Following Monday’s WWDC keynote, Apple placed an iTunes App Store info page online highlighting several forthcoming applications.  One of the featured apps is Sega’s Super Monkey Ball, which was first demonstrated during Apple’s iPhone SDK rollout event back in March and shown again, complete with over 100 levels, during Monday’s keynote. The page features a demonstration video of the game mapped onto a an animated iPhone, illustrating the title’s accelerometer-based control system.

Super Monkey Ball will be available as a $9.99 download at the launch of the iTunes App Store in early July.

A developer behind the iPhone port of the FPS classic DOOM recently spoke out regarding the port project as well as iPhone development in general.

Developer Psychochromatic explains: “Looking at the hardware specs, I knew iPhone would be able to play a simple game like Doom no problem as it was open-source and already ran on the click-wheel iPod running Linux. I knew Stepwhite, who I work with on Mac projects, and as he’d just bought himself an iPhone and was working with the unofficial tool-chain I jokingly told him he had one week to port Doom to iPhone, and all it had to do was run; he didn’t have to implement controls. One week later, he proudly linked me to his Doom port homepage.”

The first build of Doom saw 15,000 downloads on the project site alone, even without a way to control the game. Once controller input had been included that version received over 25,000 downloads.

Behind the ease of development lies the iPhone’s inherent support for a full scale OS. “The iPhone runs OS X. It’s a full UNIX system in your pocket, with brilliant Objective-C frameworks that make coding beautiful and powerful applications a dawdle,” explains Psychochromatic.

Psychocromatic is not the first developer to expound the virtues of the iPhone’s rich, versatile, open development environment.  While writing iPhone apps was once a challenge, Apple’s release of the free iPhone SDK has made such projects “trivial.”

Apple’s iTunes App Store launches in June and the list of games that will be available at launch grows daily.  Stay tuned to keep up to date on just what download to expect on launch day.

Ok, it’s not Mercury…but it just might be the next best thing.  And it’s definitely more of a “classic” than Archer MacLean’s modern take on it.  It’s Labyrinth for the jailbroken iPhone and iPod touch.  And it’s awesome — my personal favorite iPhone game, right now.

Everyone has seen the classic, physical manifestation of this game, where the player controls the slope of a wooden labyrinth by way of two knobs, the goal being to get a steel ball from start to finish without falling into one of the many holes along the way.  Good fun and frustrating as hell.  We’re happy to say that the iPhone is quite similarly fun and frustrating thanks to the extremely accurate ball physics the author has implemented.  As can be seen from the video, the on-screen ball behaves exactly as one would expect from its real-world counterpart.

The game’s realism is furthered by the care the author has put into the graphics.  As of v1.0.3, sub-pixel rendering is utilized to increase the graphic realism and animation smoothness.  That’s effectively rendering the game at a resolution of 480×960 pixels!

Labyrinth is a free trial download and can be registered for $7 which funds further development and enables downloadable levels.  Don’t miss this amazing title.

As readers will recall, one of the first games demonstrated on the iPhone was SEGA’s port of Super Monkey Ball.  It, like EA’s Spore, was ported in just two weeks time by a team that had no previous experience with the iPhone or Apple’s Mac OS X platform.

Recently, SEGA producer Ethan Einhorn was interviewed by GameCyte regarding the Super Monkey Ball port and had many promising and positive things to say about Apple’s mobile gaming platform.

…it’s also the hardware concerns of what is the button confguration like on all of these different devices.  It’s uniform on the iPhone and the iPod touch.  It’s one device that you know that you’re programming for, that you know it will work.  No software compatibility concerns.  And that’s very exciting.  You combine that with a level of power that is definitely competitive with dedicated handheld gaming machines and you have, potentially, a revolution on your hands in handheld gaming.

While the Super Monkey Ball franchise played well on the its launch platform, the Nintendo Game Cube, it was only when it landed on the Wii, with its accelerometer-laden Wii-mote, that it became a perfect gaming experience.  Players should expect nothing less from the iPhone port of this very enjoyable title.