1.) Apple will be releasing a new model iPhone on June 19th
For all those iPhone gamers that were holding their breath through the first hour and fourty-five minutes of the conference (where Apple showed off its new, lower priced MacBooks and Snow Leopard upgrades), they got what they were waiting for: the iPhone 3GS (the ‘s’ stands for ‘speed’).
Apple touted the fact that the 3GS will load SimCity 2.4 times faster than the original iPhone (among other 2-3x improvements), will support OpenGL|ES, and will include new hardware like a 3 megapixel camera (with tap-to-focus capabilities, better low-light shots, etc) and 30fps VGA video recording (with integrated YouTube uploads), a digital compass, and voice activated commands.
The new model will launch in the U.S. on June 19th at a price of $199 for the 16GB model, $299 for the 32GB model, while the standard 3G drops today to $99.
What Apple didn’t stress was the idea that games that take advantage of the faster model might soon bring about an App Store split that sees new titles created ‘for 3GS only.’
2.) Apple will also launch the 3.0 firmware on June 17th
Even for all those that aren’t planning to upgrade their hardware, the new 3.0 software will be released two days ahead of the new models (with ‘100 new features’) and will bring previously touted new advances for games like push notification, auto peer-to-peer multiplayer searching over Bluetooth, and in-game upgrade purchases, with the same 30-70 Apple/developer price cut. Developers can also now embed geolocation/the Google Maps code into any application, which could lead to new and better geo-aware games. The upgrade will be free for iPhone users, and will cost $9.95 for iPod Touch owners.
3.) Games took a relative back-seat during this keynote
Compared to previous keynotes, which introduced the iPhone and its competitive strengths via game demonstrations (think Monkey Ball and Spore), the game demos this time ’round were on the light side.
Apart from mentioning Dizzy Bee developer Nathan Hunley in a lineup of developer profiles, and bringing Gameloft on stage to demo their racer Asphalt 5 (with Bluetooth multiplayer), the biggest star of the game show was ngmoco, who took the spotlight to show off their just released (App Store link) spherical tower defense game Star Defense (previously featured several times, and more on that later).
In particular, ngmoco showed the upcoming in-game expansion store coming soon to the game, where users can purchase additional maps (as above, via gdgt’s liveblog of the event).
4.) Here’s what Apple didn’t mention: improvements to the App Store experience
Talk to any App Store developer and what you won’t hear is any complaints about the current iPhone’s hardware. The mounting problem and pressure for indie devs isn’t one of performance, but of exposure.
Apple was very happy to note that there are 50,000 apps on the store, miles ahead of the competition (photo again via gdgt’s liveblog), an install base of 40 million, and a billion apps sold. Developers are just as unhappy to note that, as one recently put it to me, the App Store experience is like “the world’s biggest Wal-mart with one single aisle.”
Until Apple addresses UI concerns — the ability to sort by rating? Further granularity in its sub-sections? The rumored ‘Premium App’ split? More transparency on who becomes ‘Featured’ and why? — all the speed in the world isn’t going to increase a developer’s chance to stay afloat in a sea of garbage.
Handily tidying up any lingering questions I had about this week’s LittleBigPlanet crossover DLC pack, Media Molecule have revealed that it will contain stickers, sounds, and costumes not only for Shadow of the Colossus, as teased last week, but Ico as well, as teased even earlier.
While the pack doesn’t seem to be as much of a game changer as the Metal Gear Solid blowout (which also introduced guns to the game, giving everyone big hopes for Wander’s sword in this), I’m still very much looking forward to seeing both games’ iconic imagery run through the lens of MM’s artists.
The latest, and as always, ridiculously named, games/twitter mashup: Tweet My Gaming, gamerDNA’s new tool to track games trends by tweet mentions.
The tool does show, if nothing else, that the reported figures from the weekend launch of Maxis’s Sims 3 — which, as noted by Edge, EA says was the UK’s fourth biggest PC game launch — seem to be borne out amongst twitter’s hoi polloi as well: it sits above E3 standouts Left 4 Dead 2, The Beatles: Rock Band and even World of Warcraft as the current most mentioned game.
