If you think of an iPod Touch as a portable music and movie player that happens to play games, it's terrific. But as a game system first, iPod Touch is wanting. After all, though there are thousands of games available for $2 a pop if not free, but a few of them are actually good and even less are great.

You get what you pay for, of course, but to refer to iPod Touch as a truly competitive gaming platform just because it has a thousand games is like saying your local convenience store competes with Baskin-Robins, both boast more than 1000 flavors, but one is hawking 5 cent bubble-gum, the other talks $5 ice cream cones.

Truth is, most iPod Touch games are really really short and therefore priced appropriately. But as often as not they're also glitchy, half-baked ditties that take longer to update than they do to play. Or they're derivative knock offs of one good game or t'other, but good luck trying to find the original McCoy everyone talked about for 15 minutes last week.

The thing is, with profit margins ranging from laughable to nil, lone game developers tend to release games on iPod Touch for a quick buck, while development studios look to iPod as loss leaders to a more expensive suite of not-necessarily-good games, or as a marketing ploy to gauge your demographical user statistics, or or as a proving ground for development on more popular systems like DS, PSP, WiiWare, Xbox Live Arcade or causal PC game hubs.

If portable music, movies and grass roots game R&D is your thing, go nuts. And while you're at it, here are three of the few spectacular iPod Touch games.


Skee-ball ($1)
The classic ball, ramp and cup target-bowling game found at fairground midways everywhere gets the App treatment and adds a little twist - or a tilt, to be precise. A crisp, clean game from Freeverse, Skee-ball has you flicking a ball up a ramp and launching it off the end in hopes of landing it in a cradle or cup worth 10 - 100 points. Unlike the real deal, the Freeverse version also lets you tilt the board, adding a bit of English to your roll along its way. Fast, simple and fun, Skee-ball is the ideal interactive distraction for that 5 minute line up at the bank. String 50 rounds together and poof, there's the bus ride taken care of.


Peggle ($5)
PopCap Games' dazzling game of ricochet using balls shot from a cannon and watching inertia and gravity take care the rest as they plink-ploink-plop off pegs splayed out in plethora of ploink-ready patterns, Peggle is the perfect way to waste away a few minutes or a few hours on your touchy-feelie iPod. As a matter of fact, the same can be said of any PopCap Games game for iPods; the company only does casual games and not one of is lousy.


Firemint Real Racing ($5)
For all its false pretensions as a gaming system, the iPod Touch is actually a really good portable platform for racing games - probably the best, in fact. It's tilt/gyration sensitive sensibilities make steering a car feel utterly natural. It helps, of course, when you're steering a thing of beauty, which is exactly what Firemint Real Racing delivers. What's more, it delivers lots of it, dozens of cars and tracks and scores of events to push though. Great fun, as serious as you want it to be or not at all, depending on how much time you spend with it. Hint: try lots and lots.
 
 

It's true: Quality kids games are hard to find. Sure, there's lots out there, but few that are both good and genuinely kid-friendly. Fortunately, GamersGate online games portal has an entire section dedicated to quality family fare. Go ahead, check it out!