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Cellphones First Person Shooters (Games) Handhelds Portables (Games) Games

Cross-Platform Mobile Gaming Gaining Traction 43

Posted by Soulskill from the throw-in-some-augmented-reality-and-we're-getting-somewhere dept.
andylim writes "Several mobile gaming companies are developing cross-platform multiplayer games allowing Android and iPhone users, for example, to play games against each other. Last month touchArcade reported on a cross-platform baseball game developed by Com2Us called Homerun Battle 3D. Unlike turn-based multiplayer mobile games, Homerun Battle 3D allows players to compete against each other instantly, but you don't see the other player — instead you only get to see your competitor's score being updated. Pushing cross-platform multiplayer games even further, a company called Bulky Pix has created a table-football-style game that displays the action as it happens — both players see the ball moving around. This hopefully suggests that cross-platform, multiplayer mobile shooters aren't far behind."
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Cross-Platform Mobile Gaming Gaining Traction More

Cross-Platform Mobile Gaming Gaining Traction

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  • Correction (Score:4, Insightful)

    by not already in use ( 972294 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @01:47PM (#31347898)
    You can in fact see the other player, if you enable the PiP option. The game itself is pretty fun, by the way.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by CockMonster ( 886033 )
      There's nothing fun about baseball... pixelated or not.

      • Baseball is a precision sport. It takes a certain degree of sophistication to appreciate. You self-apply the name "CockMonster", so I'm guessing you're not the most subtle and sophisticated guy out there.

  • I disagree (Score:3, Funny)

    by Monkeedude1212 ( 1560403 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @01:50PM (#31347930) Journal

    This hopefully suggests that cross-platform, multiplayer mobile shooters aren't far behind.

    I wouldn't hope that on anybody. Last thing you need is getting BOOM HEADSHOT 'd so hard that you rage and throw your 300 dollar phone to the pavement.

    • I was hoping that 3d shooters would go away like the 2d eat the dot in a maze games. Ok Wolfinstine 3d then Doom, and Quake.... But after that it is like OK a hand with a gun and shoot things.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by BadAnalogyGuy ( 945258 )

      But with a built-in camera, teabagging becomes a personal experience.

  • I've got this game on my Nexus One. I saw rave reviews about it and shelled out $5 for it. At first, I wasn't so happy with it, then I became addicted to playing it. Especially trying to play it on the subway / train since the movement of the train makes the bat's sweet spot move around. Much more difficult then playing while sitting on a couch!

    • Speaking of subways and trains... the next logical step would be to let players hook up via Bluetooth, with a "play with a stranger" option.

  • Only problem (for me at least) is the only time I can see playing these types of games would be on the subway, where I don't get any signal.

  • This is good news of course but what does not make sense to me, this refers to Google and iPhones as being cross platform games.

    How come there are not any great games on normal Java phones? J2ME has so many libraries and they're capable of the same.

    I have never understood why there are not many multiplayer bluetooth or games that connect the internet? It would be awesome to play net games on the phone on the train with people in the same train or anywhere in the world.

    (Ignoring phone signal cutting out on t

    • ...I am not just referring to scores.

      Shared scores are just an easy way to make a singleplayer have multiplayer features - it is not interactive in the slightest. I could not care less about games where only the score is the competing factor. I want to see the other player and interact with them directly.

      I think games like Galactic Colonization would be awesome on phones.
      http://www.arcadebomb.com/play/galactic_colonization.html [arcadebomb.com]

      (I cannot find another variant of this flash game where the graphics are simpler

    • J2ME was gimped, it isn't optimized well (which especially hurts games).

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by DdJ ( 10790 )

      How come there are not any great games on normal Java phones? J2ME has so many libraries and they're capable of the same.

      You can get one hint by tracking down the five most popular J2ME-enabled phones, and then trying to get the same app to run the same way on all of them.

      You can get another hint by looking at the revenue earned in the J2ME-app market compared to the iPhone and Android app markets.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mdwh2 ( 535323 )

        You can get another hint by looking at the revenue earned in the J2ME-app market compared to the iPhone and Android app markets.

        There are more games because the revenue is higher? No that's backwards. The revenue is going to be higher if there are more games for it.

        If we're looking at mobile gaming, surely the biggest platform by far is the DS...

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by DdJ ( 10790 )

          There are more games because people who own an iPhone or Android device are considerably less shy about paying for apps on their phones than the owners of J2ME devices have historically been.

          (This is a measurable and real effect. Feel free to speculate about why -- once this meme gets taken into account in the planning of mobile developers, that "why" doesn't matter anymore, unless you think you can break the trend for some reason. In which case, why aren't you rich yet?)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mdwh2 ( 535323 )

      Indeed, and I was wondering the same for Symbian, you know, that platform Slashdot hardly covers, that only has ooh, 40% of the market.

    • This is good news of course but what does not make sense to me, this refers to Google and iPhones as being cross platform games.

      How come there are not any great games on normal Java phones? J2ME has so many libraries and they're capable of the same.

      I have never understood why there are not many multiplayer bluetooth or games that connect the internet? It would be awesome to play net games on the phone on the train with people in the same train or anywhere in the world.

      (Ignoring phone signal cutting out on trains)

      With the number of J2ME devices (hundreds) porting a game to all these is not a simple task without MP... with MP (even turn-based) the costs sky-rocket. And the bottom line is that the casual player (J2ME consumers) don't really care enough about it... heck the carrier decks on these devices are complete junk... will the consumer even be aware it has MP?

      Bottom line is that adding MP in J2ME is costly to develop... and generates very little extra revenue...

