I remain a steadfast PC gamer, but the iPhone certainly won me over to the concept of mobile games that can be fun to play.
I have, though, bemoaned the flood of titles that hit the iTunes store almost nightly, making it nearly impossible even for someone who is paid to track them to stay on top of things.
I dig through the iPhone game releases nightly just to make sure something intriguing or massive doesn't pop up. Imagine my surprise then when I pulled up the iPad's version of iTunes only to discover that you can't really browse it.
Instead Apple decided to to strip away the ability to dig into categories and instead create a series of filters that are, I suspect, meant to pull out the potential gems.
Great concept, horrible execution.
When you pull up the Game category on the iPhone you're able to select All Games or from 19 sub-categories. You can then sort what you find by top free, top selling or by release date.
On the iPad, when you click on Games you're given the option to explore the 17 games listed in the "spotlight", the ability to browse games under New and Noteworthy and What's Hot.
There are no longer any sub categories though. And using the new system I was only able to browse perhaps 10 percent of the current game library.
You can, of course, search for the game of choice, but that would require knowing it, which sort of defeats the purpose of browsing.
I can only assume this is Apple's attempt at trying to minimize the open floodgate of games that confront a new iPad owner when the purchase the platform, but it's kind of crazy to completely take that control out of the hands of their users.
Oh, right, this is Apple.