EA and Gameloft show off early Apple iPad games
From the archive: published Jan 27, 2010, 16 years ago. Details may have changed since.
The games showed off at the Apple event today in San Francisco weren’t the very first iPad games announced – that honor goes to Crosswords , announced yesterday, a full 24 hours before the new tablet computer was unveiled – but they’re pretty close.
Developers from EA and Gameloft wheeled out (non-playable) demos of racer Need for Speed: Shift and first-person shooter N.O.V.A., both iPad-optimized versions of existing iPhone apps. For the record, they are not low-res iPhone apps blown up to fill the iPad’s 9.4-inch screen (which end up looking a bit grainy).
How do these optimized games look? Pretty good, actually. Engadget was on hand to snap a few shots of them in action, and noted improved graphics and more options when it came to configuring controls; two finger swipes in N.O.V.A. throws a grenade, for example. (That said, first-person shooters ain’t going to work on this thing; I’ve seen enough shooters on the Nintendo DS to suggest a touchscreen and FPSes don’t go together terribly well.)
Meanwhile, in Need for Speed: Shift, tapping inside the car takes you, uh, inside the car, an up or down swipe will move you through the gears, and (most neatly of all) a tap on the mirror will let you look behind you.
Just a few of Engadget’s off-screen pics: