Electronic gadget maker Apple, no relation to the popular fruit, revealed its latest telecommunications device last night. The iPhone 5, as it is to be known, has a screen and some buttons down the side, which have a range of functions. It can fit into hands or even pockets and features a camera that takes pictures of your ear as you make telephone calls. The ‘phone’ is constructed entirely from glass and aluminium – like an eighties coffee table.
“This is definitely the future this time,” said one observer while ‘live-blogging’ his unique insights. “I mean, the last one was almost the future, as was the one before that. But this is definitely it now.”
“Apple has upped its game and delivered the goods,” said another reporter, rendered temporarily incapable of original thought by the gravity of the event. Meanwhile, desperate journalists could be seen feverishly checking thesaurus websites to find new ways of writing ‘sleek’, ‘thin’ and ‘slightly larger display’.
The big news of the night however, was that publisher EA has discovered an utterly new feature called ‘time shifted’ gameplay. In its iPhone 5 demo of Real Racing 3, the company showed how players could set a time on a circuit, then challenge friends to beat it by competing against a ‘ghost’ of the previous performance. “This is totally not a ghost mode,” said one spokesmen. “It is not at all like the ghost modes that have been on phones since the Java days; that have pretty much been the mainstay of asynchronous multiplayer gaming for over a decade.”
The company did reveal one new facet to its revolutionary mode however – it seems that players will be able to ‘smash into’ the ghost representation of their friend’s performance, thereby retroactively affecting their time, like popular Hollywood movie Minority Report, somehow. “Imagine this,” said that spokesman from before. “You have set a time and then a friend rings you up a day later and says ‘you know that time you got? It’s not that time anymore, it’s longer, because I smashed your car off the track’. It’s going to change the way we set times and then tell our friends about it forever.”
Also shown off at the event was a new pet sim from NaturalMotion, the creator of popular horse game, My Horse. “We were thinking of what our next pet game could be,” said a different spokesman to the one that was talking about the EA game. “And we thought, okay, people love horses, but what do people love as much as horses? What things are cute and loveable, but also a bit comedic? And naturally we thought of ninjas, a formidable class of 15th century Japanese mercenaries adept at silent assassination.”
The event ended with a vast cabal of bloggers and news site writers excitedly agreeing to use the words ‘console quality graphics’ in all headlines relating to the device. This despite the fact that the huge disparity in technical specifications between machines such as the Wii and PS3, together with a wealth of digital titles eschewing naturalism in favour of expressionistic visuals, have rendered the phrase all but meaningless.
