New IPad on the Block
I suppose I am an iPad early adopter – a quick look at the machine in the Apple shop on Regent Street here in London, and there was absolutely no chance that I would pass up the purchase. It’s just a wonderful piece of design, and a scaled-up iphone seems much more than an oversized copy. It has a feel all of its own, and the gauntlet is now thrown to the game designers. What is it and what games will suit it?
In case you’ve been under a rock for a few years, the iPad copies the same innovations as the iPhone but on a bigger scale. There’s a touchscreen so many games are controlled by swipes on the screen, by pointing at targets, or even by controlling little virtual joysticks onscreen. The iPad also has the same tilt functions, and the microphone for potential voice control, and obviously it is easily integrated onto the net for online functionality.
At the moment most, if not all, of the available games are iPhone upgrades – HD versions of already-released titles from the iPhone’s library. Clearly a very easy sell, but not very inspiring really – in fact I feel miffed at the idea of republishing the same game at a higher resolution and expecting iphone owners to pay again. It’s not all sheer greed – there’s no way of allowing players a free pass for a game in the App Store (apparently).
But also the iPad is simply a different machine and many games do not suit both machines. Tilt games from the iPhone are simply unwieldy on the iPad. My favourite game on the iPhone, Drop7, is simply too small-scale for the iPad – it would feel like a waste of the bigger machine’s capabilities.
There’s also the simple difference in the way iPads are used. The massive battery life simply doesn’t necessitate 5-minutes-of-fun games – something deeper is required. You don’t just grab your ipad out of your pocket on the train and bus. It’s an entirely different beast. Obviously these games will have a place on the iPad as they have done on every other platform, but I don’t think they will dominate.
My first thought was that the group of games that would really benefit would be the 3D games from the iphone, but a quick experiment with a few of them has changed my mind. There’s still no need for first-person shooters or space flight games on the iPad, and there’s still the same problem that they just aren’t that easy to control on the system. There’s still the inherent problem that if you own a PC (or a Mac these days) or a console, why would you want your iPad to deliver a stripped down version of the popular genres on more powerful machines?
The notable successes for me so far have been the MMOs, or more accurately the Facebook-games. Farm Story is a clone of Farmville, and it really works well on the iPad – it can even push messages on to the screen when your carrots are ready to be harvested. These are real-time games that encourage regular chunks of play and also work on social interaction with other players – as the iPad easily ties up with Facebook and Twitter and a multitude of other networks it actually seems better placed than any other system to exploit this new style of gaming. We Rule could be the game that really breaks through – I didn’t like fiddling about on an iphone screen with it, but on here it’s an absolute joy to build up your civilisation with such a well-presented game.
It doesn’t have to stop with Facebook games. If Blizzard wanted to do it, I think World Of Warcraft would be fantastic on the iPad. Or maybe the other established MMOs would muscle in. The thing about MMOs is that the actual control systems have always been fairly simple in order to cover for latency issues online, so there’s no reason why they couldn’t be easily replicated. In fact I think WOW or the games like it might really benefit from touchscreen control – they’re all about pressing icons at speed and in the right order, after all.
The other game type I could see flourishing here is the adventure game. Machinarium would absolutely storm the iPad – I hope and pray they’re already at work with it. Zack & Wiki would be great too. The machine just seems to suit pretty-looking 2D backdrops and animation. And these adventure games, that you might spend a couple of hours with rather than just a few minutes, seem like a genre that has been in the doldrums looking for a new home. And the iPad is screaming out for games with that bit more depth, but light and pretty enough to avoid being poor copies of better hardcore games.
The iPad has charm, and it feels different to what has come before. It just needs the games – I think in a year or so it will be absolutely swarming with great games and will start to become a real contender.
