A Problem With iPhone Gaming

There’s a fairly irritating problem with many iPhone games. It drives me nuts. It’s the fixed use of the 90° counter-clockwise landscape orientation. If you look at this photo from the Assassin’s Creed Ⅱ demo at the Apple event back in September 2009, you can see what I mean:

The problem is that when you hold the phone, you cover the speaker and the headphone port. Whoops: No sound for you. Assassin’s Creed is far from the only game that does this. It seems like such a no-brainer, I don’t know why everybody chooses this orientation. Maybe developers are targeting iPod Touch instead of iPhone? Its headphone jack is in the top-right position when in the same orientation. It seems like a trivial thing to add, but nobody seems to do it. Hell, you could probably detect the type of device and put it in the right orientation automatically. Nobody does, and it sucks, and it bugs me whenever I try to play a game.

2010/02/05
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Discussion

No idea why they don’t do what the iPod software does and simply flip the screen around 180º when the accelerometer detects new orientation. If you play a video on the iPod it will flip around no matter which way you’ve decided to watch the video.

Joe Stump
2010/02/06

That’s probably not viable for accelerometer-based games, since it could interfere with the gameplay. The types of games I have seen with auto-rotate tend to be slower, puzzle and strategy titles rather than fast action games. And many of those have an option to disable the feature.

My feeling is that people generally want a fixed view for games, and that’s fine. I just don’t get why everyone picks the least-optimal orientation for iPhone.

Ian
2010/02/06

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