Oh dear.

No, seriously. Oh dear.

Sony’s decided to fight back against iOS gaming (having lost a huge chunk of handheld marketshare to Apple), and it’s doing so by spraying bullshit at you from your television.

The above two links both lead to the appalling advert Sony’s running. If you don’t care to watch it (and I won’t blame you if that’s the case, since it might make you want to punch things—such as whoever came up with the idea and whoever signed it off, along with your screen, JUST TO STOP THE PAIN), here’s what happens:

Moron on a bike says “Dear PSP, check out this sweet game I got”, holding up a device that doesn’t at all look like an iPhone and yet has graphics worse than any iOS game I’ve ever seen. (And, believe me, I’ve written enough ‘best 10 free iPhone game’ articles now to have seen dozens of very bad iPhone games.) SCREEN PUNCH #1!

Hip kid on a bus (you can tell he’s hip, because he wears his hat in a manner that makes it look like it’s sliding off his head—COOL!) says “That ain’t built for big-boy games”, “That’s built for texting your grandma and calling your girl”. SCREEN PUNCH #2!

It’s pretty clear at this point that hip kid, who is, apparently ‘Marcus Rivers, Deputy of Great Game Deals’, is clearly a colossal idiot. If you have an iPhone, chances are you like convergence. You like being able to ‘text your grandma’ and ‘call your girl’; but you also like the fact it does a whole bunch of stuff other than just playing games, although it does that rather well, too, and there are tens of thousands to choose from.

The thing is, I seem to remember a certain other device was once heralded as the King of Convergence. I’m pretty sure it was by Sony and called the PS… something.

Anyway, on with the ad!

Hip kid shoves a PSP into the camera, and yells that for only $9.99, you could be playing THIS! and THIS! and THIS! At this point, I nearly set fire to all my iOS devices before realising that for more than even the most expensive high-end iOS games, hip kid was telling me I could instead buy aged, budget PSP titles! Hurrah! (Incidentally, THIS!, THIS! and THIS! turn out to be GENERIC-O-RACER, RUBBISH-O-QUIZ GAME and CARTOON GOLF GAME. Man, if only the App Store was full of racing games, quiz games and the likes of Let’s Golf!) SCREEN PUNCH #3!

Moron on a bike now gets confused and excited, and hip kid makes everyone’s built-in ‘black person stereotype detection device’ explode in a mixture of overload, fury and SCREEN PUNCH #4! Presumably, Sony’s marketing is aiming to snare dim people who’ve teleported in from the early 1980s.

“Step your game up,” concludes the advert (rather obnoxiously trademarking the phrase). It’s advice Sony should itself take to heart, rather than spewing garbage about the competition. Amusingly, the final logo is Sony’s own, with ‘make believe’ under it. It may as well say ‘away with the fairies’ or ‘WE HAVE TOTALLY LOST IT! PLEASE SEND HELP RIGHT AWAY! NYYYAAAHHHH!’

I’m a retrogamer at heart. Although I do now and again enjoy modern games, most of those that bite are old-fashioned in many ways. This is probably why I’m such a big fan of iOS as a gaming platform—it’s like the 1980s all over again (low prices, tons of novelty in games, individuals putting out what they want to rather than what focus groups ask for).

However, it’s interesting to see that ticking all the boxes isn’t always enough. A case in point is Earth Defender, a 59p game I downloaded for almost certain inclusion in an article I’m currently writing about cheapo iPod games. The grabs on the game’s App Store page looked great—screens full of swooping neon ships. The gameplay looked like it mashed together Missile Command and Galaxian. What could go wrong?

Plenty, as it turns out. Earth Defender isn’t bad, but it’s also not great. The levels are too long and become a little tedious. And the game’s far too easy—I would have completed it on my first go had the game not erased my supposedly saved game. As it was, I completed it the first time I seriously tried to.

The irony is that Earth Defender therefore, despite being a retro title at heart, ends up being more like modern titles I dislike: dull and repetitive but inoffensive gameplay, with a layer of gloss overlaid.

For daily iPhone/iPad/iPod touch app and game reviews, follow @iphonetiny on Twitter, or bookmark iphonetiny.com.

