iPad

Yesterday Apple announced their long leaked and highly anticipated tablet, the iPad. I understand the hype, the last big thing Apple announced was the iPhone and despite not having one or even a remotely high tech phone, I think it’s a pretty cool little device. I’m not sure it changed the face of the world or whatever the hell the Apple marketing machine said it would, but that’s beside the point.

What I want to know is why do gamers care?

I get that the app store gave rise to a huge amount of games in an incredibly short period of time, but I personally don’t have any desire to play any of them. By the sounds of it, which I’m basing on the almost absurd amount of reading I do on video games, not many other gamers do either. I hate the separation of casual versus hardcore discussion so I’ll just say it like this; of all the news sites and pretentious analytical blogs I read about video games, rarely do I hear anything noteworthy about iPhone games. I hear a lot about their potential, but nothing on the platform has resonated with me enough to buy an iPod Touch.

It’s clear the gaming community that I subscribe too, and you too probably if you are reading this doesn’t really care about these games. So why then are gamers freaking out about the IPad? It’s basically a bigger iPhone with a few added gaming related features. Since its announcement yesterday though, Joystiq has had half a dozen posts and updates about what it is capable of gaming wise. Yet, unless the few announced games (most of which are dumb downed ports of console games) churn out something major, we’ll probably be back to ignoring it quite soon.

Honestly, the only cool and useful thing I can think of that the iPhone has done is the app store. It’s definitely a better setup than the Xbox Indie games store and something Microsoft might want to look into emulating. I suppose the iPad also fixes the problem of user input horribly conflicting with your ability to see the screen, but that’s just because they made the screen bigger. Your grubby gigantic thumbs are still going to be all over the screen that you need to see to play.

Well, I’ve ranted enough. I’m probably making a bigger deal out of this than is actually the case, but based on the current state of affairs gamers don’t really care about games on Apple platforms and I don’t see that changing any time soon because of the iPad. Seems kind of strange how much coverage it is getting. Maybe if the oft rumored Apple gaming console ever comes out we’ll have something to care about, but for now I’ll stick with the major consoles and on occasion use my PSP… probably not though.