Two New iPod Games… It's Strange…

The other day, I was playing chess on my Palm Pilot, and I think to myself, "Wouldn't it be cool if they make a chess game for the iPod?"

A moment later, I think, "You know what, I haven't played Backgammon in a while."

Tuesday morning, I check out the iTunes Store, where lo and behold, there's a new iPod game: Chess & Backgammon Classics. This was like wishful thinking realized. I instantly bought and downloaded it. The controls are a bit weird on the iPod, but given the limitations of the iPod's click wheel, they try to make moving the chess and backgammon pieces as simple as possible by limiting your actions to legal moves. That can be said for both games.

The other game that was released is called Naval Battle: Mission Commander. It's like Milton Bradley's Battleship, but different.

Chess and Backgammon for iPod. They must have been reading my mind.

Speaking of which, sometimes, it seems like you can influence your iPod to play a certain song while shuffling so that it plays sooner than it would otherwise play. Here's what I did.

1. Began playing a song from a playlist, making sure that under Settings, Shuffle Songs was selected.
2. Go back to the playlist that's playing and highlight another song in the playlist.
3. Set the hold switch.

After one other song, the iPod played the highlighted song.

Then again, I tried this again with no success.

Either it only works some of the time, or I have such an intimate knowledge of my iPod that I know what it will play before it plays it.