Charlie Brooker, in his latest piece for The Guardian:

Look at the App Store. Read the reviews of novelty games costing 59p. Lots of slaggings – which is fair enough when you’re actively warning other users not to bother shelling out for something substandard. But they often don’t stop there. In some cases, people insist the developers should be jailed for fraud, just because there weren’t enough levels for their liking. I once read an absolutely scathing one-star review in which the author bitterly complained that a game had only kept them entertained for four hours.

FOUR HOURS? FOR 59P? AND YOU’RE ANGRY ENOUGH TO WRITE AN ESSAY ABOUT IT? ON YOUR EXPENSIVE IPHONE? HAVE YOU LOST YOUR MIND?

He says this is human nature, with technology having left us hopelessly spoiled. I say people should get a sense of perspective, because their incessant moaning about App Store games is ridiculous. I wonder how many of these idiots whining about a good 59p game that provides four hours of entertainment have ever bought a game on another platform (such as the Nintendo DS, with its carts costing 15 quid a pop or more), or back in the days where you took a punt on an Amiga game for 25 quid. Even in the mid-1980s, the era of the C64 and ZX Spectrum, the absolute cheapest games were £1.99, came on cassette, and were—proportionately speaking—often as bad as the worst 59p iPhone ‘specials’, with the odd gem randomly lurking in the mix.

Four hours of fun gameplay for 59p isn’t something to complain about—it’s something that should be celebrated.

Touch Arcade just reviewed the iCade, and made a bunch of points I agree with, but some that I vehemently disagree with, notably

I found tearing through these classic games [in Atari’s Greatest Hits] on the iCade to be everything I’d hoped it to be. On the whole, it’s just an awesome experience

and

As far as I’m concerned, the iCade (along with Atari’s Greatest Hits) is an absolute must-have iPad accessory for the serious retro gamer.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, so QUICKFIRE HISTORY MODE!

In April 2010, wags at ThinkGeek announced the iCade, but, alas, it was April 1, stupid face! Duh! But heros in the distance emerged in the shape of ION Audio, who went “man, that’s a great idea”, licensed the design and made it a real boy.

I got to play with an iCade while working on issue 5 of Tap! magazine, and my review unit came pre-assembled, so I’ll have to take Touch Arcade’s word for how easy it is to put together. Touch Arcade’s bang-on about the unit itself, though:

• The iCade feels weighty and robust. It feels like it could stand up to a lot of fairly heavy gaming.
• The buttons have a great feel to them, and click in a very satisfying manner.
• The stick’s travel is too long (and my unit’s one ‘stuck’ in the left position quite a lot), but is nonetheless reminiscent of arcade sticks of old. (I always used to play games with a Competition Pro, which had a lower travel and was therefore more responsive.)
• The iPad sits very nicely within the unit in portrait mode, although you need to watch the surprisingly heavy lid doesn’t snap down on a finger, like it did on mine. (Ouch.)
• In landscape mode, the iPad perches a little precariously in a small ridge.
• Set-up/pairing with the iPad was reasonably simple, although in my case it took a few attempts.

The problem I have with the iCade as it currently stands is the games—well, app (singular) Currently, iCade only works with Atari’s Greatest Hits, which is a compilation I’d call middling if I was being charitable. The compilation includes a bunch of Atari 2600 games, which aren’t emulated correctly and only play in portrait (wasting loads of screen space), along with a selection of arcade hits, most of which were specifically designed by Atari to have unique control systems. You can see where this is going, can’t you?

In use, the iCade itself is actually pretty good, but the experience of the only compatible piece of software is not. Atari helpfully leave some of the interface behind, so you get to watch a giant pause button along with your game, but it helpfully removes the gigantic virtual joystick, leaving a huge blank space under the game. Had Atari enabled landscape mode for Atari 2600 games, I might have overlooked the shortcomings in emulation (major colour problems in some games, poorly emulated sound), but the entire thing felt more proof-of-concept than “an absolute must-have iPad accessory for the serious retro gamer”.

With arcade games, things weren’t much better. The games felt a bit like home conversions rather than the arcade originals: Tempest and Crystal Castles stripped of their spinner and trackball, respectively, and lumbered with joystick controls aren’t as satisfying nor as playable. However, ironically, because Atari’s Greatest Hits is so bad on the iPad, scaling up the iPhone mode’s virtual controls (meaning in Tempest that you need GIANT THUMBS to reach the superzapper button), iCade does actually make for a better experience—but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one. And again there’s the interface issue, with some games barely filling half the screen and many showing redundant controls.

Given that the iCade will cost 75 quid in the UK (it’s $99 in the US), I think you’d be bonkers to consider it, purely because of the lack of software. But if ION can get a lot of developers on board, and those developers actually take enough care when adding iCade support (minimum: full-screen games), the device would be a very different prospect. I know Manomio (the C64 emulator guys) are already working on support, and I sincerely hope others follow suit, including Taito, Namco and especially Capcom. Street Fighter games on iPad with the iCade would be fantastic, as would Namco’s Pac-Man: Championship Edition. But that’s currently a big ‘if’. For now, then, my opinion of the iCade is subtly different to what Touch Arcade wrote, but it’s an important difference: iCade could become an absolute must-have iPad accessory for the serious retro gamer—but it’s not there yet.

