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.
