LIKE: - Gameloft (Many, Big and badass games) - IUGO (Many, small and just as badass games) - Freeverse (Many, small and just as badass games) - Tapulous (Few, but nicely done music games. NIN rocks) DISLIKE: - Ngmoco (Tons of crappy overhype games) - EA (Wheres the NFS update) - MumboJumbo (you all know why) - Team17 (Scam artist extraordinaire. Eat its own words about worms multiplayer update and tried to scam money with shitty 99c lite version)
Like: Gamevil for their great games with good replay ability (ie. Baseball 2010) : Gameloft for high quality games that just keep coming. : Com2uS for their great RPG Inotia 2, and the Online Shooter; Sniper VS Sniper. In between: EA, they produce great games but lack in updates and some games in replay ability. Dislike: Ngmoco are only out for your money and the games are rather horrible. CamLauder
Like: Justin Smith (aka, the creator of the legend that is Enviro Bear), Gameloft, EA, Firemint, Hand Circus, and loads of indie devs. Dislike/hate/want dead: ngmoco.
Eliminate, and Touchpets (aka the scam apps). The only game that I like that has any involvement with ngmoco is the Rolando games. But that is probably because they are developed by Hand Circus and merely published by ngmoco.
Firemint; Always delivering excellent quality games. Bolt Creative; Pocket God. Mountain Sheep (Developper of Minigore right?); Unique and awesome artworks!
Not gonna make a list, but will rant a bit (a spiffyone special, in other words ): Sega. Sega's internal dev teams are among my favorite dev teams of all time. Even now, with Sonic Team, the "face" of Sega for many fans, faltering here and there (though, IMHO, aside from the werehog sections, and the erroneous focus on "go fast" gameplay - "going fast" is NOT what the Genesis Sonic platformers were about, btw - Sonic Unleashed was a good game), I still respect Sega devs. AM2 (Virtua Fighter, Shenmue) is still the pre-eminent arcade gameplay dev in the business, IMHO, even without Yu Suzuki (who sadly, apparently, has been shamed and shuffled aside by Sega execs, who STILL haven't "learned"). The new "lead" team, which is a mix of the old Amusement Vision (Yakuza, Super Monkey Ball console games, F-Zero GX) and Smilebit (Panzer Dragoon Orta, Jet Set Radio) makes great games. The merged OverWorks and WOW team (WowWorks/OverWorks) made great games (Skies of Arcadia, Shinobi, etc.) and still does (Valkyria Chronicles). And even the new Western dev pickup, The Creative Assembly, has made some great games since becoming part of Sega (Spartan: Total Warrior, Viking: Battle for Asgard). But what, exactly, has Sega, the 800 lb. gorilla in the room, moreso than Gameloft and even industry behemoth EA (due to Sega actually having an EXTENSIVE catalog of original and classic IPs and not resting on licenses, as well as having extensive experience developing for PowerVR GPUs), done on the App Store? Relatively little. Two Super Monkey Ball games, over a year apart. A port of Columns from cell phones (not even the Genesis version). ROM dumps of Sonic the Hedgehog and Streets of Rage running on an unoptimized emulator. This is what Sega, which should have an advantage over EVERY other team developing games for the App Store, has done. That's it. The biggest insult was having the audacity to ask us Sega fans, via a blog post, what they at Sega should do for the iPhone/touch platform. After a friggin' year of nearly NOTHING. Wow. That just showed the lack of direction at the company. Sad to see that sort of thing. Old Sega at least had direction. They took risks. They had balls. One could say that that sort of risk taking lead to their ouster from the home console market, but that couldn't be further from the truth. Sega lost out on the console race because of stupidity, from the business side of the company, not because of the risk taking by the development teams. And Sega, to me, is the dev teams, not management. Sega management sucks now and almost always has sucked (aside from the bright shiny days of the Katz and later Kalinske reign, though I'll give Peter Moore some props for handling Dreamcast as best he could with almost no confidence in it or Sega's hardware future from Sega JP in Japan). Now Sega management rules the roost...and the dev teams have suffered quite a bit. Bring me back old Sega, the Sega of my youth. The dev teams still make great games...but the management side isn't letting them go all out it seems. The iPhone/touch platform, with it's low dev cost, instant gratification paradigm, and one that also supports nostalgia, seems ripe for Sega to take advantage of, and yet they aren't? Why? Because Sega execs still don't "get it".
