Saturday, April 10, 2010

Retro Gaming iPhone apps

I've been noticing a number of iPhone apps that have to do with classic gaming, so I thought I'd share them here.

GAMES

  • Adventure - Peter Hischberg's port of the classic Atari game.
  • Vector Tanks - Actually discovered this one through the textfiles blog. It's a lot of fun to play, very nice integration with iPhone tech.
  • Vector Tanks Extreme - again, textfiles blog. Played it last night for the first time, LOADS of fun! And check out the trailer (below), it is very entertaining!
  • Ms. Pac-Man is the only one so far that I've regretted purchasing. The control is just not responsive enough to really play well.





GAME-RELATED
I've had this crazy notion recently about trying to program games for the 2600. I discovered some very helpful discussions and tutorials for it on AtariAge via a Twitter friend, @JoeShopping. It turns out there are a couple tutorials for this in the form of iPhone apps, by a former Atari 2600 Activision programmer named David Crane (he created Pitfall!).
  • 2600 Magic - holy bleeps, did I really say I wanted to program games for the 2600? It uses scan lines instead of pixels, the scores have to be programmed on the playfield, and the entire program has to be like 4,000k?? At least I'm learning all this on a cool and well-formatted iPhone app. :)
  • Dragster Magic - I haven't cracked into this one yet, it's the sequel to the first, but it was a no-brainer to buy.


That's got to be the tip of the iceberg. What else is out there? I've heard rumors that a Collecovision emulator is in development, for one (I think I read that in Retro Gamer magazine recently, I'll try to dig it up)...

2 comments:

Girls Are Geeks said...

Oh, Atari games on the iPhone, almost makes me want to get one. I used to play a bunch of those games.

Rosalind
<a href="http://girlsaregeeks.wordpress.com>Girls Are Geeks</a>

Red_Daze said...

You can also check out C64. It's a commodore 64 emulator. A fun free list of titles with more you can purcahse in the app.