Apple to show off THQ's De Blob at Apple Stores

I bought De Blob as my first and only major (over $5) App Store purchase, at the recommendation of this website. While it was entertaining for about 2 minutes, I can't say I've ever played it since the first day I bought it. The "3D" graphics aren't really, the accelerometer use is gimmicky at best, and over-all it really isn't that fun.

In general, I was highly disappointed in the game, and now take with a grain of salt any talk of the iPhone as a real gaming platform. The fact that I haven't paid money for another game since (the NES emulator, Quake4iPhone, and now the Sega emulator are all free) is due to the complete disillusionment that came from buying into the hype that the App Store heralded the dawn of a new PSP-killing gaming platform.

Simply put: I'm a big fan boy, but De Blog sucks, and if that's the best Apple has to demo, I think we've got a ways to go...

Apple definitely shares some of the limelight with small startup developers. Our iPhone application, Cosmovox, has enjoyed the no.1 spot under "Staff Favorites" on the iTunes store for almost a solid week thus far. We really appreciate this recognition and exposure. While this list of apps isn't accessible from the iPhone App Store app, it is on the front page of the App Store under iTunes. The exposure hasn't rocketed Cosmovox into the top ten, but it might have done so for iChalky which is also in the Staff Favorites.

at my local apple store they also had Enigmo on the iPod touches...
are they taking that off?

DeBlob is also a great game, regardless of its host system.

All of the Apple Stores that I've been to in the Ft. Lauderdale area have tons of apps already installed... Cro-Mag, Enigmo, etc. All of the iPhones/iPod Touches each have the same apps, so it's the store that put the stuff there. Is this normal?

Nice.... Waiting for it to come up at AppStore !

I'm sure that Apple has nothing against the smaller developers.

Imagine a new user opening the demo game from well known developers on the iPhone/iPod Touch at the Apple Store. The EA or THQ splash screen appears and the customer thinks, "Cool. THQ writes for this thing".

Now imagine the same scenario with smaller developer demo installed, you wind up with "Who is Pangea Software, I've never heard of them". I'm not picking on Pangea, I love them, but they don't have the star power that EA does.

So a comment like "Apple has shown a bias in their official outlets for larger companies like EA" does not make sense. Apple is clearly using well known names to show customers how big developers are on board. It just seems like common sense that when you name drop you have to drop a name that people know :-)