Letter from America: Want an iPhone Game Boy?

February 23rd, 2014, 01:07 Posted By: wraggster

Greetings all!I'm kicking off this week with something that we didn't write a story about, but simply tweeted the moment we saw it because we thought it was so cool. It's an HTML5 Game Boy emulator written by New York-based programmer Ben Midi specifically to work with smartphones. It certainly runs beautifully on my iPhone 5 - others have said that it also functions perfectly well on their newer Androids.All you have to do to make it work is type www.benmidi.com/gameboy into your browser, and hey presto! Your phone is now a Game Boy - complete with a nice selection of old classic games that includes one of my all-time faves, Tetris. The emulated Game Boy's buttons are a tad cramped in portrait mode, but in landscape mode there's plenty of room for your fingers to take you on a highly enjoyable cruise along memory boulevard.Proper buttons! Proper buttons! My kingdom for some proper buttons!

I'm not sure how bothered Nintendo is about this, but since I played a similar java-based Game Boy emulator about 18 months ago that's still around, it seems that, at least for now, they have more important things to deal with. Either way, this emulator is just another step toward a future where we'll be playing all sorts of interesting stuff on our browsers. And by interesting stuff, I mean really decent games, and not just the simple things we tend to associate with web gaming. I'll be talking a little more about this in an upcoming LFA. I recently spent time with some folks involved in WebGL and the PlayStation 4 UX (whose backbone is WebGL code), and they have some very exciting things to say about how browser gaming will evolve.Mike also had emulators on his mind this week when he wrote about the best ones currently available for Android. He picked out some interesting apps, which made me look at my iPhone with some degree of irritation. I do like the thing, but sometimes it feels like Apple's vice-like grip is just a tad too iron-clawed. Still, at least I have iMame for it, which I managed to snag in the few minutes it was on the App Store before Apple yoinked it off.As I'm writing this piece, Mike is putting together a news story about Amazon's rumoured Android-based video game console. The Seattle company showed it was serious about entering the gaming market some weeks ago when it acquired Double Helix, and now it's busy posting gaming jobs that sound pretty damn exciting. Most interesting of all is that Amazon's Lab126 (essentially its consumer electronics R+D department) is looking to bring around 250 new people on board. It certainly sounds like things are beginning to pick up the pace.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/20...r-from-america

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here