Palm Pre and WebOS Get Native Gaming 49
rboatright writes "WebOS developers have been waiting, and with the 1.3.5 release, Palm's open source page suddenly listed SDL. Members of the WebOS internals team took that as a challenge and within 24 hours had a working port of Doom running in SDL on the Pre, in a webOS card. 48 hours later, they not only had Quake running, but had found in the latest LunaSysMgr the requirements to launch a native app from the webOS app launcher from an icon just like any other app. At the same time, the team demonstrated openGL apps running. With full native code support, with I/O available via SDL, developers now have a preview into Palm's future intent with regard to native code SDK's, and a hint of what's coming."
Re:I'll be honest (Score:3, Interesting)
Using the traditional buttons, I phone gaming to be an absolute pain in the past.
Using tilt functionality and a touch screen on the iPhone is a whole other story. I really do love it as a gaming device.
Lots of games are pretty good (Score:3, Interesting)
I play a fair number of different things on the iPhone - the whole category of tower defense games work pretty well, and there's unique stuff like Peggle (of course) and Doodle Jump and ZenBound and JellyCar and others...
Interestingly, almost all the games I end up being least happy with are commercial games from big development shops. Some of them look impressive to be sure, but I just don't find myself coming back to play them. Star Wars Trench Run is a recent example, where the game looked and sounded good but really I thought the gameplay was over simplified (for instance turrets shooting at you can never hit you).