Tomorrow, April 20th, Microsoft Xbox Cloud Gaming, also known as xCloud, is coming to the iPhone and iPad and the PC as a limited, invitation-only beta. The service will allow invited Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers to stream over 100 games using the Edge, Chrome, and Safari browsers.
The limited beta is our time to test and learn; we’ll send out more invites on a continuous basis to players in all 22 supported countries, evaluate feedback, continue to improve the experience, and add support for more devices. Our plan is to iterate quickly and open up to all Xbox Game Pass Ultimate members in the coming months so more people have the opportunity to play Xbox in all-new ways.
Xbox Game Streaming was launched on Android last year but was delayed on iOS and iPadOS when Apple told Microsoft it couldn’t stream the games to a dedicated app unless each game was approved by Apple App Review.
Microsoft’s and Apple’s bets on downloadable subscription services would seemingly place them behind their streaming counterparts in the long run, but that’s not quite the case. Their success shows that they’re neither ahead of the curve nor behind it; they’re simply meeting the expectations of their players. Apple debuted 30 games on Friday on a service that costs $4.99 a month and is often included in larger Apple product purchases for free. Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass Ultimate tier costs $14.99 a month and includes games on Xbox console, Windows PC, and Android devices — and will now regularly feature launch-day releases from Xbox Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks, and even Sony, along with a rotating collection of more than 100 catalog titles. They’re providing the best deals in gaming at this moment.
Compare Friday’s news and these strategies with other industry announcements from this week. Nintendo ceased selling a digital collection of Mario games for no greater reason than artificial scarcity, despite already hosting an online subscription service that could house the games. And Sony confirmed that it will be closing its digital storefronts for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation Vita — with no clarity on how or if those venues or their games will be preserved, let alone be made available in the future.
The fact that Apple, possibly inspired by Microsoft, has a real chance to do game preservation better than Sony is not a sentence I would have expected to type in 2021.
Timeless Classics and App Store Greats are differentiated by the addition of a ‘+’ in their title.
Second, Arcade includes two new game categories: Timeless Classics and App Store Greats, which are a big collection of all-time favorite iOS games that are now available at no extra cost as part of an Arcade subscription on the iPhone and iPad and differentiated from other titles with the addition of a ‘+’ in their titles. Games included in the category include Zach Gage’s Good Soduku, Mini Metro, Fruit Ninja Classic, Badland, Blek, Flipflop Solitaire, Reigns, Monument Valley, and more. It’s an impressive list of classics that that is great to see spotlighted by Apple and preserved.
It’s good to see Arcade expanding, especially with the addition of iOS classics. Game and app preservation is something that has been an issue on iOS with the relentless evolution of the platform. Many games got left behind with the switch to a 64-bit processor architecture and other games were never updated for new hardware specifications. With the addition of classics to Arcade, the best of the App Store lives on for new players to enjoy, which is fantastic.
Sofa is a terrific downtime organizer. Since its release, the app has seen frequent updates that have added features and refinements that make it an excellent one-stop destination for collecting media you want to enjoy later. We’ve covered the app before, so I won’t revisit its core functionality here, but if you’re new to the app, be sure to check outour previous reviewsfor moredetails.
The headline feature of Sofa’s latest update is the addition of apps, audiobooks, and board games to the lineup of media it can track. I’m especially pleased to see that iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps have been added to Sofa. I’ve long considered trying new apps as a form of entertainment. Even poking around productivity apps that most people would consider ‘work’ apps is fun for many people.
The addition of apps is timely given the trend towards subscription-based apps with free trials. If an app catches your eye, but it’s got a relatively short free trial period, you can drop it into Sofa to try later when you can make the most of the trial. The addition of apps also provides a way to track games on Apple’s platforms that weren’t always available in Sofa’s videogame category. However, the change also means that you may have to search for an iOS game in a couple of different places at times.
It’s always a good sign when the hardest part of writing a game review is putting the game down. That has absolutely been the case with Kitty Letter, the new word game from Matthew Inman, the artist behind The Oatmeal webcomic. The core mechanic is familiar: make as many words as possible from a handful of jumbled letters. But as with many of my favorite iOS games, Kitty Letter takes a classic genre and adds a twist.
