Gadgetory

Hawaii their retro gaming handheld fans if they were fantasized about taking your iphone or your iPod Touch and turning it effectively into a game gear that's right this is a old-fashioned sega game gear from maybe the 90s the mid-90s well yeah you can do that with thanks to the ion icade mobile a seventy dollar accessory that works with iOS devices like the iPhone and iPod touch you can see the ones inserted right here and much like an old game gear you've got a d-pad and buttons even got shoulder buttons on the back now I'm a big handheld gamer I have all the handheld game systems and I know one of the big beefs about handheld touchscreen devices like the iPhone is that there are no buttons and there are ton of great games hey wouldn't you like to be able to play Street Fighter and use buttons well not so fast the icade mobile is an offshoot of the icade arcade cabinet that came out last year and if you use that you know that only a certain number of games work with the icade it basically fools the iphone into thinking that it's a keyboard and pairs with it that way you enter a certain number of buttons to activate it and then you're paired and set and as a result there's no analog control pad here which is frustrating and you can already tell it a lot of games like shooters wouldn't work on this there are a number of fun retro games like Ataris arcade greatest hits midway arcade and some indie titles that are retro inspired like super crate box that work really well at the icade oh wait no they don't they don't work with the icade mobile yet not all of them in fact Atari arcade greatest hits and super crate box at this point don't and I'm sure a lot of them will be updated to work with the icade mobile but you have to basically look on ions website and see which of the games work and which don't which is a hassle the ones that do work work really nicely you can play joust on this thing and hey the buttons respond really well but the whole construction of this is big and bulky to double-a batteries going to the back you actually have to unscrew a panel which is a little frustrating and it adds a lot of weight this thing is not pocket-sized unless you've got king size cargo pant pockets or enjoy carrying a holster pack with you it's not as big as a game gear but it's getting close it kind of looks like an atari lynx and if you're paying seventy dollars for this on top of whatever games you're purchasing that's a lot of dough it doesn't include any games with the package you know what else can be said about this it's not that pretty and that's another downside I think this looks like a kind of a generic third-party gaming peripheral and the buttons are a little rattling loose feeling they work but they feel kind of like a little knock off and this whole rubber holster that keeps your iPhone or iPod Touch in which can also rotate keeps it in sturdily but it pokes out a bit on the sides it doesn't it feels like a little weird when it gloms on here you can't access your volume buttons or your your top buttons up here it's just not that pretty and it does come with a little rubber insert so you can put an ipod touch in there but it feels kind of like a hack and at seventy dollars you would expect something a little more elegant than a hack the ion icade mobile would be awesome if it worked with a whole bunch of games if you could download games on the App Store and you could play any game you wanted with these controls well that would be the fantasy that's not allowed right now companies aren't finding it very easy to create a universal controller for the iPhone or iPod touch this is I guess the next best thing right now although be nice to see analog pads and it really adds up to a neither here nor there a product that would be maybe a fun stocking stuffer for those who like retro games but at seventy dollars that's an expensive stocking stuffer and we're not at the holidays yet I'm Scott Steinman that's a look at the ion icade mobile for the iphone and ipod touch