I’m a retrogamer at heart. Although I do now and again enjoy modern games, most of those that bite are old-fashioned in many ways. This is probably why I’m such a big fan of iOS as a gaming platform—it’s like the 1980s all over again (low prices, tons of novelty in games, individuals putting out what they want to rather than what focus groups ask for).

However, it’s interesting to see that ticking all the boxes isn’t always enough. A case in point is Earth Defender, a 59p game I downloaded for almost certain inclusion in an article I’m currently writing about cheapo iPod games. The grabs on the game’s App Store page looked great—screens full of swooping neon ships. The gameplay looked like it mashed together Missile Command and Galaxian. What could go wrong?

Plenty, as it turns out. Earth Defender isn’t bad, but it’s also not great. The levels are too long and become a little tedious. And the game’s far too easy—I would have completed it on my first go had the game not erased my supposedly saved game. As it was, I completed it the first time I seriously tried to.

The irony is that Earth Defender therefore, despite being a retro title at heart, ends up being more like modern titles I dislike: dull and repetitive but inoffensive gameplay, with a layer of gloss overlaid.

For daily iPhone/iPad/iPod touch app and game reviews, follow @iphonetiny on Twitter, or bookmark iphonetiny.com.

I read ZDNet’s article on RearType a couple of days ago, but it’s remained in my mind, right next to a 500-metre-tall neon sign that says, in all-caps, WHAT THE HELL WERE THEY THINKING?

I’m all for innovation, and I fully understand that some people hate software-based keyboards on tablets, but Microsoft Research’s answer is to split the keyboard and put it on the back of the device. Never mind that this will require a ton more retraining and muscle memory shifts than using a virtual keyboard; never mind the fact that it will cause RSI sufferers to scream and non-RSI sufferers to become RSI sufferers and then scream; never mind that this makes the device itself unwieldy, ugly, and also forces it to be used in a specific orientation (unlike, say, the iPad, which doesn’t care which way up it is).

I was half expecting the white paper to be dated April 1, and the introductory text to be “fooled you, idiot-face”, but, no, it’s dated September 2010, which is presumably the same date every single person involved in the project took leave of their senses.

On Every time someone buys a Mac, Steve Jobs drowns a kitten, ‘blair’ commented: “It is amusing that they refer to it as PC vs Mac, rather than Windows vs Mac, as if they own the PC world. I own a PC, but it runs Linux, not rubbish Windows.”

This nicely highlights one of the problems Microsoft has when trying to fight Apple. Apple owns everything, so it can advertise a complete solution. Because Microsoft is peddling software, it can’t. That’s presumably the main reason why Apple’s website has loads of pictures of shiny computers running its software, and Microsoft’s equivalent has a strange woman who looks like she wants to leap out of the screen and bite off your nose.

That said, it’s curious that Microsoft offers this many screen grabs of Windows 7 on its anti-Mac page: none at all. Words are all very well, but showing why you think your stuff is best makes more sense, unless, of course, your arguments stop holding up when you try to do so.

The title of this post isn’t strictly true, but then neither is much of Microsoft’s bonkers new PC vs Mac page, which tells you “what you need to know” if you’re “deciding between a PC and a Mac”.

What you need to know, apparently, is that Macs do not allow fun, are complicated, don’t work in school and business environments, don’t enable you to share documents, are incompatible with almost everything, and don’t provide you with any choice.

Specific warnings from Microsoft include “the mouse works differently” (the site doesn’t elaborate—presumably, mice for Macs, including ones you can use on your PC, need to be used vertically or something to work with Mac OS X), the need to “buy a separate hardware dongle to plug your Mac into a standard VGA projector” (from the Stone Age), you needing to “manually set up printer sharing” (clicking a checkbox is, after all, terribly hard work), and the ‘fact’ that “Apple’s productivity suite file formats won’t open in Microsoft Office on PCs”. Amusing that Microsoft couldn’t bring itself to mention iWork, nor note that it happily exports to PDF and Office file formats.

The sad thing is, there are some decent points within the mess. Snap is briefly mentioned, and it’s a genuinely handy UI feature Mac OS X lacks (unless you buy Cinch or SizeUp from Irradiated Software). PCs are also far superior for games, a point almost glossed over due to Microsoft’s desire to spread as much disinformation as possible.

What the site also says to me is that Microsoft is fighting the wrong battle. This is the campaign it should have launched at least two years ago, when Apple was happily flinging its awful ‘I’m a Mac, I’m a PC’ ads everywhere. But like with its smartphone operating system, Microsoft seems content to clone something Apple did two years ago. In the meantime, Apple itself has a much smarter offering than Microsoft: Why you’ll love a Mac.

Apple’s website looks much, much nicer than Microsoft’s effort; it shows off the kit and the OS, and the front page has quick, simple bullet-point-oriented reasons why Apple thinks Macs are superior, most of which are to do with differentiation rather than defence. Importantly, Apple only rarely feels the need to dismiss the ‘opposition’. So when the site talks about multitouch trackpads with four-finger gestures, it doesn’t feel the need to go “and you don’t get that on most PCs, which, incidentally, are rubbish and mostly smell of cabbage”. At the most, the site simply says features are unique to Macs, or notes that third-party PC solutions are required for the kind of accessibility features that are bundled with a Mac.

Microsoft could and should learn from Apple’s latest effort—and it might be a good idea this time to not take two years to respond.

Like every other publication with a digital mouth, the BBC reports that Mark Papermaster has left Apple. He was largely responsible for various aspects of the iPhone 4 and so, of course, everyone’s now speculating that Jobs fired him for the antenna disaster (you know, the one where the iPhone 4 actually has a superior signal to the 3GS, unless you hold it in a very specific way, whereupon reception can sometimes drop somewhat—DISASTER!).

The reason I cite the BBC report is because it’s typical of the copy-and-paste reporting on subjects such as this. The assumption is Papermaster was canned due to iPhone 4 issues; the report calls the iPhone 4 “troubled” (the biggest ‘trouble’ with the device is that Apple can’t make the damn things fast enough, so finding one available to buy isn’t easy); it notes Consumer Reports saying it won’t recommend the iPhone 4, but omits the publication’s hypocrisy on recommending other devices with the exact same ‘issue’.

The WSJ, naturally, digs a little deeper, claiming that the departure was “driven by a broader cultural incompatibility” and that Papermaster had “lost the confidence of Mr. Jobs months ago and hasn’t been part of the decision-making process for some time”. It also claims it was Jobs, not Papermaster, who made the final decision to press ahead with the external antenna, even once Apple was aware of the ‘risks’ associated with that design.

Regardless of the truth behind Papermaster’s exit, anyone not clamouring to write iPhone 4 link-bait can and probably should make the following predictions regarding where things go from here:

1. The Papermaster story will continue to bubble around the tech and mainstream press, in cut-and-paste fashion;
2. The press will continue to refer to the iPhone 4 like some kind of poo on a shoe, repeatedly rattling on about all its problems and how this could spell disaster for Apple;
3. The general public won’t care and the iPhone 4 will continue to fly off the shelves (real and virtual) as fast as Apple can make them.