With all the game’s characters now revealed we can see that it’ll retain all of its easy vector charm, but there’s something edgier and scrappier about Walamies’ hand-drawn versions that makes them even more appealing.
It’s exceptionally hard to pick a favorite from Hollis Brown Thornton’s The Earth on the Back of the Giant Turtle series, which eventually devolved into various meditations on Invaders approaching Earth, so I’ll pick the most abstracted instead. [via Clayton Cubitt]
As you’ve no doubt seen by now, no less than Google has given Alexey Pajitnov’s landmark game Tetris the official re-design nod in celebration of the game’s 25th anniversary. In celebration of our own, I figured it’d be as apt a time as ever to give mention to BBC4 documentary From Russia With Love — still the most complete and directly resourced (though admittedly occasionally heavy handed with its Soviet melodrama) re-telling of the story of Tetris‘ birth and rise to ubiquitous acclaim.
I don’t think many people still know just what a fascinating story it was, between the iron-curtain drama and international business intrigue, and just how shrewdly major players were acting behind the scenes to all get a four-block piece of the action, creating a whirlwind with Pajitnov — here portrayed as someone who just, quite simply, was happy to have created an appealing game — at its center. [Though he would later tell me, with a sly smile, that he didn’t necessarily go without taking at least some advantage of the situation.]
Since the complete documentary has been stripped from Google Video’s archive (and still, bafflingly, hasn’t been released on DVD), it’s presented here in six YouTube chunks (with the remaining five after the jump): make your way through it while you still can.
Like Alpinist, one indie development I’ve been keeping a very quiet but steady eye on is Florian ‘1000points’ Hufsky’s micro-skirmish blowout Puit Wars, which he succinctly and comprehensively describes as a “world-exploration story-driven arcade-action-platformer rts-townbuilding and space-exploration game.” Something for everyone, then.
Do I have any grasp of what’s going on in that video above? Not especially, and yet, with every passing in-progress screenshot posted to Hufsky’s work blog, I find myself minding less and less, and am incrementally more willing to put my trust in his pixel-sculpting hands. It helps that Hufsky is co-developer of the widely ported (and wildly IP confounding) four-player party game Super Mario Wars — it also helps that Hufsky realizes, as I’ve suspected all along, that Aesop Rock should be scoring many, many more games (Fight Night 4 aside).
Of all the under-sung games of E3 that popped up over the past week, the one that I was happiest to see make a stateside appearance was fyto’s WiiWare puzzler You, Me and the Cubes.
As I mentioned back in March, the game is the console comeback of Kenji Eno, the director behind Dreamcast horror adventure D2, and the co-creator — with Chibi-Robo producer Kenishi Nishi — of the aesthetically similar early iPhone game Newtonica.
The goal? As above, dropping the hapless ‘Fallos’ on to a series of ever-more-complex interconnected cubes, while attempting to maintain some semblance of balance and harmony, to keep them from falling into precisely the same terrifying void as One More Go’s just-mentioned Intelligent Qube.
Nintendo lists the game for a summer 2009 release, which, considering it also did so for the just-released DSiWare game Mighty Flip Champs, could mean it’s due to make its appearance in just a few short weeks.
Though the impact will have been undercut just slightly by seeing the pre-E3 leaked video of ‘Project Trico’, watching the first official video of The Last Guardian — the PS3 debut of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus creator Fumito Ueda — is honestly no less heartbreaking.
The reason? In its full, updated glory, details emerge that either weren’t present or as prominent in the years-old Trico video: most notably, the spears and arrows still cruelly jutting out of the gryphon’s thinning plumage — evidence of abuse endured during his time chained up before breaking free.
The updated trailer also shows the first sequences of the game’s protagonist without the companionship of his new-found friend, looking much more vulnerable to his surroundings than either Ico or Shadow of the Colossus‘s Wander, and, at the very end, some of the same now-signature sun-drenched washed out courtyards that’ll take you straight back to some of Ico‘s most beautiful scenes.
