In another of my “Blast from the past” series, here’s an interview I did last year with David Frampton, a Wellington iPhone developer, who’s a nice guy to boot and made the great Chopper 2.

David Frampton first started dabbling in iPhone games just before Apple’s App Store launched in July 2008. His first project? An iPhone version of his Apple Mac freeware game Chopper, which he made in 2003. It seemed the natural choice, he says.

“When Apple opened up the iPhone for developers it seemed like a huge opportunity. I already had experience with the development tools, and with touch screens and accelerometers, and Chopper seemed like a good fit for the platform. It looked like a great way to get my game out to more people, and help me switch to full- time indie development.”

Chopper went on to sell 300,000 copies – and is still being downloaded two years on, despite the release of Chopper 2 – but Frampton never expected the game to be as popular as it had become.

“Initially, while I was working on Chopper I really had no idea it would do so well, but when I did stop to think about how many iPhones had already been sold, how many developers would be working on games, and kind of worked through all the probabilities in my head, I started coming up with some pretty big numbers. In the end I think it exceeded even my most hopeful of guesses.”

Chopper was pretty much done as a “one-man band” and Frampton puts the success down to that it was a day one title on the App Store – “There were only a few hundred games to choose from on launch day”. It also had brand recognition due to the Mac version and filled a gap in a genre, and “people generally enjoyed playing it”.

“Chopper 1 development went remarkably smoothly. For a while I only had the simulator to work with as there were no iDevices available in New Zealand at the time, but as soon as I got an iPod Touch I was in business.”

Chopper 2, however, was a much more time-consuming endeavour.

“Chopper 2 has been a 16- month-long project, and in that time Apple have released a number of new devices including the iPad and iPhone 4, which I have had to cater for. This added a bit of a challenge and a few weeks to development, and just the general complexity of the game made it take a long time.”

Frampton said despite the success of the Chopper games, it can sometimes be hard being an independent iPhone developer.

“There are many struggling independent iPhone developers out there, and some really sad stories around the web of people putting their heart and soul into a project to see it only get a handful of sales. I’ve been one of the lucky ones, getting a foothold early on, and being able to take my time getting the sequel right.

“But Chopper’s success is definitely not the norm. It’s a difficult industry where it can be nearly impossible for new players to get noticed, but the payoffs can also be huge.”

Frampton said that because Apple’s devices tend to take a while to arrive in New Zealand, with Chopper 2 he had a colleague in the United States send him over an iPad for testing. “I also flew down to Christchurch to get a day with one of the first few iPhone 4s in the country (when it launched) so I could make sure it worked on that device too. I still don’t even have my own iPhone 4, so it has meant there are some features I haven’t been able to provide yet due to a lack of device to test with.”

New Zealand has a growing iPhone development community, especially in Wellington, says Frampton, and developing for iDevices would appear to be easier than developing for gaming consoles. ” It has a much lower barrier to entry than the consoles, and a larger and more active online community when you need a hand.

“Also once you have completed a game for the iPhone you send it off to Apple and immediately it becomes available to roughly 100 million iDevices with credit cards attached. There is nothing like that in either the PC or console world, so it’s easier to make a buck, although it’s probably just as hard to make a million.”

I gave Chopper 2 four out of five stars.

Game Junkie 2.0 is constantly evolving, a changing work in progress that is always being tweaked when and where I think it needs improvement. That’s while you’ll see changes from time to time, as I refine it into a better blog. It’ll also evolve as I learn more about WordPress and see just what it’s capable of.

The other day, I was looking through some of the many stories that I’ve written over the years, some of the cool developers I’ve spoken to,  and thought I’d share some of my favourites interview with you.

Being a video game writer gives you the chance to talk to people in the games industry that most people don’t get the chance to so I thought I’d post some of my past interviews in .pdf form, complete with pay layout so you can see how they looked when they were published.

I’ve spoken to a few great game developers both in person or over the phone about games such as Alan Wake, Killzone2 and one of my favourites, Evan Wells, from Naughty Dog, about Uncharted 2.

I’ve spoken to Charles Martinet, who is the voice of Nintendo’s mascot, Mario, and to Jonathan Hawkins  and Bruno Velasquez, who both worked on God of War 3. I’ve also spoken to musician Module about his work on Sidhe’s great PSN game, Shatter, and Curtis Creamer from Bungie about Halo.

