By Steve Niles
Living on a coconut plantation in the former British colony of the Solomon Islands, I ended up playing a lot of the English game of snooker at the company's social club. Snooker is to billiards what cricket is to baseball, in that it's got a complicated scoring system, a far -to-busy playing field, a bewildering set of rules designed to maximize your ability to foul, and a vocabulary that's just plain silly. It's amazing the British manage to look so dignified when they're constantly hitting googlies and getting snookered. In my few attempts at mastering the game, I excelled only at scoring points for the opposing team.
It comes as no small amount of relief to be back in a country where a standard barroom attraction is the simple, elegant billiards game. As long as you can remember whether you're stripes or solids and are careful not to scratch or knock the 8-ball in before its time, you're fine. It also helps to have a fair amount of eye-hand coordination and a basic understanding of the laws of physics, but other than that, billiards is a relatively simple game.
It also makes for a fun Palm OS game, two great examples of which can be found in Enzyme's PalmPool and Megasoft's Billiard applications.
PalmPool
PalmPool is available from Enzyme at http://www.enzyme.org/palmpool/index.html. Of the two billiards games I looked at, this one has the more expansive tabletop, leaving plenty of room for the small balls to bounce around in a highly satisfying manner. However, the small size of the balls makes them difficult to discern, especially on a monochrome screen, as pictured in Figure A.
FIGURE A
Without benefit of color, the billiard balls can be difficult to distinguish.
A color version of the game is available for you lucky Palm IIIc owners, and the difference between the striped and solid balls is represented by coloring them either red or blue, as shown in Figure B.
FIGURE B
Palm IIIc owners can enjoy the color version of PalmPool.
Of course, it would still be nice to get a more accurate view of each ball's color and number, so to do that, you just tap on Zoom and then select the region you'd like to enlarge, as shown in Figure C.
FIGURE C
Use the Zoom button to get a better look at your balls.
I tended to like PalmPool's handling over that of Megasoft's Billiard application. Lining up the pool cue is generally easier. You simply tap on the screen, and the cue stick draws a straight line between the cue ball and the tip of your stylus. You're then free to move the stylus 360 degrees around the cue ball until you find your target. Once you've got the cue stick lined up, you use the power-meter bar above the pool table to select the strength with which you want to strike the cue ball. Then you hit Go. The virtual cue stick draws back and pounces on the cue ball, sending it streaking across the tabletop. If you're lucky, you'll send the ball you were aiming for into one of the waiting pockets.
