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Rise of Lost Empires: Like Warcraft for iPhone, but Not Nearly as GoodYesterday

I think I may have achieved a grasp of Gameloft’s concept design strategy for their iPhone catalog. It seems to have something to do with being “inspired” by titles and franchises that are already wildly successful. You can’t help but see the similarity between Hero of Sparta and God of War (even syntactically). Likewise, with Rise of Lost Empires ($4.99, iTunes link), their new real-time strategy game for the platform, which resembles a certain other title in which humans and orcs do battle strategically.

Don’t get me wrong, Gameloft’s “inspiration” strategy is not something I’m against. It has resulted in some very fun games to date, and Rise of Lost Empires is, hopefully, just one more opportunity for them to get iPhone gaming right with yet another lovely homage. If the original dev studios aren’t bringing the platform any love, I’d rather Gameloft did than no one at all.

RTS On a Phone?

Once upon a time, I was a devout real-time strategy fan; Warcraft, Starcraft, Command & Conquer, A

Windows 7 Pricing vs. Mac OS X: Why Even Go There?Yesterday

Windows 7 pricing was made official not long ago, and the general consensus is that, despite a slight drop in Home Premium pricing compared to Vista, it’s too expensive.

Still, there are some in the Microsoft community that try to justify it by comparing it to Apple’s pricing for Mac OS X. Microsoft can never win this game. Heck, Microsoft never even gets in this game. And yet, you have folks like Ed Bott at ZDNet giving it a shot. Here’s his latest salvo:

In two recent posts… I took a closer look at the differences between Windows 7 editions and their counterparts from Apple.

That’s from the first sentence, and already the article is off to a misguided start. There are no “counterparts from Apple” to Windows’ OS Editions. Every Mac OS X sold is — to use Microsoft’s terminology — Ultimate. Let’s keep that point i

Thanks to TheAppleBlog Sponsors!Yesterday

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Jailbreak for iPhone 3GS Now Available OnlineYesterday

At this point we probably shouldn’t need to start a jailbreaking post off with a disclaimer about how doing it with your iPhone is not condoned with Apple, and may void your warranty, so you should approach doing so at your own risk, but a friendly reminder never hurts. Now, on to the reason behind the disclaimer: The iPhone 3GS, after only three weeks on the market, has been successfully jailbroken, and the software that allows it is now available online. Happy Independence Day.

The iPhone Dev Team, who are behind this and almost every previous iPhone jailbreak, actually hadn’t planned on releasing this particular jailbreak yet. George Hotz (aka Geohot), a member of the Dev Team and the first to unlock the original iPhone, seems to have gone behind the team’s back and leaked the software early. The Dev Team was holding out for iPhone OS 3.1 to drop, in order to hopefully avoid Apple patching the vulnerability that allows jailbreaking with that update.

For now, the hack, called purplera1n, is Windows-only (and doesn’t work with the Windows 7 Release Candidate), and obviously you need an iPhone 3GS to use i

App Developer Diary Part 2: Pitching My ConceptYesterday

In this week’s enlightening installment of the App Developer Diary, I pitch my game concept to the coders, preach the gospel of the Game Bible and muse upon the possibility of the project imploding.

Straight after submitting last week’s App Developer Diary, I packed up my Macbook Pro and headed down to Nolla, a local bar and Scandinavian restaurant. I was to meet with Markus, one of the project’s coders, and pitch my game concept to him.

Hailing from Finland, Markus Piipari is one of the three coders who invited me on board to make the game. Together, with his brother Matias and Benjamin Schuster-Böckler, the trio formed Pear Computers, a dev studio specializing in mobile development.

When I arrived at Nolla, Markus was hunched over his MacBook (one of the old white models, which was sealed, I noted, in a scruffy faux-leather hard cover). He glanced up, headphones in ear, and although he acknowledged