I was going to wait a bit, but when I saw that Dell was selling their top of the line Pocket PC for under $300 I had to get it! I got it mainly for college (storing contacts, appointments, etc…) but I’m going to be doing a bit of gaming on it as well. So what do you guys recommend?
I’m thinking about downloading Age of Empires and trying that out. Monopoly and Chess look pretty good as well. So what do you guys recommend?
It was made by ZioSoft, along with their excellent PocketPC version of SimCity. Sadly, I went to their website and it’s down right now. Hopefully their server’s down and the company as a whole isn’t kaput. Keep checking www.ziosoft.com from time to time.
There are some threads discussing Pocket PC games here.
I’m not so sure I’d recommend the Ultima Underworld port anymore. While I was in Thailand, I spent a lot of time with this, and while the port is excellent for what it is, the fact of the matter is that this game doesn’t play too well on a Pocket PC due to the nature of the Pocket PC interface. I think this is probably one of those games that is better off just being played on a PC.
Right now on my Pocket PC, I spend most of my time with things like ScummVM, a Pocket PC interpreter for old Lucas Arts adventure games; Pocket Nester, a full-featured NES emulator that has run any game I throw at it with perfect sound at 40 FPS; ceGG, a great Game Gear/SMS emulator. I also have a little gem called Snails installed, which is a cool little Worms clone, and Pocket Heretic, which runs pretty well.
Projects that are coming out soon include Elite for Pocket PC and a port of Warlords 2 (!).
Hey, looks like someone finally managed to create a compelling Doom experience on the Pocket PC:
I’ve been playing around with this this afternoon. The frame rate is really acceptable with full sound support, and it also has full screen support (which is a great idea but practically proves to be unplayable in Doom, since there a PDA has all of the buttons on one side of the device when it is turned sideways and there’s no way to say, control and fire at the same time), PWAD and overlay map support. What I like most about it is that if you don’t mind some text file editing, you can configure the controls to your preferences. It even has Plutonia and TNT support! Neat.
Derek, I could totally be convinced to buy BC3000 again if you released it for the Pocket PC with an interface that wasn’t dreamed up as a penance device by the remnants of the Spanish Inquisition for particularly sinful monks in an effort to mortify both the body and soul, then converted into electronic form and outshopped to you. The Pocket PC has a depressing lack of space games, which is a shame, since the platform was so clearly made for it. And Civilization. Sigh.
Yeah, I’ve been thinking about doing a PPC based space game actually. But the more I think about it, the more I think that it would be seriously crippled.
I have seen some decent space games on the PPC, but they’re all just brain dead shooters. :( …which isn’t a bad thing, but it gets old real quick.
The memory footprint of a PPC is just not adequate for a game of BC scope. Know what I mean?
I dunno. I mean, if we’re just talking about something with the scope of BC3000AD, I would think that this should easily be doable. Perhaps I don’t quite understand the intricacies of porting to the Pocket PC, but if they can get Age of Empires, Ultima Underworld, Doom, Quake and Sim City running on the platform, I would think that a 4X space sim with a scope of say, 1998 or earlier, would work pretty well. And with 256 meg storage cards going for less than 60 bucks in some places, I would think you would have plenty of space to play around with if you didn’t load it up with mpegs or movies and strictly went for gameplay and necessary art assets.
I have to say, I’ve become steadily disillusioned by the Pocket PC as a gaming platform. This is mostly because developers seem to be trying to make all of the wrong kinds of games - real-time strategy and FPS games, mostly. Unfortunately, the Pocket PC is really ill suited to both of these games, where as it is an ideal turn-based strategy, adventure and sidescrolling platform. I wish people would stop trying to make the Pocket PC into a PC and apply their talents to what it is naturally going to be better at. This is even more frustrating considering the fact that the Pocket PC is probably the last frontier where a compelling game can be produced by basically a one-man team, yet no one seems to be trying.
That all said, here’s a screenshot for the upcoming Pocket PC FPS Gang Warfare that is pretty damn snazzy:
Fun fact about the pocket pc, it came in multiple processors, some of which are MIPS, ARM and SH-3. Xscale processors are backwards compatible with arm software, so you should download that version.
Also all the games they make are pretty nice, rocket elite is like, the ‘super’ Lander or something, and the motocross game is isometric-fake3d excitebike.
Even the penny-arcade themed breakout clone is really nice.
Also capcom sells emulated versions of some older arcade games in a pack, 1942, legendary wings etc…
Snails is also good, pretty ncie worms clone that is a bit more than just a clone.
The everquest game is kind of horrid, just fyi. (It looks like cutesy diablo - which would be great, but it is funky and not very enjoyable - cant put my finger on why)
Anyone here tried PocketDOS? Supposedly, games like Ultima 6, Wing Commander, Microsoft Flight Simulator 4.0, Star Control 1, &c. work almost flawlessly on it. I’m going to try giving it a test spin and see if I can’t get Civilization for DOS working on it… if so, I finally have my ultimate PocketPC game.
