First impressions of Game Center

Well, Apple’s Game Center has been out for around a day now, and the list of supported games is steadily growing. Top rated games such as Real Racing and Flight Control join Ms. Pac Man and the original Namco title in the list of games you can now hoard achievements in, whilst the most popular iOS titles, Doodle Jump and Angry Birds, are yet to make an appearance. Cro-Mag Rally gets the distinction of being the first game to support multiplayer through the service – all the other current games (at time of writing) just add achievement and leaderboard support.

So, disregarding the pretty small library at launch, here is a little list of some of my other gripes with the service, and what Apple could or should possibly change in future updates:

1. The UI – it’s such a dramatic shift from the rest of the GUI within iOS, right down to the inclusion of Times New Roman as the default font (I thought Apple were all about Helvetica?) I know it’s meant to resemble a casino table (that is what it’s meant to resemble, right?) but I personally feel it looks a bit garish
2. No Automatic Game Searching – at the time of writing, Game Center will only display the games it supports after you’ve opened them up on your device, there’s no auto-searching just yet. It’s not a massive deal, but it’s a bit of an annoyance when you’ve downloaded an update to an app that clearly states that it now supports the service.
3. You Can’t Send Messages to Friends – as far as I’m aware, there doesn’t seem to be any way to get in touch with a friend on the service – sure, you can view games you have in common, and even launch  said game from the page, but with Apple supposedly trying to break into the social scene (read: Ping), you’d think it would be featured.
4. You Can’t View Friend’s Friends – I currently have only 4 friends on the service, having to manually add them in or add their manual friend requests. I’ve posted the nickname to my Facebook and Twitter pages to make it easy for them to find. The one thing that I don’t understand is why Apple haven’t made it possible to view the friends of your other friends – it’s a feature of every social network, and even other gaming services like OpenFeint, Xbox LIVE, and PSN. It would make the spread of the service happen a lot faster, and it could make finding mutual friends easier to locate and add.

Is there anything else you would like to add? Feel free to leave a comment, or join the discussion here.