.KEYWORD globalstar
.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Fun and games: Austin Powers and Serious Sam
.FEATURE
.SPOTLIGHT FIGALT cover.gif
.SUMMARY Looking to waste time or waste aliens? Senior Technical Editor Claire Pieterek has been doing some serious gaming with two fun diversions from Global Star Software. Check out these cool reviews of Serious Sam: The First Encounter, and Austin Powers Pinball. Yeah, baby!
.AUTHOR Claire Pieterek
If you’re looking for action and adventure for your Palm handheld, Global Star Software (at http://www.globalstarsoftware.com) has it. Their Palm OS games run the gamut from sports to strategy, killing aliens to killing time. I received two Global Star products that fit the bill quite nicely: Serious Sam: The First Encounter, and Austin Powers Pinball. From these titles, you know you’re in for a ton of fun.
Both products support both grayscale and color devices, which is nice. The packaging is professional and quite eye-catching, as you can see in Figure A.
.FIG A Serious Sam’s packaging is attention-getting.
.H1 Serious Sam: The First Encounter
Serious Sam: The First Encounter is based on the eponymous PC game developed by Croteam. It was named GameSpot’s 2001 PC Game of the Year. Indeed, GameSpot called it "an unpretentious, no-nonsense arcade-style shooter." And that is just what it is-much like Duke Nukem, or Robotron–the more enemies you can manage to knock off, while keeping yourself out of trouble, the better off you’ll be. It’s pictured in Figure B.
.FIG B Serious Sam is your standard first-person shooter game.
There is a bit of a plot, but it really doesn’t matter if you read it. As with most games, it doesn’t tell you much, and it doesn’t really help. What you really need to know is this: the Up button moves you forward, the Down button moves you back, the ToDo list button shoots, and the Memo Pad button is the strafe lock. Tapping in the Graffiti area is supposed to change weapons, but I guess you don’t get anything other than the six-shooter in the Tourist area.
I’ve really lost a lot of my skills at this style of game since I left the network administration business. Quite a few of us used to use Doom and Quake to do network load testing. Some of us were even able to justify putting in Ethernet switches that way!
Serious Sam offers three levels of play: Tourist, Normal, and Serious. I died early every time in the numerous games I tried in the Tourist level, so I’d rate this as good for people who are more serious about their arcade-style gaming. Also, I found it somewhat difficult to pick up some of the smaller items, since there is no way to move diagonally.
.H1 Criticisms
However, I have a couple of bones to pick with the people at Global Star who wrote and edited the box copy. The system requirements don’t match up in the two paragraphs devoted to the subject. There’s a generic system requirements paragraph that lists just about every Palm OS device under the sun, and a more specific system requirements paragraph that is exclusive to Serious Sam. The first paragraph says "any device that supports Palm OS (3.0 or higher)." The second paragraph says "Serious Sam: Requires a minimum of OS 3.5 or above to run." Make it one or the other, please. It turns out that the second paragraph is correct.
How many parents are going to buy Serious Sam, look at the back of the box, read the big, bold type where it says "System Requirements," see that just about every Palm OS device is covered, and then take the product home only to find out that it won’t run on the old Palm handheld they gave to their kids? I was hoping to try this out in conjunction with a nifty piece of hardware that only works with a Visor, but no go. Serious Sam won’t work with my old Visor Deluxe. There are a few Palm OS devices on that laundry list that aren’t necessarily going to run Palm OS 3.5 or be able to upgrade to Palm OS 3.5. Global Star could and should have done the homework on that.
Also, there’s one minor glitch in the installation process. There’s a message that pops up telling you to use Palm Desktop to install the files. Although you certainly can do it that way, it just seems a little faster to me to cut to the chase and use the Palm Install tool.
.H1 Austin Powers Pinball
Austin Powers Pinball is just plain fun. I can and did spend hours wasting time with this little gem. Maybe that’s Dr. Evil’s plan for taking over the world: get enough people to buy this, and who needs a stinking laser? There are nine different tables, each of which features a different character from the Austin Powers movies. The Dr. Evil level is pictured in Figure C.
.FIG C Stop Dr. Evil’s plan for world domination with a little pinball.
My biggest problem here was one of contrast. Due to my installation woes detailed below, I installed this on a monochrome Visor Deluxe. It’s pretty easy to lose track of the ball and lose the game, especially on the Mini Me table, pictured in color in Figure D.
.FIG D The Mini Me table looks great in color, but is, of course, less impressive in monochrome.
This is a product definitely benefits from a color screen or even an enhanced resolution monochrome screen, such as the one found on the HandEra 330.
I didn’t have any problems with the system requirements here. In fact, Austin Powers Pinball ran just fine on my Visor Deluxe. The problem I had was with the installation process. For some odd reason, if you have multiple users on your user list, Austin Powers Pinball defiantly selects the first one and that’s it. You can’t choose another user, no matter what sneaky PC tricks you try to play (nope, can’t do anything with RegEdit).
A massive file that contains all the .PDBs for Austin Powers Pinball is installed to your PC, and you choose from among the nine different table layouts. This program then sends the appropriate .PDBs to the Palm Install Tool for the first user in your user list, and that’s that. Fortunately, that wasn’t a big problem for me on my Visor Deluxe. However, I didn’t have the time to reconfigure multiple things to get Austin Powers Pinball running on my CLIE, which is a shame, since I would really have liked to have been able to play this game in color.
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.H1 Summary
I like these two games. Both of them have their virtues. Serious Sam is, in spite of my ineptitude, a good solid arcade-style shoot-em-up, and Austin Powers Pinball is really quite a lot of silly pinball fun. However, I kind of have to wonder about a company like Global Star which seems to have quite a bit of money behind it, but is lacking in some crucial areas, such as quality assurance and proofreading. If you have a good basic product, but you can’t get some of these other things right, it just isn’t enough.
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.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information on Global Star Software, visit http://www.globalstarsoftware.com.
For more information on Palm handhelds, visit http://www.palm.com.
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.BIO
.DISCUSS http://powerboards.zatz.com/cgi-bin/webx?50@@.ee6fe64
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