MacMagazine.com.br is one of the most visible Brazilian websites devoted to the Apple universe, and their evaluation couldn’t bring us anything but a super-wide smile:
Brazilians create iMimic, a very well crafted Genius(Simon) style game for iOS
“We already featured a few Genius/Simon style games in our site, but I’ve just knew iMimic and I can tell it overcomes all the other ones.”
Written in Portuguese, among some of the iMimic features, the article highlights something we joked about:
“They told us that, before developing the game, they tried out more than a dozen similar games in the App Store and got determined to create the best version of them all.”
This is absolutely true, both of us bought almost 20 paid apps and got even more free variants. Even though we enjoy retro games A LOT, of course we would never buy that amount of similar apps if it was not the effort to know and FEEL what the existent games were giving.
Getting Techie
Just two, maybe three, of those games pleased us (no, I won’t tell which) – the rest shared three very annoying problems:
- lack of synchronism between lights and sound;
- high latency between touching and the visual/audio feedback;
- impressively, many had buttons already so “bright/colored” in the Off state that it was hard to notice when/which button was LIT.
It is curious how even such simple gender ends up needing high-performance solutions. For example, we couldn’t get rid of audio delay until we finally went to OpenAL with audio fully loaded into memory – the difference was absurd. This is a strong point in favor of iOS: at the moment I am writing this, Android’s Gingerbread 2.3 doesn’t offer real-time audio APIs (aka low-latency audio). So, in the Android universe there are NO realtime audio apps like Mixers, professional Guitar Amps with effects, instantaneous Drum-Kits, etc… And, of course, no iMimic 🙁