Inman’s twist reminds me of another classic iOS genre: tower defense games. As you create words by swiping across the letters that appear in a mysterious language vortex, armies of exploding cats are launched, countering other cats bent on destroying your home and attacking the crazy cat man who lives in a trailer across the street. Add collectible power-ups, a funny storyline, The Oatmeal’s signature humor and art, and multiple game modes, and Kitty Letter is completely absorbing. The game is perfect for one-handed mobile play and theoretically short sessions because no single level takes that long to play, but that’s only the case if you actually manage to peel yourself away from it.
Kitty Letter can be played in single or multiplayer modes, each of which has two ways to play. In single-player story mode, battles are interspersed with a storyline that I won’t spoil, but which includes elements like a fish you have to slap repeatedly to defrost and groaning deer. I’ve played through the first set of levels, and the story adds depth to single-player mode, which lacks the competitive dimension of multiplayer mode. The other single-player mode is an arcade mode, where the goal is to survive as long as you can, racking up points as you are relentlessly attacked by waves of exploding cats that come at you faster and faster as you play.
In multiplayer mode, you can play head-to-head against a friend or against a stranger. I played several matches against strangers and only won a couple of times. Kitty Letter has only been out a few days, but there are already some terrific players. What makes multiplayer mode difficult, absorbing, and incredibly fun is that, like Arcade mode, it’s critical to maintain a quick (but not too quick) pace and be good at coming up with lots of words. You can try to slow down a little to see what your opponent throws at you, but if you slow down too much, your letters reset. If you play fast, you may overwhelm your foe, but you also might run out of words too quickly and have to wait for new letters, helpless against an onslaught of cats.
In both modes, the game mechanics are roughly the same. Build words from the letters launching cats that counter incoming armies and hit back at your enemy to inflict damage (or win points in arcade mode) when your cats make it through your enemy’s defenses. The longer the words you put together, the bigger the cat armies you generate are. Timing counts, too, because incoming groups of cats can only be countered by making a word that starts with the letter that appears above the group of enemy felines. As you and your opponent are hit by incoming cats, your health meter tracks the damage you each take. Whoever’s health runs out first loses.
Kitty Letter is available on the iPhone, iPad, and M1 Macs, but it’s best on the iPhone, where you can quickly swipe across letters to make words one-handed with your thumb. The game includes a stats page that keeps track of your highest scoring word, wins and losses in multiplayer mode, and your highest arcade mode score. Kitty Litter is free and has no ads, other limitations, or gimmicks to entice you to spend money. Instead, there are a variety of avatars, cats, and houses that you can buy as In-App Purchases, but they are purely cosmetic and don’t affect the game.
It’s been a while since I found a casual iOS game that is this fun and distracting. Kitty Letter silly, challenging, and addicting, which is the perfect formula for fun.
Headland is a new game for iOS and Android by the award winning game studio Northplay. The game revolves around a young boy exploring a world of his own imagination; fighting enemies and hunting down the missing shards of his robot friend’s “imagination core.” I played through Headland over the last few days and found it to be a well-made and overall quite enjoyable experience.
I really like that Headland plays in portrait orientation. Most games like it run in landscape, which is fine, but it’s nice to have a change. On my iPhone Mini I can actually play Headland entirely one-handed, which makes the game feel more light and casual even though its gameplay is engaging. Playing two-handed on my iPad Pro was still fun though since I could support the device with a single hand and play with the other.
The key to this is the game’s excellent controls, which are intuitive and only require a single finger at any given time. To move your character, you place your finger anywhere on the screen and then rotate it. This is essentially a joystick movement control, but it works so much better because the joystick will appear underneath your finger wherever you place it. My struggle with most touch-joystick games is that I end up placing my finger off-center from the stationary joystick and then I move in an unwanted direction. This never happens in Headland.
Microsoft originally planned to bring cloud-based Xbox gaming to iOS as a native app. The company got as far as a TestFlight beta, but that ended when it became clear that Apple would not allow Xbox games to be streamed unless they were available as App Store downloads that were subject to App Review.
When Microsoft pulled the plug on the Project xCloud beta, The Verge reported that its sources said the company would shift to a browser-based solution. Now, the company has confirmed that browser streaming is indeed planned for its Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers, announcing that the solution would be available in 2021.
