Apple has slowly warmed up to the iPhone and iPod Touch's accidental transformations into portable gaming juggernauts, but Game Centre makes the embrace official.
Game Centre
For: iPhone/iPod Touch (available for iPad in November)
From: Apple
iTunes rating: N/A (comes bundled with iOS 4.1)
Price: Free (games sold separately)
Officially speaking, Game Centre is to the iPhone and iPod Touch (and, come November, iPad) what Xbox Live and PlayStation Network are to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, respectively.
As such, the features are what you'd expect, with accommodations for friend lists, leaderboards and achievements.
In terms of execution, it succeeds more than not.
Being able to quick-launch any supported game from inside the Game Centre app is handy, and the leaderboard section - which employs a nifty percentile system in addition to standard ranking metrics, ranks players worldwide and among friends, and has daily, weekly and all-time leaderboards for both tiers - is terrific.
The system for finding friends is clumsy, though, and there's no way to chat or set up a multiplayer game from within the Game Centre app.
The biggest caveat, though? Before Game Centre came along, OpenFeint already thrived on iOS by doing the same thing, and between that service's admirable member support and its pending arrival on the Android platform, it arguably remains superior to Apple's offering.
Time will tell which service attracts more new games - OpenFeint presently has a gargantuan lead, but developers are sure to flock to a system that's ingrained into the OS - and that, more than features or interface, likely will determine which platform leads the pack in the future.
In the meantime, the competition can only benefit users of both services.
