iPad fever has hit the internet, as you have probably already noticed.

It certainly looks like a swanky piece of kit (I was going to type “little piece of kit” there, but I guess the “little” isn’t so true, though it is very thin), and already pundits are jumping over themselves to either damn it or praise it.

Oh by the way, have I ever mentioned how much I hate the phrase “game changer”? They rarely are. Though Apple seems to have a better track record of producing them, with the iPod and then iPhone.

My own take on it, and I’m assuming that if you’ve read this far you care, is that it will probably sell like delicious hot cakes that come with a free gold bar. But I’m not sure if it will do anything particularly amazing for the games industry.

The doubts I have are based on these half formed ideas:

• It is apparently targetted at a casual user who wants internet, email, etc. from home, but doesn’t like computers. The thing is, I’m fairly sure a lot of these people already do have computers. What is the relationship between this market, and people who are willing to buy a new gadget to fill a role that is already occupied in their household?
• It will use the existing iPhone app store, so will players carry over their current expectation of quality games at very cut prices?
• Most of the existing iPhone apps that have enjoyed great success have been built specifically for the phone and its strengths. ie small bursts of gaming for when you are on the go (or on the can). The iPad is clearly not as portable as the iPhone, I doubt even the most ardent Apple fan would argue otherwise. Will players be expecting more meaty (for want of a better description) games?
• Anything that uses the accelerometer seems to be out of the window. Rotating a phone is one thing (though it’s fairly annoying on that), but watch this guy waving the iPad around while playing a racing game. It’s a combination of annoying, nauseating, and scary (would you be happy flopping your expensive new toy around like that).
• Existing games that use on screen “virtual buttons” are also a bit screwed. Again, something designed for a phone’s dimensions and relative thumb to screen size ratio, double scaled just isn’t that comfortable (according to some reports, which annoyingly I can’t find the link to again right now) to use in the iPad’s scale. Anything that uses virtual buttons, but doesn’t have a dedicated iPad version released, is just going to put its players through pain.

So yeah, I’m sure that provided it sells as expected there will be some great games made for it, and some success stories will provide impressive numbers. I’m also sure there will be plenty of app developers who will continue to make good, but not great, money off it. I’m just not convinced it’s another “game changer” is all.

As I’ve been dabbling in XNA I’ve also been checking out more of the games on the games marketplace’s Indie Games channel. Mainly to see exactly where the bar is set, but also to see what other people are doing with the tools.

I thought I’d highlight a couple of really great efforts that I played.

First up is Arkedo Series 03: Pixel. Aside from the developers giving it this unwieldy name (that I had to google to find the full version of), this is ace. It’s a platform game about a cat’s adventures, which doesn’t sound like much but the presentation really stands out – Big chunky pixel graphics with a clean UI and smooth scrolling.

Occasionally the gameplay is punctuated by an odd little maze game to reveal a hidden element in the level, and the cat also meows as a special weapon (yeah, I’m a cat person, so what of it?)

At 240 points it is one of the more expensive indie games, but Arkedo is a professional outfit and the quality really shines here.

The second game that really appealed to me is Head Shot 2. This is a sniping themed game, based aroudn the idea that Bad Men are in the city and are masters of disguise. You’re given a picture of the current disguise, and have to locate and shoot the target as quickly as possible.

It’s an incredibly simple idea, but one that works really well. The cartoony graphics stop the whole thing from getting too serious or gory.

80 points well spent.

Now, let me preface this entire thing by saying I’m not really much of an online gamer. For whatever reason I like a feeling of progression in my gaming that repeated five minute bursts of the same map just can’t give me*

Modern Warfare 2 was a huge let down to me. In fact, if it wasn’t for Scribblenaughts (spit) it might have ranked as my biggest gaming disappointment of 2009.

I could go in to a lot of detail, but I’m not going to. To be honest I think I’ve probably lost a load of readers already, and those that are still reading more than likely either feel the same way as me or don’t really care and are fed up of reading about bloody Modern Warfare 2.

The airport level, for all the hype, was a complete waste. There was no real player agency – you couldn’t opt to take out the terrorists there and then, for example, but also the player was not forced to participate in the slaughter either. You would think terrorists would notice one of their number not actually shooting anyone, but no. So any emotional attachment that I might have been able to muster from being forced to save, or kill, the airport full of clones was lost.

I’m also not entirely sure thematically where the developers were going with this. One the one hand it is a level where the evil terrorists are able to make progress without your help up until the armed police arrive, and then they need the help of the American spy to proceed.

But on the other hand it sets up the entire rest of the game in which the Russians were completely right to be pissed off and hit back – the Americans had knowingly allowed horrific a terrorist attack to be carried out on Russian soil, without attempting to stop it.

My second main gripe with the game is that all of the “best” bits were also pale imitations of the same bits that Modern Warfare had already done. Better.

