iPad - a game changer?

I bought an iPad last weekend (please insert your own 'more money than sense' joke here). I think it is a fantastic piece of kit and it is now my primary device for surfing the net, reviewing my RSS  feeds and reading/sending email.  Or accessing IMDB while on the sofa, having had a 'what's he been in before?' moment while watching TV (who'd have thought that someone from Sky 1's 'Dream Team' would next turn up as the big villain in 'Flash Forward'?). A better of way of putting it would be to say that it is my leisure' device', with my laptop being my 'business device', used for drafting documents (though Pages is available as an App) or anything that needs printing out.  Drafting with the touchscreen keyboard is fine in short bursts - this blog post has been wholly drafted on my iPad, with the Blogpress App -  but if I was drafting anything more weighty, I'd still be reaching my my MacBook.

The iPad isn't perfect but it has proved even better than I thought it would be. Magazines and comics look great on the screen and, if enough publishers chose this as a distribution medium, I think it would become my primary method for consuming them (take note 'Future Publishing').

But this is a videogame blog, so I suppose I should talk about its gaming performance. I've had  an iPhone for a year and, while I have some games on it, as a gaming platform it is hampered by the small screen and lack of buttons. Some games that don't require constant contact between the player and the screen - Angry Birds, for example - work very well but many, more action-oriented, games - such as iDracula - have virtual 'buttons' (used to control the  on-screen action), on the touchscreen itself, a technique I do not think works very well. I'm a pen-pusher and, as such, have never done a proper day's work in my life, giving me the dainty hands of a Jane Austen heroine. When manipulating virtual buttons during iPhone games, however, it seems as if I have the crushing fists of a cage fighter, obscuring a third of the screen as I go about my my ham-fisted quest to die as quickly as possible.

That is not the case with the iPad, as the large screen can easily accommodate a few virtual buttons without risk of the player obscuring the touchscreen. I've returned to the afore-mentioned iDracula and found it far more enjoyable than on the iPhone, even with some pixellation, as the buttons (and my hands) don't clutter the on-screen action.

All the games I have on iPhone  have been uploaded onto my iPad and, for the most part, they work well. You can either run them at their original resolution, with the game then appearing as an iPhone-sized rectangle in the middle of the iPad screen,  or you can increase its size, which is enough to fill the iPad screen. The latter option does result in some pixellation, which does no favours to text-heavy games but is passable for games such as Angry Birds that have minimal text. A special mention should given to Metal Gear Solid Touch, a game I bought for the iPhone ages ago but didn't get very far with, due to 'big hands' hands syndrome - it was automatically maximised for iPad, with no pixellation. Still not a great game but it was a nice to see.

Angry Birds actually has an HD version, optimised for iPad but, if you have the original, I don't think it is worth the extra expense (£2.99, as opposed to the iPhone version's 59p), as it works perfectly ably when upscaled on the iPad.  It is worth noting that your progress on iPhone games won't always be transferred when you sync the game to the iPad - some do (Beneath a Steel Sky) and some don't (Angry Birds).  For those that don't, you will have to start from the beginning again, which isn't really a problem for something as immediate (and short-burst) as Angry Birds.     

The one native iPad game that I have bought so far is Real Racing HD, a spruced up version of an iPhone game that relies on the device's accelerometer for the steering,  with the iPhone (and now iPad) effectively becoming the steering wheel. It was £5.99 and I'm a little disappointed with it, though appreciate its technical prowess. Apart from anything else, holding the heavier-than-you-think iPad like a steering wheel is a feat of endurance itself for long periods.    The game looks like a higher resolution  version of an early PS2 game and it plays reasonably well within that limited purview but isn't, control method notwithstanding, a particularly revolutionary game.

And revolutionary games are what I want from the iPad. I believe that it is a truly viable mobile gaming platform (something that I don't think that the iPhone is, for me anyway)  and I hope that developers  can harness the unique qualities of the iPad  to deliver some great games. I'm particularly hoping for a truly accessible RTS title but I hope that the development community will deliver far more innovative games than just that.  I won't be selling my 360, PS3 or Wii anytime soon (well, I've not sold any console I've ever owned, so that's a  misleading claim) but I think that the iPad has the potential to be my mobile platform of choice. Mobile-ish anyway - the size of it would tax the BFG's pockets...