David Frampton of Majic Jungle Software, who we interviewed earlier this month, has posted actual screenshots of his upcoming iPhone title Chopper running on the iPhone.  Chopper is a side-scrolling helicpoter game, reminiscent of the classic Choplifter, in which the player must complete various missions while avoiding enemy fire and return safely to the base.

David is putting the finishing touches on the iPhone version of Chopper which is no mere port of the Macintosh version, but a complete rewrite that takes full advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer controls and 3D graphics hardware.

Have a look:

These screenshots are taken from the current, in-development version of Chopper and don’t necessarily reflect the exact look of the final product.  Chopper will be avialable at the launch of the iTunes App Store on July 11.

Darxun Games has recently released their first iPhone game, a port of their 3D mobile Mech-style shooter, Cybersaurus.

Cyber-Dinosaurs!
Our planet was their home for millions of years. Now they want it back!
The ultimate mix between a 3D shooter and an adventure game.
Explore 6 stunning planets (11 maps fully 3D) with outstanding backgrounds!
Navigate through the solar systems using the interactive 3D map and destroy the robosaurs!

Features:

• 11 full 3D levels, 6 different planets and environments
• 3D engine with “astonishing” lighting system
• 3D audio engine
• Full 3D animations
• Different characters–every enemy has different AI
• Adventure gameplay style

The game features a combination of accelerometer and on-screen button controls for negotiating the landscape, selecting weapons, and firing.  While movement in the 3D world is currently fluid, Darxun points out that an update due in approximately two weeks will utilize the iPhone’s 3D hardware acceleration and improve the game’s framerate and render quality. (Cybersaurus is currently using a software-based rendering engine.)

Cybersaurus can be installed on any jailbroken iPhone or iPod touch via Installer.app and can be found at Darxun’s repository: http://iphone3dgames.com. Users can try out the game in demo form with the option to unlock the full title for $9.99 USD.

iPhone developer Binary Square has released gameplay videos of two native iPhone game titles currently under development: Space Out and Spinblox.

Space Out, “a tribute to old school arcade games,” is basically Space Invaders meets Arkanoid.  The game presents a Space Invaders-style monochrome game screen, but rather than controlling a movable turrett, the player is in control of a sliding paddle with which he/she must destroy the advancing alien horde by deflecting a bouncing ball.  Like Arkanoid, power-ups fall from certain enemies when destroyed with the ball.

Spinblox is a colorful puzzle game in which the player swipes his or her finger over two adjacent blox in order to spin them.  The goal is to line up three or more of the same color blox in order to create a set.  All sets are removed with each wave, every few seconds.

Binary Square CEO Dan Bliss indicates that both titles will be sold through the iTunes App Store.  There are no details on pricing at this time.

David Frampton of Majic Jungle Software has been hard at work porting his excellent Macintosh title Chopper to the iPhone in hopes of making it available on iTunes App Store launch day.

Chopper is a $15 shareware side-scrolling helicopter game in which you try to complete specific missions and return to base while avoiding enemy fire. A version is available for the Macintosh. Majic Jungle Software is working on porting this game over to the iPhone taking advantage of the iPhone’s accelerometer and 3D hardware.

We’ve recently had the opportunity to engage in a little Q&A with David concerning this upcoming iPhone title.

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In the latest news out of the BREW 2008 conference, it appears that 2K Games’ highly acclaimed title BioShock will soon be landing on the iPhone platform.

Currently available for the XBOX 360 and Windows PC, BioShock is a first person shooter set in a fictional underwater dystopian city during an alternative history 1960.  The game received wide praise for its stunning visuals, physics system, and audio quality.

Mobile development house IG Fun is doing the mobile conversion of the original title and plans to bring a version to several mobile platforms, with a 2D rendition in the works for handsets unable to handle a 3D game of this sort.  IG Fun CEO Sean Malatesta demonstrated an early 3D demo of the game running on a BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless) handset which Pocket Gamer reports “looked spectacular” with impressive visuals that should please even die-hard fans of the console / PC original.

