A Powerful Database with iCloud Sync
This week on Ruminate, more snacks than you can shake a stick at, Weblog posting month 2024, Raycast experiments, and some new game controllers.
At last fall’s iPhone event, Apple and Ubisoft announced that Assassin’s Creed Mirage would be coming to the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. Today, Ubisoft confirmed with a press release that the game is coming on June 6th, just before WWDC. In addition to the iPhone, the game is coming to iPad Air and iPad Pro models with an M1 chip and later, which includes the 5th generation iPad Pros released in the spring of 2021 and later, as well as the current iPad Air.
According to Ubisoft’s website:
Developed by Ubisoft Sofia, these ports offer an intuitive, comfortable and engaging gaming experience with optimized touch controls and controller support. Cross-save and cross-ownership will also be available for players to enjoy the game between iPhone and iPad as they please.
The game will also be a Universal Purchase that will work across the iPhone and iPad and will be free to download and play for 90 minutes. The full version of Mirage will unlockable for $49.99. If you’re interested in pre-ordering Assassin’s Creed Mirage, you can do so now on the App Store.
Assassin’s Creed Mirage launched on consoles and PCs last fall to favorable reviews. I’m looking forward to giving it a try on the iPhone and iPad, but I’m a little disappointed that it’s not also launching on the Mac.
As any Pokémon fan knows, the series is all about data – lots and lots of data. So much data that entire websites and apps are dedicated to helping players keep track of it all. That’s a big design challenge for any app developer, which is why I was so glad to see it taken on by Ben McCarthy, whose apps, including the camera app Obscura, are some of the best designed on the App Store.
Ben’s new app is called Ketchup, and it’s a comprehensive compendium of every generation of Pokémon that incorporates powerful search, caught and favorite Pokémon tracking, a battle match-up utility, and a quiz game all in one app. But what makes it special and sets the app apart from others I’ve tried over the years is the design, which makes it easy to find what you’re looking for and presents it in a coherent, understandable, and modern interface.
Earlier this week, Supercell soft-launched Squad Busters, a party action game, in Canada, Mexico, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Singapore. Today, the company announced that the game will launch on iOS and Android worldwide on May 29th.
According to Supercell’s CEO, Ilkka Paananen:
Our dream is to create great games that as many people as possible play for years and that are remembered forever. Huge credit to the Squad Busters team – it’s already apparent that the game has such high potential, making it our first company game launch since Brawl Stars in 2018. Squad Busters brings together our Supercell characters in a fun way that fans have never seen before and I can’t wait to see the reactions from players across the globe!
I haven’t had a chance to play Squad Busters yet, but from the demo Supercell shared with me, it looks like an interesting addition to its lineup, which includes popular titles like Clash of Clans. The Supercell team likens Squad Busters to the fun, chaotic competition of classic games like Mario Kart. Players compete against friends and online squads in ten-person, four-minute matches that are populated with characters from across Supercell’s stable of games, collecting gems and other items. Along the way, characters evolve in a style similar to Pokémon games.
Squad Busters may superficially look a little like a last-person-standing battle royale game, but Supercell says its goal was to design a competitive action game that is accessible to players of all skill and experience levels. To that end, prizes are awarded no matter where you finish among the squads competing during a match. It’s not easy to design a game that appeals to such a broad spectrum of gamers, but if Supercell can manage it, Squad Buster’s colorful, frenetic, one-button gameplay has the potential to become a big hit. In that same vein, Supercell has worked to make sure that the game works on multiple generations of hardware as far back as the iPad mini 2.
Clash of Clans and Supercell’s other games have never appealed to me, but Squad Busters is intriguing. The gameplay I’ve seen looks fun, and I can see it working as a way to introduce a new wave of gamers to the company’s other titles.
Squad Busters is available for pre-order on the App Store now.
Game emulators are nothing new to mobile phones. That is unless you have an iPhone. There’s a long history of emulation on Android and an even longer history on Macs, PCs, and other platforms. However, with ‘retro game console emulators’ (Apple’s App Review Guidelines term) now allowed worldwide on iOS, we’re seeing the iOS world speed-running game emulation. It will be a while before iOS emulators catch up to Android and other OSes, but in just over a week, there’s already been a lot of news.
