Kotaku’s Mike Fahey has decided to copy and paste a commenter’s whine-fest and has entitled it:

iPhone Games Just Aren’t Any Fun

Maybe not, but this teardown is sure going to be.

I can’t count how many demos or $1 games I’ve bought since I got an iPod Touch back in 2008. Every day I was looking for new games to try out, be it on the poorly-organized App Store charts or on mobile gaming-dedicated websites. If it was free or cheap and looked half-way decent, I’d add it to my Touch and keep it around for a rainy day, or a slow day at work.

I downloaded lots of games, but only free or cheap ones, and, as everyone knows, every other system’s best games are the ones that are free or cheap!

Puzzle games, adventure games, RPG’s, Angry Birds. They all provided minutes of fun. And then I’d delete them.

I have the attention span of a — SQUIRREL!

Download a demo. Play it for a life/round/minute. Delete.

Also, I have zero staying power, because I’m not invested in the games. Tsk, eh?

Download a $1 game. Get the point. Delete. Actually have some increment of fun playing something. Never come back to it again. Delete.

Strangely, I never thought that maybe I was downloading the wrong games.

I don’t want to do it anymore. I’m sick of it. These ‘experiences,’

I like scare-quotes. They enable me to belittle iOS games really easily.

many based off similar ‘experiences’ from other companies selling similar Apps, are lifeless. Sure, Tiny Wings is beautiful to look at, but after getting to level 6 and having the sun set, I stop caring.

Also, those classic, highly focussed arcade games, such as Robotron, Pac-Man, Space Invaders, Defender and Missile Command? All rubbish.

Sonic the Hedgehog? Sorry, touch-screen controls for platformers can disappear along with the US economy. Hero of Sparta made me both stop caring AND curse the controls at the same time.

For some reason, I thought games specifically designed for other systems would work well on the touchscreen. In other news, my microwave is rubbish for frying eggs.

To be blunt, iPhone games aren’t fun.

To be blunt, I AM TEH HARDCORE GAMER!

When I look at my iPod Touch as a gaming device, I throw up in my mouth a little bit. It’s not a gaming device.

I’m slightly obsessed about the ‘hardcore gamer’ thing. And a little weird.

It’s a music player.

If we ignore every other app than ‘iPod’ and ‘Spotify’.

If it was an iPhone, it would be a music player and a phone.

If we ignore every other app than ‘iPod’ and ‘Spotify’ and ‘Phone’.

I have used it for games, or rather, tried to use it for games, for over three years now, and not once have I experienced my ‘Tetris Moment’ (Gameboy) or my ‘Lumines Moment’ (PSP) or my ‘Advance Wars Moment’ (GB Advance). That moment when all that the system is and can be is absorbed into your brain. It’s a moment of brilliance which is rare, and after three years of trying to find it amidst the mass of pointless, moronic, copycat, or just plain impossible-to-control ‘games’ on the iPhone platform, I’m done looking for it.

There are no good games for the iPhone at all.

No more wasted time trying to find a diamond in the rough.

Every other system has 100 per cent great games. Phew!

It’s beyond a needle in a haystack now. The App Store is a wasteland that I no longer feel the need to trudge through. There’s so many things wrong with it that the occasional mildly-amusing cheap game that I may be missing won’t matter.

I hate the future.

I’m going to make a prediction: games on the App Store will suffer their own market collapse at some point in the next five years.

PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE! PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE!

Be it through lack of innovation or consumer indifference, the store will cease to be the money-printer it is right now.

PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE! PAGING JOHN GRUBER AND HIS CLAIM-CHOWDER MACHINE!

How many times can people pay $1 for a game they’ve already downloaded fifty times under a different title?

No other games company and system ever recycles IP.

How many in-game lives must be lost to horrible touch-controls that can only be rectified by actual buttons?

I don’t understand multitouch, nor how to avoid games with rubbish virtual controls.

How many minutes must be wasted downloading and installing the next mini-game, only to delete it minutes later because you’ve seen all there is to see?

The Civilisation series is rubbish—there’s just this guy, standing on a field, surrounded by inky blackness. I DELETED IT RIGHT AWAY.

My time is more valuable than that.

Yet not valuable enough that I can’t spend some time writing a poorly thought-out rant about iOS gaming.

I’m not against indie games, or even spirited re-imaginations of existing games

Unless they’re on the iPhone.

but I am against the devaluation of games as fun.

Because if you ignore the thousands of fun iOS games with plenty of depth, there are no fun iOS games with plenty of depth.

The iPhone is a great device (when people don’t drive with it), and kudos to Apple for innovating in a space that had become stagnant with boring cell handsets, but games shall no longer grace my iPod Touch, or my iPhone if I ever get one.

I’m a gamer. I play real games. On real systems.

REAL MEN USE BUTTONS! AND PLASTIC CARTRIDGES! AND PAY OVER THE ODDS FOR BOTH!

Bloomberg reports that investors are starting to argue Nintendo should ditch its Nintendo-only stance and offer games for other platforms:

“Smartphones are the new battlefield for the gaming industry,” said Ohki, a fund manager at Tokyo-based Stats Investment Management Co. “Nintendo should try to either buy its way into this platform or develop something totally new.”

