Editor’s Choice: iOS, Do You?
A very lovely gentleman who may or may not go by the name of Brett was kind enough to send me a no longer used iPod touch. The iPod has a slightly bust headphone socket, ironically rendering it almost useless for the one thing it’s meant to do best; play music. But not to fret, as iDon’t really care about that, iWant to play games!
And games iPlayed. Though not before going through the torturous process of going from having the iPod in my hand, to having the iPod with a game in my hand. iThought this was Apple’s bread and butter? I’m in their walled garden now, they can offer me as many fruits from forbidden trees as they want and I’m nothing by a mushy pile of brainwashed misery with a wallet. TAKE MY MONEY STEVE, TAKE IT FROM MY VEINS.
iThought wrong.
After a quick charge the iPod’s first burst of life was a tantrum. No words, just a child-like pout in the form of an image showing me iNeed to plug it into iTunes. Wanting to know why my mp3 player needed a specific bit of software probably makes me a communist, so iDidn’t question. iLoaded up the Worse Software in The World and was then told my iPod would not talk to anything but the very latest version of said Worse Software in The World.
iStarted to feel like my iPod had issues. Not so much technical ones, but class-based ones. It’s above its station. I mean, who does it think it is demanding I plug it in this, download the latest that. Back in my day you had files dragged into you and you were happy with it.
No Apple, iDon’t want to install Safari. Or Quicktime.
After the auto-updated had failed for the second time iDecided it would be easier to just download the latest version of the Worse Software in The World directly. Twenty minutes later it had deemed me worthy enough to finish installing, and promptly locked up my laptop for a good thirty seconds as it tried as hard as it could to download the entire internet.
And now my iPod works! Hurray! Quick, download Flight Control, the greatest iOS game of all time! Aww man, landing planes is going to be so fun.
No demo? Wait, iNeed to register too? I guess that’s cool. Demos and not wanting to hand over my personal information probably means I have a poster of Marx in my bedroom, so iDidn’t question. I’ll spare you the tedious password attempt, fail and recovery story. Needless to say it was… wait, I just said it was needless to talk about it. Moving on.
Joy! After redeeming my £15 voucher and confirming, with a smile on my face, Apple should remember “none” as far as debit cards go, I’m landing planes! For real! Sweet.
Though, to allow me to play more than one game, iBest put my iPod back on charge.
*Plug*
Why is my laptop whimpering… oh god, the Worse Software in The World has become self aware and is loading itself up again to download the internet and break any and all electrical equipment within a thirty mile radius!
What do you mean “synchronising”?
What do you mean “removing”?
Where did all my games go?
And that’s how iFirst experienced playing games on an Apple device.
To be fair, I’ve not paid for any of it (Brett sent me the iPod and the gift voucher was from Christmas) and most of the crap I’ve just described will only happen once, to lucky people. But it’s still left me a little frustrated say the least. iThought iOS based devices were meant to “just work”?
To recommend me games, hop in to the forum thread I created to save myself the bore of looking things up.
To its credit, iTunes is only terrible on PC’s (from what I hear). I use it on my Macs and it’s fantastic.
A nice thing about having an account set up is that you can freely delete and reinstall games without having to re-pay for them.
While reading this story, I silently raged every time you did the lowercase-i thing. I hate that.
I got an iPod Touch 2g from work as a service award a few months ago. It was a pain in the butt getting it to sync with the Windows versions of iTunes. I bought one game for it and had trouble syncing it back and forth. Eventually I jailbroke it and stopped using iTunes.
Now I’m getting really bored and tired of sifting through all the shovelware trying to find the few gems available for the platform (unfortunately I don’t care for casual games, and most hardcore games don’t seem to translate well to the touchscreen platform). Last night I pulled my GBA SP back out of the drawer and had more handheld fun than I’ve had in a while.
I think what I really want is a handheld system with a d-pad and buttons that can emulate 8- and 16-bit console games (NES, GB/GBC, SNES, Genesis etc.) with high framerates and good sound. I was hoping that my iPod would fit the bill, but touch screen d-pads suck and all emulators I’ve tried have crappy sound and/or don’t really run on 2g devices.
I actually once met an elderly gentleman who had been sold an iPhone by unscrupulous commission-based high street dealers, and couldn’t even get it past the ‘plug in to iTunes’ screen, because the poor old bloke didn’t have a computer. The store refused to take it back because it was on contract, and even after an hour with an entirely unlocked webcafe computer we couldn’t get iTunes to connect up to the damn thing so he could use it as a phone.
The fact that a computer is needed to set up what is essentially a tiny computer is just ludicrous.
@HunterZ: If you think there’s plenty of shovelware on iTunes, you’re head is going to explode when you see the Android Market.
I’m glad someone else realises that iTunes is truly a terrible piece of software. The fact that Apple can’t play nice with Microsoft and put a decent version of it on Windows really has put me off buying an iPod, let alone an entire operating system from them.
@TheGyro: I don’t plan to go to android as a solution either. I’m thinking of getting a Wiz from ThinkGeek, at which point I’m not sure what use I will have for my iPod Touch.