iGame Radio

The Apple event today was all about the music, as could be inferred by the invite with the guitar in the background. But game treasure could be found all around if one knew where to look. Jobs gave us more information about Game Center, we saw a wonderful demo of an Epic Game in development on the new iPod Touch, and we discussed the possibilities about the new AppleTV.

First up was the announcement that iOS 4.1 would be released next week. This update would include a number of bug fixes (including iPhone 3G performance issues) as well as a new HDR photo standard, HD video uploads over WiFi, TV show rentals, and most importantly to us gamers, Game Center.

Game Center is the social networking game solution that Apple introduced back in April. We learned a lot more today about Game Center, including that it will include the ability to play multiplayer games with others, challenge your friends from within a game, auto matching to find people to play with, and leaderboards for score comparison.

Mike Capps from Epic Games came on stage to demo Game Center with a new iPhone/iPod Touch game still in development, code named Project Sword. This gorgeous looking fantasy 3D RPG adventure game developed using the Unreal 3 Engine is planned for release sometime later this year, and involves knights fighting each other with big swords among other things. Capps pvp’d with one of the designers of Project Sword to show off the ease of using Game Center.

Capps played the game with very nice swiping control for moving the swords. He was able to issue an invite to his friend without leaving the game itself as well. All of the social integration is done for you…you’ll just need to pop onto the leaderboards to look for who to choose to play with or who has the best score.

We also received a sneak peak at iOS 4.2, which was all about iPad. Basically, iOS 4.2 will bring all of the great features already on iPhone to iPad, including multitasking, multithreaded email, folders, etc. Also, an additional feature will be printing via WiFi, which is a wonderful bonus to get. This iOS update will be coming out in November, and will be a free update for iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch (though not all models).

The main part of the event was all about iPods, where Jobs introduced a new iPod Shuffle and iPod Nano, as well as an updated iPod Touch. The Nano, for example, is going very tiny and will include a touch screen.

Jobs also stated that the iPod Touch is not only their most popular iPod, it’s also the #1 portable game player, beating out Sony and Nintendo! 1.5 billion game and entertainment titles downloaded to the iTouch alone. So the iTouch has been made thinner, and will include a retina display (4X pixels, 326 ppi, 24 bit color), Apple A4 chip, 3-Axis gyro, a front facing camera with Facetime, a rear camera with HD video recording, and iOS 4.1 with Game Center. Preorders for the new iPod Touch start today, and the device will become available starting next week. The pricing will start at $229 for the 8GB and go up from there.

The real question is how will the iPod Touch compete against the PSP and the Nintendo DS as far as pricing goes, because in many ways that will be a determining factor on whether people continue to look at it as the #1 portable game player. Right now you can buy a Nintendo DSi for $169 and a PSPgo for about $249. So though the pricing is on the high end, it’s still competitive.

iTunes 10 was announced, set to release later today. Among the changes was the logo…Apple has removed the CD background image behind the note symbol. But the biggest addition to iTunes 10 is Ping. This is a social network for music-lovers. Described by Jobs as Facebook meets twitter, Ping will allow you to follow your favorite artists and friends, keep tabs on what they like to listen to and what they are blogging about, and download their music. You can also build a custom chart that shows what everyone you follow is downloading from iTunes. Privacy can be set so that you allow everyone to follow you or filter it as you wish. Ping will also work on iPhone and iPod Touch.

And in the one more thing category, AppleTV is finally seeing a much-needed makeover. Unfortunately for game-lovers, there won’t be any apps or games (at least not yet). Jobs said that people wanted movies and tv, in HD, for lower prices and in a smaller device that was easy to use. So Apple accommodated by releasing AppleTV 2.0 (no, not iTV). It’s a quarter of the size of the original AppleTV, and will go for a third of the price, down to $99. AppleTV 2.0 will go for pre-order starting today, and be available in 4 weeks.

All you need to do is plug in a power cord, HDMI, and ethernet (if you want, it includes 802.11n WiFi) and you are good to go. Movies and TV are all rentals now, so no storage management issues. Airplay will now be able to stream video from any iOS device to an AppleTV as well, with one push of a button. Jobs demoed watching the movie Up on his iPad, then switching it to watching on the main screen via the AppleTV device.

The no storage management issues part probably means, however, no or a limited hard drive. If that is the case, then it is another argument against AppleTV turning into a type of console device as many in the Mac gaming community were hoping it might do some day. Only two things might change that. First, Apple might decide to move into the clouds. The desire to not deal with storage management issues, and rumors that iTunes 10 might turn to the clouds itself, points to this possibility.

The second is that Apple may decide to turn the AppleTV OS into iOS 4. It was hard to tell which operating system was running the 2.0 device, but in the process of demoing how to move icons around, Jobs pressed a button of the remote and the icons on the AppleTV screen jiggled as they do when you attempt to move them on your iPhone or iPod Touch. If the device runs iOS 4, there’s no reason they couldn’t install iTunes and allow users to purchase their games to play on the big screen. And if you can stream video to your TV via AppleTV from your iDevice already, why not games? That iDevice would make a handy gamepad.

All in all, I was both happy and disappointed. We did get to see some significant stuff from Apple, and the demo of Project Sword was stunning. But there was not nearly as much information presented regarding Game Center as I would have liked. And still no connection of AppleTV with gaming yet. Maybe Jobs just needs to find the right game to play.