Hello, first post here! A regular reader, I registered to contribute this. With new generations of iPhones and iPod Touches offering increasing performance or visual quality, some of us old-timers (I got my 1st gen iPod Touch eons ago, in 2008) are getting left behind. Some games have to be downgraded (Real Racing?) to accomodate older devices, some don't run as smoothly (ugh Dungeon Hunter 2's cinematics), some don't even run at all (hello, 7th Guest). I don't propose you spend inordinate amounts of time reviewing every game on every gen, but it would be useful if we could get some kind of one-word pointer on how playable a game is on all generations (something like unplayable/choppy/ok? Or a red/orange/green color code? I don't know). Case in point: 7th Guest requires iOS4 (which is not available on 1st gen iPod Touches) an information that was missing from your review - though my bad for missing it on the App Store. Really, you wouldn't even need to review it yourselves, the devs could probably just tell you. I rely a lot on your reviews to determine which timesink I'll throw myself into next, but this uncertainty on whether I'll be able to enjoy it does give me pause. I'm not sure how many of us still have ye olde 1st gens / non-3GS devices, but I think it's not entirely unreasonable to assume that not a whole lot of people will buy a $500 upgrade every two or 3 years. Cheers!
I definitely think at this point people who still are regularly using first generation devices are in the extreme minority. Like most (all?) portable electronics, iPods and iPhones are basically disposable and come packaged with a healthy helping of Apple's planned obsolescence. It's not really realistic for us to test games on every hardware configuration. I tried it when Sonic 4 came out and it took an incredible amount of time. I think your best plan of attack might just be reading the forums and waiting to see if someone with a similarly ancient device chimes in.
