Oh my. Still need convincing that the iPhone/iPod touch is the greatest gaming platform ever made? Then check this video of a couple Japanese researchers playing a game they claim to have put together "in about an hour": multiscreen, touch-based Pong.
On first glance, it looks like the game is even checking orientation of the iPods, but if you watch it a little further, when things go faster, you can see that it's actually just pushing the ball from screen to screen as it leaves. Still, if nothing else, a quick demo like this shows that multiple Touches (via a certain website, or on the same WiFi network, maybe, or -- hopefully -- just in close proximity to one another through Bluetooth or another protocol) can easily be made to connect multiplayer gamers.
As a demo, very nice (and it seems fun as a game as well). Can't wait to see a full-featured game that takes advantage of all of the iPhone's connectivity options.
Yes, that is the title. Penny Arcade's game has been released, and is now available for sale or demo over on the Greenhouse site. What's perhaps most amazing about this game is that on Tuesday, developers Hothead Games released the thing simultaneously on as many platforms as they could, including PC, OS X, Linux, and even the Xbox Live Arcade. That in itself is almost admirable enough to pick it up on principle alone.
But is it any good? Reviews have been middling, though word on the street says that if you're a fan of the webcomic, you'll probably enjoy the game. Jerry Holkins, writer of both the comic and the game, spoke with our sister site Joystiq about the grueling process of putting it together, and gameplay is basically a mix of old-school RPG, Call of Cthulu, and Sam & Max. Play, in other words, at your own risk.
Or just try the demo. The game itself is only $20, but it's the first of four episodes, all priced that way, so it might be pretty costly by the end. Still, especially if you're a Penny Arcade fan, it's worth a look. And any developer that goes multi-platform including OS X on day one, complete with demos, gets a TUAW salute from us.
Good news for indie game designers on OS X -- GarageGames has released version 1.7 of their Torque Game Builder, which allows programmers to create games for almost any platform from within an OS X interface. This latest release improves the editors for link points and collision polygons, as well as a new editor for vector objects and new t2dSceneObject methods. If you know what all that means, then you could probably program a better game than I could.
But the good news here is the one of the cheapest and best tools for game developers is now better than ever. Demos and trials of the tool are available on GarageGames' site, and licenses are as cheap as $100 for independent game developers. You've got the tools-- now go make us some great Mac games!
Among the Macworld Best in Show winners was an application I hadn't heard of before: Flow, from Gridiron Software (makers of After Effects supercharger tool Nucleo Pro). Flow is still in pre-beta, but when it ships this summer it should make the lives of graphics and production professionals much easier by exposing the various components that go into complex documents; you'll be able to track down your source files, roll back to previous versions and perform "super collects" to grab all the files you need for final output in one package.
We got a demo of Flow at Gridiron's Macworld booth; it looks very cool, and it will be exciting to see if it lives up to its promise when it's released. Video after the jump.
Freeverse dropped me a note to let me know that their new tower defense game released yesterday. It's called Horde of Orcs, and I have to say, it looks fun. If you've ever played Desktop Tower Defense, you know what the deal is here, except that this time around, everything's in shiny, colorful 3D, with a nice dose of humor added in.
The demo is available for download over on their website (along with a freaky live action trailer that means someone had to get dressed up in green paint and go Orc-crazy). Just the other day, I said I hadn't had a Mac-only gaming experience worth recommending this year, but maybe I spoke too soon. Horde of Orcs might be just the thing to finish off 2007 right.
Ian of Feral Interactive kindly dropped us a note that Colin McRae Rally for the Mac has gotten a release date: this Friday, October 26th. I'm not sure if he's aware that he's got a little bit of competition that day (because, as we all know, Dan in Real Life is releasing on Friday, too-- what? Leopard?), but then again, maybe the big OS release will give a little boost to the latest rally racing game, PC editions of which have been reviewed pretty well so far.
