The soundtrack to Um Jammer Lammy rotated through my iPod yesterday and it got me thinking: why hasn’t there been an iPhone port or, um, homage? If you’ve never played it before (or the seminal PaRappa the Rapper), these games are arguably the granddaddies of the rhythm genre. They predated fancy guitar controllers and significant music licensing in video games. What you got instead was a hallucinogenic blend of Simon Says and Salvador Dali. Ninja onions and chainsaw beavers first give you a musical phrase (read: a rhythmic set of button presses) and you repeat it a moment later to make music. So the gameplay is basically an uncomplicated Guitar Hero and the story shares needles with Katamari Damacy.

You’d have to pare down the number of buttons for an iPhone port, but it’s easy to imagine how it would work. In fact, it might be one of the only button-style interfaces that would seriously work without tactile feedback. You’d hold your iPhone in its landscape orientation, but grip it a la Guitar Hero: On Tour. That is, the iPhone rests in your palm and your fingers curl around to touch four buttons along the top edge of the screen. The phrase bar scrolls along the play area below your fingers, and your grip keeps your fingers from accidentally wandering off the buttons. The accelerometer turns the effects (like distortion and reverb) on and off–it’d also be a pretty good way to spike your iPhone into the sidewalk, but what does that matter in the face of gestural controls? After that, it’s just you, your insecure lamb guitarist, and all the wacky you can handle.

You there, smirking in the back. You think you have a better idea?

As was predicted in the dead sea scrolls, the Fieldrunners update has arrived, and it’s a biggie. The iPhone tower defense game now has two new maps, Skyway and Frostbite, and each will set you back $0.99. The new maps are more complex and ambitious than earlier offerings, with terrain features in Skyway and a [...]

Pinch Media is claiming that an average of 34% of iPhone app installs are pirated and that the piracy affects 60% of apps in general. A few months ago, the developer modified their analytic software so that apps could identify and report pirate installs. Using the accumulated data, they’ve just posted a slideshow of piracy [...]

When I asked Ashley Monif to tell me about Fieldrunners, the first thing he did was start rattling off awards the game had won. Small wonder, because the game spent six months in the top twenty on the iTunes App Store, made Time Magazine’s top ten game of 2008, and won best game in the IGF Mobile competition. That’s not bad for a tower defense game that started out with four towers and no sound effects. Check out the full text of the interview to read about the game in depth, accessibility in the RTS genre, and how Subatomic Studios ended up developing for the App store in the first place.

Peggle has been getting the Tetris treatment, and not just insofar as unscrupulous companies want to steal the intellectual property. Peggle is being ported to every platform known to man, and the casual megahit has some fun for just about every type of gamer. However, the similarities end there because Peggle’s greater complexity means that PopCap has to re-optimize the game every time they switch platforms, so you never really know what you’re getting when you pick up a new version. The iPhone port has its own perks and quirks, but still feels like Peggle on the whole.

The new iPhone application store will launch with well over 100 games, according to Steve Jobs. The device’s considerable screen resolution, sophisticated touchscreen technology, and developer-friendly profit sharing position the iPhone to take a bite out of Nintendo’s DS. While games have never been breakout successes on phones, the technology may finally be converging.