Y’know, every time I think I can go a day without talking about Windows Phone 7 Series, bleedin’ Microsoft go and do something, or announce something, or show off something, that makes me give a little fangirl scream (which is quite funny to see, y’know, what with me being a bloke), before going on to blog about it. I can’t help it, I’m like Pavlov’s dog: Microsoft show off something awesome, I go on about it. It’s conditioned in, and I can’t fight it, so I might as well go with it.
Besides which, today’s news is actually, genuinely exciting, especially if you’re a bit of a gamer, or if you even dabble in the games on your mobile phone.
I’ve said, many times now, that if you had to pick one absolute killer app in Windows Phone 7 Series, it would have to be Xbox Live integration, because that’s something absolutely nobody else can replicate yet (at least until Sony get their act together, and release a PSP Phone, with PSN integration), thus making it a unique selling point.
And as USPs go, it’s a doozy, especially since it’ll let you play cross-platform games, carrying on a game from your Xbox when you have to leave the house. It will be, in short, bleedin’ brilliant. As long as, of course, the experience isn’t a bag of poo.
Well, today, thanks to Engadget, we have our first hints of what these cross-platform Xbox Live games might look like. And based purely on these screenshots, I can say that, in my opinion, Windows Phone 7 Series is going to utterly dominate the smartphone market. Forget iPhone gaming, forget the iPad (which is a pointless waste of money, anyway), forget Java games… this, right here, is the future of mobile gaming.
Yeah. Sweeping statement. I went there.
The reason the games look so good is because they use the XNA developer toolkit, which is precisely the same toolkit as devs use to make games for the Xbox Live Arcade. And so, we get awesome-looking games like The Harvest (the isometric shooty game with gorgeous-looking ‘splosions) and Battle Punks (which, admittedly, doesn’t look as good, but has the current fad for character customisation nailed). And then I remember some of the games I’ve downloaded from the XBLA (*cough*Shadow Complex*cough*), and how some have included the Unreal 3 engine, and then I pretty much, more or less, wet myself with excitement…
As an aside, as well, it also helps to explain why Microsoft have such exacting requirements for hardware platforms running Windows Phone 7 Series, and why (HTC HD2 aside, possibly, maybe) current generation phones won’t be able to upgrade to the new OS: they need a minimum platform that games can run relatively smoothly on. Of course, a mobile phone’s not going to match the 3.2 GHz processor and 500MHz graphics card of the 360, but with decent specs and XNA, mobile gaming should get a lot better.
Hmm, it’s almost as if, in drafting up the minimum system specs, Microsoft actually did have gaming in mind as an important, core feature. Of course, the list of people signed up to develop games for Windows Phone 7 Series (since it includes Oberon, Sega, Glu, EA, Popcap, Hudson Entertainment, Namco, Konami and Microsoft Game Studios… that’s some big names, right there) might also give that impression, as well…
And before I go, here’s the screenshots that’ve actually got me drooling. Oh aye, and in one of ‘em, you can see it’s got the same Achievements as a full X360 game…
So, yes, in short, basically: want. Now.
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