Meanwhile, all eyes are on Nintendo. The company is notoriously protective of its intellectual property. And, although Nintendo has not sought to restrict the availability of emulators for its oldest systems, it aggressively pursued the makers of Yuzu, a Switch emulator, which resulted in the emulator being forced from the Internet with other emulators following suit. So, while emulators for early Nintendo systems have been available elsewhere for years, the sudden mainstream popularity of Delta on the App Store could draw an unwanted reexamination of emulators by the company. My hope is that instead of litigation, the new crop of iOS emulators spurs Nintendo to offer older games on the App Store and via other channels, but history isn’t on the side of my hopes and dreams.
This week on MacStories Unwind, I’m a little wired, we explore Southern expressions, share some Legion Go follow-up and have app, hardware, TV, and music picks.
Southern Expressions
Picks
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So, you’ve probably seen the (totally justified) hype surrounding the Delta emulator’s launch on the App Store and downloaded it because, why not, it’s free. You may have also recalled that, like a lot of people, you have a box of old Game Boy cartridges stored somewhere that are gathering dust. Or, like me, maybe you spent way too much money on second-hand videogame sites during the COVID lockdown. Regardless of your Game Boy cartridge origin story, today I’m going to show you a simple way to breathe new life into those games by bringing them, along with your save files, to your iPhone.
The easiest way I’ve found to pull the game files from a Game Boy, Game Boy Color, or Game Boy Advance cartridge is with a little USB-C accessory called the GB Operator by Epilogue, or as I like to call it the Game Boy Toaster. That’s because the device looks like a top-loading transparent toaster that takes game cartridges instead of bread. If you have a big collection of game cartridges, the GB Operator is a great investment at $50 because it allows you to both play and back up your games using a Mac.
Writing at his personal blog, Brendon Bigley explains why the Delta emulator launching on the App Store is a big deal for retrogaming fans who also love native iOS apps:
AltStore for me (and many) was just a way to get access to Delta, which is the best emulator on iOS by a pretty shocking margin. While there are admittedly more feature-rich apps like RetroArch out there, no other app feels made for iPhone in the way Delta does. With a slick iOS-friendly user interface, custom themes and designs to reskin your experience, and the ability to grab game files from iCloud, Delta always represented what’s possible what a talented app developer could do if the App Store was even slightly more open. It’s in this possibility space where I likely never switch to Android again.
I posted this on Threads and Mastodon, but I was able to start playing old save files from my own copies of Final Fantasy Tactics Advance and Pokémon Ruby in 30 seconds thanks to Delta.
Years ago, one of my (many) lockdown projects involved ripping my own Game Boy Advance game collection using a GB Operator. I did that and saved all my games and associated save files in iCloud Drive, thinking they’d be useful someday. Today, because Delta is a great iOS citizen that integrates with the Files picker, I just had to select multiple .gba files in iCloud Drive to add them to Delta. Then, since Delta also supports context menus, I long-pressed each game to import my own save files, previously ripped by the GB Operator. And that’s how I can now continue playing games from 20 years ago…on my iPhone. And those are just two aspects of the all-encompassing Delta experience, which includes Dropbox sync, controller support, haptic feedback, and lots more.
Brendon also wraps up the story with a question I’m pondering myself:
How does Nintendo react to the news that despite their desire to fight game preservation at all costs, people are nonetheless still enjoying the very games that built their business in the first place?
I’ll never get over the fact that Nintendo turned the glorious Virtual Console into a subscription service that is randomly updated and not available on mobile devices at all. I’m curious to see if Nintendo will have any sort of response to emulators on iOS; personally, I know that Delta is going to be my new default for all Game Boy/DS emulation needs going forward.
Delta, the videogame emulator for a long list of Nintendo systems, is now available worldwide. In the US and many other countries, you’ll find it in Apple’s App Store, while in the EU, it is part of the AltStore alternative marketplace.
I’ve been using Delta for years. The app was available using a clever system that took advantage of an Apple Mail plugin and developer account to allow it to be side-loaded onto iPhones. It wasn’t the most convenient way to use the app, but it worked, and legions of classic videogame aficionados flocked to it for its excellent performance and design.
Today, however, anyone can download Delta from the App Store for free, load their game files, and play their favorite NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Advance, SNES, N64, and Nintendo DS games on the iPhone. Delta has been in development for years, so the experience of playing your old games on it is superb, incorporating native features like haptic feedback and quality-of-life enhancements like the ability to save a game’s state, fast forward, and use cheat codes. Delta also supports controller skins, local multiplayer, and syncing of save state, save data, and more.
Delta is the Nintendo emulation standard bearer on iOS. I expect we’ll see other emulators that work with the same games, as we did briefly last week, but Delta is going to be a tough app to beat.
