• 17Mar 10

  My Coming Out

  It's your old pal Adam_B again. You may remember from such films as "Adam walks around the GameSpot office at midnight and breathes heavily" and "A bunch of people run over Adam trying to get to the Nintendo booth at E3."

  Well, I've been doing a lot of lurking since then, and sometimes feel a bit like an outcast. For too long I've had to hide this part of me away from the world and live a lie. But today I've decided to finally admit who I really am for the world to hear. My name is Adam, and an I'm an iPhone gamer.

  I didn't even ever really mean to play games on the iPhone. Heck, for the longest time, I was skeptical of the device which has its share of setbacks. But even so, when I was approached by a couple guys who used to work with me at GameSpot to build a new site about iPhone gaming, I agreed. I wasn't so interested in the subject matter as I was in building a cool site, hanging out with some cool guys, and giving myself something to do.

  And so, back in September of 2008, Slide To Play was launched. And even then I resited the lure of the iPhone, despite seeing some compelling evidence that there might be something to this device when it comes to gaming. Relying on the old ill-founded assumption that a device can't be good at gaming if it does other stuff too, I resisted. But as the site started to grow and we started to get users and developers kept pushing the bar higher for game quality, I finally gave into a moment of weakness. And you know what? I was impressed.

  And apparently, I wasn't the only one. Game developers started to flock to the platform with the potential to make a splash without needing a development budget of millions of dollars and the backing of a publisher to distribute their game. In this rush, there was a lot of good stuff, and a lot of pretty mediocre or terrible stuff. An unemployed software engineer spent seven weeks in his living room coding up the rather bland game iShoot, but despite the fact that it wasn't so good, it made the developer nearly a million dollars.

  A game like that got popular mostly because of the rather limited ways of browsing the App Store. If a game happens to do initially well enough to make it to the top selling list, it will tend to stay there a long time because of its exposure. This means that people are often not exposed to the diverse number of great games to satisfy any gaming palate.

  That's a large reason why we built Slide To Play, but honestly, the kind of people who would browse a site for iPhone games are typically enthusiasts anyway; they're typically people who already know what kind of great games are out there, and so when they go to the App Store to buy a game, they don't bother browsing, but instead just type in the name of the exact game they want. That works for them, but what about everyone else? Thinking about this a bit led to a plan for a new way for people to find games for their iPhones. This paved the way for a rather ambitious project that I'm now very proud of: GameFinder.

  GameFinder is an iPhone app that incorporates much of the content and data from Slide To Play, but its focus is different. It's there to help you discover games in the App Store. Want to find the best FPSes, zombie games or great games that just became free? There's an app for that, and it's called GameFinder. (Okay, very very sorry for that really corny marketing line, but you get the idea.) How much would you pay for such an app? Nothing, you say? Good, then we've priced this app right, cause it's free!

  In the famous words of LeVar Burton, "But don't take my word for it! Look at these beautiful screenshots. Photon torpedos ready, Captain." (Well, close enough.)

  Some dude on the App Store wrote: "The app manages to throw TONS of useful information into a tight, easy-to-use package."

  Some other dude writes: "I absolutely love this app."

  And a different guy raved: "Ugh"

  Okay, you can't please everyone. But like I said, it's free, so give it a try!

  http://www.slidetoplay.com/gamefinder

  

  

  

  

  

  • Posted Mar 17, 2010 2:08 pm GMT
  • Category: Games
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• 7Oct 09

  On iPhone Gaming

  More than a year ago, I wrote this here in this very blog:

  "A few friends and I built a site dedicated to games on the iPhone."

  I was referring to a little iPhone gaming site we had built, called Slide To Play. There were four of us back then, with one guy doing the majority of the writing. Our pace was pretty leisurely, releasing a few reviews a week.

  It's remained my side project, but over the past year, I've watched something amazing happen. The site started to get traffic. We then started to get some sponsors. Then we were able to get some freelancers, and were able to produce more content. And so on.

  Well, the most gratifying event in our site's existence happened just yesterday, thanks to GameSpot. The announcement was made public that GameSpot is now covering mobile games, and editorial content, at least iPhone game reviews, is coming from none other than SlideToPlay!

  I'll be honest. When I started building STP, and even after it launched, I didn't have an iPhone and didn't really plan on it. It didn't seem that important; I'm not an editor after all. But just a little exposure to some of the games on the system changed my mind. I got myself an iPhone and have been a believer in its gaming capabilities since! It can handle an intense combat flight sim in the form of FAST to flawless ports of old stand-bys like Myst and The Secret of Monkey Island or ports of great new games like Peggle or completely addictive simple pick-up-and-play games like Flight Control and Harbor Master and everything between.

  I was a little skeptcal at first, but I gotta say, it's really hard to put down the iPhone: it doesn't hurt that it's always with me packaged into a phone I'd need all the time anyway.

  Regardless, I'd just like to say thanks to GameSpot for giving us an opportunity to expose to a new audience all the cool things you can find on this platform! Keep an open mind and try it out!

  • Posted Oct 7, 2009 4:30 pm GMT
  • Category: Games
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• 19May 09

  Sure, why not

  It's been more than seven years since I signed up for my GameSpot account on the "new" registration system.

  Boy, things sure do change, don't they? One of the reasons I'm writing this is because I'm curious how many people will be surprised because they forgot that they were following some ex-GSer named Adam_B. Even now, my inbox has hundreds of unread notifications of people who decided to follow. Sometimes people did it because I had an official GameSpot emblem or because I occasionally posted wacky heavy-breathing videos showing tours of the GameSpot offices.

  But boy, things sure change. I had written more, but I guess that's the crux of it -- things change before you know it. But what have you all been up to, peeps?

  Is Blinx still the all-time floppiest flop ever?

  • Posted May 19, 2009 6:34 pm GMT
  • Category: Opinion
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