Live through all of Infinity (Blade) in just 40 minutes!

August 24, 2022 7:07 PM

The Best Mobile Game You Can't Play looks at Infinity Blade, which was originally released for iPhone 3GS (on Unreal 3!) in 2010. The video covers all three videogames and the two interstitial novels. It's quite a journey for the hero and their bloodline, forward and backward through time across generations. And a fascinating look at a very well developed game and story that is now basically lost.
posted by hippybear (23 comments total)

I played it at the time and very distinctly remember thinking, "This? This is what people are so excited about?" I think its success had to do with how starved the platform was for games that felt like serious "gamer games."

I also remember Brandon Sanderson writing a novelization was big news in the fantasy world at the time.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 7:39 PM on August 24, 2022

I remember liking Infinity Blade when it came out, but the tiny smartphone screens and awful touch/swipe controls made it not particularly fun to play.

Also crazy - it sounds like a game that could have been released a few years ago, not 12 years ago. It has elements of a roguelike / soulslike before either of those two became big.
posted by meowzilla at 7:49 PM on August 24, 2022

Hoo boy. That editing style. Yikes.
posted by Philipschall at 8:25 PM on August 24, 2022 [5 favorites]

Well, that exhaustive explanation of the story did not make me think the story of that game was good or interesting. I think the thing that set Infinity Blade apart was that it had a gigabyte worth of assets and looked pretty good, but was on a phone. And the gameplay sure was designed for mobile - like you do a short thing while you're on the bus and then you stop and get off the bus and go get on with your life, because your iPhone 3G ran out of battery because you were playing Infinity Blade on it.
posted by aubilenon at 9:12 PM on August 24, 2022 [5 favorites]

I remember it mostly as a sequence of fixed battles in which you had to swipe or tap in set patterns to engage in a swordfight. Mostly frustrating and closed to exploration.
posted by argybarg at 10:15 PM on August 24, 2022

When I was a kid in the 90s, it was fairly common that older games, sometimes even only a few years old were unplayable on then modern hardware. I remember some game that had been optimized for older Intel chips that ran much too fast on my not-very-advanced 486/33.

Or they were just impossible to find. By the early-to-mid 2000s, that seemed to be a thing of the past. I’m fascinated that this is again a factor in gaming, games no one can get.
posted by Kattullus at 10:46 PM on August 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

Infinity blade is pretty cool, but I doubt it's the best lost mobile game. There are a lot of other early iPhone games that are basically impossible to get or run now. I don't believe there's any real way to emulate those either due to Apple's security rules. Old android games should be easier to preserve and there are decent PC emulators.
posted by JZig at 10:52 PM on August 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

It was no Flappy Bird.

Or perhaps the problem is that it was. Gameplay consisted largely of tapping or swiping at the right time. I don't recall much in the way of exploration, strategy, or any of the other things that make games interesting to me. It did have professionally-produced graphics and sound, but honestly I'd have gladly sacrificed those for something with more engaging gameplay.
posted by Nerd of the North at 11:30 PM on August 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

The best lost iOS app was clearly NekoSushi. One of the many apps that didn’t make the jump when they went from 32 to 64 bit. More than just that entrancing and lovely song, the app was filled with little bits to explore, little spots filled with all sorts of historical Neko Sushi scenes. I still miss it.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:34 AM on August 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

Eliss is the best lost mobile game.
posted by rocketman at 4:57 AM on August 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

Not exactly a game, but the app I hated losing the most on the move from 32-bit to 64-bit was the Penguin Books Poems by Heart. Even more so because the functionally identical Bible by Heart app did make the jump.
posted by cosmonaught at 5:29 AM on August 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

I was sad when they removed guitar hero (or rock band? I can't remember which brand) from my iPad, the first one. It was so well suited to the tablet, and just stopped working one day!
posted by fizban at 5:51 AM on August 25, 2022

Oddly enough, I was thinking about this the other day and couldn't remember the name. I remember spending forever downloading, playing a lot in a short time, then becoming deeply frustrated and then bored. It was great for a very short while, but it didn't go anywhere.

