It’s just SO UNFAIR!

Earlier today, Apple took its store down for two hours to add a single product (see How to update your online store, the Apple way for more on that) and, when it returned, large, white cats were everywhere. Yes, Apple had announced that Mac OS X 10.6—Snow Leopard—will start shipping on August 28. And already, Mac users and journos are right behind the company, whining about various things, and so here are three helpful tips.

1. Calling Snow Leopard a ‘service pack’ makes you look stupid

Mac OS X 10.6 has few show-stopping features as far as end-users are concerned—there’s no Quick Look or Spotlight equivalent—but it has plenty to offer. Under the hood, huge chunks of the system have been gutted and rewritten. You’ll get several GB of hard drive space back (great for laptop users), a machine that’ll be faster (meaning this update is like getting a newer Mac for naff-all outlay), Exchange support, and great refinements, such as Dock Exposé.

This is a major upgrade, not a bug-fix, and I suspect only the fact most of the changes are transparent to end users stopped Apple charging full-whack for it.

2. Complaining about the ‘upgrade’ price makes you look stupid

Do you Tiger users really think Apple was going to let you leapfrog Leopard and update to Snow Leopard for £25/$29? If so, you really are crazy. [Update: Wired confirmed Snow Leopard will install right over Tiger, although this possibly breaches the EULA.] And for everyone whining about how Apple’s ‘forcing’ Tiger users to upgrade via a ‘hellishly expensive’ box-set that includes software they don’t need (the £129/$169 Mac Box Set bundles Snow Leopard, iLife and iWork), here’s a tip: buy Leopard instead.

Seriously—it really is that simple. Stop moaning about evil Apple, and nip over to Amazon and grab Leopard (at the time of writing, $93 in the USA and £69 in the UK) along with Snow Leopard, and you’ll be spared the horrors of the Mac Box Set, with all its iLife and iWork goodness, you poor dears.

3. Complaining that you just got a new Mac two days ago and so it’s SO UNFAIR that Apple’s releasing Snow Leopard right now and WAH WAH WAH WAH WAH makes you look stupid

Apple runs Up To Date, giving anyone who grabbed a Mac since June 8 the chance to upgrade for £7.95/$9.95, if they bother to fill in and send an order form within 90 days of buying their Mac. Moan about this and the Mac Box Set and call Snow Leopard a service pack and we hear Steve Jobs himself will come round to your house and punch you in the face—twice if you’re British and rattle on about exchange rate injustices.

This has been a Revert to Saved public service announcement. As you were.

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.

So there I was at the cinema yesterday, bracing myself for a hateful YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A BABY’S RATTLE AND THEN USE THE RATTLE TO KILL A POLICEMAN AND STEAL HIS CAR AND THEN USE THAT CAR TO RAM-RAID THE TOWER OF LONDON AND STEAL THE CROWN JEWELS advert, offering a typically slimy, inaccurate representation of reality and law, trying to create an analogy with film bootlegging, when, surprisingly, it didn’t happen.

Instead, I got Martin Freeman affably thanking me for coming to the cinema and asking nicely if I’d perhaps let the staff know if someone was ‘camcordering’ the movie, because, really, that’s not a very nice thing to do, is it?

Aside from the idiot copywriter who decided that ‘camcorder’ could be used as a verb (nous camcordon, vous camcordez), this was a pretty good ad, and, in a tip to irony corner, far more persuasive than the braindead YOU WOULDN’T STEAL legalese crap cinemas have been shoving down our throats for the past few years.

So, please take this across to DVD ville, rather than that moron ironmonger, and make it skippable, and then I won’t hate you, media producers.

O2’s been criticised for treating iPhone users with contracts like everyone else and forcing them to honour said contracts or buy them out. With O2 having set a precedent on the move from the original iPhone to 3G, I have some sympathy with user expectations not being met, but understand O2’s reasoning. However, my experience over the last week in the Pay & Go space (and, frankly, O2’s now very regular network outages) has removed any lingering doubt that the company needs a slap.

My story begins last year, and ends with some ‘O2 stupid’. Last year, I bought a 3G iPhone on Pay & Go, because I make few calls via mobile and figured it’d be cheaper in the long run. Prior to the Pay & Go pricing becoming official, I noted how it went up by £60, but O2 added an extra six months of internet bolt-on. Essentially, O2 got more money up front and presumably hoped you’d not use the bolt-on that much, thereby generating more profits per Pay & Go device. As a consumer, this made no odds to me, since I’d be buying the bolt-on anyway. However, I had, as far as I was concerned, paid up front for 12 months of usage.

Clearly, though, I’m a total idiot. I assumed I’d be able to retain remaining bolt-on time in some manner when transferring the phone. I’m in the market for a Pay & Go 3GS and plan to give the 3G to my wife. Surely, I thought, I’d get to keep my remaining time or transfer it?

My first email to O2 revealed that bolt-ons are tied directly to SIM cards. I was told that I could buy a 3GS and my wife would have my remaining internet time on the 3G. Something in the curt nature of the email started alarm bells ringing, and so I asked for further clarification regarding transferring numbers, and a rather large snag became apparent:

“If you buy a new iPhone and transfer your existing number on the new SIM card your current SIM card will be permanently disconnected,” said O2. “If this happens we won’t be able to transfer the free Bolt On to your new SIM card. Also you wife won’t be able to transfer her number to this SIM card.”

O2’s wonderful suggestion to me is this:

“I would suggest that you wait until the free Bolt On gets ended and then buy the new iPhone.”

It seems O2 is treating the bolt-on as a freebie that the company gives you when you buy an iPhone because O2 is made of fluffy bunnies, and not because it’s bundled into the device’s price, and not because you’ve actually paid real cash money for it. My assumption is also that I’ll have to—for no good reason—buy a new SIM for the 3G so that my wife can use it, or just jailbreak the phone (which I don’t want to do).

I’ve got three months left on my bolt-on. I’m now hoping the rumours are true and the announcement of the end of O2’s iPhone monopoly comes around that point, because its Pay & Go attitude strikes me as unbelievably dumb and has really rubbed me up the wrong way.

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.