Apple Apps help Xbox 360 users enjoy their gaming even more.

iPhone Gaming Apps help you be more connected.

XboxLIVE on your iPhone. Got to love Apple for giving it to MS (and Sony) with free & Paid for apps that work across platforms.

by Shadow Wave

©2008 Ben Cadwallader:

The iPhone: Applications

The joys of owning a 3G iPhone just seem to go on & on & on . . .

It has only been a few days since I happily scored myself an Apple 3G iPhone, and I must say it is a truly amazing phone. In the past few days I have been overwhelmed by the vast amount of applications you can download for free, or pay for on the iTunes store.

These apps seem that they can do almost anything you can imagine. You can even check on your Xbox live friends list! And play 3D games! So read below for my impressions of a few of the iPhone applications that are available now.

Xbox LIve update:

This just in regarding getting XboxLIVE apps FREE for all users over at Blog-Wired. Here’s an excerpt, head there for full news.:

“Microsoft has officially halted the distribution of all Xbox Live-related iPhone applications via Apple’s App Store — not to quell creative coding, but instead to mandate that all such programs must be offered to users free of charge.”

iXboxLive

Cost: $1.19 AU
This application should be free, but at its small price it warrants the purchase as an Xbox 360 user. This app is your ticket to viewing all your friends’ Gamercard information, and currently live status.

The program doesn’t actually access your own friends list, you just add their Gamertag into the application and away you go. The application can only hold about 10 – 12 Gamertags before the program starts to slow down, which is very disappointing.

But truth be told, most gamers I talk to agree, your friends list often consists of a few players that you prefer to play with a lot more than others, so this application works well with that idea in mind.

The data that is shown is their reputation, Gamerscore, location and live status. It shows their most recently played games and their total Gamerscore for each game, you cannot view each specific achievements. This app does not feature any way to communicate with your friends however. It simply serves as a way to monitor what your friends are doing perhaps on the way home on the train to plan your afternoon and evenings gaming.

I think this program is a great start, and hopefully with future updates we will see it improve a lot further, to become a great XboxLIVE application on the iPhone.

Crash Kart

Cost: 12.99
This is the best selling iPhone application on the iPhone store, a game that tries to put the Playstation 1’s Crash Team Racing on your iPhone. And it does it quite well. Read that agian. That’s Sony on an Apple product people.

When you first start playing the controls will overwhelm you. You can not control the acceleration; that’s automatic, it’s your job to use the iPhones motion sensing to make your driver turn and move around the race course.

Braking, jumping etc, is done by pressing a certain area of the touch screen. It’s also quite difficult to get to grips with (no pun intended). So I’m sure Wii players, and PS3 racers that use motion sensing might feel right at home, but as a player that does not really enjoy motion sensing I found it took some time to get used to.

The graphics are quite good but character models do not look as good as the PS1 classic. The frame rate drops considerably when there is a lot happening on screen. But overall the graphical end holds up quite well for a game of this vintage.

The main problem with this game is its pricetag. $AU12.99 is extremely high, and when I played the game, I did enjoy it, but not for that price. But if you can justify the price, I’m sure you will be happy . . . for a while.

iPhone Remote

Cost: Free!
This has to be the most innovative and excellent application I have used so far on the iPhone. This little baby lets you use your iPhone as a remote for your computers iTunes library. This won’t play the songs out of the iPod, it will play them out of your computer.

What does this mean? For me, it means I no longer have to get up off the couch when playing a game to change a song that’s playing, it means when I’m outside with mates playing poker, BBQ etc, and I’m playing music on our outdoor speakers that are connected to my computer, I no longer have to walk back into the computer room to change the song. It is a program made for pure convenience and of course, not to mention showing off to your buddies on Friday night!

This application can have the odd bit of trouble getting it to work, and might have conflicting issues with your firewalls etc, but once you can get it working, it is an amazing program!

