Slashdot Mirror
Sega doing PalmOS Games
Bill Kendrick writes "Sega has demonstrated a number of games for Palm OS handhelds during a keynote address at the PalmSource Japan conference. PDA Live has the scoop. The games they've made so far aren't going to be released commercially, but they're available for trial download through April."
Don't read this!
This is what I've been dreading for ages -- a big player in the Palm Game cottage industry. The thing about Palm development is that it's nice and friendly, but it's not *too* capable.
As a result, some teenager in his garage can write the best software. It's like back in the eighties when ten-year-olds would be writing assembly code and games were *playable* rather than *pretty*. It's an area of the software industry that throwing money at the task won't help.
I've been writing a pretty large scale Palm game on my own for the past six months, and it's still a long way from completion. I really don't want a big player to come in and start causing trouble for all us small-time developers.
Sorry about the unstructured rant, but I'm just annoyed now.
"Another way to go blind!"
RTFA, they're porting games, not pr0n.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Note: I have an oldish Palm iiic.
The games load fairly slowly (10-15 seconds, maybe they're doing some precalculation or something) and you have to sit through slowly fading in/out Sega/Smilebit splash screens (come on, seeing it once should be enough!)
Triangle looks cute, like some old MSX Konami game, but as soon as I selected (out of curiosity) 'quit game' from the menu, I got a 'fatal exception' and had to *hardware* reset -> game deinstalled.
The other game seems definitely addictive, and it hasn't crashed yet, so I think I'm going to keep it for now: the rotation of the square is a bit choppy, but the user interface is really cool. Sucks that, unlike most palm games, if you switch to some other application and you re-enter the game, it just starts from scratch instead of remembering where you were.
-- the cake is a lie
The page says the game requires "3.5 or more PalmOS(s)". I can get two instances of PalmOS running at once, *maybe* two and a half on a good day, but three and a half Palm OSs... man, that's more than I can do. They must have some really good engineers over there.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
I Wonder when they will start making some games for Texas Instrument's line of calculators. If the TI-92 can do multivariable calculus, it should be able to play some really decent games. Doom anyone?