There are tons of "best game" lists for Palm OS devices out there, but most of them are ancient. And many of them point to games that cost $. And most of them omit game system emulators. So behold my own little contribution - a posting that directs you to the best free game software available today for your Palm / Treo / Centro, with a focus on the awesome array of system emulators and PC ports. Take that, iPhone!!!
Lets get started.
Below are links to two Palm developers that decided to make all of their fancy-pants Palm OS previously commercial games available for free. Like Snails! Not demos, the full version, for free. Cool. Check em out at:
http://pdamill.com/prod_palm.shtml
and
http://www.ellams.com/
And of course, you need to check out
http://little-john.net/
which allows your Palm to play all the game roms from the following systems:
- Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)
- Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES)
- Nintendo Gameboy/Gameboy Color (GB/GBC)
- Sega Genesis/Megadrive
- Sega Master System (SMS)
- Sega Game Gear (GG)
- Bandai Wonderswan/Wonderswan Color (WS)
- NeoGeo Pocket/NeoGeo Pocket Color (NGP)
- Atari 2600 (VCS)
For PC game classics, go here
http://www.metaviewsoft.de/en/index.html
to run Doom, Doom 2, Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, Heretic, Hexen, and Hexen2 on your phone or PDA! Wh00t! I personally play Doom 2 regularly on my Treo 680. Although these games play perfectly on your Palm, they are very RAM intensive. Especially if you have an older model Palm device, I recommend you consider installing UDMH to get a better experience with demanding these PC ports.
For games on PC systems of yesteryear, check out my favorite Apple IIe emulator at
http://palmapple.sourceforge.net/
If you want piles of classic games for your new Apple II, grab em from
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/images/games
For you old Atari 400/800/ST fans, check out :
http://www.codejedi.com/shadowplan/castaway.html
What geek could go without a good Chess game? The best free one is here:
http://palmopenchess.sourceforge.net/
And to counter-act the geek factor from Chess, DopeWars is a classic must have. Buy and sell drugs on the hard streets of NY, borrow money from the mob, make a fortune. Takes just a few mindless minutes to play, always entertaining:
http://mytreo.net/downloads/dopewars,152.html
Finally, I adore old-school Infocom-style text adventure games ala Zork and friends. You can play them all by installing CellarDoor on your Palm; grab it here:
http://cellardoor.sourceforge.net/
and read this page to get started reliving text adventure fun:
http://home.kc.rr.com/bobfahey/text_adv.htm
If you have a link to share, or something to say re one of my choices above, please post a comment below!
