iGame Radio

It’s been a couple of weeks since the historic announcement from Apple revealing the iPad, and the reactions have been an interesting mix of heavy criticism and excitement. The heavy criticism stems mostly from the geek community, that seem to feel that they have been betrayed. Months of hype that at sometimes felt like the inevitable return of the Messiah (or the Jobsiah?), the iPad was far less than many of us perhaps fantasized, though in fact really not that far off the mark from what most analysts and the geek community in general had expected.

Meanwhile, many developers are crowing about the potential the iPad has to offer. For example, former Facebook iPhone developer Joe Hewitt believes that the iPhone’s OS still has a huge amount of potential that hasn’t been tapped. “I felt strongly that all Apple needed to do to revolutionize computing was simply to make an iPhone with a large screen.”

But, to quote one of my all-time favorite movies, “I didn’t make him for *you*!!”

Yes, indeed, Steve Jobs did *not* make the iPad for you and me, fellow members of the geek community. But for your mom, your dad, your grandfather, and my stepdaughter who most decidedly wishes to identify as anything but a geek (while she gleefully texts and gmails her way through life), this is the perfect device. These are the media consumers that will be attracted to the iPad. To quote iShoot developer Ethan Nicholas, “The iPad is a computer for people who don’t like computers…if you have managed to convince yourself that the iPad is a useless, locked-up DRM-laden failure of a ‘computer’ before even touching one, I have two words for you: My mom.”

And, hopefully, they will be attracted to the games that the iPad has to offer. We’ve already seen a few offerings of those possibilities in what both EA showed with Need for Speed and Gameloft showed with N.O.V.A. Many more have already piped up with me-toos of games that they intend to show up on the iPad as well. Others have listed out games that they want to see on the iPad, or speculated on games that would work well for the platform.

Remember that quote of Joe Hewitt’s? That bigger screen really does make a bigger difference. Aspyr Media put out a game early in the iPhone game rush called Buggled. It was a cute little game about trying to touch all the ladybugs on the screen in order, and you could play two person. Unfortunately, the iPhone screen is so small that what could be challenging fun ended up being frustrating. Not to mention how many times the phone kept falling from their hands. My kids got tired of it after a while.

This game on the iPad, however, would be a blast. With a larger screen, it will be easier to find where you need to place your fingers, and easier to expand the number of levels to include. Most importantly, the biggest frustration of the game, the threat of dropping your iPhone, would be removed. Place your iPad on your lap or table top. Include more players. FTW!

But, what about online games? Many are Flash based, and as we well know from the presentation last week, the little blue lego tells us that Flash has been banned from the sacred iPad screen. Ain’t Adobe pissed (enough to use the pr0n card, no less).

Or is it? Adobe had already announced an iPhone tool that would allow developers to create native iPhone applications using Flash. They are in the process of expanding this tool for multiple screen sizes to use on the iPad as well.

Then there’s HTML5. The next version of HTML seeks to reduce the need for proprietary plug-in based internet applications, such as Java and Flash. There are even some preliminary HTML5 platform games that have been created, although they are very rudimentary. These show the potential and power of this new version of the web’s basic markup language.

But none of this means the end of Flash, or Flash-based games. Even if more online games will be using Adobe’s iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad tool and even if more online games start using HTML5 with javascript for the foundation of their game development, you can be sure that Flash will be around for quite a while at least.

So, what’s the conclusion that we can reach? The iPhone has proved that you don’t need Flash to have a healthy mobile game scene. And Facebook has proved that Flash games are extremely popular online. Both can coexist, and I’m sure we’ll see a hell of a lot of great games to come from both sides.