4 ms·
In my youth, the closest thing I ever had to a gaming console was a Palm. There was a plethora of quirky, indie, and experimental games for Palm OS, here are so
by pierrec 12y ago
In my youth, the closest thing I ever had to a gaming console was a Palm. There was a plethora of quirky, indie, and experimental games for Palm OS, here are some of the best I can remember:
- All games by Naoki Ito. This Japanese genius made simple arcade-style games, always with short levels of increasing difficulty, all of them perfectly balanced and extremely addictive.
- Space Trader. On the other end of the spectrum, a slow-paced trading and fighting game set in a generative world.
- Sigma. A weird little game with dice and a bell-shaped cumulative bar graph, unusual but once you got the hang of it, it was impossible to put down. I sort of recommend installing a Palm OS simulator/emulator just to try this one out.
Edit: Alright, here's some more:
- Car. A bare-bones version of GTA I. The best part was that the level editor came with the (free) game and ran right there on your Palm.
- Space War. A turn-based strategy game where you move your (Star Trek inspired) ship on a hexagonal grid, and try to predict what your opponent will do during that turn.
- Aldon's Crossing. A fairly classical top-down RPG. It seemed like a tiny game, but the more you played, the more you realized that the world was surprisingly huge.
And, of course, tons of remakes of ultra-classic games. Note that I only played a small portion of the palm-game-o-sphere, and I was limited to those that would run on my low-end grayscale Visor.
- irq 12y agoPlease do go on! I remember Space Trader quite fondly. The intimacy of games for this platform is something I don't quite find in today's marketplace.
- DrewRWx 12y agoIt was pretty fun re-playing Space Trader in Classic on an HP TouchPad. And now I'm searching for that Windows port: http://ticc.uvt.nl/~pspronck/spacetrader/STFrames.html http://ticc.uvt.nl/~pspronck/spacetrader/STFrames.html .
- ikeboy 12y agoAs a kid, I once made my own (terrible) version of Space Trader on a TI-83-plus. That game was cool. (Oh, and I'd cheat by exiting the game to save before a battle or anything random, then turning off the palm if it didn't go my way.) Brings back memories ... As for games, bike or die was major.
- RodgerTheGreat 12y agoI was particularly fond of the onboard programming environments for PalmOS. For example, cbaspad: http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/palm.html http://www.nicholson.com/rhn/palm.html Most of the links on that page are broken, but you can download the interpreter from archive.org: https://archive.org/details/tucows_34107_cbasPad https://archive.org/details/tucows_34107_cbasPad It's a wonderful classic BASIC that even supports goodies like peek(), poke and call(), access to the serial port, graphics, pen input and more. There were also C compilers (OnboardC), Forth implementations (Quartus Forth), a Scheme (LispMe) - all enabled by the robust text input capabilities of the device. edit: There's an interesting paper about the making of LispMe: http://3e8.org/pub/LispMe.pdf http://3e8.org/pub/LispMe.pdf