Under the extremely rare circumstances where you haven’t heard this — we have a new iTunes Store. There you can now find games and feature-length films.
After some days of tinkering around with it, I’ve got some pretty strong mixed feelings about it. It may be a big step forward, but it definitely has some issues that need to be addressed.
The game I chose to try out is the arcade classic, Pac Man. This game looks awesome on the 5G iPod’s screen, despite its old-school graphics. Where it suffers the most is at the control, where you move Pac Man by touching (not clicking!) on the click wheel’s directions. This takes a lot to get used to — especially if you’ve been a joystick twiddling, button smashing, gamer a great part of your life.
In the end, the idea for new games designed for your iPod sounds logical. Even some of them are definitely worth the five bucks they go around for. And in case you’re wondering, yes, you can only play these games on a 5G iPod, but nowhere else — not even on iTunes. On a side note, they do feature the same DRM as any other media sold in iTunes. Pity.
As for the movies, I chose The Rock, where Sir Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage can appear on your iPod for ten bucks.
Here, even though the movie resolution has been upped to 640×480 (about that of a full-screen DVD, but wait…!). But the overall quality isn’t what expected — the movie clearly looks blurry, as compared to one that you can rip on your own for about the same size. Apple clearly needs to work on this. You can view the comparisons for yourself over here.
On the plus side, these movies feature their own chapter system (which even works on QuickTime), and have Dolby Digital sound.
But when played on a 5G iPod, this new stuff does shine — too bad you have a non-existing to regular experience with them on a computer. Once again, Apple must do something about the movie quality — especially since the users can get much better results on their own.
Anyways, how’s everyone else’s experience with the new content?
–
[tags]Apple,Mac,PC,iTunes,iPod,Movies,Games,Music[/tags]
Leave a Reply