What evidence did we see of games’ potential on the company’s newest piece of hardware? On the stage, two games, N.O.V.A. and Need For Speed: Shift, both of which were essentially scaled up versions of those produced for iPhone/iPod Touch with tweaked controls and, in the case of N.O.V.A., additional screen furniture in the form of a minimap. Neither were any more prepossessing for it. Apple also allowed attendees to play games including Bejeweled 2, Assassin’s Creed: Altair’s Chronicles, The Sims 3, Tap Tap Revenge 3 and Madden NFL Football - all, again, more or less their iPhone incarnations, blown up. Little surprise, given the developers only had two weeks to work on them.
Despite these games' roots, iPad is not iPhone. Its size makes it as different a proposition for gaming as it does for other apps and for the experience of internet browsing that Apple’s so proud of. It’s shallow to simply write iPad off as just a big iPhone, even if its base specifications seem, on the surface, similar.
After all, a larger screen lends it a range of applications that are new to the gaming landscape - because of two important properties.
First, iPad’s format makes it easily able to perform social roles. You can imagine putting one down on a table and for four people to play on it at once, taking advantage of its multitouch. Imagine, for instance, four player Flight Control, or board games, from Carcassonne to Hungry Hippos. And hey, what about iPad taking a subtler role in game playing by doling out questions in Trivial Pursuit, or running a few rounds of Pictionary - perhaps some players are even online, their pictures displayed as they draw them? Try those with an existing platform like DS.
Second, the screen’s size not only allows games to show more detail and information than they can on iPhone games but also lends players finer control, and stubby fingers will no longer obscure half of what’s on show. Imagine RTS games, or their more fashionable younger brothers, tower defence games. Or World Of Goo. Yes, we’ve been playing games like this on laptops for years, but, as iPhone has demonstrated, the directness of control that multitouch lends games profoundly extends their appeal.
These are just quick and dirty ideas of what Apple could have demonstrated on that stage. Hopefully, professional game developers have a lot better ideas for what iPad can do. In fact, surely they do. Which begs the question - why weren’t they on that stage, showing the potential of a new platform in the same way Apple did its own iWork apps? Why didn't Apple bring them in earlier in iPad's development to explore and define its potential for the app developers to come?
It’s curious that Apple hasn’t appeared to have learned from how iPhone/iPod Touch has matured as a gaming platform. After all, games make the App Store go round - they’re by far the most downloaded type of app for iPhone and iPod Touch, so much so, in fact, that Apple had to issue two download charts for 2009 which separated games from more traditional apps to ensure the apps got a look in.
Is Apple slightly ashamed of games, discontent to let them distract from iPad’s more socially acceptable photo browsing and flyer designing? Or is it complacently sitting back, content that imaginative developers will do it themselves a few months after iPad's launch?
Either way, the game industry seems distinctly unimpressed by what it saw in LA yesterday. But it needn’t have been this way. What better way to galvanise opinion on a promising new platform than showing a raft of games specially designed for it?