PalmOne PalmPak Games Card (m125, m130, i705 & m500 series)
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List Price: Our Price: $10.99 You Save: $29.00 (73%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: CE See more product details |
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Let's face it - the Palm is not a high-end gaming platform, and even m505 owners should not expect a stupendous experience. The best games for this size screen are the simplest ones. Klondike is the same as always, with slightly nicer graphics but no scoring. Chroma is a nice three-in-one package of chess, checkers, and backgammon (great for 2-person games on long trips), Vegas Slots and Blackjack are faithful reproductions of their real-life counterparts and SimCity is very basic but contains the essence of the original (I imagine this one is much better in color).
I had none of the technical difficulties of the other reviewers, and I have no problem with the fact that this card is a) only 10% full, and b) thirty bucks. A collection of games like this probably pays the developers a small fraction of the retail price, and we should be supporting people like them if we want better games in the future. I wish they could find a way to selectively unlock the SD card though, so the saved games would also live in there and the memory footprint of the whole pak (er, minus the patches) would be zero.
Bottom line: It's a fine price to pay for a collection of fun, good-looking games. Not perfect, but still very much worth it.
But potential buyers should be aware that there are problems with the software on the card that need to be resolved if the games are to work properly. Zap!2016 can eat up your main memory, and Vegas Slots and Klondike can stop functioning altogether. See the Palm web site for details and solutions. Fortunately these problems are fixable, but I wish that these games had been tested more thoroughly before this card was released. The patch for Zap!2016 takes up 124 KB of your handheld's main memory, which undermines one of the chief advantages of this product, namely, that it frees up handheld RAM.
I would also have liked more games on the card. The card itself is a 16 MB MultiMediaCard, of which the games take up only 1.6 MB. The selection of games seems a little light and could be a problem if, for example, a buyer doesn't much care for a couple of games, such as the Vegas-style gambling games or the card games, and ends up using only a few games on the card. I personally would have liked a strategy game in the mix; others may find other reasons to quibble about the selection. Still, why so few games? Would more have pushed the price higher?
In sum, this game card is satisfying - I do use it quite often - but I'm not entirely sure it's worth what it costs.