Under The Bridge

So we’re naturally interested in the idea of developing games for the iPhone/iPod touch, and thus we were intrigued by the offerings of iGiki, “the world leader in iPhone and iPod touch games,” and particularly the Ultra Games Bundle II Interactive, which they say “includes over 40 premium games, software to create your own games, widgets, and extraordinary extras.” Wow! What a deal, huh?

So we checked it out, and here’s how it went:

First off, we ordered the Digital “Available For Play Immediately” version. Now, iGiki has an interesting definition of “immediately”. To wit, “9 days after the PayPal receipt, in response to your second email asking what black hole your money disappeared into, we’ll finally get around to sending you an activation code.” Annoying, that. But these things happen. So we went to the site, entered our code, and found that there were indeed a whack of new icons in our account page online, we didn’t count them but perhaps there are over 40. However, the most stunningly stellar of them aspire closely to mediocrity — with which judgement, we are perhaps being unduly generous — and several don’t qualify as games as all, unless you think something on the order of “Quip” which loads a random quote counts as a game. Certainly, there was nothing there I didn’t figure I could do better than in short order and not even dream of charging money for.

So, on to the downloads page. There are indeed embedded game widgets for download — 3 of them. None is actually worth downloading. The “software to create iPod touch and iPhone games” turns out to be, get this, the free version of the justifiably obscure Windows Adventure Maker software. You want the same exact thing iGiki is charging good money for? Here’s the download page. However, you probably do not want to waste your time. The vast majority of the originally … limited … feature set of Adventure Maker does not work for their “iPhone export”, which is actually basic HTML. Its capabilities pretty much are exhausted by their demo iPhone “game” which is seriously not worth the time to examine, either as a player or the source as an author.

And that leaves us with the promised “extraordinary extras”. Appropriately enough, there are none. And by a not so amazing coincidence, “none” is precisely the amount of interest you should have in the iGiki suite of products. There’s much better out there for free. As a matter of fact, I can pretty much guarantee you that as I find the time to experiment with Mobile Safari development, there’ll be much better here for free.