Amazon’s Fire Phone is coming out this week in North America on AT&T, and with it, are two exclusive games that take advantage of the device’s unique features. To-Fu Fury is the third installment in the mobile game series, a …
Amazon’s Fire Phone is coming out this week in North America on AT&T, and with it, are two exclusive games that take advantage of the device’s unique features.
To-Fu Fury is the third installment in the mobile game series, a puzzle-platformer where players must fling the eponymous To-Fu around, bopping enemies and avoiding spikes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=84OYT-1r9Jk
Saber’s Edge is a match-3 and RPG hybrid where players must form a party to take on enemies, with a different board for each character.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8x4GnKri3c
What makes each game stand out is that they both use dynamic perspective; one of the key selling points of the Fire Phone. For example, you can look ahead in To-Fu to see which hazards are ahead, simply by tilting and moving your head. In Saber’s Edge, you can explore the game world by tilting, can see the boards of other characters by peeking around, and switch characters using gestures.
While these are certainly neat, how useful will this be in actual gameplay? And if useful, is there any reason developers couldn’t mimic this without dynamic perspective, just using the tilt on a normal device?
And will the technology take off to enough of a point where not only game developers find it worth their time to implement them, but also to where a gamer will buy a Fire Phone instead of an iPhone or Android? That’s the question that Amazon Game Studios, who published each title (and also has its own internally-developed titles in the works) is going to have to answer.
