Filed under: Gaming, Rumors, Software, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch
Namco's iPhone division considering... Tekken?
But that won't stop Namco's guy from putting the old head gears into motion: "It's just the controls that are a challenge. We are thinking about that." Think away, crazy man -- I'd love to pull out Yoshimitsu for a few rounds while waiting at a bus stop. Obviously, the easiest way to try and port these would be to put overlaid buttons on the screen, but that doesn't leave a lot of room for the fighting (and not having the tactile feedback would probably be a problem as well). Maybe some gesture-based accelerometer movement? Sky's the limit, right?. Your call, Namco -- can't wait to see what you come up with.
[via Joystiq]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Heimbachae said 9:39AM on 8-05-2009
i miss yoshimitsu
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This Is Me said 9:48AM on 8-05-2009
Am I the only one who wishes the Mac OS would get more games, not just the iPhone? I'd sure like at least some parity with Windows re/the more popular sellers.
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Heimbachae said 1:41PM on 8-05-2009
patience my friend, patience.
http://www.tuaw.com/2009/05/08/the-evidence-for-an-apple-game-console
jodamiller said 10:41AM on 8-05-2009
Overlaid buttons? I think that'd be the most backwards-thinking approach to this problem. Innovate!
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istarman said 10:59AM on 8-05-2009
Dear God, if Tekken came to the iPhone, you'll see a spike in replacement iPhones from people whipping them at the wall when dying to an unstoppable combo.
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Joanna D said 11:05AM on 8-05-2009
Without buttons iPhone gaming truly is doomed. The games which are fun (like Tekken) simply cannot translate to the platform.
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Orion said 12:43PM on 8-05-2009
And you're still as narrow minded as you ever were. Clearly you don't own an iPhone and have no idea how well touch screen controls work on the device.
tuaw said 1:22PM on 8-05-2009
I completely agree, using the screen for controls just will not come even close to cutting it. The only way i could see a game like Tekken working for the iPhone would to have a handheld controller plugged into the inputs on the bottom of the phone.
VanillaSpice said 11:44PM on 8-06-2009
iPhone gaming is doomed? Heh, we got ourselves a regular John C Dvorak here! (That is definitely not a compliment.)
I've played many traditional games with on-screen controls on my iPod Touch, and not once have I disliked the experience; on the contrary, I've found it preferable to a physical controller on more than one occasion.
The great thing about the touchscreen is that the controls are changeable between games - you are not forced to use (for example) d-pad plus cross, circle, square and triangle buttons in every single game. Each game only needs to put up the actual buttons they use, and no more. If the game uses more buttons than a traditional controller (and can find room for them) then they can have them! No Playstation game can say that - they are all limited to the same buttons and layout of the physical controller.
But importantly, the controls can change mid-game! Sure, having twenty buttons on-screen is probably not going to work, but you only need some of those buttons in certain contexts. Buttons can change function, and different buttons can come and go. Compare that to the physical controller - ALL the buttons that will ever be needed each have to be present on it, they cannot label actions (you have to remember that the X button means punch in game A but jump in game B), new buttons cannot be added, superfluous buttons will permanently take up space, and of course the layout never changes no matter how inappropriate it is for a certain game.
Sure, there are advantages to a physical controller, but it is not all one-way, there are advantages to the touchscreen, too. In any case, it is more than useable for the games I've played, it is excellent in a few of them, and it certainly is not an absolute barrier to porting games.
"iPhone gaming is doomed" belongs right up there along with Dvorak's classic "Apple should pull the plug on the iPhone" (early 2007) and "Apple is planning to move to Windows" (early 2006) quotes.
soxneon said 11:47AM on 8-05-2009
NAMCO... still selling 20 year old games at a profit. People... still buying the same games they had on 3 other systems.
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Kelmon said 12:18PM on 8-05-2009
Here's the thing - I used to absolutely love the Tekken and Soul Calibur games but I definitely do not want to see ports of these games on the iPhone. The iPhone's hardware just isn't right for "traditional" games that rely on buttons and D-pads. The sooner developers accept this and produce games that are suited to what the iPhone does have, the better. This is much the same statement as I have to developers of Nintendo Wii games.
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sockatume said 12:43PM on 8-05-2009
They could produce a great parity with the console version if they just mapped moves arbitrarily to directions and parts of the screen.
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bigdilvey said 1:19PM on 8-05-2009
I could see this working if they made a "dock" similar to what TomTom has announced for their app. but instead have the controller buttons on it. Sell a cheap dock and make up your money on the games. just my two cents.
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Bones3D said 3:30PM on 8-05-2009
I've been working on solving the issue of how to implement a hand to hand combat game on the iPhone for a while now. So far, the best I've been able to come up with is something involving invisible bounding boxes around the major joints of each character that the user would tap and drag to use that part of the body to attack their opponent in the area the box was dragged to on the opponent's body.
Blocking would be done by moving the boxes vertically within the bounds of the player's character's body to protect the area the box was dragged to.
Power moves like ki blasts would be handled by dragging the boxes behind the player to charge up and then toward the opponent to release. The force of the blast would be determined by how long of a back charge there was coupled with how fast the forward release motion was.
Finally, overall character movements would be dictated by drag gestures over the general bounds of the player's character's body. So dragging upward would be a jump, downward would be a duck and so forth...
As for combination movement/attacks like jump kicks or foot sweeps, these could probably use either multi-touch (one finger on the body and one on a joint bounding box) or done separately by relying on the player to time the movement.
Special attacks would probably be handled using drag gestures with the joints, such as dragging the player's character's hand down/back diagonally followed by an up/forward diagonal movement to perform an uppercut versus a straight-on punch.
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