GDC 2010: Street Fighter IV for the iPhone out now

March 10th, 2010

Filed under: , , ,

Tonight at GDC 2010, I went out and stopped by the Capcom Fight Club party here in San Francisco, and while there, Capcom projected the actual App Store interface for sending their Street Fighter IV app to the App Store on various screens around the room. We actually got to see them press the button on the release live and in person, and sure enough, the game is in the App Store right now for $9.99.

Before you go press buy, though, I’ll also tell you that I got a chance to play the game, and while it is about as faithful a Street Fighter IV game as you can get on the iPhone, playing a fighting game without actual buttons is not really an ideal experience. While I was able to pull off a Hadoken and almost all of the other old moves after a few tries, the highest levels of competition in a fighting game require precision and subtlety, and this control scheme has neither of those. If you just want to play Street Fighter on an iPhone, sure — be an early adopter, pick up the game, and enjoy a few rounds of Guile vs. Ryu. But if you’re looking for the kind of in-depth fighting experience that Street Fighter IV on consoles and in the arcades offered, you probably won’t find it here — the controls are a little too inconsistent to really dig into the deep counter and powerup systems on display.

The game does have a lot of extras and addons, including a dojo mode for training and Bluetooth multiplayer. And while the game’s eight characters offers up a pretty slim selection compared to the current console titles, these are definitely classic Capcom characters, and all of the old moves you’ll remember still work. Save for the controls, nothing about this game is half-done — it’s definitely a premium port of a premium game. But as a true fighting game experience, this one comes up short. Buy it if you want, to see the spectacle of Street Fighter squeezed into Apple’s touchscreen, an achievement in and of itself. But don’t buy it expecting an ideal Capcom-style showdown that you’ll be able to pull up time and time again — for that, save your quarters for the arcades.

Stay tuned — we did get to talk with the Japanese producer of the game about what he thinks of the iPhone, the iPad, and the challenges he had to overcome by squeezing this one on to Apple’s handheld. That interview is coming up later today right here on TUAW.

TUAWGDC 2010: Street Fighter IV for the iPhone out now originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Posted in General | No Comments »

eBooks outnumber games in the App Store

March 10th, 2010

Filed under: ,

The number of eBooks in the App Store has surpassed the number of games for the first time, and the spread is widening. Mobclix, a mobile device advertising agency, reports that as of last month, there were over 27,000 eBook apps while games were relegated to the runner-up position of 25,400 apps. Over the last reported month, new introductions of eBook apps more than doubled that of games (158 eBook versus 71 game apps).

There are a number of reasons being kicked around to explain this phenomenon. It’s easier to churn out an eBook than a game app. There are more free eBook than gaming apps, since many of the eBooks are out-of-copyright classics or collections of free content; this lowers the cost of development. Once an eBook engine is built it’s fairly trivial to use the framework for another book. Currently there are over 10 times more free eBook apps than paid ones. It’s different in gaming where paid apps outstrip free ones by over 2 to 1.

These eBook apps will, of course, work on an iPad, but the Apple idea is to have you use one eBook reader and that would be iBooks. Jason Kincaid of Techcrunch, admittedly with no background evidence, posits that there may be an eBook purge coming. It would be very un-Apple to have an iPad owner searching for a copy of Treasure Island, and letting them find over 25 apps with differing interfaces and many of them free.

This could be confusing for new iPad owners, and more to the point, Apple can’t monetize it. It doesn’t sound unreasonable that Apple will do whatever it takes to make iBooks the eReader of choice at the expense of the plethora of current eBook apps. They will be doing it in the name of providing a simpler and more enjoyable user experience, but of course you can’t pocket what you can’t sell.

It will be fascinating to watch the eBook market about two months from now, after the first iPads have been delivered, and to see what Apple has planned.

[via The Guardian]

TUAWeBooks outnumber games in the App Store originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Posted in General | No Comments »

Automatically open Bittorrent files using Dropbox and Hazel

March 10th, 2010

Filed under: ,

Every year there is a torrent made to let listeners download most of the music for SXSW. This year’s torrent has recently been posted (previous years’ are also available at the same site). I don’t usually use Bittorent, so I asked around for client suggestions; Transmission seems to be a favorite among several of my TUAW colleagues.

I also remembered a tip from my friend Guillermo Esteves (who did the awesome Star Wars crawl using only HTML and CSS), about using Dropbox to start torrents remotely. Guillermo provides some detailed instructions for Transmission and µTorrent to set them up to “watch” a folder for new .torrent files, with an important caveat to make sure that you don’t download the files to your Dropbox.

One additional Transmission tip: be sure that you un-check the box next to “Display ‘adding transfer’ options window” so that files will automatically be added, and be sure to check the box next to the “Start transfers when added” option. Guillermo shows both of those settings in his screenshots, but it took me a few minutes to figure out that I had them set incorrectly.

Then I asked myself: “How can I be even lazier?” and I remembered Hazel, a program for automatically moving files from one folder to another based on a set of predefined rules. So I added a Hazel rule for ~/Downloads/ which will move any file where “Kind is BitTorrent Document” to my ~/Dropbox/Torrents/ folder. I repeated this on both my iMac and my MacBook Pro. Now I can be on my MacBook Pro and download a torrent file to ~/Downloads/ and have it moved to my Torrents folder, and have the torrent automatically start downloading on my iMac. So when I’m done with my MacBook Pro I can just close it without having to worry about interrupting any of my downloads.

You may have noticed that we’re big Dropbox fans around here. We use it for syncing Things or instead of a USB sync cable or keeping our notes with us or sharing screenshots, along with any number of other uses. Do you know of any other unusual uses for Dropbox? Let us know in the comments.

In the meantime, enjoy the free, legal music downloads from SXSW!

TUAWAutomatically open Bittorrent files using Dropbox and Hazel originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Posted in General | No Comments »

« Previous Entries
Next Page »

Powered by Yahoo! Answers