And if you don't trust reviews for other systems (probably a good idea), worry not-- we're told a demo is imminent, so you'll be able to try the game out for yourself. Find out more about the game itself over on the minisite. Apparently the game features more than 30 cars, 300 tracks in nine locations around the globe, and realistic physics and handling. Throw in a few muddy curves, and you've got a recipe for a fun Saturday night.
The rumors are flying about what Apple might do to the Mac lineup tomorrow-- for my part, I just hope Jobs stays away from the Mac Mini long enough for me to get one with Leopard on it. But I can guarantee you that you won't see this baby, as cool as it is. This is a 3D demo from a guy working on a demo reel for ad agencies. But it is pretty amazing.
Now, people have said before that a multitouch computer like this wouldn't work-- to find out why, touch your screen for five minutes and notice how tired your arm feels. However, an interface like this is too good not to use somewhere. Sure, we may not see an iMac with a big touchable screen like this, but "...a guy can dream, can't he?"
Now that you have a usable snippet of the music from the iPhone commercials with which to start making your spoofs, how about a default set of contacts so you don't post anyone's private information for the whole world to see? Thanks to a clever reader by the name of Stephen Kenny, TUAW is now hosting this copy of the 60 phony contacts set up in the demo iPhones in Apple Stores. In case you're wondering, yes: this means you too can have John Appleseed in your iPhone!
The primary idea here is that you can simply sync these contacts perhaps as a group (or the only group) to your iPhone and only use those when demoing making fun of any of its features. Adding them all to a specific group in Address Book will help you keep things organized (both on and off screen), and you can easily delete them once you get all those spoofs uploaded to YouTube. Plus, your friends and coworkers will thank you for not putting their phone number or home address in too public of a place.
Without further adieu, here is the 5.2MB zip file containing 60 contacts that won't mind being spotlighted in your iPhone spoof ads. This zip file contains a vCard file, ripe for importing into Address Book (and possibly Entourage/Outlook as well) and synching with your iPhone.
DemoApp is that mystery application that coexists in the iPhone's Applications folder along with all the standard apps like Google Maps, Calculator, Stocks, and so forth. We've known for a while that it had something to do with movies but until today, we weren't sure what it did. Today, I can confirm that it does what most people have suspected: it plays a single movie over and over in a repeat loop. It does not, as others hoped, allow you to play video out through your dock. Here's the down and dirty on DemoApp.
Where is DemoApp located? It's found in /Applications. You will not be able to see this application without hacking your iPhone.
How do I make my iPhone automatically play a movie? Place an h.264-encoded movie named Demo.mov into /private/var/root. Reboot your iPhone. (Power down and then re-power on.) The iPhone automatically opens your movie and begins playing it on a loop.
How do I make it stop? Remove the movie from /private/var/root and reboot.
While playing, will it export video out my dock? No. Just audio.
Why does it play in portrait mode? Presumably so it can remain docked and powered.
Does it have to be encoded in h.264? That's the only encoding I've tried.
Does it have to be named Demo.mov? Yes.
How did you figure this out? Testing and playing with the Unix strings command and, frankly, quite by accident.
How do I make DemoApp appear with my other Widgets? You can do this but it's really kind of pointless. You must edit /System/Library/CoreServices/SpringBoard.app/DisplayOrder.plist. Copy the file to your Mac, make a copy, and use Property List editor to move the com.apple.DemoApp dict pair from special into iconList. Return the edited version to the iPhone and reboot. To hide the widget, just restore the original DisplayOrder.plist.
Google, says Scoble, has created a brand new just-for-iPhone demo page for their search engine-- yes, apparently they're still doing search. I used it within my browser (using my standard search engine test word: "Batman"), and it seemed to work just fine. It's all Javascript, as well, so it's fast and simple. The one drawback is that you can't actually go back after you've done a search (since it all loads in the same window), but it's Google, so odds are you'll find what you're looking for right away.