On the other hand, I'm still playing Orbital, which I see was first released in 2009 and is still only up to version 1.5.

The game I still keep an old iPad around just to play: GeoDefense (and sequel GeoDefense Swarm). Lovely.
posted by YoungStencil at 5:53 AM on August 25, 2022 [2 favorites]

It's a serious problem for archivists. I do wish Apple would allow unlocking of 32 bit apps so they can be played in a safe sandbox on desktop. I also understand that would probably require a lot of never-recouped developer time. But they owe it to all of the developers and users they've fucked over, as well as the digital historians.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:04 AM on August 25, 2022 [6 favorites]

There used to be a fun little game called Flight Control for iOS that disappeared about 10 years ago.

Just recently some United Airlines customers discovered it's back and has been added to the United app.
posted by JoeZydeco at 8:17 AM on August 25, 2022 [4 favorites]

A friend of mine has lamented for years that Chair, the developers, never followed up on Shadow Complex, but I'm guessing that their next game making millions of dollars had something to do with it.

(Orson Scott Card outlined the story for Shadow Complex, and I had hoped greater public awareness of his racism and homophobia had played some part in sinking any sequel plans. But it seems his views were out there well before the game came out.)
posted by Monster_Zero at 8:35 AM on August 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

If you ask me, Infinity Blade was great, a pioneering design for touch-gesture-based combat that deepened as you got further in, with a simple but functional equipment upgrade path, all distilled to its essence with no unnecessary filler mechanics like wandering around an overworld or leveling up by killing a thousand trivial cannon fodder enemies, etc. The way they designed the game loop and the enemies to fit a lot of high-fidelity game into the extremely limited space and performance requirements of devices of the time was highly underappreciated. It sounds from comments here that its main shortcoming was not being the game they expected it to be; I think it was successful at what it was trying for.
posted by churl at 1:15 PM on August 25, 2022 [3 favorites]

I liked it okay, but the “buy weapons with real money” (or “buy coins to buy weapons” or whatever) put me off it. I could see that grinding was going to be a very slow path to success.

Also, the pre-purge game I miss the most is 100 Rogues.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 3:24 PM on August 25, 2022

When Infinity Blade II quietly disappeared off my iPad, I was a little bummed, but I'd beaten the game enough to have the same armor as the main baddie, and even though it was a nice mindless way to ignore the world around me from time to time, there was too much half-explained backstory and a whole bunch of easter-eggy game unlock thingies that I knew I did *not* have the time nor patience to dig into, and I'm allergic to pay-to-win, so I wasn't getting any shortcuts. Having installed it on some week when the app store made it available for free, I couldn't even complain about having spent money on it at all.

It was ridiculously high quality graphics for an iPhone/iPad though. Really clever use of the Unreal engine, and a pretty solidly in the "ideal on touchscreen" category of apps. Kinda wish there was a way to explore the maps more freely, but not enough to find out if someone's extracted the assets to make that doable.
posted by Leviathant at 6:49 PM on August 26, 2022 [1 favorite]

Property is Theft.
posted by eustatic at 9:37 AM on August 27, 2022

Surprising how many people remember playing it with microtransactions. I looked into it and apparently they did later add a way to buy in-game gold with real money, but I played it for quite a while and must have stopped before that update came along. IIRC in-app purchases weren’t even possible in iOS when the first game shipped.
posted by churl at 11:39 PM on August 28, 2022

THANK YOU JOEZYDECO FOR POINTING ME TO THE "NEW" FLIGHT CONTROL GAME. I LOVED THAT GAME AND HAD COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN ABOUT IT. YES ALLCAPS IS NECESSARY FOR THIS COMMENT
posted by AgentRocket at 8:15 AM on August 29, 2022 [1 favorite]

churl, my one data point is that my fuzzy memory may have turned whatever the currency system really was into something else, but the bottom line was that I didn't feel like I was ever going to be able to buy good weapons, so the whole thing felt like a goal that ran away from me as fast as I could chase it.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 8:41 PM on September 2, 2022