Comments on: PalmSource Nasdaq Opening Coverage

Lots of pics and video! of the Zodiac.

http://tinyurl.com/tr3c

Ha! Synchronicity! I came across that twenty minutes ago. It's 44 pages of posts! Just finished watching his video.

Lucky guy. But the unit's not for me. Others will love it, I'm sure.

Nintendo has consistently had the poorest hardware (I am still very underwhelmed by the GBA SP) but that is balanced out by having value-priced, widely available hardware & software in every major retailer across the world. The huge game library ( a few strong titles and a lot of garbage) and consistently good battery life only sweeten the pot. Maintaining backwards compatability with almost every GB title released in 15 years doesn't hurt a bit either, especially as far as frugal parents are concerned.

If you look at the TurboExpress, Atari Lynx, Neo-Geo Pocket, Tiger's Game.com, and now the Zodiac, you'll see a trend of: A. powerful/expensive/awkward hardware or B. hardware only slightly more powerful than the GB with no software to back it up. Either way, a lack of killer titles and a plethora of rehashed ports doomed every one of the above machines.

I also cannot stress how vital Tetris was as a pack-in to the original GameBoy's success. You don't hearing anyone clamoring for AcidSolitaire and that bland racing game, do you?

I just hope that if Tapwave tanks, there will be enough support from either Palm or the community to ensure at least sporadic updates to the Palm Desktop software to keep it as a servicable PDA--can it run off standard Palm Desktop 4.1 or is it a proprietary version like Sony's?

What could have saved (or still can save) Tapwave?

1. Just imagine if Tapwave coulda talked iD into granting the rights to do an official Doom as the pack-in for the Zodiac. Doom, Warfare Inc, and BeJeweled (all in ROM) would have made things instantly more appealing.

2. Sega's got their fair share of problems currently, but they are sitting on a fabulous collection of titles, from the Master System all the way up to the Dreamcast. Instead of fooling around with a half-assed GameGear emulator and the disappointing Sega Classics MMC, they should have jumped on board the Zodiac with a little enthusiasm. I know there are tons of gamers out there who fondly remember their Genesis days and are dying for, say, a new Panzer Dragoon, Golden Axe, Shinobi, or a decent collection of Sonic titles. Or Blizzard, for example, could have ported some of their older Warcrafts or Diablo 1 over--maybe even Blackthorne, their side-scroller action title from 8 years ago.

3. Retail availability!!! These puppies should've been in retail stores loooong ago, even if for demo purposes alone. You still see people crowding around Halo on the Xbox at EB, 2 years after the kiosks were installed. That sort of buzz cannot be represented by a website or video clips, no matter how badly Tapwave tries to do so. I've complained about Palm having disorganized, broken retail displays in recent years but it's STILL the only way to let the general public you have a "better than GameBoy" machine out there.

4. I've never seen anything indicating pricing for the Zodiac titles on MMC/SD but I am positive they will cost more than GB cartridges do. A sure-fire way to win people over would be with a bunch of high-quality compilations on one card-selling for no more than $30 per card. Sorta like what Palm/MDM has done with their various game collections, but with titles that are not just endless Solitaire and checkers rehashes. Imagine a card with Doom I &II, or Hexen & Heretic, or all of the Duke Nukem sidescrollers, or the whole Tony Hawk series on it...