Lately, I’ve had absolutely no time to test new games because I’ve spent all my time in real-world projects (yeah, I need to do some work to make both ends meet and to be able to purchase all the new gadgets), the Windows Mobile Web Browsing Bible and, of course, the Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine’s Annual Best Software Awards I’ve become the Nominations Manager of. So, let me quickly review two of the titles; first,

A REAL Prince of Persia-clone!

You must have heard of Prince of Persia, which, back in 1990 (in addition to Indianapolis 500 and Legend Entertainment’s Spellcasting 101), was one of my favorite games on the IBM PC.



So far, there was no real Prince clone of the game on Windows Mobile. Up until now, that is; now, well-known (see the review of their Billiard Master 2 and Bowling Master review & comparison in the Windows Mobile Multiplayer Bible) Russian Windows Mobile & Palm OS games developer Mobirate has just started reimplementing the game on Windows Mobile.

The demo can be downloaded HERE and is WM2003+ compatible.

The project is really at the alpha stage and a lot of stuff doesn’t work. The Options screen is completely messed up (the labels are not visible at all and you can only guess what a particular checkbox does) on both VGA and QVGA devices, there’s no Button 1 (I’ve tested this on all my three Pocket PC’s (Dell Axim x51v A12, HP iPAQ 2210, HTC Wizard with AKU3.3 ROM) I’ve deployed the game on). The on-screen controls seem to be non-existent (albeit, after switching some “Off” checkboxes to “On” in Options, the game started to use them – but not the D-pad any more). Furthermore, there are absolutely no sound effects / music. Finally, the game may be pretty slow on some devices: it was barely playable (17-18 fps) on my iPAQ 2210. The HTC Wizard running at 240 MHz fared better (24 fps); finally, the x51v was the best (about 26 fps).

While the lack of for example button support may render the game completely useless (for example, you won’t be able to even do basic stuff like drinking potions), you may still want to give it a try, particularly because the developer is giving away free copies of the final version to the best, most productive betatesters (see the last sentence in readme.txt).

I really hope a (more) playable version follows very soon.

Note that the developer’s homepage doesn’t contain any real information on the game. For example, the image’s link takes you to their game compilation Brain Master. I’ve tried to supply different URL’s (by increasing the document ID referenced by the URL) to find out whether there is a page dedicated to the game; there (still) isn’t. That is, you won’t get any additional info on the game.

(News source: have run into the news upon routinely checking for a new, Microsoft Bluetooth stack-compliant version of Billiard Master 2 and Bowling Master on the developer’s homepage).

Microsoft MVP - Mobile Devices, 2006, 2007. See my PPC & SP blog HERE.

    

Prince of Persia was one of my favorite games back in the day on my ol 386DX PC. Going to check this out.

Important safety tip: Don't cross the streams.