Asphalt Adrenaline versus Mars Bar - FIGHT!

The other day I spent a whopping €0.79 on Asphalt Adrenaline for my iPhone. It's the 6th installment in the cheap and cheerful arcady racing game series that has been released on several gaming platforms. It's a pretty cool little game. Graphically pretty good for a handheld racer, runs smoothly at a nice stable framerate, even though the scenery is pretty rich. Plenty of fun content for the same price as a candy-bar from the snack machine at work. And since the controls/handling are very arcady, it lends itself to being controlled with gyros, accelerometer and touchscreen controls so it's a pretty good fit for the iOS platform.

Now, what I find interesting is that this game is easily better than the Asphalt game that was launched alongside the 3DS. It's even better than the drab and blandly designed Need for Speed:The Run on the 3DS. Both of these games have an MSRP of €45, which makes them a whopping 5600% more expensive than the iOS game, which happens to have better production values and arguably is more fun to boot.

Gaming elitists like to dismiss iPhones and iPods as wannabe gaming devices that are just good for Angry Birds and overpriced flash games. Thanks to games like this one, Real Racing 2, Infinity Blade etc., I'm getting more and more convinced that iOS is starting to become a very compelling value proposition for certain genres of games. Notably games that lend themselves to control via a touch-screen and gyroscope. The graphics prowess of contemporary iOS devices is very impressive (a lot more powerful than the 3DS, and with a screen that has over 6 times more pixels) and it's hard to beat the value of games that cost less than a fiver.

If I get more than a few hours worth of entertainment out of an 80 cent game, that's mad value for money. Hate all you want on iOS gaming, but that's a hard to beat proposition right there.