A DS and a good game is such a lovely little package. A modern game and nothing more, complete and contained within its little japanese clamshell. No downloads, no updates, no facebook status, no-in app purchase and no highscore achievement leaderboards.
I tend to think that to some extent the frame makes the art. It says, “this is it, this is a thing, here is the extent of it, consider it”. From that point of view a DS game is very well framed. The DS is modern, if limited, hardware featuring all sorts of input, good quality output and technical capability, but all of it balanced within a certain scope.
By contrast an iPhone makes for a large and very fuzzy frame. The hardware is technically very powerful, but capabilities varies between model. Even on a given device, resources are shared between many apps at once, always being available for cellphone calls, meanwhile checking your email in the background.
The internet encroaches, scores, open feint, game center, advertising or social media. Download an update, purchase the second episode. The game leaks into everything else and everything else into the game.
The incredible retina display is put to use displaying some bland 3D model, downloaded for free by a developer, sparsely animated if at all and clumping round a poorly thought out game. You can feel the game barely inhabiting the pixels, its hardly there. A strong breeze and it may just blow away, replaced with one of its 200,000 friends.
Finally and unavoidably, the only dedicated hardware button on an iPhone game is the one that says “go elsewhere”.
I’m currently playing “Might and Magic, Clash of Heroes” on the DS, and it feels like a very thoughtful gift. Given, once and wholly, from the developers to me (thanks Cabybara you guys are great). The sense of enjoyment, delight and investment in the game grows on the strongly given message, “this is the game, this is it, the whole thing is here, right now, in front of you, we worked the whole thing out and its all here waiting for you”.
However to make games and distribute them myself the DS is not really an option. Unfairly, but understandably, Its homebrew is closely associated with pirated games and there is only unofficial development tools available. By contrast the iPhone gives me easy access to an official SDK and a monetised distribution channel, both greatly appreciated gifts by me and a giant hoard of other developers.
So its seems like a challenge, how to cultivate the same sense of a packaged, complete and fully present game within a frame of such broad and fuzzy scope.
