[iPhone September 2018 Keynote] What Matters To You When Upgrading iPhones?

As Apple unveils its new iPhone models this week, the iPhone XR, Xs, and Xs Max, I find myself once again thinking about what’s going to affect my hardware purchasing decision the most — the software.

My decision on when I’ll want to upgrade from my 6 Plus is going to depend a lot on how iOS 12 performs on my current phone when it drops next week and throughout the fall. I actually could’ve sworn I’d posted something here about that when Apple unveiled it in June but according to the search on this site I haven’t, so I guess I can go over my hopes for that too.

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The Nintendo Wii 10 Years On: What Was And Could Have Been

The original Nintendo Wii turned 10 over the weekend, I haven’t seen many retrospective articles about it but I haven’t really been looking. Maybe they’ll be up this week. In any case I don’t think I’ve ever shared my thoughts here on what the Wii accomplished and why it failed to follow that up.

The Game Gear’s Lessons After 25 Years

There sure are some anniversaries going down in October 2015, so it might look like I’m putting these kinds of posts out in rapid fire. Maybe it’s gonna be like this every fall since that’s usually the biggest season for game releases. Today’s post is about a platform though, and a Japanese release from the early 90’s at that.

Apple’s News App & News Consumption, Part Two

I could only really mess around with Apple’s News app for a few hours before I wrote that previous post about why I wouldn’t really need it and why I still use RSS. Since then I’ve discovered a little more about it, but still don’t know how much use it could ever really be to me. It also got me thinking some more about how fundamentally my news consumption has changed in the last 10 years or so.

Previously I compared Apple’s News app to RSS before realizing it actually does have a function to accept RSS feeds. If you go to a website in Safari with a certain kind of feed you can tell iOS9 to add that feed to the News app. I haven’t gotten it to actually work but there it is.

iOS9 News And Why I Still Prefer RSS

With the buzz around about iOS9 I thought I’d go ahead and at least check out Apples new News app before I dismissed it. Even before the OS update and the app came out I already assumed I wouldn’t be very interested in yet another news aggregator, but it’s made me realize what’s happened to the way I get my news.

The New Apple TV Looks Like A Wii With Actual 3rd Party Support

Apple seems to be sidestepping the “mobile games on your TV” problem other microconsoles have run into.While Apple indicated you will be able to run legacy iOS apps on the newly announced Apple TV, the conference clearly focused on games made specifically for the device. This is what it should  be pushing for.

What we may end up seeing here is the first real library of games built specifically for a microconsole. That might open up an experience not quite mobile but not quite traditional console.

Yet Again We Anticipate An Apple TV App Store

Here we are once more, talking about the possibility of Apple unveiling an Apple TV that finally incorporates an app store. I’ve blogged about this and other people have talked about it like some kind of doomsday scenario for TV entertainment since iOS and the Apple TV have been around.

This new recent story out of 9to5Mac suggests gaming will be a big focus of the new Apple TV. That in itself suggests a lot of different possibilities. People have doubted Apple’s potential success with TV gaming for a long time but at the same time I think this article may be overestimating what may or may not happen.

What Is Happening To Portable Fighting Games

The current fighting game climate and a sale have me trying to do something I thought I’d never do: play fighting games on a mobile device.

It’s just about over as of this writing, but SNK is having a pretty good sale for its iOS games so I decided to grab a couple: The King of Fighters-i 2012 so I could maybe have a good mobile practice tool for King of Fighters XIII, and Garou: Mark of the Wolves because for some reason the mobile version is the only port that exists in the west outside the Dreamcast and Xbox 360. People keep telling me how accurate the mobile ports of so many of these old console and arcade games are, including Soul Calibur, but I still can’t understand people speaking so highly of touchscreen controls.

Mighty Switch Force! Hose It Down!, Summer, Slide Puzzles, And Me

I couldn’t come up with anything to write about directly related to the United States or Independence Day. The best I could think of is a recent event that’s vaguely related to summer weather. Maybe big gaming publications have already covered this, but the mobile version of Mighty Switch Force! Hose It Down! has made the switch to being a free, ad-supported game with a couple other changes. It’s one of a relative handful of “actually good” mobile games I’ve managed to pick up recently and subsequently neglect in favor of my 3DS, but I have played it enough to see what it’s about and recommend it for people who haven’t played it yet and can get it for free now.

What The iOS Game Removals Say About The Entire Store

Apple’s overreaction in the midst of the recent retail push against depictions of the Confederate flag has already generated some good articles before I had the chance to write or pitch anything. I seriously suggest you read the one by Mike Williams at USGamer. It get’s to part of what I see as the heart of the matter in regards to Apple — that it still doesn’t really care about video games. We’ve gotten this feeling for a while in regards to art and serious issues, but I think this is just another sign of what’s possibly the source of all the problems with the iOS game market.