Gadgetory

hi I'm Bridget Carey and joining me today is senior editor Scott Stein who has just completed a massive review of the best ipad games and I checked out your list quite hard to boil down to 30 yeah I imagined it would be I went through them and you can probably fit more than half in the category of strategy and puzzles so over the years where have you seen ipad games really shine and fall flat well you got me I like strategy and puzzle games on the ipad but the reason is that i think when you started out and the ipad wasn't a big phenomenon yet you had a lot of iphone ports and you're holding a thing in your hand you've got virtual buttons it's easier in your hands like this to tilt and so it was easy to bring over to the ipad and look like that you got more room for those virtual buttons but they're harder to find I find tilting and lifting the iPad a little more annoying not that it doesn't have some great you know versions out there games like driving games and flight games if you want to experiment with that but I think the best games i've seen are the ones that take advantage of the puzzle elements the ones that use all of your fingers and and that large screen and almost more like pc games i think Angry Birds sealed the deal as far as the games that you see most likely on the store are going to be puzzle games affordable puzzle games so it tends to be that those are the majority of games that you see out there on the app store makes sense to put it on a table and play because how many times do you want to lift that whole thing up to you know steer or something yeah I think like for a few novelty games I mean especially they're just a couple of bucks each you may want to experiment with a couple but I find that the the rewards are limited for those now we're at the third-generation iPad where you have the high-resolution Retina display is that really adding a lot to the game experience at this point not a huge amount but I almost think that's by design you know sort of like the nintendo 3ds doesn't really use 3d all the time there's a bad example but you know the the ipad 2 is out there and it's out there at the same time as the IV the 3rd gen ipad something a lot of developers are making games that take advantage of both but also those graphics you know at retina display if you're going to play 3d quality graphics like shooters first-person shooters and racers it's hard to get those graph at Retina display you can even do that on a laptop so largely the games that take advantage of it the best tend to be ones with static images board games 2d games not that there aren't some games like airmail sky gamblers which our flight games you know real racing to some of them really show off that Retina display and you'd like to see it in all games but it's not it's not essential now let's talk price because app games on the ipad are known to be pretty cheap you can get them for five dollars or less but you pointed out that sid meier's pirates if that was on a pc it would cost at least twice as much so is this culture of keeping the prices low discouraging these game developers from making better games and getting more money for them we look at some meier's pirates and that's a bet is a pc game that got ported over and that you know it's also been on consoles and the touch controls are really nice on it I think people think about making good big games and then pricing them the way they want to price them then I think you end up with you know maybe some some higher quality games not that there aren't great games priced at just a dollar but I think maybe some developers take the attitude of almost going scattershot making a lot of small low-budget games for a dollar each throwing them out there see if one goes viral and then you're also starting to see a lot of these games with in-app purchases you know a dollar here two dollars there and I think that's an unfortunate trend I you know I think if you price a game well you let the market figure it out you have hit that sweet spot maybe promote it for a while at a lower price but you can definitely capable making great games on an iPad I think it's all about the mentality of is it worth it for the price that you're going to charge now tablets and touchscreen gaming is its own genre now thanks to the iPhone the iPad you're seeing it in the next Nintendo Wii U with the controller has a touchpad you're seeing Apple saying that you're going to be able to take your ipad game and pour it to your television Microsoft's going to be teasing with this too or you have two screens now in your tablet gaming environment the controller is evolving or we're going to be seeing better tablet games because of this push I think you will because a lot of games are involving touch now the nintendo DS started it you had the touch with the stylus and then you saw iphone games and ipad games now you've got microsoft with SmartGlass you've got the Nintendo Wii U which is a very different concept but it also has touch the PlayStation Vita has touch almost all smartphones tablets you have Windows 8 computers coming out with touch so I think so many devices are going to have touch that it's inevitable that game developers are going to think in terms of that and so it's going to create better games with touch and probably a lot more across platform games great point Scott thank you for seeing it I'm Bridget Carey thanks for watching