The bit where your current character dies. The bit where you shoot de-humanised tiny dot people using a distant top down camera view. The bit where you and the other gruff voiced guy go sniping and kill people at the same time. The bit where the nuke goes off. The bit where the final level is a vehicle section followed by you being incapacitated and having to reach for a weapon and get a last shot off to kill the main baddy.

On the plus side, I thought the special ops mode was a pretty good idea. And their level artists have a knack of making a place look grounded in the real world, no matter what surreal thing is going on.

* and yes, I know about the experience system for online, but really seeing a number go up and getting to play with different gun models isn’t the same thing as progression to me.

Can you spot the quote that caused the headline “Only bad Wii games sell badly – Bloober” in this Eurogamer article?

I’ve read it over a few times now, and he says that their game isn’t just cobbled together, and that he’s not surprised an on-rails shooter didn’t sell. But i just can’t find the bit where he says that only bad Wii games sell badly.

But it must be there. Eurogamer wouldn’t completely miss-quote someone to stir up hits would they? Aren’t they professional journalists?

I will keep looking, maybe it’s like one of those magic eye pictures…

I’ve recently finished playing through Halo 3:ODST. Aside from having a crap name that’s faily difficult to remember and type into search engines, I thought it was rather good.

It’s essentially a “best of” Halo. All of the fun bits, with the boring chunks that were required for storytelling, continuity, or just some level designer’s mad flight of fancy cut out.

This means you get entire levels devoted to sniping, or Warthogs, or tanks (sorry, even having played four Halo games I still can’t remember what these are called in the game’s world), or interiors. All linked together by some open-ish city bits that are a pick and mix of everything.

Admittedly, these city trekking parts are probably the weakest, consisting largely of copy & pasted geometry (you will be relying on the compass and map a lot here), though they are also the shortest sections, as long as you go in the right direction.

And best of all, we finally get that game set entirely in an Earth city that the early Halo 2 E3 footage had promised, and then failed to deliver.

I was also impressed that they have included a visor mode very similar to the one in Batman: Arkham Asylum, only they have seen fit to give it a drawback (it’s essentially night vision, so it works very poorly in well lit situations, or poor atmospherics) so you don’t use it the entire time.

Well done, Bungie – this is well worth picking up if you fancy a new fix of Halo-flavoured shooty fun (oh yeah, it also comes with all of Halo 3′s multiplayer on a separate disc for some reason).

In contrast to yesterday’s post, it seems that last year was the second strongest for the UK industry, since records began.

Not bad considering the economic climate. Not quite the once believed recession-proof, but perhaps more resistant to it than had been feared?

Over on IndieVision – a site dedicated to small indie developers – they recently compiled a blow by blow account of all of the studio closures and job losses in the industry in 2009.

It makes for some pretty grim reading.

And if you haven’t already, it’s worth having a look around the rest of their site if you’re at all interested in the business end of small studio development. There’s a lot of good stuff on there.

So here we have it, my first XNA game. I’m quite chuffed with it, even though I probably have no real reason to be.

The object of the game is to score as many points as possible by shooting the coloured blocks that are moving down the screen. If a block reaches the pink zone at the bottom of the screen you lose. If you match the colour of your shot with the colour of the block it hits you get more points.

There are plenty of bits in it that I think are missing, or that I would improve. And maybe at some point I will. But possibly because this is my first game the code for it is a horrible mess – the majority of it is in one class! So I’m going to read up a bit more, and follow a couple more tutorials, and then write something better for my next game (and obviously being a designer I have a load of things I want to make).

Anyway, here’s the download link: ColorZap v1.0

You will also need the XNA redistributable from here.

And yes, I think it’s odd that I chose to call it “color”, when I write colour (being one of those English folks and all). Blame XNA for using the Americanised version.

When it’s being awarded by someone who apparently doesn’t understand a 5 star rating system.

Continuing my trend of talking very late about games that everyone else has already finished thinking about…

I played through Batman: Arkham Asylum just before Christmas. Now, a lot has been written about that game recently, what with it coming high in numerous end of year polls. As it deserves to – it’s a fantastic game that has clearly had a lot of love and attention to detail lavished on it by the development team.

There are just two areas that I felt let it down:

Firstly, the boss fights. Now I’ve written about boss fights before, and I’m never much of a fan. They are usually just an annoying stumbling block to progression with an artificially inflated difficulty jump. And unfortunately Arkham falls into that trap. Repeating the same series of attacks, or fighting off waves of generic baddies, is not as much fun as stalking around the halls of the asylum.

The other let down to me was the detective mode. Not in theory, but in execution. The mode made the game ugly – replacing the detailed locations with a dull blue wash. Which wouldn’t have been so bad, except that it provided useful game information, while having no (non-cosmetic) downside to its use. So essentially players were conditioned to play the game in this ugly mode.