Requiring the remote for all games kills any game that wanted to support the controller only, say good buy to anything that cannot be played with that touch pad and require some accuracy. Restricting the app size sucks, again killing any advanced games with assets that cannot be downloaded on demand. Frigging what is up with basic UI things like the keyboard? I know Apple are backwards as fook in many ways, but how did anyone think a straight line was good? It takes forever to type anything out. It's a mess and a far cry from what we wanted to see which was a sudo console thing.
The UI drove a lot of the design of the simple game I made. At first, I intentionally did not include a way to input your name because I wanted to keep it very simple. It only showed Player 1, 2, etc. Feedback asked for it and I found that the dictation is surprisingly good. I tried lots of names in testing and had almost 100% success. So, that's in the game now. Anyway, give that a whirl instead of using the keyboard.
I disagree about one line text unput. I think it's brilliant, and I'm much faster at it than some square or qwerty order. It takes two swipes for any letter, you have play/pause for Caps, and long press for delete.
A "sudo console" is what you wanted to see. Most people just want a better device for streaming media, which Apple TV delivers -- voice search alone was worth the upgrade. As a pseudo-console, I've found that it works surprisingly well. I got the Hori controller at the same time as the Apple TV, and I find it pretty excellent (for a controller -- I've always preferred mouse/keyboards). Pretty much every game I've played supports the Hori, and if the experience is in someway hampered by the fact that the game has to support the remote as well, it's not obvious to me. Most games automatically switch their tutorials when they detect a controller, buttons are mapped our logically, and games like MC5 use primary and secondary triggers as you would expect on a PS4. As to the 200 megabyte initial download, it's a non-issue: I've been playing 1 GB+ games without a problem. All that said, an Apple TV is not a real console and it's not meant to be one. You cannot expect to be playing Dark Souls and COD -- and that's a good thing. If you want to play those games, get a PS4 or a gaming PC. Gaming on the Apple TV is for folks like me: I'm 49 years old, have a ton of responsibilities at work, and have a family that take up the bulk of my free time. What I want is to play AG Drive on a huge screen for 20-30 minutes at time. Spending $400 on a console that plays games that I will never enjoy properly is just dumb. If there's anything that is really holding back the Apple TV as a gaming device, it's the fact that the install base is still very small, especially compared to iPhones and iPads. Until that changes, I expect that developers will privilege other platforms. But that's just the way the world works.
Pretty much spot on. And supporting the remote, while not the ideal situation, isn't the deal breaker you'd think. All we have to do is support basic play with the remote, nothing more, that's Apples stipulation. It's fairly straightforward to have any game functional with that remote. You've basically got the equivalent of two analog sticks (touch pad and motion) and a couple of buttons. You can get anything running at a basic level with that if you put the time in and then you have a proper setup for those who want to play properly with an MFI controller. And if you were, for instance, making a COD style game. You can be pretty sure you're target market is going to have an MFI controller anyway. So it's not that much of a big deal. But at the end of the day it's a media streamer that happens to play games. Gaming is not its primary function, so in that respect I don't think it's doing too badly so far.
I'm really bummed about how this Apple TV strategy has turned out. I thought being able to install apps was really going to make this a go to device for me (I've owned two previous versions of Apple TV, but was most excited about changes for this current version). I thought by now I'd be playing 75% of my iOS games on the Apple TV, instead of maybe only 4-5 games at the most. I expected universal games to all be able to be played on iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. I have to believe that Apple insisting the remote to work for all games as a requirement has to be the deal breaker here - otherwise all of the games which currently play on my iPhone or iPads with a MiFi controller I would already be playing on my Apple TV, at least that's what I was hoping for. Do I expect a pseudo-console from it? Of course not. But just like I eagerly awaited the iPad to be able to play larger screen versions of iPhone games, I was looking forward to Apple TV to be able to play larger screen versions of iPad games, etc. I'm not expecting anything different than the same games I play on mobile now - 20 minute gaming sessions at a time - except on nice large screen holding only a controller. As far as a streaming device, someone got me an Amazon Fire TV as a gift and I find that it actually loads Netflix or HBO Go in less than half the time my Apple TV takes so I use it probably more often. But I do keep hoping that Amazon allows Sev Zero to be ported to iOS, man I totally dig that game!
