Well secret of Mana I know very well. As a teenager I combined playing
cooperatively and watching a sighted friend of mine, (since I could see
most of the characters providing they weren't in a zone with low contrast).
There are several interesting points about the mobile version of secret of
Mana however. For example, the combat mechanics while exactly the same as
the snes use the touch screen capability to target a given monster for
physical attacks just as with spells. So you move your character around with
one finger, and use a second to target a monster for your character and for
the other two to attack.
I could actually imagine an accessible game similar to secret of mana from a
first person perspective with your allies Ai controled, though of course the
enviornments, sounds for all the monsters and massive massive massive!
amount of area programming would be the big problem since just on a basic
walking level Secret of Mana makes Shades of Doom look like wandering around
a student bedsit!
In terms of health and mana however, while I agree with you that a game like
a mud with a huge amount of statistics to monitor, health, mana, staminer,
experience split between many levels, number of practices etc would be a
problem, since a game like Secret of Mana just has essentially two basic
statistics I don't think a single on screen button or specific gesture to
read mana and health would be too tortuous. papasangre 2 if not using the
gyroscope has five separate on screen controls, two feet and hands and the
cumpass slider, and that causes no trouble.
I could imagine an rpg game with a walk forward button bottom center (no
need for the two feet mechanics of Papasangre), a cumpass for turning above
it, an attack button in the bottom right corner, a spell casting button just
above it in the middle right, a speak status buttton in the bottom left hand
corner and a status menue in the top left corner for changing out currently
active spell etc.
Heck, you could even reduce this down by having a control with different
interaction methods, ---- say tapping the status button once spoke your
health and mana, while tapping and holding bought up the pause menue to
change spells and weapons etc.
While I do takee your point about limited keys, ---- it'd after all be
nearly impossible to do something like swamp without a pc keyboard (I think
Swamp uses every keyboard key there is), if the games interface is designed
correctly for it I wouldn't say the Iphone is specifically limited by laack
of controls, it's just different and needs a different design approach, eg,
having both mana and hp spoken on one key rather than having two separate
ones as you would on a pc.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
---
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