Disturbing trend in iPhone games

[eobet]

I was so looking forward to a game called Zenonia for the iPhone, but when I saw the screenshots I was a bit shocked.

They murdered the pixels:



And this isn't the only game that has done this. Puzzle Quest does it too (even stretches the graphics) and 24: Special Ops uses a horrible scaler. I'm not sure if Crystal Defenders does it, but it looks suspiciously like bilinear filtering, even though they've added horrible ugly borders, instead of drawing proper widescreen graphics.

In short, for me this means that I'm staying as far away from ports to the iPhone platform as I can.

Though some ports choose a different route.

Both Pinball Dreams and Boulder Dash try to update the original graphics, but thankfully, you can choose to have the original pixels via a menu option.

[Ben2theEdge]

That is absolutely horrifying... looks like it was a pretty handsome game too before it was unceremoniously whacked with the billinear ugly stick. Is this a port? Maybe there were no artists involved at all (with most cheap ports there are not, which is a terrible shame.)

[eobet]

Yes, all games I've mentioned are ports (mostly from mobile phones).

And in Zenonia, someone had to draw the d-pad and the action button, which seems to be sharp and without scaling.

However, this port probably didn't have any artists involved at all:

[Helm]

what is this a port of? Seems vaguely x-comish

[Akira]

24: Special Ops. I can't actually find a version that isn't for the iPhone. Sprites appear to be larger than those in X-COM. They created the graphics with the intention of up scaling them with a horrible filter? Or maybe they realized too late in development that the sprites were going to be rather small on the device.
The problem with the iPhone is that it has quite a high pixels per inch ratio so traditional pixel graphics appear puny. Due to the high ppi the graphics probably wouldn't appear quite this ugly on the device either.

[Dusty]

Wow, the cliffs are so similar to Minish Cap

I had to look it up to make sure they weren't stolen. Can definitely see the inspiration, though.

edit: I realize this seems a bit off-topic from the original point, however.

[Dr D]

Interesting find, they could very well be edits.

[Dusty]

I checked and I don't believe they're edits, probably just heavily inspired. However, the style in the game seems to be all over the place.

[ndchristie]

I especially like how two clouds make a double-shadow .

Most likely there was a whole slew of artists under a weak director with very strict ideas about the games he wanted to borrow from but only a vague sense of how to keep things consistent between his desires and among his team.

[Jad]

Actually it's just a cloud shadow overlapping a piece of dark ground, but the dark ground and the cloud are the same colour more or less : D