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, I could only find two) include:

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?: http://ipodsoft.com/files/xgamerx/istory/istories/Millionaire%20Vol.%201.zip

Okay, so it’s not precisely an official license, and it has a paltry amount of questions, but this recreation of Regis Philbin’s greatest suit-and-shirt-matching moment has sound, a clear objective, and works into the quiz format that seems to function best in the very limited Notes structure. In other words, it’s kinda fun the first time.

Harry Potter Adventure: http://ipodsoft.com/files/xgamerx/istory/istories/HarryPotter.zip

This unofficial adaptation of the Brunching Shuttlecocks’ also unofficial Harry Potter choose-your-own-adventure humor site is both amusing and very unofficial. If you were a fan of those Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone Fighting Fantasy books in the early ’80s (and who wasn’t?), it works very well as a piece of fluffy, slight interactive fiction.

If you’re really considering buying a game, the XOPod site (http://www.xoplay.com/xoplay.php) sells several choose-your-own-adventure titles at prices of up to $15 each. Titles include Herbert’s Big Adventure (very Leisure Suit Larry-esque) and Bum-Rags To Riches (with a suitably bizarre illustration) to tempt your fancy. Honestly, though, you’re paying for the novelty of playing a new game on your iPod. Because you can recreate that experience by downloading the free games, and because the pay titles aren’t that much more sophisticated, you may be okay staying with the free content unless you have the need to collect every possible game.

Making Your Own iPod Games

There’s only one tool to build your own pseudo-games on iPod right now: iStory Creator (http://ipodsoft.com/). This completely unofficial software works only on Windows and, bizarrely enough, requires the Microsoft .NET Framework, a significant irony given the target platform.

It does work, and it definitely makes some of the basic content-creation tasks a little easier, especially organizing things and cranking out stories in a hurry. You can still do everything you want in a text editor, however, so it’s not a requirement.

The iPod Notes format

If you want to get down to the nitty-gritty and do some more fun stuff, see the iPod Note Reader documentation on the official Apple site (http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ipod/ipodnotereader.pdf). However, there aren’t many details because there’s so little to the Notes format. You have two tools at your disposal for creating crazy interactive stories:

Text links: You can have as many text links as you like within each individual Notes .TXT screen. More than one of them can point to the same place, too. If you’re running a quiz program, you may want to point three of the links to the false.TXT text file for that question and the other to the true.TXT file. The syntax of a link is:

 <a href="15.txt">Selection 1</a>

where 15.txt is the next file to load, and Selection 1 is the name of the link to appear on the screen.

Music references: Because the iPod is a music player at heart, you can insert links in Notes to songs on your player. You’ll have to import these songs onto the iPod before you start playing the game, but when they’re there, you can play little snippets as sound effects, speech, and so on. These will play after the player makes a selection. The particular syntax is:

<a href="ipod:music?song=songname&NowPlaying=false">Song</a>

where songname is the actual song title on the iPod.

Tricks and limitations

In addition to the actual iPod Notes features, there are a few important caveats to keep in mind:

You have a maximum of 1,000 notes. If you try to emulate an inventory system by crafting slightly different room descriptions to remember which item is where, you’ll soon run out of locations.
Notes have a maximum size of 4KB each, so War and Peace-style descriptions are out.
Full pathnames must fit into 255 characters, which seems large, but be careful if you’re trying to structure your adventure using lots of lengthy subdirectories. If you exceed this length, you’ll see no error message. The documentation notes:

Files whose pathnames are too long are not loaded, and no error is reported.

A short example

What would I be if I failed to show how to write your own game? Here’s a template you can use to start. Fill in the parenthesized words to create your own text adventure!

You are (verb) in a (location).  You see a (adjective) (noun one) on the
(noun two).  A (portal) leads (direction).
What do you do?

1.  <a href="page2.txt">Pick up the (noun one).</a>
2.  <a href="page3.txt">Go (direction).</a>

Fill in the blanks, save this as page1.txt, write pages 2 and 3, copy them all to your iPod, and go! Of course, you may want to brush up on your interactive fiction ( [Hack #85] ) skills first, though.

Limitations Breed Creativity

Now that you know the simple syntax of iPod Notes, what can you do? You’ll have to work around some severe gameplay limitations. You can’t save data or select links randomly. Every move happens when the player chooses an option. Maybe you can go crazy and create chess in less than 1,000 notes. An enterprising hacker may be able to use ASCII art to fake the look of actual graphics.

Still, until someone works out how to alter or add to the built-in games without breaking everything, these are the best homebrew games there are for the iPod. Go ahead, improve the art.