I may be a little late to the iParty (har), but I was thrilled when I heard from a friend that the original Dragon’s Lair is available in the app store. Admittedly Dragon’s Lair II: Time Warp was more my thing. The original was pretty tough, and I was very young. But the sequel got my tokens every week. I could beat the entire game on one credit. I still have fond memories of guiding a shrunken Dirk the Daring across Beethoven’s grand piano avoiding the composer’s hungry cat, and finding the secret golden objects required to finish the game. Those were the days. Though I prefer the sequel (get on that, EA!) I can’t pass up the chance to play an amazing port of an ahead-of-its-time animated experience.
One of the heartbreaking April Fool’s Day jokes for gamers this year was ThinkGeek’s iCade iPad Arcade Cabinet. Oh, how we wished that was real. Turns out that with a little ingenuity, you can make it so. Brian Lockwood spotted the cardboard iPad arcade cabinet at Tokyo Make Meeting 05. In the video, the demonstrator controls a racing game on the screen with an analog joystick in a surprisingly solid looking cardboard construction. “Not sure how this was accomplished but the developer seems to have made a Joy stick and button firing mechanism for a iPad turning it into a mini video game Arcade,” Lockwood writes.
When I want to show off the Apple’s iPad to someone who’s never seen it before, I always include the following apps: Air Hockey, Pukk HD (basicallya fancy version of Pong) and Paper Football, which has two players trying to flick the football to the opposite edge of the screen. All three games involve competitive play at opposite ends of the iPad. Omium, a game that’s coming soon to the iPad, takes the idea further by ditching the standard tropes of Pong, hockey and table games in favor of something different, and it looks very cool.
Multitasking? Tethering? Feh. It’s always the console emulators that make me want to jailbreak my iDevices. Take this SNES emulator on the iPad, for instance. It’s actually just snes4iphone running in pixel-doubled mode on Apple’s magical, revolutionary, unbelievably-priced device, but it sure looks pretty. As you can see from the demonstration video, those controls aren’t exactly manageable. The bumper buttons are practically unreachable, and thumb controls seem out of the question.
The iPad is already a less-portable version of the iPhone, so it only makes sense to add bulky and superfluous accessories such as the iPad steering wheel. This concept from Michael Greenberg explains itself in the above photo: snap the two halves of he wheel together,with the iPad nestled into the depressed corners. Actually, I dig this design more than CTA’s existing iPhone steering wheel, because it has a slot for your fingers to wrap completely around the wheel. It’d be nice of the wheel could be collapsed to fit into a small laptop bag. What we really need, however, is a way to control these iPad racing games without craning your neck during tight turns. No word on whether the iPad steering wheel will become an actual product, but something like it seems inevitable as gadget makers try to cash in on Apple’s latest creation. [Yanko Design via Pocket Gamer]
