Subscribe Feed (RSS)Cube FPS Engine is iPhone Bound
October 28th, 2008 by SJC | Filed under iPhone.The video above shows the open source Cube Engine FPS running on an iPod Touch, and I don’t think anyone can deny that it’s rather impressive. (Take a look — if you can’t stand the over-excited narration then just turn the sound down.) It demonstrates both the power hidden in the iPhone … and why it sadly isn’t the gaming platform everyone seems to think it is.
When the narrator describes Cube Engine as “really playable” we’ll have to take his word for it, at least for now. I can’t help but think fans of twitch-style shooters are going to be a little unimpressed by the controls. Sure, the usual tilt-to-turn we’ve come to know and love in there, but this isn’t a simple racer. Touch the top of screen to jump, lower right-hand corner to fire, lower left-hand to bring up the menu (I think I’ve got those right — please correct me if I haven’t). This is not the fault of the programmer — who in the cubeengine.com forums modestly describes it as “a proof of concept technology demo type thing…” — but of the iPhone. I know it’s really old fashioned of me, and anathema to everything Steve Jobs holds dear, but to be any kind of action gaming platform you need buttons.
The Cube Engine should hit the App Store any time now — it was submitted at the beginning of October and is currently hanging in acceptance limbo. Since like most FPS engines it creates a scriptable environment, we can only hope that it doesn’t fall victim to an over-strict interpretation of Apple’s “no interpreting code” edict.
[...] be expected. We highlighted the same potential problem a few days ago when we took a look at the Cube FPS Engine. There are probably good security — as well as performance — reasons for the ban. It still [...]