Since I first bought an iPhone 3G and started downloading games for it, I’ve been of the opinion that iOS is the greatest gaming platform I’ve experienced. Having grown up during the 1980s, videogaming for me is at its most exciting when it’s about fun and novelty. Due to low barriers to entry for developers and low-risk for consumers (through iOS games costing way less than those for other platforms), iOS utterly succeeds in providing a gaming environment totally at odds with the mundane, pedestrian, focus-grouped-to-death output that plagues most other platforms.

Apple makes it hard to love sometimes, though. It’s too easy to lose (or be forced to lose) game progress, and Apple’s now decided to drop Game Center support from the second-generation iPod touch and iPhone 3G. I think that decision beggars belief, and it could have grave consequences for developer uptake and iOS grabbing more marketshare at the expense of Nintendo and Sony.

More on this in my TechRadar piece Game Center for iOS bombshell shows Apple still doesn’t get gaming.

Kotaku’s mini-article Will Nintendo Release Its Games On, Say, Apple Hardware has some brief content from the Japanese giant that’s raised the hackles of gamers. On the prospect of Nintendo IP on iOS, Nintendo’s president Satoru Iwata reportedly said: “Nintendo’s software and hardware are the same thing. Other companies don’t share Nintendo’s values or traditions when it comes to creating devices. We are absolutely not thinking of doing that.”

With every gamer wanting every game everywhere, Iwata’s statement has gone down like a sack of shit, but the reality is that Nintendo has, for many years, been the closest thing to Apple in the gaming space. It operates a largely closed model, and it’s therefore able to innovate—something it does far more often than its rivals, and often regarding UI/UX rather than by churning out Yet Another Console That Can Shift More Polygons. Because of this, Nintendo’s totally right to continue its ‘lock in’ way of thinking. It can do what it wants with its IP and not worry about anyone else.

However, the problem of being the Apple of the gaming space is when Apple itself arrives to spoil the party. On the desktop, Apple gaming has always been a joke, but in the mobile space, Apple is gaining serious ground. Time will tell whether Nintendo acts accordingly to the threat of Apple’s underlying ecosystem (if it doesn’t, it’ll potentially be playing the same game as Sega in a few years), but in retaining a general closed approach, the House of Mario is on the right path.

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about gaming on the iPhone and iPod touch is how close it is to perfection. Apple’s ecosystem is excellent, providing a low barrier to entry for developers, which encourages crazy, innovative ideas full of fun and novelty. For the consumer, dozens of great games arrive on the App Store every day, and are often priced at a third of 8-bit budget titles for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64—from 1985.

However, there’s a fly in the ointment that continues to defecate everywhere—Apple’s lack of providing any means of backing up game save/progress data. In Apple’s world, deleting an app means pretending you’ve never used it. Spent ten hours battling through Peggle or GTA? Accidentally deleted a game, or removed a huge app on purpose, to get something else on your device? Too bad: next time you boot the game, it’ll start from scratch.

In the modern era, this simply isn’t acceptable at the best of times. For Apple, it’s an embarrassment, since it aligns this aspect of its gaming alongside the cheapest and nastiest Nintendo DS carts, which don’t offer any kind of battery back-up. With news that iPhone OS 4 would scrap the equally dreadful ‘rate on delete’ dialog box, I was hoping it would be replaced with a dialog that would enable you to save your progress for the app being removed. iTunes would then offer to restore your app’s data the next time you installed it.

With iPad gaming, this issue’s only going to get worse. Looking at the App Store, it’s clear apps in general are going to hugely increase in size—interactive book The Elements: A Visual Exploration clocks in at a whopping 1.74GB (US iTunes Store link). With the iPad screen being much larger than the iPhone’s, games will of course follow suit, due to the huge increase in asset size.

In the long run, iPad users will be faced with a stark choice: delete a game and all the progress they’ve made, in order to buy something new, or just avoid buying anything further. Already I hear from people with iPhones doing the latter, and that will eventually impact on Apple’s sales—unless it has the common sense to provide some way of saving progress for later restoration. Perhaps Game Center, Apple’s gaming social network in iPhone OS 4, will include such functionality. If not, it’ll remain clear that while Apple’s continuing to aggressively target gamers, it certainly doesn’t understand them.