Game is being "fine tuned" for Chillingo. I'm guessing that means the Crystal "social network" a la Gc, Plus+, etc. etc. See http://www.tuaw.com/2009/11/24/chillingo-officially-launches-crystal-sdk-for-iphone-game-develo/ "Like many of the other services, Crystal is offering to integrate challenges, achievements, leaderboards, and other social services into iPhone apps." The Crystal screen is active in the beta, albeit not 100%. I think I posted a screenshot a couple of weeks ago. And yes, the game IS supported by GC. Should be submitted soon. Yeah, my fingers are crossed too. Too many people waiting!
Not quite. Unfortunately GameCenter was not the game changer everyone expected. It still lacks in features compared to the third party networks.
I actually did that with my 3G. It was in a leather case, grabbed it within 2 seconds, it blipped a bit for an hour or so and then was totally okay.
lucky mines got white blobs forming on the edges of the screen where water has seeped in o well hopefully my insurance should cover it
Such as? A lot of the stuff in OpenFeint is unnecessary fluff and Crystal is just plain terrible. Imagine if Xbox segregated their own community into two networks instead of just one (Xbox Live). We need ONE network...it's better to stick with the one fully supported by the actual hardware mfr. Apple should just block the other networks from future submission and strip the API support for any more 3rd party networks. It's not a game changer because it arrived extremely late to the game and it doesn't import any achievements tracked by older networks like OpenFeint. What Apple needs to do for games is require what Microsoft requires. A) Achievements and B) tie-in to GC. Only by enforcement can we achieve single network harmony.
Never gonna happen and for good reasons. 1) screen would be too crowded. There is basically too little area to work with. 2) the coding required for it would likely be prohibitive! The game has already been massively changed due to the MP aspect. 3) MP involved strict time limits and you would have to be very quick to text your chat and move. Imho, it really doesn't pay. Meneisyss and I used Skype on a desktop/laptop nearby during beta and that worked but even then and even with a real keyboard, messages were often garbled as we were attempting to focus on the playing field and to type. The only way for chat to work in O2 is to remove the time constraints. Once you do that, the game would likely drag or the experience would be not as much fun. It's MUCH harder to win if you don't spend 100% of your focus on the play of the game.
