Chair’s Donald Mustard on the Apple console threat

Three donald mustardyears ago, Donald Mustard and his team at Chair Entertainment first started working with the iPhone. And, as a lot of people did around that time, they began to speculate about its potential impact on the gaming world.

The consensus from the team was that within five years, Apple could have a device that was a viable threat to console systems. It was a throwaway guess – the sort of thing you make and tend to forget about. When he got his hands on the iPhone 5S three or four weeks ago, though, Mustard thought back to that discussion – and realized it could have been right on target.

Read more at GamesIndustry.biz

The iPhone game worth $30 million (not Angry Birds)

Angry Birds gets most of the spotlight when it comes to big money apps, but Epic Games has got legitimate crowing rights as well.

Infinity Blade, the action swordplay franchise from Epic’s ChAIR Entertainment division, has now topped $30 million in revenue – with the sequel taking in $5 million in just one month.

Read more at Variety’s Technotainment blog

App Review: Blood & Glory

The gladiator setting of Blood & Glory (not to mention the app’s title) should be fair warning to parents that this is not a game for little kids. But for adults and older teens who play, this is a fairly well done fighting game. It attempts to tread the path blazed by Infinity Blade, though discards any semblance of story, reducing it to a series of fights.

This would be fine, except the game continually ramps up the difficulty, but your skills don’t advance at the same pace. This puts you in a position of essentially being forced to buy in-game credits to upgrade your skills or weapons (or suffer hours upon hours of defeats to slowly build the skills and earn the credits through gameplay). If you’re willing to spend the money (or walk away when you reach that point) it’s a fine choice. But if painting yourself into that corner is a frustration point, pick up a copy of Infinity Blade (or its recent sequel) instead.

Read more at Common Sense Media

Bite-sized Gaming Heats Up

Long the domain of garage and independent developers, the iPhone is starting to lure over some of the more familiar names from the Xbox 360. They’re eager to see what they can do on Apple’s iOS, but might that mean they’re thinking about abandoning the console world?

As 2010 drew to a close, a pair of top-tier iOS games hit the app store — id Software’s Rage and Epic Games’ Infinity Blade. Both let players see a console-quality graphics engine up and running on a portable device. But for the developers, it was the chance to return (in some ways) to the industry’s early days – in a much more dramatic fashion than independent or Xbox Live arcade games allow for.

Read more in the March 2011 issue of Official Xbox Magazine