Rant - The emerging iPod compatibility nightmare

The iPod Classic

You may recall that I "won" an iPod Classic at the Penny Arcade Child's Play Charity Auction. Actually, I overpaid a little for it, but it was for a good cause and it lit a fire for me to finally fix my broken iTunes library (long story).

I figured: 20 extra gigs of space and it will play Peggle. What's not to like?

Well, it turns out, a whole lot.

Charges
First of all, the system introduces a lot of backwards compatibility issues. You might not expect your original Xbox games to work on the Xbox 360 (and in many cases, you'd still be right). But you would expect an iPod game you bought a year ago, back when it was first introduced, to work on a brand new iPod - expecially if it had the audacity to be labeled a "classic." You'd also expect all of the music videos you bought from the iTunes Store to work.

In both cases, you may or may not be right.

I've been an iPod user since 2004, the year they started giving away free songs with Slurpees at 7-11. I picked up a couple of tracks, got hooked and started ripping my entire music library to iTunes. I continued to buy songs and the occasional music videos and games, plus I download virtually every freebie they offer. Among these, I bought Bejeweled, Zuma, Mini Golf, Mahjong, iQuiz and Vortex plus collections of music videos from Foo Fighters and Tori Amos (yeah, I have eclectic tastes).

Fast forward to last month when I went to load everything onto the iPod Classic. First of all, I was pleased to see that it came preloaded with iQuiz and Vortex - the full games, not cheesy demo versions. But that's where the good news stops. All of my other games were incompatible with this newer iPod. Turns out, there are are two classes of games in the iTunes Store:

• Playable on iPod Classic, iPod nano video and 5th generation iPod video
• Works on 5th generation iPod video only

This is a mess, as you can imagine, particularly for more casual players who may mistakenly purchase the games that don't work with their system.

In addition, I found that some old video podcasts and other content (even certain games, on occasion) cause the iPod Classic to spontaneously reboot. Also, the Foo Fighters videos work with the iPod Classic but the Tori Amos ones don't - they won't even copy to the device. Can I get a free upgrade to updated versions? Not as far as I can tell. Will I ever buy another video, movie or non-music product from the iTunes store? Probably not any time soon.

Remedy
I've complained for a long time that Microsoft should adopt Apple's model for DRM - which permits the user to authorize and revoke licenses from specific PCs - for the Xbox 360. Similarly, I think Apple should take a page from Microsoft's DRM playbook: If a customer purchases something from the Apple store, they should be entitled to redownload that exact same item and receive any free updates to it. In this way, if a music video or movie is re-encoded in a better format, or a game is updated to play on newer hardware, the customer should be allowed to get the update as long as they are using a PC with the same active DRM authorization.

Community service
On to the good news. I purchased Peggle and Phase, a rhythm game from Harmonix. Peggle is basically just Peggle. No new challenges or anything. You simply use the clickwheel to aim, which works great. If you ever wanted to play Peggle on the go, this is a great option for $5 (assuming you have a compatible iPod and no expectations that the game will work with future Apple hardware).

If you're a Guitar Hero fan, there still isn't a portable version with frets and a strum bar - but Phase is an interesting though simplistic alternative. It's more like Harmonix' earlier games, Frequency and Amplitude. You tap out the rhythm by pressing left, center and right on the clickwheel and occasionally collect streams of "notes" by sliding your finger along the wheel itself. It's a nice diversion.

The really cool part of this game is that you can play along to any audio file in your library. So if you want to play the Red vs. Blue theme or Bunny's "Box in a Box" or even a chapter from your favorite audiobook, knock yourself out. All you do is add the songs you want to a special Phase playlist and they'll be converted and sync'd to your iPod. Worth noting: The first time I tried this, it didn't work but I emptied the playlist, resync'd and then added the songs back and it finally converted them.

Verdict
If you're new to iPods, the Classic is a good choice - apart from the occasional spontaneous reboot. But if you are upgrading and have a lot of purchased videos and games, it may suck to be you. But at least you'll have that cool cover flow feature to entertain you when you find that some of the the stuff you paid for cannot.

-=Gamewatcher