I don’t care how many times Steve Jobs, one of his henchmen or an Apple fanboy tells me that the iPhone and iPod touch is a great gaming platform, I still say it stinks.

In fact, its strongest feature as a mobile platform turns out to be its Achilles’ heel when it comes to gaming.

I’ve given gaming on my iPod touch the benefit of the doubt several times. I must have spent over $100 on games. While throwing a Ben Franklin at PC games will only buy you a couple of new games, that sort of dough buys a lot of games from Apple’s App Store.

I’ve spent several frustrating hours trying to see if I could appreciate the platform. After all that investment, I still think that compared to the Wii, PS3, Xbox or PC, the iPhone sucks as a gaming device, and sucks whole lemons at that. Even when it comes to mobile gaming, overall my gaming experience has been a sucky one.

The problem is the screen. Sure, the iPhone is easy to use because you do almost everything via the screen, and that’s what’s made it the success it is.

After all, nothing confuses users faster than being faced with a raft of buttons. Compared to the iPhone, a Blackberry looks like the cockpit of a jumbo jet.

However, the problem is that ease of use as a phone or media player doesn’t automatically mean that you get a great gaming experience.

So, what’s the problem? Well, it’s that most games require some basic controls, and that most of the time these controls have to be placed on the screen along with the gaming action.

Initially this seems like a flash of brilliance, but it has a couple of very large drawbacks.

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