Category:iOS Games

Games (and similar apps) that can be played on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. A subset of Mobile Phone Games.

Here divided into three categories:

• Relatively new games that were made for the smartphones, taking advantage of their interface.
• Really old games that have made a comeback on the smartphones.
• Games originally designed for a much larger computer that have a condensed port or mini-version for iPhone.

This index is for the iPhone platform only, because iOS users want to be able to use it to find games they can play. A game must have an iPhone/iOS version to belong on this list. Games that are only or also for Android belong on Android Games. For games on other smartphone systems, please create an index for that platform and replace this message with a link to the new index.

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. Many games for the platform are designed to use the accelerometer as a primary control. 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. The touchscreen also makes games involving tracing pathways (similar to many Nintendo DS games) possible alongside old-school PDA tap-and-drag games. The system's API (Cocoa Touch) is similar but not identical to the Cocoa toolkit used on Mac OS X, and uses the same XCode environment as Mac developers use.

Apple traditionally has somewhat of a love-hate relationship with the gaming community, going back to the first Mac and Steve Jobs' insistence that it be treated as a Serious Business machine. Though the Mac game market flourished in spite of Apple's ambivalence, games like Marathon and Glider that should have been world-shaking... weren't. 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. 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. Apple gave the Touch, followed by the next generation of iPhone, similar accelerometers, and positioned the Touch explicitly as a gaming system. Unrestricted by the licensing and hardware barriers of the Nintendo DS and PlayStation Portable, game developers (especially small ones) responded in droves, making an Apple platform a serious contender in the gaming world for the first time since the Apple II line wound down.