Trying to understand the GameDock for iPhone and iPad
Although it at the time of writing only has 260 backers, the GameDock for iPhone, iPad and iPod is over 80 per cent of the way to funding its Kickstarter project. As hard as I try, I just don’t get the point of the device. I last year wrote about iOS controllers, which at the time were fragmenting wildly. Today, the majority of controllers are iCade compatible, and yet the devices I’ve tested still exhibit massive fragmentation, largely due to the manner in which buttons are mapped.
Much of the reason for this is down to the original iCade’s set-up: a joystick and eight action buttons. Developers made their own decisions regarding which buttons mapped to which controls. You therefore find some games work with the left-most buttons and some with the right-most ones. For the original iCade and iCade Core, this doesn’t matter a great deal. The worst-case scenario is one rapidly aborted game with your on-screen guy getting killed as you figure out which buttons equate to jump and fire. iCade-compatible mobile devices, such as the iCade Mobile and Gametel aren’t nearly so lucky. With only four action buttons, many games become unplayable, substantially reducing the already smallish compatible selection. (Games aren’t automatically compatible with iCade—developers must specifically add support.)
The GameDock further reduces the number of action buttons to two, and so it’ll be a small miracle if many games work well with it. Additionally, the controllers are clearly modelled on NES controllers, which is a pretty good way to get sued by Nintendo, and the entire system is based around wires. You plug a wire from the GameDock into the TV, for video output, and the controllers plug into the dock itself. This might be kitsch and retro, but it also feels like a step back. To my mind, the future for iOS and gaming remains AirPlay and the Apple TV. It’s still not there yet—it’s too common to get just enough lag for games to feel wrong—but it makes more sense to me to use this system than one so solidly rooted in the 1980s.
I don’t mind the two buttons or the controllers, and I don’t think Nintendo cares much (so far, they haven’t bothered companies selling NES-style USB controllers), but whole setup seems strange. Put the iPhone into a dock. Connect a wire from the dock to the TV. Connect two wired controllers to the dock. It’s all so unnecessary.
If they had two products (a dock that allows simple a lag-free connection from your iPhone to the TV, and NES-style wireless controllers), I’d probably buy both. But the way it is now, I don’t see how I would ever use it.
@LKM: I’m not against the two buttons per se, but the lack of buttons will heavily impact on compatibility—and that is a concern. Having reviewed the GameTel (four face buttons) and tried to play platform games where jump was mapped to ‘start’ and fire to the left shoulder button, I shudder to think how few games will work with the GameDock. (It’s a pity there’s not a much stricter set-up for iCade games in general, but buttons appear to be assigned quite randomly.)
I have to agree, it seems daft to go for so few buttons at a time when apps are generally becoming more focused on multiple actions.
And the wires? Seems such a backward step. I could see potential hiccups getting FCC clearance for a wired device, let alone trying to make a wireless version with so many homes using that sort of tech now.