Just to throw salt on the wound: Fish Labs made a rally game. EA, Gameloft and others ramp up with the racing games (Need for Speed, Asphalt, and stuff like Real Racing and Fast & Furious). And yet...where in the f'n hell are the Sega racers? Sega's one of the preeminent racing devs of all time...all of their internal devs have made quality racers. Sega Rally. Outrun. Daytona USA. Even stuff like F-Zero GX (a Nintendo IP, but Sega did it better than Nintendo EVER did) and Crazy Taxi and, hell, Sega GT. Hell, there was a Crazy Taxi style game released a little while back. WTF, Sega? Nothing on the racing front from Sega. Zilch. Nada. WTF? Y'know how everyone seems to at least like Glu's Glyder series (1 and 2)? What is Glyder but an over the shoulder version of NiGHTS...into Dreams when you get right down to it? Yet we've got no NiGHTS game. There are a bunch of SRPGs on the platform now...and yet, we still don't have a Shining Force game. Or a Valkyria Chronicles offshoot. Not even a Shining Force or Phantasy Star or whathaveyou branded tower defense game or mini RPG. WTF? Some other company is porting over Sega Master System games...why isn't Sega? Have they forgotten about Wonderboy? Or Alex Kidd? Or a bunch of the other quality SMS games? No, because there they are on Gametap and Wii VC, etc. Why not on the iPhone/touch platform? Why not optimize the friggin' Genesis emulator, for that matter? I don't mind the re-releases of the classic games (though I'd rather Sega also give us new offerings as well...there's nothing wrong with wanting BOTH), but at least optimize the damned emulator. We've had the older Genesis ROMs of Sonic the Hedgehog, but where is the new, iPhone/touch specific Sonic platformer? Why let stuff like Castle of Magic, Bounce On, Hook Champ, etc. fill the platforming need? If that can't happen, why not port over the Gameloft developed Sonic Unleashed Mobile, which already runs on non-iPhone touchscreen mobile phones? For that matter, why doesn't Sega actually put their goddamn mobile team (Sega Mobile) to use and port over the Sonic Jump games (which are like PapiJump and DoodleJump but starring Sonic, so you know they'd likely sell better overall)? Why isn't Sega using Sega Mobile on the iPhone/touch at all, seemingly? Why isn't Sega publishing the Prope developed games on the App Store. Prope is Yuji Naka's "indie" studio - the quotation marks are there because Sega owns a minority stake in the studio, making it a virtual Sega 2nd party team. WTF, Sega? It's all so...nutty. It just doesn't make any goddamn sense. Sega, home of my favorite dev teams because it's home to some of my all time favorite game IPs. Sega, focus of my wrath as concerns the App Store market due to their inability to do anything when they have so much.
Excellent Devs IMO : Com2us, Gameloft, Firemint, Id, JoshCM, Secret Exit, origin8 and Illusion labs. Least Favorite: Ngmoco , Gamevil, Tatooforever, rockiphone, and all other fart app devs.
Lima Sky just cuz they are consistant with updates so far. Firemint because they put good games out. obviously....
lol, everyone seems to hate ngmoco (including me). The Rolando games are good, but all ngmoco did is publish them. They get all the glory, while the actually developers - Hand Circus gets almost no attention at all. Then ngmoco comes along with their scam games - Eliminate and Touch Pets, with their annoying pay to play DLC crap, while gameloft are making plenty of money from NOVA and they don't even have to constantly charge you for points. That's why I hate ngmoco.