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The days when one or two programmers could make a game just as good as anyone else's in their spare time, and proclaim it a big success if they sold 1000 copies and made $20,000 out of it are long gone. Nowadays, partially _because_ of the photorealism, game budgets are in the millions range, so you need a publisher.

The little guys aren't dead yet! Every once in a while there's a game developed by a small company that either sells like crazy, or gets a lot of industry buzz. In fact, because these companies don't have the money to focus on photo-realistic graphics, they put more focus on gameplay.

Two examples that come to mind include Snood, and Alien Hominid.

I have an iPaq h6315 that I use all the time, and I don't think I'd find a Palm all that handy (I know, terrible pun). I think the PocketPC's more powerful processors make them a lot more useful- as you mentioned, they can be used for music and movies, but I also use mine for games (I'm addicted to snood), for checking the bus schedules (I've got the PDF's saved on my phone. They're not really very PDA-friendly, but they certainly suffice and are frequently useful), I keep mine synched with Money on my PC (which is great since I'm terrible about keeping a checkbook register), and I surf the web (and not just the limited stuff you get thru a cell phone) and check my e-mail with it as well.

Sure, some of those things I could do with a laptop, but a laptop has a shorter battery life, won't connect to GPRS by itself, doesn't fit in my pocket and I wouldn't want to carry one around all the time.

Agreed- One of my favorite games, snood, has some of the dumbest graphics i've ever seen. I almost feel embarrassed playing it, yet it's so frickin' addictive! ...and so reasonably priced that I actually paid for a piece of software for once. $15 to register- I got it for my PocketPC and my desktop.

Snood.
It's a shareware game in the same vein as BubbleBobble / Bust-a-Move, only it's got no time limits and can be played at whatever pace you might like. It is a lot of fun and many find it addictive.

Any turn-based strategy game - Civilization III is awesome.

Bejewled is another popular puzzle game.

Old school RPGs like Wizardry(I-VIII) and Ultima (I-VII), Might & Magic (dunno how many) and others.

Best of luck and enjoy!

Having minor carpal tunnel from typing and my (brace yourself) sport, I've been taking a break recently from
games like Counterstrike which heavily employ my left hand on the keyboard, and have been going mostly mouse only...

The most recent addictive game I've played is called Oasis. I describe it to my friends as a 5 minute
version of Civilization. It has no time limit or anything that might be limited by slow mouse control, and although their
website states that it's currently in beta I had no problems with it during my binges.

The poster said he wanted to play "by himself" so I'll exclude multiplayer games and suggest two other obvious ones
which come to mind: Snood and Zuma. These two have taken myself and probably many
others through some long nights. Good luck!



(The sport is rowing, for those in disbelief)

I certainly can't be the only one like this - but my home box is one I slapped together about three years ago. I bought an unopened copy of Win98SE that was floating around surplus. Likewise for Office 95, Photoshop 4, and CorelSuite (for Quattro Pro). Bought Partition Magic 7 when I wanted to put a Slackware install on there, too. All my games are legit - hell, I even registered Snood.

I'll grant that this is no more proof than any other anecdotal evidence - but here's a non-corporate-owned PC sitting in front of me with the majority of its software legit. (I say majority because, if I look, I've probably got a few old DOS abandonware pieces on here, like Sopwith.) I'd like to think that this situation is, at least among geeks, more common than not. Wishful thinking, perhaps...

With an attitude like that, you'll probably be fired before you can train a replacement.

In today's tech environment, IT managers and sysadmins don't usually have the time to supervise every project themselves. The more people collaborate and network within an IT department, the more seamlessly services are integrated. Keeping knowlege close to your chest is one of the things that really turns me off about some IT managers.

The education field is usually a good place to look for initial work, especially at the college you graduated from. College IT departments are constantly growing as colleges and expectations grow too. At the very least, look for part-time work with your school, and if that fails, get some independant projects going. The age of one-man software development isn't over. One of my professors created the popular game Snood, and he makes about 15K a month from it. Teaching is what he does to fill his spare time.

The Tapwave has a chance, where the GP32, etc did not. The Zodiac- at $300 and $400 for the 32 MB and 128 MB models respectively- make sense to buy as PDAs. The price is right for similar items in their class, they've some features that most PalmOS PDAs don't have and a few that no other POS PDA has.

