Perhaps the most frustrating thing about gaming on the iPhone and iPod touch is how close it is to perfection. Apple’s ecosystem is excellent, providing a low barrier to entry for developers, which encourages crazy, innovative ideas full of fun and novelty. For the consumer, dozens of great games arrive on the App Store every day, and are often priced at a third of 8-bit budget titles for the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64—from 1985.

However, there’s a fly in the ointment that continues to defecate everywhere—Apple’s lack of providing any means of backing up game save/progress data. In Apple’s world, deleting an app means pretending you’ve never used it. Spent ten hours battling through Peggle or GTA? Accidentally deleted a game, or removed a huge app on purpose, to get something else on your device? Too bad: next time you boot the game, it’ll start from scratch.

In the modern era, this simply isn’t acceptable at the best of times. For Apple, it’s an embarrassment, since it aligns this aspect of its gaming alongside the cheapest and nastiest Nintendo DS carts, which don’t offer any kind of battery back-up. With news that iPhone OS 4 would scrap the equally dreadful ‘rate on delete’ dialog box, I was hoping it would be replaced with a dialog that would enable you to save your progress for the app being removed. iTunes would then offer to restore your app’s data the next time you installed it.

With iPad gaming, this issue’s only going to get worse. Looking at the App Store, it’s clear apps in general are going to hugely increase in size—interactive book The Elements: A Visual Exploration clocks in at a whopping 1.74GB (US iTunes Store link). With the iPad screen being much larger than the iPhone’s, games will of course follow suit, due to the huge increase in asset size.

In the long run, iPad users will be faced with a stark choice: delete a game and all the progress they’ve made, in order to buy something new, or just avoid buying anything further. Already I hear from people with iPhones doing the latter, and that will eventually impact on Apple’s sales—unless it has the common sense to provide some way of saving progress for later restoration. Perhaps Game Center, Apple’s gaming social network in iPhone OS 4, will include such functionality. If not, it’ll remain clear that while Apple’s continuing to aggressively target gamers, it certainly doesn’t understand them.

Before this mini-rant, I should point out that I like Slide To Play. It’s one of the few iPod gaming websites that’s got things largely right, and it offers reviews that don’t make me want to claw out my own eyes with a spoon—something of a rarity online these days.

Sometimes, though, a whopper of a clanger slips through the net, and such that it is with the site’s review of Snood. “Who can resist a game filled with disembodied cartoon heads? Certainly not us,” it begins, which we rather liked and had a little chuckle about. And then it all goes horribly wrong at the start of the next paragraph: “Snood has been around for over ten years, and has been available on PC, Mac and Game Boy Advance. A game this good is always in danger of being copied, and Snood has definitely had its share of knockoffs made, including South Park Snood for Mac.” (My emphasis.)

Yes, you did read that right. In a review of Snood, a reviewer said: “A game this good is always in danger of being copied.” I’m sure the Pazuru Boburu (Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move) guys think much the same, what with Snood being a blatant and massive rip-off of Taito’s game. I can only hope the writer was being ironic, but I somehow doubt it.

What this likely shows is how short people’s memories are when it comes to videogames, and also how a younger generation of writers is seemingly unaware of anything that happened before 1995. If I had 2p for every time I’ve read about some iPod shooter being a rip-off of Chillingo’s iDracula, despite iDracula being a straight update to Eugene Jarvis’s Robotron (from 1982), I’d… well, I wouldn’t be rich, but I’d be able to nip over to the garage and buy myself a couple of Double Deckers, and let the chocolately goodness take away the pain.

Stuart Dredge’s iPhone Games Bulletin just ran a story on Edge magazine once again placing itself firmly in bizarre-o-land. Despite its constant claims at being at the forefront of gaming, it’s made a bunch of stunning screw-ups over the years, the most obvious perhaps being an off-hand dismissal of WarioWare (which got 7/10, a rating Edge has tried ever since to remove from the history books, both by arguing that the review was written by a poor widdle overworked freelancer, and by running 46-page articles on why Made in Wario—the Japanese name for the game that Edge insists on using over the localised one—is so good).

Gosh, that was a long sentence, wasn’t it? Almost as long as one from Edge. Anyway, anyone who’s been keeping tabs on my work will know that I’ve become a total iPod gaming fan-boy of late. The reason isn’t some insane, misguided love for Apple, but the simple fact that iPod (as in touch, or the iPhone) is the only gaming platform that matters.

Ignoring for a second the problems surrounding the App Store (most of which don’t concern the general public), not least the rush to 59p/99 cents that every publisher seems to be taking part in, the simple fact is that since I got an iPhone, I’ve barely used any other games console. The App Store offers thousands of games, most of which are by independent developers, offering highly individual takes on gaming. Because of the nature of Apple handhelds—touchscreen; accelerometer; no tactile buttons—you can’t easily port stuff over from other platforms, and the best games therefore take direct advantage of the system.

To a great extent, iPod gaming is like a return to the 1980s, but with modern technology. Independent developers can make and sell a game, without pandering to the needs of focus groups. These games are then easily accessible (simply download from the App Store), affordable (even ‘expensive’ iPod games are about six quid) and often innovative. Games like Eliss are genuinely doing something new, and I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about a videogames system.

This is why it’s so galling—so hugely irritating—that Future’s supposedly forward-thinking industry bible has once again got it wrong. In its Edge Award For Interactive Innovation 2009 Shortlist, you’d think at least one iPod game would make the cut. You’d think that the magazine, despite its inexplicably tiny amount of iPod gaming coverage, would notice one of the genuine futures of gaming, and champion it, shouting from the rooftops.

But no. Instead, the publication specifically singles out iPod gaming, stating “the games made for these environments are still nascent” (And why is that a bad thing? I seem to recall arcade games development was once ‘nascent’, but we still hail Defender, Robotron and Missile Command as classics) and “It’s difficult to think of an iPhone game that truly exemplifies the singular abilities of its host”. Really? I can think of at least a dozen, but perhaps this merely shows how Edge is stuck in the past rather than the future, if it’d rather showcase the likes of Far Cry 2—an impressive but incremental update on the FPS genre—over products that genuinely innovate.

Many gaming platforms are suddenly finding themselves becoming increasingly irrelevant as new formats take hold. It seems Edge is going the same way.