Hands on with The Game Trail iPhone game video preview app

Apple has been pretty good about addressing the shortcomings of its App Store over the months, adding new metrics and sections, showing ratings by version, and so on, but the app description pages are still often woefully inadequate.

The worst are written in barely comprehensible English with screenshots that give away nothing about the game, while even the most polished are severely limited by the small range of screenshots available.

The popularity of sites like GameTrailers and the increasing availability of video reviews on mainstream gaming sites indicate that we're quickly approaching the time when still images aren't enough: we want to see a game in motion before we decide whether or not to buy it.

As of tomorrow, the App Store will have its own equivalent of GameTrailers. The Game Trail, developed by Swedish studio Fabrication Games, is an app - and a site, available now - that allows you to see videos of iPhone games before buying them.

We've managed to get hold of an advance copy, so here's what to expect.

We'll get the unusual appearance out of the way first. The Game Trail is decked out in a rather odd brown and gold colour scheme and fleur-de-lis wallpaper, with the result that the whole thing has a slightly odd wild west saloon feel. Practically speaking, it has a similar layout and menu system to the App Store.

Like the App Store, The Game Trail gives you a range of ways to find videos. Featured appears to be an editorially driven category into which Fabrication Games slots outstanding or interesting titles; New is self-explanatory; and so is Search, other than to point out, for the sake of completeness, that this category also allows you to browse through 20 genres.

Top250 is potentially confusing, since it arranges the videos by star rating. This isn't the star rating for the game on the App Store, as you might assume, but the rating for the video on YouTube. For example, GTA Chinatown Wars has a five star rating in The Game Trail not because it's a five star game on the App Store but because that particular video - a hands on by AppSpy.com, as many of the other videos are - has full marks.

In short, the stars are for the videos, and not the games.

The app itself is very clear and easy to use, and the game description pages provide information absent from the App Store: a small passage of text, in some cases critical and in some cases purely descriptive, and usually a selection of other videos at the bottom of the page to complement the one at the top.

There's plenty of salient information The Game Trail omits, of course - user rating, version number, screenshots - but each game page contains an App Store link so that you can easily get the full picture.

A niggling criticism: The Game Trail website rather neatly includes links under each video called 'You may also like' and 'Random trail'. These do a good job of coaxing you through the content on offer, and their absence in the iPhone app is a minor disappointment. Hopefully it won't be too difficult for Fabrication to add them in future updates.

As well as browsing videos you can submit your own. I had a go at submitting the Bruce Lee Dragon Warrior video from the Pocket Gamer YouTube channel earlier and the process was very straightforward. I just entered my name and email address, the title of the game, Pocket Gamer's YouTube ID, and a description. Somebody in Sweden will presumably do the rest.

The Game Trail app is due out tomorrow, for free, at which price I recommend downloading it and having a play. Whatever your thoughts on the colour scheme, this is a promising repository of video content that only needs a few tweaks to be indispensible.