In my youth, the closest thing I ever had to a gaming console was a Palm. There was a plethora of quirky, indie, and experimental games for Palm OS, here are some of the best I can remember:
- All games by Naoki Ito. This Japanese genius made simple arcade-style games, always with short levels of increasing difficulty, all of them perfectly balanced and extremely addictive.
- Space Trader. On the other end of the spectrum, a slow-paced trading and fighting game set in a generative world.
- Sigma. A weird little game with dice and a bell-shaped cumulative bar graph, unusual but once you got the hang of it, it was impossible to put down. I sort of recommend installing a Palm OS simulator/emulator just to try this one out.
Edit: Alright, here's some more:
- Car. A bare-bones version of GTA I. The best part was that the level editor came with the (free) game and ran right there on your Palm.
- Space War. A turn-based strategy game where you move your (Star Trek inspired) ship on a hexagonal grid, and try to predict what your opponent will do during that turn.
- Aldon's Crossing. A fairly classical top-down RPG. It seemed like a tiny game, but the more you played, the more you realized that the world was surprisingly huge.
And, of course, tons of remakes of ultra-classic games. Note that I only played a small portion of the palm-game-o-sphere, and I was limited to those that would run on my low-end grayscale Visor.
It's a wonderful classic BASIC that even supports goodies like peek(), poke and call(), access to the serial port, graphics, pen input and more.
There were also C compilers (OnboardC), Forth implementations (Quartus Forth), a Scheme (LispMe) - all enabled by the robust text input capabilities of the device.
As a kid, I once made my own (terrible) version of Space Trader on a TI-83-plus. That game was cool. (Oh, and I'd cheat by exiting the game to save before a battle or anything random, then turning off the palm if it didn't go my way.) Brings back memories ...
This brings back fond memories of Palm OS development. It wasn't the easiest platform to develop for, but as this document describes, user experience was emphasized and the thrill of making sophisticated tasks simple using constrained resources was satisfying.
PalmOS did a lot of things right. One thing I'd like to see make its way to mobiles again (or iOS at least), is better handling of "app data". PalmOS made it a point to separate the executable and it's data, in the form of a database file that could be easily backed up.
- All games by Naoki Ito. This Japanese genius made simple arcade-style games, always with short levels of increasing difficulty, all of them perfectly balanced and extremely addictive.
- Space Trader. On the other end of the spectrum, a slow-paced trading and fighting game set in a generative world.
- Sigma. A weird little game with dice and a bell-shaped cumulative bar graph, unusual but once you got the hang of it, it was impossible to put down. I sort of recommend installing a Palm OS simulator/emulator just to try this one out.
Edit: Alright, here's some more:
- Car. A bare-bones version of GTA I. The best part was that the level editor came with the (free) game and ran right there on your Palm.
- Space War. A turn-based strategy game where you move your (Star Trek inspired) ship on a hexagonal grid, and try to predict what your opponent will do during that turn.
- Aldon's Crossing. A fairly classical top-down RPG. It seemed like a tiny game, but the more you played, the more you realized that the world was surprisingly huge.
And, of course, tons of remakes of ultra-classic games. Note that I only played a small portion of the palm-game-o-sphere, and I was limited to those that would run on my low-end grayscale Visor.