Gamertell

I was recently flying on Delta and able to play the new eFlyte games included in the Delta on Demand service on the plane.

The setup is essentially a small touch screen where you can access pre-installed movies, TV channels, music and casual style games.

The screen is mounted into the seat in front of you with the vision area about 7 in. wide by 5 in. tall (approximations since I didn’t have a ruler in my pocket). Though most of the functions are controlled through the touchscreen, it also includes a -/+ button to control brightness, a Power button to turn on the screen and a Call button to flag own the Flight Attendant (though that button didn’t seem to work).

The screen flips out about an inch from the bottom to help improve the viewing angle and expose the credit card slot at the bottom. The service was free in First Class and those in Coach had to pay to use some of the offerings: $5 for all 12 games, $5 per movie and $2 per HBO TV episode. Non-HBO TV shows, music channels and one game, Inflight Trivia, were free. Audio was channeled through the headphone port in the arms of the chairs. As usual, the headphone were $2 in Coach and free in First Class but you could use pretty much any standard headphones.

The 12 games available on this flight were all Casual style games including a few by PopCap:

• Inflight Trivia
• Bejeweled
• Big Money
• Bookworm
• Chainz
• Galaktor
• Head-to-Head Chess
• Inflight Poker
• Insaniquarium
• Klondike Solitaire
• Dynamite
• Suma

To select a game, you touch the Games menu, then click on the game to get a description and small screen shot. From there you can then back out or load and launch the game.

The games look good, about the same as those you’d download online. In fact, a few seem to be direct ports, even including instructions with keyboard controls even though you only use the touchscreen to play.

For the Galaktor (essentially Galaxian lite) where you typically press a fire button as often as you can, it was pre-set on auto-fire so you only had to move your ship side to side and dodge oncoming attacks. In the match-three games, like Bejeweled, you tapped the two jewels you wants to swap with our finger.

Although I appreciate fun and addictive video games being offered on long flights, there are a few problems with the touchscreen setup. The touchscreen controls worked fairly well, though it was easy to touch the wrong area especially when flying through turbulence. Anyone with fat, fleshy fingers or lacking a medium length, solid fingernail would have a very hard time with precision.

Also, you need to lift your arm up to play, which makes it quite tiresome and tends to keep the blood from flowing to your fingers very well. Since you are tapping on the back of someone else’s seat and, depending on your screen’s sensitivity, you accuracy and how excited you are about gaming, you could easily tap the patience out of the person in front of you.

The person behind me was selecting TV shows behind me, and even that was enough to notice and become a little annoying. If you are sitting in front of a smaller kid in the less insulated Coach class seat, you’d likely want to turn around and rip out the system. Luckily, I knew the person sitting in front of me, so he was a bit tolerant while I tapped away at Bejeweled. Even though I was trying to be gentle (once I realize I was poking at someone else’s back), he did say he could feel the tapping. I also switched from using my finger to using my Nintendo DS stylus, which helped improve my accuracy with the games and menus.

I like the eFlyte games and Delta’s video and movie offerings but the control scheme is a bit tiring for both the player and the person in the seat in front of them. I’m sure they were trying to conserve space and use existing seats, but they should have combined the new service and screen with the older Delta system.

In the older setup you used the corded, removable phone that popped out of the seatback or arm and could be rotated and used like old style game controller with a control pad and buttons. That would eliminate the seat tapping, fat-fingered inaccuracies and arm fatigue, offer more avatar control and even let you control the firing rate for shooting games.

Delta’s inflight touchscreens and delta on demand service are best for picking videos or music and then settling in while you sit back, enjoy the flight and play one of the portable game systems you brought with you.

Site [eFlyte]

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