Final Fantasy ATB: Possibly the Worst Game Ever Created

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If I pitched this game to you right I could see you thinking this was a game with tons of potential.
Play through a streamlined Final Fantasy game on you iPhone!
Fast paced combat featuring up to 40 characters at a time!
Unlock your favourite characters from the Final Fantasy universe!
It sounds good doesn’t it? Well it’s not… This game is a steaming pile of horse manure dressed up as a game, and the costume department is t even that good.
Final Fantasy ATB consists of battle after battle with enemies from various FF games, and you do, technically, get to control up to 40 characters… Only by control I mean furiously rub the screen with no semblance of thought or strategy.
You control an increasing number and variety of FF archetypes and presumably when you unlock them named characters from the FF universe. Tap a character to attack, and the. The character has to wait a little while to attack again. Any character who gets hit is immediately eliminated.
You might start by tapping, you’ll soon discover that you can just as easily just run your finger over the screen to achieve the same if not a more effective result. Your characters will one by one die and you’ll have wait for them to to revive which happens at a rate of one every 3 minutes.
That’s it. That is the gameplay. You essentially masturbate your phone to kill enemies.
Oh and you can spend money to get more characters. It’s like Squeenix didn’t even bother trying, they aren’t phoning in this performance, they are are making a collect call to their canvass and asking them to phone it in for them.
Do you want a particular character? Too bad the character you get when you spend money is RANDOMIZED! It’s like those gumball capsule toy vending machines.
This is extortion plain and simple, there is no game here just some animated pixel art and a means for FF fans to give Squeenjx money for nothing.
The worrying thing is that this game has over 100 five star reviews on the iTunes App Store.

Why Don’t More Phone Manufacturers Make KeyBoards/GamePads?

Sony patent suggests an Xperia Play with dual keyboards, it's slidingly slidable

I saw this post on Engadget about a Sony Patent for a phone that had both a QWERTY Keyboard and a Gamepad, I’d love that. I blog from my phone, and I’ve also tried writing on my phone (I think this was during last years NaNoWriMo) so I’d love to have a QWERTY Keyboard that allowed me to see more text and type faster. I also play a lot of casual games on my phone and I’m not 100% sold on touch as a means of control for some of them. Particularly platformers, you just need a D-Pad and Jump buttons and shoe horning them onto a touchscreen is irritating, this is why I’ve not really played FF III on my iPad, it just hurts the pads of my fingers to play it for any amount of time.

If you aren’t going to include on on the device at least sell an addon that allows you use one externally. If I had an iPhone I’d probably have one of these things:

Although the orientation of the buttons would annoy me a little, keyboards are not meant to be a grid…

I guess now Android has support for USB controllers, but as far as I can tell no one is making them… I was to emulate classic games on my phone that is more powerful than the computer I had 10 years ago god-dammit!

There is this Gametel Portable Games Controller for Android but it’s ugly as sin:

What if Apple Designed the GameBoy?

Artist Patrick Staudt re-imagines the Nintendo GameBoy as it would have been designed by Apple. The thing is the original GameBoy was  released in 1989 at about the same time Apple released the Newton. I think for a game playing device the GameBoy is definitely more iconic and probably better designed than the Newton…

File:Nintendo Gameboy.jpgApple Newton-IMG 0454-cropped.jpgFile:Apple Newton.jpg

Also if apple designed the GameBoy right now we would probably just end up with the iPhone,iPod Touch or iPad because lets face it those products do what the GameBoy did and are both stealing market share from Nintendo and Sony.

But if hypothetically Apple’s design engineers went back in time and took with them the technological advances that allow them to make the iPhone so slime but not the retina display and their hatred for physical buttons and decided in their infinite wisdom to stick a green and black dot matrix screen on their design for the GameBoy then it might just look like this (More comments inline, Comments may be sarcastic…):

Wireless? Wirelessly connecting to what? The internet didn’t even exist at that point. And modems maxed out at 28.8K in 1989 (Or there abouts). You might have had IR connectivity but that would have been slow as hell too.

 

I’m not going to bother looking up the GameBoys max FPS I doubt it was that high…

I’m willing to bet he thought he was being clever by going that small… In that size of packaging you’d have been lucky to squeeze 8Mb into that device if you wanted room for other electronics. It wasn’t till 1991 that you could even get a 100Mb 2.5″ drive a 2.5″ drive is about the size of an iPhone…

Okay so they are designing it now… Otherwise how WiFi? The WiFi alliance wasn’t formed until 1999. Still 200 hours of gaming on a battery that fits in that case? Even with a DotMatrix screen the original GameBoy managed 10-12 hours on 4 Batteries. What fantasy world do they live in! I want to be there! But I can’t! Why am I shouting!

My thumbs have power… Also zero mechanical failure? That’s impressive, except my Old GameBoy that I got in 1989 still works, so not that impressive…

Oooh volume!

What the hell do those buttons do? I assume the are contrast buttons but that’s only because I had a GameBoy and it had contrast buttons on it.

