Play LucasArts Adventures on Your iPhone

Following a Nintendo DS port and various PDA ports, ScummVM now has an iPhone port too…

While it was announced on the ScummVM website, its still not an official port and currently still in beta.
Here’s what Gizmodo had to say about the interface:

After trying it I can tell you that if there’s a platform designed to play these kind of games,it’s the iPhone. In fact, these are the only games that truly feel at home on the iPhone, thanks to its great touchscreen support, even better than Apple’s native software:

ScummVM fully supports multi-touch to simulate the behavior of the mouse using gestures. With a single tap you left click, but for a right click you hold one finger and tap with another. To toggle click and drag, which is necessary in some games like Monkey Island 3, you “hold one finger on screen, swipe another up from bottom to top.” Then you can drag something, lift your finger to drop it and it will automatically switch back to normal. Quite ingenious and easy.

Monkey Island creator Ron Gilbert, who is an iPhone user, also seems to be pleased with this new iPhone emulation.

And there’s clearly a market for such old games on new devices (iPhone, Nintendo DS, XBOX Arcade…) it really makes me wonder why the owner companies would let these games be pirated as abandonware rather than make use of them in the new gaming platforms we have today.

While such games do not have the graphics and sound to compete with games like Halo 3 on today’s leading gaming platforms. They can still take advantage of the computing power mobile devices have these days which is probably stronger than the PCs these games used to run on.

There’s a whole market of mobile casual games where such games can have success these days, if companies are not smart enough to commercialize on it, at least I’m hoping to see many more emulations like these supporting old games on new platforms.