But the problem with this goes right back to what Scott was talking about the other day-- we aren't supposed to be getting half the web on the iPhone, we're supposed to be getting the real web. In this case, there's not much to complain about-- this really is Google, minus the extra content and the ads. However, the links actually go to regular browser windows (not iPhone formatted sites), and if you hit "More Results" at the bottom of the page, it takes you to a normal, full-screen Google page anyway. So what's the point? Yes, this is just a demo, but why bother making an iPhone specific page in the first place? iPhone users should be able to browse to the Google homepage like everyone else.
Update: This page is not quite what it seems-- it's not actually an iPhone version of Google. A Google spokesperson contacted us to say that it's actually a Google demo for how web developers can use the Google AJAX search API in their iPhone apps. That explains why it's not much more than the main Google page, and why it has no ads. It's not designed to replace the Google main page (although, as a side bonus, that's a pretty good one). Instead, it was created by the Google API devs to show off how the AJAX search API can be used to make apps for the iPhone.
Here's a distillation of demos seen at Delicious Generation. This time we're trying something a little different and using Viddler, a service that will reportedly allow you to interactively bash the quality of the video as it plays (no need to mention the interlacing, we see it). Oh, you can leave constructive, useful comments inline as well. So if you're a developer and you'd like to explain what we're seeing, that's good, because the mic at the party wasn't really getting audio past the crowd noise.
I'm not sure which is more classic: Steve's "scrolls like butter" comment, which I think he used in reference to iPhoto '06's transparent pop-up for month and year when scrolling through albums, or this YouTube compilation of his tendency to use a particular adjective onomatopoeia at the climax of a demo gone well (as opposed to poorly). Enjoy.
Forgive the bitter headline, but I'm sick of Mac game companies releasing games, especially ones as massive and significant as Quake 4, without a demo. This gripe is further compounded by the fact that the current state of Mac gaming is so demanding of hardware; yes, it's certainly improving, but many of these games require a PowerMac G5 or, now with the Intel switch, at least an iMac or a MacBook Pro to run them with any decent amount of detail and frame rate. Releasing $50 games without the ability for users to test them first is shooting oneself in the foot, and apparently, companies like Aspyr seem to have no shortage of feet.
With that small bit of editorial out of the way: Aspyr has (finally) released a demo of Quake 4! Hooray! Both a torrent and a direct download link of the 536MB Universal Binary demo are available from MacGameFiles. Enjoy.
At long last, Aspyr has released a demo of the hugely popular sequel to Call of Duty, the aptly named Call of Duty 2. No matter how badly I wanted to run to the Apple store and pick up the retail version, I knew I would feel horribly foolish if I got the game home only to find that it wouldn't run on my PowerBook. I knew I had to wait for the demo. MacGameFiles has the 665MB file as either a direct download, or a deliciously communal bittorrent file (doesn't the sharing just make you want to hug someone!?). If you've been waiting to try the game before you buy it, there is no better time than the present to kick some virtual Axis butt.
Good news for indie game designers on OS X -- GarageGames has released 
Now that you have a usable snippet of 
Google, 
Forgive the bitter headline, but I'm sick of Mac game companies releasing games, especially ones as massive and significant as Quake 4, without a demo. This gripe is further compounded by the fact that the current state of Mac gaming is so demanding of hardware; yes, it's certainly improving, but many of these games require a PowerMac G5 or, now with the Intel switch, at least an iMac or a MacBook Pro to run them with any decent amount of detail and frame rate. Releasing $50 games without the ability for users to test them first is shooting oneself in the foot, and apparently, companies like Aspyr seem to have no shortage of feet.
At long last, Aspyr has released a demo of the hugely popular sequel to Call of Duty, the aptly named Call of Duty 2. No matter how badly I wanted to run to the Apple store and pick up the retail version, I knew I would feel horribly foolish if I got the game home only to find that it wouldn't run on my PowerBook. I knew I had to wait for the demo. MacGameFiles has the 
