machines boasted simple, square joypads with two main buttons. Nice and easy to get to grips with. But from there on in things started to get complicated.
Sega’s next machine, the Mega Drive, added an extra button. Then Nintendo, as it has a history of doing, laid down the roadmap for the next generation of controllers by introducing the shoulder bumpers on its six button SNES pad (eight buttons, in fact, if you include the ‘Start’ and ‘Select’ buttons).
Today, the joypads that ship with the likes of the Xbox 360 and PS3 are undoubtedly supremely refined, but their six face buttons, four shoulder buttons, d-pad and twin analogue sticks are an insurmountable barrier to anyone other than the hardened gamer.
Which brings us back to Nintendo. As its GameCube console struggled to assert itself in the global marketplace of the early 21st century, the Japanese firm was busy planning a brave revolution to the way games were played. The first Joe Public knew of this was January 2004, when Nintendo unveiled its bold new handheld, the DS.
It’s easy to forget that the initial reaction to the machine was very negative – in comparison to Sony’s upcoming PSP, which boasted a huge, bright LCD screen and the promise of PS2 quality games, the DS looked like a kid’s toy.
Five years later and the DS is rapidly approaching the 100 million unit sales mark worldwide. Its use of a touchscreen instead of traditional console controls has not only sparked the imagination of gamers – it has almost single handedly recruited a whole new generation of games players into the industry.
I say ‘almost’, of course, because Nintendo has since built upon the success of DS with its equally popular Wii home console, which ditched the joypad completely in favour of a single-handed ‘remote’ that responds to player’s movements. The Wii, which was launched in September 2006, is itself approaching 50 million unit sales worldwide.
And while the shenanigans of Nintendo may not be directly applicable to the mobile games industry, the UI revolution it is currently going through is remarkably similar. Though not burdened with the alienating joypad, mobile gaming has a poisoned chalice all of its own – the keypad. Twelve alpha-romaic buttons and a couple of hotkeys (if you’re lucky) a good gaming experience does not make.
It’s of no surprise, then, to see that the mobile games industry is itself making moves to address the barriers that the keypad has placed upon it. However, while the console games industry struggles to cope with standardising just a handful of platforms, mobile gaming, with its multitude of manufacturers and almost countless number of handsets, faces a far stiffer challenge.
With the prospect of handset vendors standardising their approach proving very remote, third party companies have instead attempted to take the gaming bull by the horns. Zeemote Inc’s JS1 Controller, which wirelessly syncs with compatible handsets, is a solid attempt at bringing standard game controls to mobile.
However, Zeemote itself would admit it faces a number of barriers – compatibility and standardisation hurdles aside, it’s a big question to ask if mobile users are willing to carry an ancillary device alongside their handsets.
More in keeping with the modern boom in motion controlled gaming is TiltNTwist’s GestureTek gesture recognition software, designed for use with Windows Mobile devices. Cleverly, the software works with a phone’s in-built camera to translate movement in the real-world into games, without the need for built in accelerometers.
As is always the case, however, such is the turnover rate of new handsets that manufacturers themselves are already all over the touch and gesture revolution. Few have been as proactive as Sony Ericsson, with many of its recent models, such as the F305, including motion control out of the box.
Peter Ahnegard, Sony Ericsson’s content acquisition manager for games and graphics, says: “We have consistently, over the last 12 months, launched accelerometer-enabled phones with a wide variety of games. Motion-controlled devices are one of the key areas in the strategy of delivering ‘energised’ experiences to our users.
“However, different games require different input mechanisms. There is no single perfect solution, but at the same time we need to keep the design and the various motion controls as well defined for mobile phones as possible. Touchscreens are becoming increasingly established and will no doubt be a more common input mechanism for games. Sony Ericsson wants to be an active, contributing partner in driving this forward.”
Perhaps what the industry really needs is for one vendor to step forward and present one device so ground-breaking and influential that it successfully forces a standard upon the rest of the industry. Some would argue that Apple’s iPhone has already assumed that mantle.
It’s certainly true to say that iPhone offers a gaming experience unlike anything seen previously in the mobile market. It perhaps can’t better the likes of Nokia’s N-Gage for traditional gaming, but then it’s leagues ahead of the old N-Gage when it comes to telephony – a lesson Nokia learnt the hard way.
The most striking feature of iPhone, of course, is its total shunning of the keypad altogether. Instead, Apple’s device packs the latest and greatest in control technology – it obviously has a touch screen, but also includes an accelerometer as well as other options that are being increasingly incorporated into games by developers, such as GPS.
It doesn’t hurt that Apple’s device is a ...
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