Also, here some recent reviews that I’ve run in The Press, also in .pdf form: L.A. Noire and hands-on with The Darkness 2 (I’ve already run my Duke Nukem Forever preview here but here it is in visual form). Let me know what you think.

It’s hard to talk about anything other than E3 this week: there’s not much else happening in the gaming world at the moment. E3 is all things gaming this week.

I’ve been pondering the three big  pre-E3 press conferences from Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo and you know what? I think Nintendo kicked the arse of the other two companies. I really do.

Let me explain my reasoning. Xbox was all about Kinect – more games  and voice commands (and, a personal bugbear of mine is that New Zealand doesn’t even have voice recognition up and running for our 360’s yet. That’s probably not going to arrive till the end of the year). Apart from Gears of War 3 and Modern Warfare 3,  there wasn’t really anything there for hardcore Xbox 360 owners to get excited about (I say that because games like Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier and MW3 are going to be out on PS3, too). Sony was mainly all about the PlayStation Vita, which is an exciting piece of hardware, and 3D – again (the 24-inch 3D monitor, though,  did surprise me and sounds brilliant).

If I’m being honest, though, there was nothing from those two press conferences that made me say “Holy shit that is the most awesome/mindblowing thing I have ever heard/seen”. I knew about the handheld console from Sony and, well, I quietly suspected there would be  a Fable game for Kinect because Peter Molyneux told me a few weeks earlier in an interview that he was working on something that he wasn’t allowed to talk about.

Nintendo, on the other hand, blew me away with the tablet-style controller for the Wii U (stupid name, by the way, but no doubt we’ll all get used to it). Everyone was expecting to be shown a new console – and there is one: apparently it looks like a slightly thicker Wii but with rounded edges – but no-one was expecting Nintendo’s focus to be the controller itself. Oh, yeah, there were rumours that the controller would have a touch screen but who was expecting the controller that we saw? Not me, that’s for sure.

This year, Nintendo showed what E3 should be all about: innovation, trying something different, taking a risk (even if it didn’t admit right away that the game footage on show for Wii U games was actually footage from PS3, Xbox 360 and PC versions of potential games). Sony hasn’t taken a risk with the Vita: it’s essentially a more evolved version of the existing PlayStation Portable. Xbox haven’t taken any risks with Kinect: it’s just expanded the game line up to have more than party-style games and expanded voice commands on it.

Despite what you think of the  controller for the Wii U and Nintendo (and let’s face it, not much has been shown of the new console itself) know one thing: it’s innovative and it’s going to be a talking point with gamers for some time to come. Over the next year Nintendo will drip feed details about the console and while I still think that come this time next year, PlayStation and Xbox will announce plans for their next-generation consoles, which could overshadow the Wii U,  for the time being, Nintendo is quite clearly in the spotlight. Milk it, Nintendo, milk it for all you can.

Oh, games out tomorrow: PlayStation 3 exclusive inFamous 2, which I’m making my way through at the moment – and it’s good, and Duke Nukem Forever. I just saw an ad for it on Tv.  I think Duke just said at the end: “You’d better buy my game – or else.” Hail to the king, baby.

 

The announcements at the Xbox press conference yesterday about being able to use voice commands to search for things – “Xbox Bing this” and “Xbox Bing that” – and issues commands in game is all well and good, but many Kiwi Xbox Kinect owners would just be happy being able to turn their Xbox 360 on using voice commands at all – functionality the US, Britain, Japan and Canada all enjoy.  For us down under, the function has been switched off since launch – and it seems our accents are to blame.

So with all this focus now on voice support for the Kinect at yesterday’s presser, I decided to ask Xbox NZ’s PR firm about it this morning, specifically when can New Zealand Kinect owners expect voice recognition to be activated for us.  I’ve heard from many people who said they bought a Kinect just so they could use voice commands.

Xbox PR tells me that there are “no confirmed dates yet, but voice will be here this year. The postponed rollout is due the complexity of configuring the technology for our accents and ‘voice variation’.” Reports indicate that Australia will get the functionality by the end of the year, so we should follow suit.

So there you have it: Kinect can understand the variety of British and American accents we hear so often on the multitude of British and American TV shows we get here, but it just can’t handle the Kiwi dialect – but that seems to confuse many Americans anyway.

During my  “Red Dead Redemption” review with Glenn Williams last year, a lot of Americans commented on the YouTube link that I’d said  “Rid Did Ridimption”, which is just ridiculous. Perhaps Kinect is having the same trouble.