the-inbetween.com

The DS: Under the Radar, Above the Moon

Every time Apple makes any announcement about the iPhone, whether it’s new functionality or sales numbers, the internet goes abuzz. Rumour mongers, Apple blogs and tech sites make a lot of noise. The mainstream press follows suit and everyone everywhere hears how great the iPhone is and how successful it is and how sexy it is. Apple does a good job of marketing itself in this regard.

Now, I’m not about to rag on the iPhone — I like it but I don’t own one, though I do have a an iPod Touch and I make use of the App Store — but I do see all these numbers and press releases from a slightly different perspective. It’s not from the point of view of a PC user, I made the switch and bought a MacBook last spring, but through my hardcore in-the-trenches gamer goggles. This perspective doesn’t in any way diminish what Apple has accomplished, but it does put Nintendo’s successes in a new light altogether.

The recent news is that Apple sold almost 7 million iPhones in the quarter, outselling the Blackberry, which puts them close to the ten million sold number for the year. There’s a lot of “told you so” coming from the Apple camp — Apple fanatics are adorably annoying when they get any shred of success — and it reminds me of the Nintendo DS (Nintendo fans are equally cute.) Obviously, the products are very different, focusing on entirely different demographics and users, but they are both portable consumer electronics so certain comparisons are apt.

While a quick perusal of mainstream news and business sites will reveal a number of stories about the success of the iPhone, the same search will show little about the Nintendo DS. Maybe Apple is the more mainstream story with broader consumer appeal. Maybe the fact fact that Nintendo is a Japanese company factors in a little bit. Maybe the iPhone is just plain sexier and the DS has that whole “gamer” stigma attached to it. Maybe it’s seen as a child’s toy and not an adult product. Whatever the case, unless you are a NeoGAF member or a seriously invested follower of the gaming industry, it’s hard to know what is going on with the DS. The mainstream news doesn’t notice that little Nintendo device. It should.

The iPhone has sold around 9 million units this year. In the same time, the DS has sold around 18 million and it still has the massive holiday season ahead of it as well as a new SKU in Japan (the DSi). It has quietly (relative to the buzz around the iPhone) sold nearly 90 million units in total. Is there any doubt left about the mainstream appeal of videogames?

• It’s also worth mentioning that the PSP, (wrongly) considered a “failure”, has sold on par with the iPhone: around 9 million on the year.

TIGSource Demakes for OS X

if you are a Mac user, as I am now, looking at the TIGSource Demakes competition will probably bring one thought to your head: “wow, look at all those seemingly awesome games that I totally can’t play.” Most indie games are built on PCs for PCs. That’s where the majority of the market and the majority of the dev tools and majority of operating systems are. As a new Mac user, I miss the vast wilderness of low-key and big budget games that exists on Windows machines.

Soundless mountain screenshot

Eager to play something, I went through the competition and compiled a list of games playable on OS X. I likely missed a few, but I did go through the top 10 and most of the higher rates ones (10 votes or more.) Here’s the list. Maybe it’ll be useful to somebody.

• Soundless Mountain
  The winner of the competition, a NES-style “Silent Hill” demake, is OSX friendly (though it does trap keys in an annoying way.)
• House Globe
  A 2D pixely “Homeworld” remake. With multiplayer. Awesome. I definitely need to play this more to get a better sense for it.
• Smaze
  “Haze” in the style of an Ikari Warriors game. The OSX version can be found here. INHERENT BIAS: I know the creators.
• Lady Boy Love Collection
  Which is a… ok, I don’t know what the hell is going on there.

There are two browser-based games that are playable too: Rocket Belt Rawr (a “Jetback Brontosaurus” demake) and Thieving Raccoon (a game and watch version of “Sly Cooper.”) Additionally, a few games are playable with some dependencies: Offslaught ‘81 is Python based so it should be platform independent (but it’s not the most user friendly way to distribute a game) and Super 3D Portals 6 is playable in an Atari emulator (which is impressive in its own right.) A few other games have source code so you can try your hand at porting them, but that’s contrary to the whole “download and play” instant-action philosophy.

And that’s it. A pretty short list considering there were 69 rated entries in total. As a Mac gamer, you take what you can get.

iPod Touch in London

On Thursday it was cold and rainy in London so, for the first time since my arrival, I took a day “off”. I was not wandering the streets nor riding the underground nor hitting a gallery nor adding to the blisters on my left foot. Instead, I stayed indoors reading, listening to British radio–it’s very British–and manually added the artworks to all the albums in my iTunes library. This is a tedious process. I’m up to artists starting with the letters “Bu”.

The reason for such busywork was, more or less, to beautify my iPod Touch. I’ve been using it extensively, on the Underground, in sunlit squares and in bed, and I was growing tired of the grey music note on white graphic that accompanies any and every song without album art assigned to it. It seemed like such a waste of prime screen real estate.

Never did I think that I would devote such labour to this tiny device. I never intended to own it, I was perfectly content with my tiny iPod Shuffle, but jumped on the chance to get one when I discovered that it came “free” with the MacBook Pro. Like any offer too good to be true there was a catch. I still paid for it but could redeem the price with a mail-in rebate. This was acceptable, I thought. Unfortunately, in the move before the bigger move to the UK, I misplaced the iPod box and its required UPC so I could not claim it. The Touch was no longer free.

When word that the firmware update to 2.0, to coincide with the release of the new iPhone, would cost $10 I scoffed. Can you imagine if Microsoft charged $10 for their updates to the XBox 360 dashboard? There’d be riots. Yet here was Apple charging for this most basic of features. It was charging for the privilege to be able to buy from the new App Store. The nerve.

But I’m considering it. I have grown to appreciate this device a great deal over the last week and a half. It goes with me everywhere. Apart from the music that it contains, which is good, all the other features have proven useful. I take notes. I have used the address book to make a phone call. I check my email and post to Twitter, whenever I can find open wifi in London (not so easy), and use Google Maps to find my way through some of the labyrinths in this city. It’s not like Toronto, a city strictly laid out in a grid like manner, where it’s impossible to get lost. Roads go off in all directions here and in my wanderings, on one day, by dumb luck I crossed through the same intersection three times (it was a SEVEN WAY intersection). I didn’t need the Maps then because I was just aimlessly wandering, but they have proven useful in other situations.

Knowing what’s in the App Store I think $10 is a small price to pay for the extra convenience therein. Besides, the app store has one more category of applications useful for the boring minutes spent on the Underground: games. That is the most compelling because, no matter how many thousands of kilometers away from home I find myself, I can’t escape my nerdy passions for digital interactive entertainment. It’s a passion that I was going to work on during this trip, trying to build an idea I’ve had for a while, but so far it’s all been for nought. I’ve been too busy being a flaneur on the streets of London.