  • I'm not much of a gamer, but I can appreciate how gaming tends to push new technology to the forefront that can be useful in other applications.

    Is there a chance that the various game developers will settle on a standard for the exchange of real-time xplat data?

    If so, I can see all kinds of other uses for something like that - in hospitals in particular... imagine if all the staff at a hospital had real-time access to what each other were doing and who they were treating?

    Pagers and such do pretty well

  • That Magnetic Sports Soccer game looked like fun. I'll have to test it out on my iPhone sometime. These types of applications by the game developers is a good thing for everyone. Just look at the success that Blizzard has enjoyed with WoW on Windows and OS X. It would be foolish for a developer creating a networked game to ignore either platform.

  • Cross Platform? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by icebike ( 68054 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2010 @02:09PM (#31348176)

    Pitting one cellphone against another cellphone does not seem like cross platform. Looking at the specs the hardware is almost totally identical on many.

    Similarly pitting one gaming console against others of the same ilk seems only slightly more impressive.

    Ditto for general purpose computer gaming.

    It will truly be cross platform when PC/Mac/Linux gamers can be in the mix with Play stations and iPhones with skill (and ping) being the only deciding factors.

    Checkers and Chess, no problem. First Person shooters or team combat type games are a whole different story.

    This is levels of magnitude harder than porting a game to yet another ARM processor with a slightly different video chipset.

    I don't see anything but turn based games having much prospect of competing fairly across all platforms.

    • It's a bit harder than porting from ARM to ARM, the software itself isn't written for ARM so the fact that both devices use same underlying processor doesn't make anything easier. In Iphone's case the software is written in Objective C, on the Android the user programs are written in Java.

    • Pitting one cellphone against another cellphone does not seem like cross platform. Looking at the specs the hardware is almost totally identical on many.

      Why is it not cross-platform? Android phones and the iPhone run completely different OSes and software platforms. You seem to be incorrectly limiting the term "cross-platform" to mean only with respect to the hardware. If that were so software that could run on Windows/Mac/Linux wouldn't really be "cross-platform" since you can run all three of those OSes on identical hardware.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by icebike ( 68054 )

        Software that can run on Windows/Mac/Linux IS NOT cross platform. Nobody thinks of OpenOffice.ORG as cross platform. Its mostly the exact same code base.

        Platform has historically referred predominantly to hardware. I suppose you might argue that different OSs constitute a platform, but things like wine or CrossOver Office pretty much demonstrate that as long as the hardware can execute the instructions set most code is transportable.

        But if the hardware does not support the assembly level instructions, you

    • As long as the game doesn't give an unfair graphical advantage to the PC or console version, I don't see why some real time games couldn't work. Of course, this is highly unlikely to be the case with commercial developers, but indie devs could pull it off. Just as a point of reference, Battle for Wesnoth [wesnoth.org] has an iPhone port that I believe allows you to play online multiplayer with the full desktop version.

      • I don't see why some real time games couldn't work. [...] Just as a point of reference, Battle for Wesnoth [wesnoth.org] has an iPhone port that I believe allows you to play online multiplayer with the full desktop version.

        If you go RTFWebsite, it says

        The Battle for Wesnoth is a Free, turn-based tactical strategy game

        Real time != turn-based.

        • Yeah, sorry, I realized my mistake as soon as I hit submit. That was supposed to be a separate thought, and to boot I was in a rush so I forgot to finish it. Let me try that again:

          As long as the game doesn't give an unfair graphical advantage to the PC or console version, I don't see why some real time games couldn't work. Of course, this is highly unlikely to be the case with commercial developers (who mostly focus on getting the most out of each system graphically), but indie devs could pull it off.

          Just

    • I think it is in the console companies' best interest to not allow competition with PC players, not due to portability but due to competition. Mice are a humongous advantage, and would cause competitive players to flock to the platform with the higher skill ceiling (PCs).

      As cool as it would be seeing Xboxers rage about mice, not gonna happen.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        I think it is in the console companies' best interest to not allow competition with PC players, not due to portability but due to competition. Mice are a humongous advantage, and would cause competitive players to flock to the platform with the higher skill ceiling (PCs).

        As cool as it would be seeing Xboxers rage about mice, not gonna happen.

        MOre likely, it'll result in people flocking to whichever platform they can glitch best to get an advantage.

        That's the real problem - Xbox360 has different graphical st

    • It seems like everyone is missing the elephant standing in the room — web based games like Game! [wittyrpg.com] are automagically cross-platform to anything with a browser.

  • Would love a Civ Mobile game on the mobile platforms that updates even while you are not logged in. I'm surprised this hasn't been done yet (although I know Civilization Network will be similar to what I'm looking for here, too bad Facebook Apps don't work well on a mobile browser)

  • Self Aware Games [selfawaregames.com] has three different real-time multiplayer card games that work on webOS and iPhone devices as well as Facebook. They've got a really nice interface and have worked to maintain the social aspects of card games. They're fun and well done, too. Word Ace is a combo of Scrabble and Texas Hold 'Em. Card Ace is Texas Hold 'Em. I'll let you guess what Card Ace: Blackjack is about.

    Interestingly, the games are all free, though I recommend picking up one of their poker chip packs to help suppo
  • Ok, it's turn based and works over WiFi but it's pretty fun.

  • Gameloft has been busy porting their catalog of iphone stuff over to WebOS since palm gave them the new PDK. Looking forward to the beta PDK release to see more native goodness on the best mobile platform around.

  • Don't forget Parallel Kingdom - a free MMORPG with both Android and iPhone clients that's been around for a year or so. http://www.parallelkingdom.com/ [parallelkingdom.com]

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