Previously on iOS Gaming Shit-storm:

Plucky developers Semi Secret Software wow the internet with Flash endless-running/jumping game Canabalt, which makes the leap [pause for laugh track] to iOS, and kick-starts a genre. After raising $25,000 for charity during an indie sale event, Canabalt goes open-source, with the caveat that

Canabalt-specific game code, game art, animation, music and sound effects are all proprietary, and protected by our copyrights and trademarks.  That is, you can copy-paste our engine code (any of the Flixel stuff, which is most of the good stuff anyways), and even sell it on the App Store, but you can’t distribute or redistribute our game code, art or sounds

Idiot developer PLD cunningly copies Canabalt (as Free Runner), even cloning its App Store description, and Apple approves it for sale (Pocket Gamer), THE FOOLS!

And now, the shocking twist in our latest episode:

I think Apple was right to approve the app.

“BWUH?” you might have just uttered, especially if you know how much of a fan of indie gaming I am, and how I spent quite a lot of time writing articles that told everyone what a dick Tim Langdell was being in 2009, attacking every game that had the word ‘Edge’ in its title. (Langdell was eventually defeated when EA decided to use its powers for good.)

The reason Apple was right to approve the app is because it cannot be the copyright police. There’s no way Apple can check a game against the 40,000 that already exist with any degree of consistency, also looking into the background of whether a ‘clone’ was authorised or not. If that was part of the app approvals process, we’d be back to the bad old days of games taking months to appear after submission. Instead, developers must be vigilant and Apple must be swift in reacting to cases like Canabalt/Free Runner, removing the clone and—where relevant—nuking the dev account responsible for the infringement.

This time I believe Apple got everything right. The game was initially approved, but then removed from sale within a day (Pocket Gamer, again), after a complaint was made. And, in an odd way, it might have even benefitted Semi Secret, in getting its ageing game a little extra PR now that myriad similar and superior games exist and are getting all the column inches.

As you might have noticed, this blog’s gone into one of its quieter patches, mostly because I’m currently drowning in iOS games for my Tap! magazine duties. The good is that I get to play and write about cracking* iOS games. The bad is that I don’t really have time to do anything else for a few days. However, this also gives me a nice excuse to mention the spiffy new website for the publication, www.tapmag.co.uk, which will carry reviews, posts from editor Christopher Phin (and maybe some of us other contributors if he gives us the magic key), and handy links so you can subscribe.

Anyway, back to Dungeon Raid and Liqua Pop.

* As in “Cracking cheese, Gromit!”, not dodgy app piracy.

This afternoon’s slice of MAKE CRAIG ANGRY comes courtesy of Wired, whose article In depth: How Rovio made Angry Birds a winner (and what’s next) should probably have been called Fap Fap Fap Rovioooooohhhh.

There’s something of a cult that’s built up around the Finnish developer’s massive iOS hit (since ported to practically every other platform in existence—I hear there’s a VIC-20 version on the way), and more than a little bullshit.

Before a million Angry Birds fans descend, I’m not suggesting the game is rubbish, nor am I saying Rovio doesn’t deserve some of its success. Angry Birds is a fairly good iOS game, and it’s immediate, usable, polished and cute. The perfect game? Not in a million years—it’s too random (requiring quickfire grind play rather than strategising) and has an irksome linear level structure (which was ‘fixed’ via a 59p in-app purchase rather than enabling users to skip levels they couldn’t solve). But it’s not bad.

What is bad is the reporting that continually goes on about Rovio’s magic formula. Ultimately, Rovio got lucky. They put out a game that users could feel they were good at very quickly (even if they weren’t) and with little effort, and built it around a level and reward structure that worked nicely with the quickfire nature of mobile gaming. Rovio then did some cunning marketing, driving word-of-mouth in smaller territories, before partnering with publisher Chillingo in larger countries. But there’s little innovation in the game (it’s a variant on Crush the Castle, a genre that can be traced all the way back to Artillery on the Apple II) and Rovio ‘Mighty Eagle’ Peter Vesterbacka’s saying the company’s “building an integrated entertainment franchise where merchandising, games, movies, TV, cartoons and comics all come together, like Disney 2.0.” is a pretty bold and odd comparison, for one key reason: Rovio is currently a one-hit wonder, with Angry Birds as its sole hit.

There’s no doubting Angry Birds is phenomenally popular. There’s no doubting many people like the game. But right now Rovio is doing little more than milking the brand until it screams: a tie-in with Rio, a self-published ‘seasons’ version to double-up iOS sales and avoid cutting in Chillingo as much as possible, soft toys, possible board games and animations… The list is growing by the month. What’s not on the list though is Rovio’s Next Big Game and The One After That, the products that would prove it has a magic formula for success. At least Wired recognises this in its article:

Rovio needs to evolve from a studio with strong intellectual property (IP), to being a publisher that isn’t over-reliant on a single hit game. There’s the rub: it took Rovio 52 games to get its first hit. To create a fully fledged entertainment empire, it will need more.

Show me another half-dozen megahits and I’ll file Rovio alongside early-1980s Atari and admit that, yes, these guys do have some kind of formula. For now, though, there are dozens of iOS devs out there offering superior and more varied gaming experiences, and that have to balls to do something different every six months or so. Here’s hoping iOS consumers start seeking them out, rather than assuming gaming ends once they’ve three-starred the latest set of levels in Rovio’s game.