I now officially Give A Rat's Ass™ about the iPhone.

Okay, so I'm a bit of a closet Apple fanboy. I have a Windows machine because I love my PC games, but when you really boil it down I prefer to use a Mac - my homebuilt PC is actually dual-booting XP and the iATKOS hack of Leopard. While most of my self-taught game projects are hastily slapped together in Game Maker 7 (yeah, laugh it up, you bastards), I spend a lot of time screwing around with the Mac-only game engine Unity 3D. It's surprisingly robust for such a straightforward toolset, and the tutorials made it easy for me to get a handle on scripting languages (code-retarded as I am).

On a seemingly-unrelated-yet-parallel note, I never really cared that much about the iPhone. It's cool, sure, if a bit overpriced. Its existence certainly doesn't push me to the paroxysms of rage you might expect from a more discerning geek, but I never found that much to get excited about. It didn't really engage me.

Well, until I saw this.

(Video here - skip ahead to 01:00:00).

Now, I'm not a rabid fan of Super Monkey Ball. But seeing a game like that - a dead ringer for a PSP title - running on a mobile device built around digital distribution was like looking into the face of GOD. They built the damn thing in two weeks and it ran at 30FPS. Halle-motherfuckin'-lujah.

So, now that Apple has released their for-realz iPhone SDK, it's only a matter of time before the Unity player gets a mobile port. Until today, I would've killed for the chance to make a PSP title that wasn't guaranteed to net a loss, but now it looks like I can pull off a similar feat by myself for less than a grand...

-----

Development
Unity indie license: $250
iPhone developer registration: $99 (!)

Models and Animations
Cheetah3D: $129

Textures
Photoshop CS3 upgrade: $199
imageSynth plugin: $99

Music and Sound Effects
Logic Express: $199

TOTAL: $975

-----

...and distribute the result on iTunes. EPIC WIN, says I.

What about the rest of you? Did this announcement change the way you look at the iPhone?