In Spring 2021, we will take the next step in our journey to reach more players around the world by making cloud gaming as part of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate available on Windows PCs through the Xbox app and browser, and iOS devices through mobile web browser. By adding over a billion devices as a path to playing in the Xbox ecosystem, we envision a seamless experience for all types of players; whether it’s playing Minecraft Dungeons with your Xbox friends using touch controls on an iPhone, or jumping into a Destiny 2: Beyond Light strike on a Surface Pro when you have a break between meetings.
It’s a testament to the importance of the iPhone and iPad as platforms for game streaming and the power of their hardware that Microsoft and others are willing to work around Apple’s App Store restrictions by developing progressive web apps. However, it’s also disappointing. There’s a place for console gaming on iOS and iPadOS, and Microsoft, Sony, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, and others should all be able to compete in the App Store on equal footing with other native apps and games. Perhaps we’ll get there someday, but for now, the gaming landscape on iOS and iPadOS remains fractured and likely confusing for many users.
I meant to link this on MacStories last week: Apple lifted some of the limitations surrounding JIT (just-in-time compilation) for apps in the recently released iOS 14.2, which is enabling developers of emulation software, such as Delta and DolphiniOS, to run their apps at full performance on iPhone and iPad.
Filipe Espósito, writing for 9to5Mac, covered this a couple weeks ago and interviewed Riley Testut, the creator of AltStore (the non-jailbreak-based alternative App Store) and Delta, the popular emulator for old Nintendo consoles:
As described by Testut, Apple has added support for JIT compilation in iOS 14.2 beta 2 — but this has never been publicly mentioned by the company. The support was maintained throughout the betas and was kept in the final release. The developer believes this is an official implementation rather than a mistake by Apple, but there’s no way to confirm this for now.
And they quoted Testut saying:
For example, with JIT Delta could in theory emulate more powerful systems such as PS2, GameCube, and Wii; without JIT, we’d need to wait several more years before the hardware was capable of that. At first I was skeptical, but am now leaning more towards thinking this was an intentional change.
Hopefully, Apple will not revert this in a future update to iOS and iPadOS.
Viewtiful Joe and Metroid Prime running in DolphiniOS on my iPad Pro. Both games occasionally drop to 30fps, but playing them at 4K is amazing regardless.
I’m an AltStore subscriber, and I’ve been playing old GameCube and Wii games on my iPad Pro with beta versions of AltStore and DophiniOS for the past week. Being able to play Viewtiful Joe and Metroid Prime1 at 4K60fps on an iPad Pro with a connected DualShock 4 controller is incredible, and something I never thought would be possible 17 years ago, when those games originally launched. What’s even more impressive is that, obviously, neither the GameCube nor Wii were capable of native 4K output at the time (as it simply didn’t exist), so not only can an iPad Pro emulate those consoles at full performance with JIT now, but it can even upscale them to 4K without any issues.
I can’t believe Nintendo hasn’t remastered Metroid Prime: Trilogy for the Nintendo Switch yet. ↩︎
I’m perpetually confounded by Apple’s approach to gaming. For every encouraging development like Apple Arcade last year and the controller and Game Center announcements at WWDC this year, there’s a story like the blocking of Microsoft’s xCloud service from the App Store and the ongoing legal dispute with Epic. As uneven as Apple’s recent and long-term history with gaming has been, though, it’s clear that the company understands that games are a lucrative part of the App Store as it continues to introduce new gaming enhancements to its OSes. This year’s updates center on deeper game controller support and a refreshed Game Center experience.
Last year saw the surprise introduction of support for Microsoft’s Bluetooth-enabled Xbox controllers and the Sony DualShock 4 controller on Apple devices. As I wrote at the time, the initial integration of the controllers was excellent, and a substantial improvement over most of the expensive MFi controller options previously available. As a result, it’s no surprise this year that Apple has extended its support for controllers, even further expanding coverage to new controllers and adding support for features like haptics, rumble, motion, lights, and special input options. Apple is also adding support for button and other input remapping on iOS, iPadOS, and tvOS, but curiously not macOS.
The other pillar of Apple’s gaming story is Game Center, which hasn’t seen much love in recent years. Game Center debuted alongside iOS 4 in 2010, but with iOS 10 the dedicated Game Center app was eliminated, relegating Game Center functionality like leaderboards and achievements to APIs that developers could incorporate directly into their apps. Game Center isn’t returning as a standalone app in 2020. Instead, it is receiving a significant makeover that raises its profile in games and on the App Store, creating the potential to make gaming on Apple devices more social than in the past.