We are wagering that BioShock, ported to the iPhone, taking advantage of all that the iPhone SDK and system hardware offers, should well surpass what is possible on the typical BREW platform.  We’re particularly interested to see how IG Fun marries the iPhone’s touchscreen and accelerometer to the game’s control system.  Stay tuned for more on this.

Qualcomm’s BREW 2008 conference is currnetly underway in San Diego.  It’s a three-day event where Qualcomm and its partners strive to “show their stuff,” giving the industy a glimpse of what’s coming in the world of wireless.  As such, it’s not surprising to see some exciting iPhone announcements coming out of this event.

Pocket Gamer is attending the event and had the opportunity to spend some hands-on game time with Re-Volt, a new accelerometer and touchscreen controlled first person shooter for the iPhone and iPod touch from Canadian developer IUGO Mobile Entertainment.

I got hands on with it tonight at the show. You tilt the iPhone back and forward to move your character forward, and left and right to strafe. Shooting is automatic, although you can tap the screen to auto-aim at an enemy.

It took me a couple of seconds to acclimatise, but once I did, the game was smooth to play – the controls felt intuitive pretty quickly. It could be an iPhone hit, for sure.

As can be seen from the YouTube video, the graphics are sharp, the gameplay is smooth and the accelerometer control definitely adds a new dimension (+5 points for not using “tilt”) to a genre that, frankly, has offered up few surprises lately.  We’re excited to see the iPhone’s processing power and unique control characteristics bring a breath of fresh air into the types of games that we all know and love.

IUGO CEO Hong-Yee Wong seems to share our excitement.

“The touch and the accelerometer really opens up a lot of opportunities for innovative gaming. We’ve been really impressed with the iPhone. The tilt is really sensitive, and you can get precise movement using it.”

IUGO has not yet decided whether it will release Re-Volt through the upcoming iTunes App Store or follow a different distribution route with an established publisher.  We will provide further information surrounding this promising title as we receive it.

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.

While we expect to see some great iPhone games once the SDK is launched, there are still some developers working on unofficial Jailbroken games.  A particularly impressive example of this is a port of Kenta Cho’s Noiz2sa.

The game is a vertical shooter. The objectives are simple: Avoid the bullets, kill the enemies.  The game was ported by Lazrhog and an early version is available to Jailbroken iPhones via the iPodTouchFans repository.

The developer is also working on an OpenGL ES version with multi-touch support which is shown as a preview here:

The most recent version does not appear to be publicly available. While we certainly hope we might eventually see this become available through the iTunes App Store, there don’t appear to be any plans at this time.

Ever since Apple released the iPhone SDK and began pushing the platform as ideal for mobile gaming, people have been wondering just how much power developers will be able to squeeze out of the hardware.  The phone gaming proposition thus far has left rather much to be desired.

Happily the game demonstrations presented at Apple’s SDK rollout event showed real promise and early comments from the game development community show the iPhone to be a gaming platform much closer to a console than a smartphone or the typical portable media device.  Underscoring this sentiment is the recent demonstration of id’s classic Quake 3 ported to the iPod touch, utilizing its integrated accelerometers for control.

While it’s true that Quake 3 does not represent the bleeding edge of today’s 3D engine technology, it is no trivial chunk of code to run; it demands sufficient performance from both the CPU as well as on-board 3D graphics hardware.

iPod Hacks recently pointed out that the ARM processor core of the iPhone and iPod touch runs at nearly twice the clockspeed of the Sony PSP’s CPU — but CPU isn’t everything.  The specs concerning the capabilities of the PSP’s powerful graphics hardware are easily found, but scant are the details of those surrounding the iPhone’s 3D chipset.   The fluid framerate apparent in the iPod touch Quake 3 video, however, should lay to rest concerns that the 3D capabilities of the iPhone and iPod touch end at throwing a bit of album art around in Cover Flow.