The Arcade: A Monthly Roundup of Freeware Games (September 2007)
[This article orginally appeared at Just Another Mobile Monday on September 21, 2007]
As I have been discussing in other articles, this year I was honored to be invited to serve as on the Panel of Experts for the Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine Best Software of 2007 Awards.
Some of you may have noticed that I reviewed almost no software in August. During this time, I was deep in the midst of judging the awards, and the only software I was evaluating came from my responsibilities as a judge. As such, I felt it would be a significant conflict to review software which I was actively judging. So, I decided to take August off from reviewing software…which was great because it got me much closer to caught up on my hardware reviews (of which there have been many). Of course, now I have found a number of “hidden gems” and other programs and games, which I have already started reviewing and will continue to bring you over the course of the coming months.
The awards, however, did not just start in August. Since early in the Spring, the process of identifying and categorizing software was well under way. This process would never have been completed if not for the outstanding efforts of Hal Goldstein, the Publisher of Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine, and Werner Ruotsalainen, the Nominations Coordinator for the awards (yes, he is the guy who crops up on every forum and blog making the rest of us all feel inadequate with his vast and superior knowledge). Of course, there were other folks both at the magazine, and at Handango, who worked extremely hard to put these awards together, but it was really the coordination and leadership of Hal and Werner that made the nomination and voting process run so smoothly.
So, why the long and seemingly off topic ramble? Well, some of you may not realize this, but not all of the software nominated for the Best Software of 2007 Awards is commercial software. Several categories I judged included freeware as well. So, I thought I would devote this month’s Arcade to five freeware games which had been nominated for a Best Software of 2007 Award (which was no easy task because many of the nominated games had already been covered by previous issues of The Arcade. Some of these games are in categories I judged, but others were not. All of them, of course, are fantastic, and well deserving of the nominations they received. The five nominated games are:
1. Open Jazz
2. Technoballz
5. BGLightCE (Backgammon)
Open Jazz. This is an extremely well made platform scroller, which is a port from the the popular PC game of the same name. You control a crazy, rocket launcher toting jackrabbit on his quest to (of course) rescue the princess and defeat the evil Devan the Turtle. At the time of the original game in the mid-1990’s, it was considered the PC response to the popular Sonic the HedgeHog. Although I had a little trouble with the controls (the jump button simply did not want to map properly for me), I felt the port was true to the original, and the game really seemed to hold up well despite being almost 15 years past its prime.
Technoballz. I have to admit that I am a sucker for Breakout/Arkanoid clones. So, of course, it was inevitable that I would include Technoballz in The Arcade eventually. This is an excellent version of the classic genre. Although the graphics are a bit rudimentary, gameplay was very smooth. I particularly appreciated the Technostore at the end of each level, which allows you to purchase power ups for the next level. This was an exception and creative touch which helped set this game apart from what can be a relatively crowded genre. Again, however, (and this seems to be an unfortunate theme this month), I did have some problems with the controls. Since this was originally a PC game, it was designed to be played with a mouse. When it was ported to the Pocket PC, those controls were not well converted for the touchscreen interface. Nonetheless, gameplay was enjoyable enough to overlook this slight deficiency.
Number Cruncher. Once again, this is a fine example of a commercial developer rewarding its users with an excellent free game. This one is coming at us from PDAMill, the creators of the incredibly popular Arvale series, among other games. Number Cruncher is a relatively simple, yet incredibly addictive game. You are faced with a grid, in which most of the squares are filled with numbered blocks. All you need to do is jump the blocks to remove them from the board. Of course, the catch is that a block cannot jump over a higher numbered block, so be careful. Strategy can be critical here. Each time you jump a block, it will be removed from the board and you will receive points corresponding to the number written on the block.
One thing that really impressed me about this game were the various modes of play. In random, the tiles are scattered about the board (you have your choice of three different board sizes in order to control the difficulty). Your job is to keep jumping tiles until you run out of moves. The second mode is layout. Gameplay is identical to random, however, the tiles are arranged in a preset pattern or picture. Finally, in mission, you must proceed from one grid to the next by completing a task (removing all of the tiles from the board or scoring a particular number of points). I was extremely impressed by the quality of this game, which at least as good as many of PDAMill’s commercial games.
Pocket Gnu Go. This could be the oldest game I have ever included in The Arcade. Go, or Weiqi, dates back over 4,000 years, tracing its origins to ancient China. The basic concept of Go is fairly simple. Players alternate placing black and white stones on the board, attempting to trap their opponents stones and remove them. While this is a competitive game, with a winner and a loser, the part of the game that I have always found intriguing is its analogy with life. Go can become, “an intense meditation, a mirror of one’s personality, and a beautiful art form. Like the Eastern martial arts, Go can teach concentration, balance, and discipline.” Just watch a game of Go, and you will find that you become much more entranced with the stunning patterns that appear to evolve fluidly across the gameboard, than worrying about the score or who is winning and losing.
BGLightCE (Backgammon): I love classic board games, but one of my favorites has always been Backgammon. As with most board games, although it is easy to learn the basic moves, there is a great deal of strategy required to win against a competent opponent.
The problem I have had with most Backgammon games I have tried for Windows Mobile is that the artificial intelligence is terrible. The computer always seems to get exactly the dice roll it needs in order to get out of trouble.
With this history in mind, I was extremely and pleasantly surprised by BGLightCE. The graphics are extremely well drawn, with a selection of different boards and checkers to use. There are several different difficulty levels, each featuring an appropriately difficult artificial intelligence. And, with numerous hints and tips, it is a great option for beginners.
It was a real honor for me to serve as a judge this year for the Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine Best Software of 2007 Awards. One of the great thrills I found through these awards — aside from pretending to fit in with some of the biggest names in mobile computing — was discovering new and exciting software which I never would have found otherwise. I called these hidden gems, and will be bringing you reviews of some of my favorite hidden gems over the coming months. When it comes to free games, however, only the best of the best freeware was even considered for nominations, and these five games truly reflect the caliber of the nominations this year.
To see previous editions of The Arcade, check out our archives, exclusively at Just Another Mobile Monday.
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Mobile computing is on the rise these days. Maybe we will get a dual core powered cellphones in the future.’”:
mobile computing nowadays is not yet very powerful compared to netbooks but time will come that it would become like that.,.”
mobile computing always have a growing trend in the succeding years;*:
we need some smaller and energy efficient microprocessors to support mobile computing “;`
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