I’ve criticised Nintendo quite a bit recently, but I also suggested the company has multiple options regarding how to continue. One of them would be to do a Sega and go multiplatform, but that would almost certainly kill Nintendo’s (usually) profitable hardware line dead. The Nintendo ecosystem is a differentiator, an Apple-like take within the gaming industry. It’s potentially a benefit, not detrimental. The problem Nintendo faces is Apple itself’s now a competitor, and so the Japanese gaming giant needs to repsond to a changing market.

I don’t think this means suddenly releasing iSuper Mario Bros. or iMario Kart (although if Nintendo did, Angry bloody Birds would be off of the top of the charts for good), but it does mean changing its stance relating to game distribution and embracing more indies. Ultimately, Nintendo needs to stop remembering the good ol’ days of expensive bits of plastic and figure out how to rip off the App Store. Make Nintendo games cheaper and more easily accessible and ensure there are more of them, and there’s a good chance the 3DS’s successor won’t be the hardware equivalent of throwing in the towel. But carry on with ‘more of the same’ and trying to convince handheld gamers to part with 30 to 50 quid for a single game in 2013 and you’ll be on a hiding to nothing.

Epic Games President Mike Capps, talking to IndustryGamers:

I think that’s the real challenge for us now, rather than worrying about the difference between a couple consoles and some order of magnitude, whether 3X or 4X. It’s about how do we deal with iPhone 8… if you watch where the gamers are going that’s where they are. Your iPhone 8 will probably plug into your TV, or better yet, wirelessly connect to your television set to give you that big screen gaming experience with good sound. So really, what’s the point of those next-gen consoles?

iPhone 8? I’ll be amazed if this doesn’t happen with the iPhone 5, since gaming over AirPlay is already possible (if sometimes a little laggy) with the iPad 2. I don’t think next-gen games consoles will vanish overnight, simply because they are, relatively speaking, much more affordable than an iOS system (which would require several devices and an Apple TV for wireless gaming streams), and also because Apple still doesn’t entirely get gaming itself. However, should Apple add AirPlay mirroring across its entire line, the Apple TV would go from being a niche concern to, potentially, a 101-quid add-on that turns any iPod touch, iPhone or iPad into a games console. At that point, Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony would have a massive fight on their hands.

From the LA Times:

The San Mateo district attorney’s office has opted not to charge Gizmodo and writer Jason Chen for buying an iPhone prototype from a man who found it in a bar last year, months before the device was made public.

What the fuck?

Chen and Gizmodo’s decision to pay $5,000 for the lost iPhone was “not motivated by financial greed,” said Morley Pitt, San Mateo County’s assistant district attorney. “His claim was that he was undertaking a journalistic investigation.”

What the fuck?

Yeah, sure Gizmodo was all about the journalism when buying stolen property. It was in the public interest to buy stolen property and report on it, because the world would have been DOOMED without that particular story. It had NOTHING to do with financial motivations, such as the fuck-ton of page hits Gizmodo got from reporting on the stolen device, and yet, brilliantly, still missing a ton of the new things Apple had added to the device, rather suggesting the ‘investigation’ part of ‘journalistic investigation’ was a bit rubbish.

Still, hey, all US journos: be happy! Precedent has now been set, and it’s absolutely fine to buy stolen property and perhaps even try to blackmail the owner, as long as you write an article about it! PHEW! *headdesk*

There’s a certain amount of “the sky is falling” hackery surrounding the iPad right now. Apple commanded a massive 94.3 per cent of the market not that long ago, when it was pretty much the only game in town. Now, according to sources such as T3, Apple’s share has dropped “as Android soars”.

The figures state Apple’s going to end up with 61.3 per cent of the market during Q2/11, with Android on 30.1 per cent. It’s notable that most Android figures appear to involve units shipped rather than sold, but let’s ignore that for a moment; let’s also ignore the fact that 61.3 per cent of the market is still massive. For me, the most interesting news is from HP, which has dropped the TouchPad’s price by $100.

When so-called ‘iPad killers’ first appeared, they were like little clones and also aped the iPad’s price, matching it as closely as possible. “Look! We’re just like the iPad in every way,” the rivals claimed, despite some of them being a wee bit smaller than Apple’s model (Engadget has a rather nice photo of the Galaxy Tab atop an iPad).

With the TouchPad, I think it’s a pity HP is attempting to fight the battle on price, because webOS is in many ways a very good system. But it’s an inevitability if a system doesn’t have the critical acclaim, popularity and ecosystem enjoyed by the likes of the iPad. Expect those rivals that haven’t dropped their price to follow suit soon; but when they do, bear in mind Apple’s been using its billions to buy up major components for tablets at the best possible price. This means while Apple could feasibly cut its tablet’s price and still make a massive profit, that’s certainly not the case for most other companies. And while in the world of PCs, massive sales sometimes led to at least some profitability, if you’ve only got a smallish share of the tablet market and are making naff-all profit per unit, you’re pretty much done for.