Tic Tac Knoe

Cost: Free!
Back when I was a young child I loved to play Tic Tac Toe on our now very very old Macintosh computer (the one you see in the shop front window in Back to The Future 2) it had a few built in games and I loved to play Tic Tac Toe it was great fun, and I also often play it during moments of boredom when I’m with friends etc. As long as there was a pen and paper nearby.

This is a quick iPhone application is just a fun thing to pass the time for 5 minutes or less every now and then. Unfortunately there is no multiplayer option, so you are forced to play against the computer. But it’s free and anything free is good, so recommended giving this iPhone application a go.

Tris

Cost: Free!
Tris is Tetris. And who doesn’t like Tetris when it’s free? It graphically looks very simple and clean. The game uses touch controls to do all you’re controlling of the blocks as they come down, once again as with Crash Kart, it takes a while to get used to, but this serves as another great free 5 minute game to have on your iPhone. Definitely grab this one!

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WordPress

Cost: Free!

Check out the WordPress gallery

While this application may not be as useful for a lot of people, but as a writer for xboxoz360-gamer, it’s very helpful, this lets me write on this blog from anywhere with a 3G or wifi connection. So perhaps if we were out at an event we could quickly pop some news up on the site via my iPhone without too much sweat at all.

So for all you bloggers out there check this one out, there were other apps for other blog companies as well if you were not using WordPress(.com or .org). This allows you to update your site, enter news, even upload pics or media to your site without having to lug around a laptop. Neat eh !

Well, that’s all I have sampled so far, but I will be looking forward to finding more applications related to gaming. Here is a small list of some that I am very hopefully for, and the odd one or two I’ve located recently.

We will update the various ganming apps as we find them where they can help XboxLIVE members enjoy their gaming experiences:

• Classic Games:

Just like Nintendo’s Virtual Console it would be great to get some classic games on the iPhone such as Zelda or Final Fantasy. But as unlikely as this is, it would be a great thing to hope for!

• Point and Click games:

Wouldn’t it be great if we could get those classic point and click games such as The Longest Journey or Monkey Island on our iPhone? The iPhone could emulate the mouse pretty easily. These classic games have already successfully been placed on the iPhone in custom firmwares. But for us that prefer to stay safe with official ones, we hope these ports get released sometime in the future.

• Bluetooth App:

The iPhone’s Bluetooth I have discovered is barley operational. All it’s there for is to connect a wireless headset. So we cannot send or receive data from other people’s phones. So we hope that we get an official Bluetooth application that will rectify the issue. Or have this fixed in a later firmware from Apple.

• Ebay Application:

Sure we can access eBay simply enough by using the iPhone’s Safari Internet browser. But it would be great if we could get a direct application that would be easier to use, use less data and would be formatted for the iPhone screen, and would not require us to “Pinch” The screen to get it readable.

• Gaming Sites News App:

Once again, we can already do it on Safari, but it would be good if a simple click of a button on the home screen took us to the current news from gaming sites. Which would be formatted for the iPhone screen, and would not require us to “Pinch” The screen to get it readable.

The bottom line is, if the iPhone community never stops pumping out new applications for your iPhone/iPod Touch these phones will prevent the phone never get old, and will always give you an opportunity in moments of boredom, to have some fun. You could visit Top iPhone News as ithas current news on iPhone apps and games

• MSN Messenger For Mac

An integrated communications client that enables you to communicate with contacts within and outside your organization. Makes it easy to take advantage of the full power of real-time communications.

What’s New in this Version
• Improves support for users of the VoiceOver feature in Mac OS X
• Fixes user interface issues that appear when Messenger is used with some European languages.

What else is there for gamers:

• Here is a decent listing of games over at  Touch Arcade for the Apple 3G iPhone

• A neat little iPhone Manager that helps organize all your gaming apps.

• Great iPhone information site called iPhone-Hack aims to keep you up todate on all things iPhone

Someone having fun designing an

interesting adaptation for the iPhone

What you get when you mix Apple with Xbox . . interesting . .

©2008 Ben Cadwallader: