Once upon a time, there was a game called Diamond Mine. It had you swap jewels in a grid and create chain reactions for big scores. It was much fun and so Microsoft hosted it on Microsoft Zone and the game was renamed Bejeweled.
The game became insanely popular—the web’s Tetris—and spawned sequels and versions for many platforms. Clones appeared, including the excellent Zoo Keeper for Nintendo DS, which hugely ramped up the concept’s speed and excitement levels.
Eventually, PopCap retaliated with the stunning Bejeweled Blitz, a Facebook app that was also welded to the iPhone version of Bejeweled 2. The hook: one minute and no waiting for the grid to settle before swapping more jewels. It took the polish and addictive qualities of Bejeweled and smashed them into the exciting speed of Zoo Keeper. Power-ups created frantic, thrilling games, and online scoreboards enabled you to battle friends.
All was good in the land, and they all lived happily ever after… Except they didn’t, because PopCap then ruined its game. If there’s one thing the company should have learned from Tetris, it’s that adding complexity to a simple game screws with the format. And if there’s something PopCap should have learned from online gaming, it’s that level playing fields are important, unless you want to turn your creation into forced grinding depression, MMO-style.
Bejeweled Blitz now has ‘coins’. These enable you to buy ‘boosts’, to attain higher scores. PopCap presumably argues that this rewards long-time players. I’d argue that long-time play is rewarded by added skill and higher scores. All the revision does is provide people who play the game enough to cherry pick cheats to leapfrog others on the high-score table. So rather than being Tetris, Bejeweled Blitz is now Bejeweled MMO, just about the biggest, saddest drop it could have suffered.
When I was a kid, there were lots of gaming platforms, but several failed due to existing IP. A prime example is the Commodore 128. Commodore touted the computer’s C64 compatibility as a major plus, but it meant no-one created C128 games, because loads of C64 ones already existed. The same, to some extent, went for the Amstrad CPC, which got loads of duff ports from the ZX Spectrum, due to some shared architecture. I wonder how iPad will fare. Apple’s device not only resembles a giant iPod touch—it also runs almost all existing App Store content. You get apps sitting centrally in the screen or ‘pixel doubled’.
With nearly 30 million iPhones and millions of iPod touches in the wild, and many thousands of games available, I wonder how many devs will target iPad, and how many will just continue developing for Apple’s already popular handhelds. If the former happens—and developers take a punt, hoping Apple’s new device will become as successful as iPhone and iPod touch—you end up with another top-quality gaming platform from out of nowhere. If not—which could so easily be the case—iPad will be a pretty device playing games that look OK, but were ultimately designed for another system. Here’s hoping the former’s the case.
Pocket Gamer reports analyst Michael Pachter has been at the scaremongering juice, topping it off with a stupid olive. He says: “I think the iPod touch is the most dangerous thing that ever happened to the publishers, ever,” and this is because when the price of Apple’s device drops, kids will want one instead of a DS or PSP. “Why would you pay $20 for Tetris when you can get it for $6.99 or $3.99 on iPod touch?” he says.
Indeed. But I can’t for the life of me see how this is the “most dangerous thing that ever happened to the publishers, ever”. Lower price-points generally mean people just buy games instead of ripping them off (*cough*R4 on DS*cough*), and with the App Store being digital-only, overheads are much lower for publishers. Therefore, decent publishers that aren’t complete idiots should rapidly be able to find a way to make decent money from iPod gaming, more so as the device’s market share increases.
What the App Store and Apple handhelds could finally put paid to, though, is stupid publishers selling games for way more than they’re worth—across the board. To that end, the only thing that has reason to be scared of iPod gaming is greed—and by extension greedy and clueless publishers.
