Apple gave the Touch, followed by the next generation of iPhone, similar accelerometers, and positioned the Touch explicitly as a gaming system. At this point, Apple decided to start leveraging the accelerometers they'd built into late-model MacBooks, which people had subsequently hacked into game controllers. For years, Apple's half-assed Pippin console was their only real attempt to court the game market, until the second generation iPod Touch came out.

Though the Mac game market flourished in spite of Apple's ambivalence, games like Marathon and Glider that should have been world-shaking. The system's API (Cocoa Touch) is similar, but not identical, to the Cocoa toolkit used on macOS X, and uses the same XCode environment as Mac developers use.Īpple traditionally has somewhat of a love-hate relationship with the gaming community, going back to the first Apple Macintosh and Steve Jobs' insistence that it be treated as a serious business machine. The touchscreen also makes games involving tracing pathways (similar to many Nintendo DS games) possible alongside old-school PDA tap-and-drag games. For example, driving games such as Pole Position Remix often have the player tilt the entire unit in lieu of providing a steering wheel, and other games use it to control an object's movement around the screen, such as a marble in a maze. Many games for the platform are designed to use the accelerometer as a primary control.

Most iOS devices (at least after the second generation iPod touch) share several characteristics: the most important are the accelerometer/tilt sensor and the touch screen. Quality varies wildly throughout this category: on one end of the spectrum, there's Ghost Trick, which looks and plays beautifully across all 'i' devices. The overlap with the 'retro' category is based on how old the original game is.

Games originally designed for an entirely different system that are released in full or as a mini-version for iPhone.

Really old games that have made a comeback on the smartphones, sometimes facilitated with emulation.

Original games that were made for the smartphones, taking advantage of their interface.

Games (and similar apps) that can be played on an iPhone, iPad, or the now-discontinued iPod Touch.

Shooting zombies? There's an app for that! note Game pictured is Zombieville USA, photo by ilamont

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