For some reason, mobile gaming has been breaking into the industry with full force and it’s succeeding harder than your as of late D-pad Street Fighter injuries. There are an ever increasing amount of games and applications that come out all the time, both as pay per download and free homebrew goodies. I do admit, I am not an avid follower of mobile gaming much with my very unhip Razor-esque phone, but an interesting app was brought to my attention by a friend who has the “latest and greatest” 3G iPhone. Do you remember those ads back in the 90’s in Nintendo Power and other gaming mags for that fancy schmancy ocarina of your very own to play on? Now Smule has brought us an ocarina app; I’m talking an actual working mobile instrument!

The Ocarina is one of the iPhone community’s many social applications to gain popularity over a short period of time. It is what you think it is, an ocarina. Although I must stress that it’s not just your Guitar Hero iPhone tapping games like I thought it’d be, simple button pressing which would play a tune to your tapping, but it is all that toy ocarina could have brought you! (Since most of us probably didn’t get to buy it since it required some sort of crazy plastic intelligence we did not yet own at that age.) You actually blow into the phone and hold different flute-like notes down on the screen to create a change in pitch to your tune.

Since it is a social app, it has some pretty fascinating features aside from just playing the instrument. Ocarina allows you to tap on an icon that will bring you to a screen of the globe, in which you can tape on any section of the globe to see and listen in on people playing from all over! I think that’s pretty interesting, and if you want people to not just see you as a “random,” you can set a name to your ocarina and people can see a name when they listen, in case you plan on being the next YouTube hit or performing in front of a live (?) audience one day via your iPhone.

Check it out at Smule’s website. It does cost 99 cents, but it’s very unique and everything you never had. It is one to stand apart from the outpouring of applications lately in the App store.

Also, how fair would I be being to you if I didn’t include a video of this baby in action? Enjoy the Song of Storms from The Legend of Zelda. I was going to put up a video of someone making a fool of themselves, but, hrdrockgrrl’s sweet music making skill could not go unnoticed.

Tags: iPhone, Mobile, Ocarina, Zelda

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 5:10 am and is filed under Gaming, Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.