iGame Radio

UPDATE 2: Game Center is now supporting over 30 games, including Cro-Mag Rally, Enigmo 2, Farmville, Field Runners, Flight Control, and World Series of Poker Hold’em Legend.

UPDATE: TouchArcade is running a thread keeping track of those games that have announced support for Game Center, and which ones have been approved with the Game Center update. So far Ms Pac-Man, by Namco, has taken first bite.

OS 4.1 has been released into the wild, which means that Game Center has gone live. Apple’s social gaming network promised a lot, but does it live up to the hype? For a quick initial look, we opened the app up and ran it through its paces.

Upon opening up the Game Center App, you’ll be asked to create an account or login with an existing Apple ID. After doing so, you’ll go through the process of setting up your profile, agreeing to the EULA (which you can email to yourself so you don’t have to squint at the screen through all 7 pages), etc. Once that’s over, you have the ability to review your own profile, your friends list, make friend requests, and play games.

Friend requests are pretty easy. You can input either an email address or a Game Center gamer tag (mine is omahacat, btw…feel free to friend me!). The email addresses can be pulled directly from your address book…just tap in a letter, and it will give you a list to look through. Sweet!

Once a friend request is accepted, you’ll know about it with a rather loud (and I would say obnoxious) horn. There doesn’t seem to be any way to either disable the horn or change it, either. You can go to the friends tab and review who has accepted your requests, and review their profile (including any status message they have left). I also found moving from screen to screen exceptionally slow and inconsistent. Sometimes tapping a tab or button would result in a response after a period of time, and sometimes not, and often I had to wait a bit to find out which.

But, hey, we came to Game Center to game, right? Tap on the games tab and you find…nothing. There are no games. There’s no word yet on whether this is a software glitch, or a network issue with so many downloading OS 4.1 and using Game Center at once. As soon as there are games we’ll update you on how they play and what the automatching features are like. But it does not bode well that upon launch of the much touted social gaming network there are no games to play.