@ nitro2k01:

i loved snake on my old phone, i could sit and play it for hours in line, long car rides, everywhere.
Top score was 1008

Probably the game I’ve found best suited to the iPhone interface is Rotorumpus and a few like it – Swipe to rotate 3D spaces and tap. Anything more reflexively demanding than spatial puzzlers with pre-determined paths that can’t be screwed up by the user (think vastly complicated Rubix cubes) are probably doomed to failure, unless it’s a worms-like Angry Birds precision aimer.

These are my favorites:

Good touch interfaces:
* Osmos — this one makes fantastic use of multi-touch and is lots of fun.
* Peggle — Simple, but touch-interface is perfect.
* Flight Control — everyone knows this one. Prototypical touch-interface game.
* Astronut — lots of fun. Doesn’t use multi-touch, but does a good job with placing “buttons” on a touch-screen.
* Doodle Bowl — simple, but fun.
* Fruit Ninja — you couldn’t play this without mutli-touch. A great example of solid game that was designed just for this platform.

Good use of gyros:
* JetCarStunts – really hard, but excellent use of gyroscopes for steering. Sort of like MarioKart for adults.
* DoodleJump — simple, but great game and perfect game-play.
* Boost — beautifully simple game. I wish there was more to it.

Maybe most of those fall into the “simple puzzle” genre, but they’re fun. I don’t think we’ll ever play a satisfying game of Quake or Starcraft on a phone. But there are lots of excellent games that make great use of the unique features of these devices. I don’t think ports from other platforms are all that promising, though.

These are my favorites:

Good touch interfaces:
* Osmos — this one makes fantastic use of multi-touch and is lots of fun.
* Peggle — Simple, but touch-interface is perfect.
* Flight Control — everyone knows this one. Prototypical touch-interface game.
* Astronut — lots of fun. Doesn’t use multi-touch, but does a good job with placing “buttons” on a touch-screen.
* Doodle Bowl — simple, but fun.

Good use of gyros:
* JetCarStunts – really hard, but excellent use of gyroscopes for steering. Sort of like MarioKart for adults.
* DoodleJump — simple, but great game and perfect game-play.
* Boost — beautifully simple game. I wish there was more to it.

Maybe most of those fall into the “simple puzzle” genre, but they’re fun. I don’t think we’ll ever play a satisfying game of Quake or Starcraft on a phone. But there are lots of excellent games that make great use of the unique features of these devices. I don’t think ports from other platforms are all that promising, though.

Well, while I don’t own a “smart”phone until now (I confess: I ordered one) my ipod more or less does the same.
More or less because you can feel the difference in processing capacity and RAM.

Games on it are:
Highborn – turn based strategy, not too original in story but lmao-dialogues. Works well.
Splodes – You touch the screen, fuzzy little thingies get coloured and flow around exploding, thereby triggering other things. Yeah… controls… really hard to get these wrong… there are almost none!
AeroWings – this is the only game using more than the touchscreen: you control a plane by tilting the ipod/phone. Funny but the ipod really lacks raw power to run it. It get’s laggy sometimes and the buttons you use for firing your gun/rockets are… well, buttons in the corner that sometimes block your view on targets.
Medieval – kinda tower defense, you control a giant crossbow on your castles parapets and the enemies troops try to destroy your castle or steal your flag. You point, the crossbow fires. Or you draw back and it fires. Nothing too original or complicated. Controls here -other than the crossbow- are little buttons on the bottom of the screen.

None of these games are too new in controls or such but since I play them mainly when I have to waste some time and am not in range of my desktop or a book… works for me.
And this is the main reason why I’ll not come into contact with FPS-games on a smartphone. FPS belong on a decent desktop and not on a console or such.
And there is stuff that’s just more at home on consoles, take Dogfighter (search at steam) for example: plays OK on a desktop, plays better when using a joystick and promises a load of more fun when using a controller.
There’s just a platform for certain types of games…

Playing it with a regular phone keyboard was possible but not very comfortable. You constantly had to remind yourself which buttons were the directional keys.

Not true! At least the newer Nokia phones had this feature where 1, 3, 7 and 9 where conditional buttons that could go in two different directions depending on where the snake was heading. 9, for example, could go either down or right. I suspect this function existed to catch mistakes by the player, but some people — like me — developed a two-button playing style where you’d never have to move your fingers between buttons during gameplay.

Normally i’d never point out something like this but:

“right at home on most modern homes” made me lol.

Android phones also have control issues, even with the keyboard, because not all phones use the same keyboard layout. For example emulators seem to assume you have a 4 or 5 row keyboard with a numbers row, and us 1 for up A for down, and Q,W for left and right. My original G1 was great for this, but my new phone (3G Slide, doesnt have a number row (you have to hit the alt key to use them), which means i have to remap keys in most of the emulators i try, and in some cases, its not possible to type some keys because a game or program just assumes the standed G1 layout (i can’t easily use TAB in my ssh client for this reason). …but at least the keyboard can be remapped, its just a pain.

One thing that i’ve liked is using my wiimote as a controller for emulators. It seems a bit silly, but you can easily play a 2 player SNES game with a friend while your on the bus or something like that. I’m not sure if the iphone supports that sort of thing or not, but it wouldnt be a bad idea for apple (or some third party) to release some kind of bluetooth controller addon, maybe one that slips on and off easily.

I have a Wacom Bamboo Fun and its gestures are really freaking useful for art. I don’t have to waste time going for the zoom/scroll things in photoshop – I just put two fingers on my tablet (aren’t you glad that I didn’t say “pad?”) and presto, instant response. Basic gestures can work really well if you simply have them use two fingers. crouch could be dragging two fingers down, jump could be the opposite. or two thumbs, whatever. imho, the world at war zombies works well on the iphone/itouch.

Duke 3D was a horrible port. I keep it on my iPhone just to show my developer friends what NOT to do for their games (not that any of them are porting old FPS’s).

I’m a big fan of the dual stick type top down shooters and hack & slash type games on the iPhone (and Android). A personal favorite of mine is still Mini Gore. Simple but attractive graphics, two controls (walk direction and shoot direction), and hours of mindless shooting fun.

I noticed the most successful FPS type games tend to be rail-shooters on the iPhone (RageHD, Doom Resurrection, etc…). This solves the control issues with a touch screen, but seem to take a bit away from the game play by keeping it too linear.

It’s amazing the current spread of games available for mobile devices these days. I’m sure Nintendo and Sony are loosing their minds trying to find a way to keep up.