 

Apple Punditry

English: The logo for Apple Computer, now Appl...
I miss this logo

I’m going to weigh in on the off chance I’m right but here are my expectations for the apple announcement today:

  1. New Apple TV (I hope with a little bit of storage but I doubt it)
  2. iTV Apple TV with integrated TV, probably available in 32″ and 24″ varieties.
  3. Apps for Apple TV (I don’t own an apple TV but I assume that it doesn’t do apps) People will liken this to the Pippin
  4. Update to the iPod range, with the iPod Touch being upgraded to match the iPhone 4 without the 3G radio of course.
  5. Update to Laptop range, this has been a long time coming and a lot of people are speculating that the MacBook Pro will move to a MacBook Air like form factor.
  6. Possible bump in processors to Apples Desktops, to be honest I’ve not paid attention to the Apple Desktops in 5 years and they don’t seem to have changed aesthetically since the G5 was announced, so it’s possible that they might refresh the desktop case but I doubt it.
  7. Oh yeah iPad 3, which is annoying as I’ve only just got an iPad 2. Higher resolution screen and beefier processor seem a given, I think Apple will continue to sell the iPad 2 this time as the low end alternative moving to a two tiered model like the 3 tier model they have with the iPhone 3GS/4/4S at the moment.
  8. Something new about the App store to mark the 25 billionth app being downloaded, what? I don’t know.

I don’t think any of this is rocket science, I think it’s business as usual. I’d like to see the Apple TV turn into a console/entertainment centre but with Valve thinking about releasing one and the way that Google TV is going I think that the market is too saturated.

I know this is cliché, I don’t actually care very much as I doubt I’ll be buying anything that Apple announce today, but I thought I’d weigh in.

This is the first big Apple event since the death of Jobs, I predict lot of people are going to be comparing Tim Cook to Steve and most of them are going to say that he doesn’t have the same charisma. It’ll be interesting to see how well whatever Tim Cook announces sell without Steve’s “Reality Distortion Field”.

If Apple announce a Pippin 2 I might want one though… I really wanted a Pippin when the first one was announced.

Bandai Pippin (Atmark Player)
Image via Wikipedia

Is choice a bad thing in consumer electronics?

I’ve been thinking about getting a tablet PC for some time now and I’ve been humming and hawing whether to get an Android tablet like the Motorola Xoom, the Samsung Galaxy Tab, or whatever one is getting the most media attention at the moment. My other option is to get an iPad 2; now I was initially skeptical about the iPad when it launched, it lacked several features that I thought were “essential” at the time, was too expensive, and was locked in Apple’s legendary walled garden etc.

As time goes on however I’m warming to the iPad, those essential features don’t seem so essential, the price although just as expensive seems to be the same as all the other tablets on the market, plus the iPad seems to be the only one that is available subsidised with a data tarrif in the UK. As for the walled garden… I have to admit having used an iPad it’s a really nice garden. I mean it’s no garden of eden, but… I’m going to stop that metaphor before I start talking about being chucked out of the garden for eating an Apple.

Anyway, I look at the Android landscape and it’s constantly changing, there are countless articles that compare the “best Android tablets” on the market, but by the time you read the article it’s already obsolete because bigger better more powerful tablets have been released.

Don’t get me wrong, I think this is awesome, I really like the Android ecosystem and I love my Android phone.

There is an implicit “but” in that last sentence though, the “but” is that my top of the line HTC Desire was obsolete 3-4 months after I got it, I’m not looking at all the cool Tegra2 powered smart phones with envy. Okay it’s a year later now, and my phone contract is nearing an end, but I wanted a Desire HD when that came out, and there has been phone after phone that I’ve thought hey that’s pretty cool I want that.

Before I went Android it was the constant Stream of Nokia phones that filled me with envy, not sooner had you bought a new Nokia phone then they would release a new one with a slightly better screen, slightly enhanced camera, or one cool new feature. They just kept on coming, no manufacturer should make you regret buying one of their products, but that is how I’ve always felt with phones, there is always a better one around the corner, so how long do you wait?

This is where I think Apple may have stumbled onto something, with Apple you know where you stand, they will without fail release a new iPhone every year, and it seems that this policy is being extended to the iPad. this new phone/Tablet will provide an incremental upgrade to the previous one, so if you are a gadget whore you will want to get the latest and greatest but if you aren’t it’s okay if you skip a generation. This works well with the 18-24 month contracts that carriers are pushing these days, you can comfortably buy on release date and be happy with your phone/tablet for two years before it’s time to get the next iteration.

Apple also subscribe to the Highlander “There can be only one” strategy, all iPhones are created equal, the only difference is the size of the solid state drive, you don’t have to worry about getting the one with the better processor or the one with or without GPS or Bluetooth, or WiFi or whatever other sparkly feature, they all have the exact same features. The same applies to the iPad except that you have the choice of 3G or not, although arguably if you wanted a non 3G iPhone you can get an iPod touch (Don’t call it an iTouch, Apple employees hate that).

So yeah, from a consumers point of view there is something comforting in the knowledge that there isn’t going to be a bigger better badder, more sparkly phone/tablet coming out in a months time to make your once shiny but now quite dull one look like a turd with a touchscreen.

From a manufacturers point of view Apple’s iPhone team have a year to focus on building the best possible iPhone they can without being distracted by releasing half a dozen different other phones in the interim, they have one product one live version of the OS and one dream (okay I just like having things in three’s because it sounds better they probably don’t have one dream).

Whether or not I get an Android tablet or an iPad 2 is still up in the air, I’m probably going to play the waiting game a little longer, but how much longer? I don’t know.

If this had come out 2-3 years ago I’d have an iPhone.

Seriously the only issue I had with the iPhone at launch was a lack of a physical keyboard, and while I’ve learned to cope in the interim I would still prefer the option of having one on my HTC Desire. It’s not just an issue of tactile feedback, it’s a screen real-estate issue, the on-screen keyboard takes up space on the screen obscuring what I am typing, which is especially noticeable when I’m writing lengthy blog posts and emails.

Via Engadget.