Astraware Releases Sandlot's Westward Game

Played this game for about an hour on my TX last night. I understand this game was ported from a PC game, Since I don't play games other then on my Palms, this was my first encounter with Westward. It is a civilization type game where you build a town in the old west. I went through a couple of levels and these were called tutorial levels where you basically just follow directions such as go find wood and click the exclamation to see what the sheriff says. After an hour of "play" or following directions I was getting kind of bored with it. I was able to save where I left off so hopefully when I get around to playing it again it will get a little more fun.

I find it funny you have a 320X320 screenshot since the whole time I was thinking the game needed more real estate then my TX provided. At one point I couldn't find one of the people I needed to move because they are so small and blend in to the background. One other problem I have with the game is the memory requirements. I first loaded this onto the Clie UX50 and was not able to start the game until I had freed up 54% of the device memory. I have somewhat of a problem with any one application requiring so much memory. On the TX this was less of a problem since it has considerably more built in memory.

If you plan to play this on a Centro, you'd better get a magnifying glass.

PDA's Past and Present:
Palm TX (Number 2)
Palm - IIIxe, Vx, M500, M505, Tungsten T, TX
Handspring - Edge, Platinum, Deluxe
Sony - SJ22, UX50
Casio-EM500
Apple - MP110, MP2000, MP2100

How DARE you criticize SSSs! Palm has DECREED that we ONLY need 320x320 and 240x240 screens. And offering these SSS devices in a variety of pastel colors will make them easier to see. And if you are older than 30 and cannot see those microscopic sprites on your SSS, well then you're old, unhip, and out of Palm's young hipster target market.

Certain Palm games just do not translate well to square screens. Off the top of my head, I can think of Warfare Inc, Broken Sword, Bejeweled 2, and Cybersaurus that all become somewhere between much less fun to play and unplayable when dropping down to a SSS from a 320x480 device.

As far as the memory problems, I think that the problem lies in limited the DBheap/cache memory of the older OS 5.x devices. This is also a weakness of many of Astraware's games since they went to that unified engine architecture--check the specs and you'll not find a single recent Astraware release that runs on, say, a T|T, T2, Zire 71, old Clie etc. If you go back and read my review of Astraware's Titanic, you'll find that an otherwise moderately enjoyable game was nearly ruined by the Treo's feeble screen size.

P.S. Interesting that you don't play games other than on your Palm! I know of several people who do all of their gaming exclusively on their mobile device (be it a PDA, smartphone or dumbphone).

P.P.S. For the most part, I am VERY unfond of PC to handheld ports, due to any number of factors. The one category I'd like to see represented with *LICENSED* ports, old Infocom text adventures (for devices with keyboards), and adventure titles with simple graphics such as Shadowgate, the Uninvited, Loom etc. are only represented by emulators & ROMs of questionable legality and quality.

Pilot 1000-->Pilot 5000-->PalmPilot Pro-->IIIe-->Vx-->m505-->T|T-->T|T2-->T|C-->T|T3-->T|T5-->TX-->Verizon Treo 700P-->Verizon 755p