Quick suggestions: ps3 & iphones games

As a recent Dad, I'm quite busy but here are some quick suggestions of things to try / look at if you are curious:

On my PS3, I recently finished Infamous and Uncharted, both of them are great games.

Infamous is very fun, somewhat repetitive (I really would have loved to see more differents enemies) but the story keeps pushing you forward and the control system is very well done so it's very easy to jump and run and fly and drift etc.. Not a "cult game" but you wont be disappointed if you're looking for fun. I would like to give a special mention to the cutscene rendered in a animated comic style, I really dig their style!

Uncharted: Drake's fortune has been on my radar since it's release as a line-up title for the PS3 but for some reason I never convinced myself to get it. Fortunatly, it's now a "platinium" game. At 20€, it was a easy decision so I picked it up and I'm really glad I did. It's one of the best game I played on my PS3: it's fun, it's actiony AND plateformy. Sort of a Tomb Raider done right. The graphics are gorgeous, the story telling is fantastic, the controls are top notch and the music is awesome. Am I using too many superlatives ? Yes, maybe, honestly, each part of the gameplay has been done in a better way in another game but they are always at least good. The sum of all thoses parts makes a fantastic game that you'll play to the end and then, like me, wait for the sequel. Have you seen the gameplay and trailer videos from E3 ?! WOAW!.

I also got Peegle and Real Racing for my iPhone. They are both amazing in their respectives styles. I wont go into the details of Peegle as it is now a classic from the hit-makers PopCap. But I will discuss Real Racing a little bit more. The first thing you'll notice is how impressive it is: smooth and so polished it raise the bar for everyone of us, iphone game developpers. I also really like the wait they do multiplayer with a nice blend of async and sync gameplay: you join a short lived "league" with other players, but you compete by doing time trial in the allowed time for each race while your challengers do the same (I like the "fast" league with 3x 10 mins races). Then you earn CR points to climb the worldwide ranking. Here is my profile on their cloudcell service, if you are playing the game, add me to your friends so we can compare our performances :)

Speaking of iphone games, SlideToPlay was nice enough to do a preview of my game: Urban Rivals, check it out!

Finally, I'm getting totally hooked into GeoCaching (thanks to the Totally Rad Show for pointing me to this great hobby), if you dont know what it is: think worldwide modern treasure hunt with iphone and/or GPS. You MUST take a look and there is even an iphone application to ease the process (but not the hunt) :)

@property & @synthesize behavior I couldn't have guessed

As I was investing a unexpected crash related to object release/retain, I had to fire up "Instruments" to understand what was happening..

After a few hours of investigation, I finally found that the code generated by @synthesize for getters is returning a new autoreleased ref to the property and not the property itself. I dont understand the reason yet, but I trust Apple to have a perfectly good explanation for doing this.

This was causing an issue in my code as I was doing [self.prop release] in my dealloc methods instead of [prop release] _all the time_. I also don't remember why I took this habit in my early obj-c days but it's a bad habit to have and it can cause very tricky bug to track down. So now you know :)

Doing game using accelerometer on the iphone ? Dont miss that.

I bookmarked it on delicious so it should is on the right side of the site but I figured it was worth a post as well.

I'm not using accelerometer in my game (still in dev.. dont have much time, gonna have my first baby in a few days) but if I would, I can imagine the pain in the dev process of not having the possibility to tilt anything to test tilt-control. Always having to push it a build to the device can be painful (especially with a large game) can turn into a nightmare!

Someone very smart figured out a solution that I strongly urge Apple to refine and bundle with the official sdk: use a client software of the device that sends out accelerometer informations to a server in your app INSIDE the simulator. Verryyyyy clever indeed.

Apple could integrate it directly in the simulator app itself (no more need to bundle anything) and apply the tilt to the window (well... let's make it a 3D representation of an iphone) with full 3D effects in space, in real time.

Apple, if you read me, do that :)

Oops: I almost forgot the link to the blog I found it: Accelerometer in Simulator | BIT-101 Blog and to the project itself: http://code.google.com/p/accelerometer-simulator/wiki/Home