It's all about how Tapwave goes about marketing it. If they market is just as gaming device, mostly ignoring the fact that it's ultimately a PDA, a pocket computer it will die. After all, why spend 300-400$ on something like that when you could get a GBA for $80?

But, if they market it as a PDA that has some very convenient perks- like having real gaming controls, dual SD slots, a big screen, a nice "GPU-" then it could succeed, although within a niche. If I were in the market for a PalmOS PDA, there is a very good chance that I would buy the Zodiac. And if I bought a Zodiac, there's only a very small chance I'd buy any Zodiac-specific games- maybe one or two if something really caught my eye, but I'd mostly use it like I use all PDAs I've owned- as very small computer. Coding, SSH/telnet/VNC, writing papers, web, email, etc.

Out of what I do, I spend the least amount on playing games. But part of the reason that is the case is that just about all PDAs up until the Zodiac has shitty controls. Some have a decent d-pad and button placement for gaming, but then you are stuck with the problem of not being able to register more than one button press at a time, among other issues. But, I would play Snood (maybe even register it again!) SimCity, Lemmings and some other games that work on any recent POS device.

The good gaming button setup is a perk for someone like me, a conveinence but not a reason to buy. It may be able to do a little learning if there was another PDA with comparable hardware for the same price, but only if the prices and hardware were almost the same.

That fact that most people can't figure this out for themselves means that Tapwave isn't doing the marketing right, or that most people haven't owned a PDA. I think both are at fault, especially the latter. This thing shouldn't be compared to the GBA so much as it should to other PDAs in its class.

My free time was eradicated by a shareware game by the name of Snood.

.. running screensavers in the root window.. Particularly the Atlantis OpenGL screensaver port.. Wow your friends and cow-orkers.. Just don't run snood or anything else intensive while you're doing so..

like snood?

I also like Tetris Attack, which a bunch of others have already mentioned...

According to this on the Snood homepage it was created in 1996, placing Bust-A-Move before Snood.

The real question is, did the programmer copy Bust-A-Move?

--Pat

Gamers tend to think that games will only be classics if they're adopted by gamers. That's why they're so surprised when deer hunting games outsell Quake.

My 64 year-old mother got hooked on Snood, and got a copy for everyone she knew. She doesn't know what kind of video card she has, she doesn't know the bus speed of her RAM, but she'd be up until 3 in the morning trying to beat her high scores.

Oh, it is already available on cell phones and PDAs.

I'm not upgrading to 128 megs until it's required by Snood. So there!

..I prefer Snood to Good any day!

One of my friends is fond of the game Snood for Windows, and encouraged me to check it out. When I did, I found that it came with two annoying bits of software, both a copy of Gator, and links to Bonzai Buddy, that stick themselves in your Start menu and various other places. Yick! (And goodbye Gator, banzai Banzai, and so long Snood.)

The latest Debian CD provides all the software anyone could ever conceive of needing.

Snood is a nonviolent arcade-style game that requires a decent amount of forethought and planning. When I was managing labs at a middle school, both the students and teachers couldn't get enough of it. Available for MacOS, Windows, PalmOS and soon, it seems, GameBoy Advance. Download a fully-functional copy of this fine shareware game and give it a try.

• During the install process I was told that Snood came with the "coolest" new software, and that Gator would be automatically installed. No option to install without it (unlike Bearshare).
• After installation, Gator didn't immediately start up, appear in the start menu, or appear in the "add/remove programs" menu. It waited about 5-10 minutes before popping up. This prevented me from immediately uninstalling this parasitic software.
• After killing Gator, my firewall caught the "Onflow Player Installer" trying to access it's web site.
• When I was finally able to uninstall Gator, it's uninstall program warned me that "Deleting your user information will erase all your passwords account numbers and login IDs." I can imagine a novice aborting the uninstall after a warning like that. It doesn't mention that it is only referring to the data that you gave Gator.
• If this software was really useful, you'd think people would want to install it. Remember ThirdVoice, it was a tool that let users annotate web pages with their own content that was visible to other ThirdVoice users. It never acheived the market penetration it needed. There's a program that people could actually find useful, and it didn't make it. I can only imagine the sheer contempt for the user that these companies must have. To resort to such deceptive and misleading practices just to show some unwanted advertisements...