Chillingo Announces Upcoming Side-Scroller 'io'
posted March 28th, 2009 1:23 PM EDT by Blake Patterson in GDC 2009, Upcoming GamesiPhone developer Chillingo has announced from GDC that they are currently working with Atman Software to bring a port of the Mac/PC action based 3D side-scroller on rails called io to the iPhone and iPod touch.
The Nautilus-114, a rather expensive interstellar research spacecraft now lies marooned in the orbit of Jupiter's moon, io. The status of the crew is unknown. In io your mission is to bring the Nautilus-114 spaceship back home. However, the spaceship is infested with many robotic minions that will block your every move. In order to accomplish your mission, you have to play evasively, avoid detection and carry out your objectives.
“This side scroller on rails shooter is a great pick up and play shooter – great iPhone based touch-screen game play with great story line and stunning 3D visuals to match. ” says Chris Byatte, co-Founder and Managing Director for Chillingo.
The work of a single developer over the course of five years, the unusual and subdued io has received positive reviews on its original platforms.
Considering the budget io had, it’s absolutely gorgeous. Not only does the game mix bright colors with moody lighting – something most blockbusters can’t get right – but it looks downright impressive.
See a gameplay video of the Mac/PC original:
Stay tuned for more details as they emerge and a full review once the game goes live in the App Store.
The buttons and d-pad look horrible.
Hope, they will not leave it that way.
Game seems very interesting.
Is there any word on when it will be released to the App Store? There is no estimation or date written.
My first comment is waiting for moderation?
Is this a new "feature"?
This looks nice…I hope some devs start making games like Flashback or Thunder Force..they would work great on the Ipod Touch.
Absolutely right. Flashback would be great because the pace is perfectly suited for something like the iphone. I do think though that it would not sell so well due to games most iphone users have become used to.
pfff… dont know why everyone has to go 3d… same with ds and psp.. why not stay beautifully 2d… and work more on details gameplay etc…
io looks shit and stiff… no fun at all judging from the video
Looks sweet, but I'd agree with Martin that gameplay is more important than 3D.
Repeat my first post again:
The buttons and d-pad look horrible.
Hope, they will not leave it that way.
Game seems very interesting.
Played Betas of the game a year ago on the mac and it was awful.
Nice engine but basically unplayable and not fun.
With a lot of extra work / tuning this could be fixed.
Lets hope they do it.
Here go out and try and mac / pc demo of the game.
http://www.atmangames.com/games/io/index.html
The graphics look good, especailly the heat waves etc, but honestly, I hope they're not banking on being the "first iPhone game with heat wave buffering!" marketing crap. The game needs to be played too, not just watched.
I played this game back in the day when I had a Jailbroken 1st gen iPod Touch. I still had to pay for the game though.
It's really not all that fun. Sure the graphics are pretty and all, but the game play is very boring and repetitive. I'm sure that the dev has refined the game a bit and more than likely added some new features, but from the look of the video, it's still a rather bland but pretty game.
WHOOPS! My bust, I actually bought the game a while back for my iMac, not my jailbroken Touch…. erm, it was bad either way though and I don't suppose that it'll be much better with touch controls. I still hope that it is though, as Chillingo has grown synonymous with the word quality(more or less)…
looks good, but everyone is saying it was a failure.
Not sure about this one…
@hkiphone
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that clip is from the desktop version. Thus I don't think the framebuffer effects will carry over to iPhone (no support for shaders on the hardware). You can always make such effects with software rendering, but it seems the game is built on OpenGL. I might be wrong though…
this game looks awesome
This is not pure side-scrolling. It is a mix of 2D and 3D. The controls might be horrible for this type of gameplay. But still, I'm going to keep my fingers crossed.
for this to be available on the iphone/itouch is cool. I just hope like de others says that the control and gameplay doesn't suckz. It would be such a waste of the beautiful graphics.
Sliding feet for the fail.
Seriously, what the heck? Did they even try to make the feet animate properly or did they think just moving up and down would be fine?