Also, I gotta say, Team Meat have a really shallow view of the iOS. It's like saying the Wii is crap because of all the shovelware on it. Yeah, it's full of shovelware, but there's still some standout titles.
If Team Meat were complaining that platformers don't work on a touch screen, I'd heartily agree.
Did you actually listen intently to Tommy's rant?
He was complaining that the games are crap (because they control terribly, there are few exceptions). The fact that it's solely on a touch screen make controls terribly clunky and it can be equated to the "Tiger Handheld" of this generation.
To add insult to injury, big-name titles are being released on the appstore, but they do not meet the quality that one would expect from said title. If you buy Megaman 2 on the appstore, you are not going to get a very good experience and the game feels very incomplete compared to the actual Megaman 2. Again, this is just cashing in on the names. BRAND NAMES SELL. It's the reason why name brand anything is expensive, people just buy something that has a trusted name on it, despite the actual product being subpar. It's not just shovelware, it's shovelware that has a recognizable name brand.
I did watch Tommy's rant, sometime ago though, I'll have to rewatch it a bit later. For now I'll just respond to your comments.
I agree, a lot of large brand companies tried to port some of their big titles over to iOS and failed miserably, delivering substandard products. The worst part is that most of them just left it at that.
The principal reason these big name ports are so terrible, is the controls are pure crap. I don't know it's because minimal effort went into making them, or if it was lack of experience putting controls onto a touchscreen; but most of them didn't rework the controls. They just put a d-pad and buttons on the screen, and treated them like physical controls. It takes a lot more than that to get traditional controls working on a touchscreen, and even then physical controls are better because of the tactile feedback they provide.
Controls are an issue on iOS, but
only for some traditional genres, that are best suited to traditional controls. The most notable examples I can think of off hand are platformers, RTS, and FPS games. To say that a great number of games suffer from poor controls just isn't true, the majority of games designed for iOS work well.
Controls of course, aren't just done on the touch-screen, as the accelerometer can come into play for tilt-controls, and on more modern models the gyro-scope or camera can also be employed as controls. As a rule, I prefer the touchscreen, but certain games make great use of these other inputs, and for me, that's what makes the iOS such an exciting platform. In the right hands, there's such huge potential for creating unique experiences, not to mention how easy it is to publish opens the platform up to indie devs like few others.
Unfortunately, the ease of access to developers does mean far too much shovelware and clones of successful games, but it's just something you deal with. Don't like it? Don't play it. It's ridiculous to tarnish the name of an entire platform because you can't be bothered to read reviews or distinguish between clones and the real thing.
Just remember, I'm talking about the iOS as a platform, I don't care about Apple, or the failings of the iPhone as a phone, or the poor attitude of major companies in porting titles. I care about what new developers are doing on the platform, specifically small indie operations.
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