Play Games on Your iPod
Make and add simple games to your playlist.
It’s commendable of Apple to avoid the whole convergence idea by making the iPod a good music player and not an amazing portable video game system with PDA functions and a built-in phone. However, this move has annoyed those contrary types who want to play games on the iPod. Fortunately, the perverse rule is in full effect; you can now download and even create your own basic, choose-your-own-adventure homebrew games for the iPod.
The iPod Gaming Concept
The trick of playing new iPod games comes from subverting the Notes format, also known as Museum Mode. By design, this mode presents individual pages with hypertext-style links. The original intent may have been to store album information or perhaps reminder notes. Whatever the reason, it’s easy enough to offer multiple-choice stories in a hyperlinked tree of pages.
Warning
Caveat hacker! At the time of writing, only the third-generation iPods and the mini-iPods officially support the Notes mode. It appears that you can update older hardware to newer firmware, although Apple will probably never support this. Otherwise, if you have an earlier version of the iPod, you won’t have Notes mode, and you can’t try out any of this stuff. D’oh.
Playing Existing iPod Games
The iPodSoft site (http://www.ipodsoft.com/index.php?/istories) is the main free area for iPod gaming. They’ve compiled a list of the only free games available online right now. Particular highlights (yes, yes, ...
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