iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Chapter 8. iPod Games and Other Extras

The very first iPod model was all music, all the time—unless you knew the secret Easter egg: the classic breakout Brick computer game, hidden from everyone who didn’t know the sequence of button presses that called it to the screen. Once the secret began to spread across the Internet, Apple’s engineers admitted that the jig was up and brought the game out into the open—or at least into the Extras menu, under a command called Game.

The iPods of Now have come a long way, baby. The color-screen models, including the iPod Nano and the fifth-generation video iPod, have four different games on board, plus a stopwatch function, a world clock to keep you current in multiple time zones, and a screen-locking feature to keep snoops from prying into your Pod. The notes feature, first introduced with the iPods of 2003, is still around and looks even better on a crisp backlight color screen—you don’t even need a flashlight to read eBooks in bed after lights-out.

Games

The iPod is a personal entertainment machine on many levels. All models have at least one game: Brick. The iPods in 2003 and beyond come with three others: Music Quiz, Parachute and—perhaps the most popular program ever in the history of the computer—Solitaire.

Brick

The Brick game (Figure 8-1) has wandered all over the iPod’s system software. In the first version of the iPod software, you unearthed it by holding down the Select button for five seconds on the About menu. In version 1.1, Brick surfaced ...