iPhone Awesome; iPhone Games not so much.

I was very excited to open that slick little box on Christmas morning. Call me a Mac fanboy. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Love the features. Better than BlackBerry. All that. But whatever goes for ‘games’ on the iPhone is a disaster. 

For one, just like iTunes at first, the available library is cluttered with B-side productions. In ye olde days of vinyl recording, artists would stick their not-so-great music on the other side of the record. The space was there, so it made sense to cram something on the other side. But that primal creative energy that makes hit songs focused squarely on A-sides. So too, it seems, with iPhone games.

Large labels make a $10 version of the PC-based titles. They figure brand recognition will convince a decent amount of those 13 million iPhone toting people out there to take a chance. It’s all about squeezing the last drop out of a franchise. And a battery of husband-and-wife outfits make Whack-a-Mole type stuff that, despite their best efforts, is cute but hardly exciting.

Second, I don’t understand the fundamental urge to play a game on these handheld devices. As much as people claim this segment has grown, I think that’s mostly because there are about 3.3 billion cell phone subscribers out there. Take half of half a percent and you have a $700 million industry. Big deal. It’s amazing that there’s an entire industry based exclusively on people trying out a cell phone game for 5 minutes. It’s like a 21st century paper plate or, worse, spork. 

Anyway, please tell me that there’s an iPhone game out there that doesn’t completely suck?