Having a black iPod 5G, I decided to play with the new iTunes Store to buy some games and also a movie for the sake of Science! Two games I bought are Bejeweled and Zuma. Here’s some mini reviews/impressions of what I got.
Bejeweled: Beautiful game. A cross between the old Bejeweled game, updated with Bejeweled 2 style graphics. You don’t get the special gems from Bejeweled 2, the game pretty much plays like the old Bejeweled v1. You do, however get the looks of Bejeweled 2, and also the impressive wormhole effect that you see from Bejeweled 2. Nice. Sound is better than the Palm version (Palm version sounds overly distorted), and adds a bit to the gameplay. The background music is annoying though. Control is through the wheel, navigating through the jewels are fast and responsive. Playing in the time trial mode can be very trying though, but I did get to level three 
So far, this is a game you can play when you have that 5 minutes of time waiting for someone. You can save a game in progress before you leave the game, a nice feature for a handheld game.
Verdict: For $5, you get Bejeweled in all its version 1 glory, but with the prettiness of version 2. If you where to get the old Bejeweled for the PC, Mac, Palm or Pocket PC, it would cost you $20. The price alone justifies it. 4/5 stars.
Zuma: Zuma is an interesting game where you try to clear up balls before it goes into this magic hole thing. I was just recently introduced to it by my colleague. I downloaded the one hour demo of it from Popcap, and I am hooked. Of course, all other platforms will cost $20, and since the iPod version is priced at $5, it’s an impulse purchase. Playing the game on the iPod is quite different from using the mouse. Although it’s easier to play with the mouse, I didn’t lose a life on the iPod, and got further than with the Mac. It’s fun though. The graphics are less flashy than Bejeweled, but it gets the job done, as it is quite faithful to the other platform versions. The music and sound effects are quite faithful to the other platforms as well.
Verdict: Requires a bit more attention than just a pick up and go game. But it works. Quite fun, easy to pick up and play. 4/5 stars for this one.
What I would like to see, is those bunch of hackers/homebrewers to put something here. I’m sure Apple would not give out any SDK, but since people manage to hack the PSP with very little information, I’m sure something could be done with the iPod.
Movies: I was quite negative with the shows on iTunes. The fact that the h.264 codec is limited to 320×240 on the iPod, makes the pictures quite blurry on TV. In fact, the quality was so poor, even VCDs could rival the iPod in terms of picture quality.
Not anymore, the iTunes Store videos are now in 640xXXX, where XXX can be up to 480 pixels high. This is as good, if not, better than the videos you can download from illegal sites of your choice. Let’s compare, the so called pirates would give you movies and TV shows at 640xXXX, movies usually weighs in at 700MB to 1.2GB in an MPEG-4 container. These videos are usually encoded in XviD/DivX format and runs at about 1000kbps or so. Quality is quite reasonable for the shady stuff.
I downloaded Flightplan from the iTunes Store. At $10, it’s about the price of VCD here (it’s $18 for a DVD on Amazon). It’s in h.264, resolution of the movie is at 640×272, encoded at about 1500kps, which is extremely good for h.264, where you could go a lot lower than 1000kbps for similar quality to what ‘pirates’ offer you. It does cost you about 1.03GB of pure harddisk space.
The video turns out to be 10 times clearer than VCDs on fullscreen on my MacBook Pro. Sound is great, at least when compared to VCDs. I tried it on the iPod and I’m impressed. The software update allows the movie to run on the iPod. I connect the iPod to the TV, and I almost cried, as the picture quality on TV is beyond my expectations.
One thing the movie supports are Chapters, and the iPod supports fast forwarding via chapters too, sweet.
One last thing. Not to leave everything on a happy note, my iPod will not synchronize properly when connecting it to the Mac. The iPod hangs when I plug it in the Dock. Thi sis frustrating. The only way to update the iPod is to do a cold boot while the Dock connector is attached. I hope to see this fixed soon.
Aliya loves to use the computer. I’ve let her use an old Fujitsu laptop as well as my MacBook Pro/iBook. Using the same programs, Aliya have problems on the Fujitsu. She likes to right click, a lot, even if I told her otherwise. On the Apple notebooks, she does not have any problems whatsoever, as there is only one button to play around with.
With the Fujitsu, she can’t launch any programs, even if she can visibly see the icons on the desktop. She would insert the program CD she wanted, wait for the menu to pop-up, and from there she can right-click her way through as the educational programs are set up to accept any form of clicks.
