WordPop!  ::  Geo Rally 2005 ::  News

WordPop!

WordPop! is a game I saw in its earlier stages and helped beta test. WP is one of those games where you create words from a scrambled list of letters. The number of letters you get is fixed: you either clear the board or run out of potential matches. Like Scrabble, you receive points for each letter depending on how rarely the letter appears in words. You can receive up to three bonus tiles (to be used as any letter) when you make words worth a certain score (the actual score needed depends on the difficulty level at which you’re playing). Pretty simple and straightforward, and WP has good graphics to go along with the basic game play. The game's internal dictionary is fairly broad and even accepts articles (a, an, and the), although words requiring capitalization (including proper nouns) are not accepted. Separate screens allow you to show off you your best words and highest scores, and a shuffle feature allows you to rearrange the remaining letters to make word recognition easier. WP holds up pretty well against other games in this category, but it does have one limitation in that there's not as much game aspect as there could be. In WP, you simply play until you run out of matches or until you've cleared them all and start over with new tiles. The game is fun as it is, but I wish there was more to draw me in, perhaps a timed mode or more structured level progression. Astraware's Word Mojo, for example, features a Las Vegas atmosphere that makes the game play seem a little more engaging than it would’ve been otherwise. I'm not saying that Smart Box Design needs to use such an approach with WordPop!, but it's something to consider.

Geo Rally 2005

European "rally" racing apparently is quite popular in Europe, but still isn't that well-known here in the rednecky, NASCAR-obsessed U.S. If you're not familiar with the concept, it basically involves driving souped-up subcompact cars around twisting, bumpy, and narrow European roads while your co-pilot shouts to you about upcoming turns. Sometimes it involves racing directly against other cars; other times it involves racing against other drivers' lap times. I love racing games, but for some reason rally racing just doesn't grab me. Apart from the playable V-Rally (which is so basic it's more like a simple racing game than a simulation of rally racing), we haven’t seen too many attempts to bring the rally racing concept to the Pocket PC.

Geo Rally 2005 is one of the more ambitious racing game attempts I've seen for the platform. The actual races span 15 stages across three continents and contain the variety of terrain you'd expect to see in a rally racing title: dirt roads, tarmac, cobblestone, and so forth. You also get a variety of tracks, which are rarely dull and do a good job of showing off (albeit crudely) the European countryside. Graphics are very well done and quite smooth; there are no obvious performance issues. You can tell a lot of effort went into making the game as feature-rich as possible. Multiple cars are included, each with unique handling characteristics. An interesting replay mode allows you to revisit past races. You can even change the color of your car.

As with many Pocket PC racing games, however, control and gameplay are where Geo Rally 2005 falters. The developer invested a considerable amount of effort to get around the Pocket PC's control limitations by including such things as mappable controls, multiple camera angles, and an auto-accelerate feature, but I still found the car a little too hard to control. As with many other Pocket PC racing games, GR2005 ends up being more about struggling with the controls than actual racing. Rally racing (or at least the games I've played that focus on it) is in some ways more demanding than other types of racing since the tight, narrow, and ever-changing tracks often involve making subtle adjustments in order to navigate curves and to avoid colliding with scenery. In GR2005, the cars aren’t quite agile enough and just don't feel like real cars. Were it not hampered by mediocre game play, Geo Rally 2005 would have a lot going for it and would have a shot at being a top-tier racing title. As it stands now, however, and especially since it doesn't offer any game modes except the main championship, I would hesitate to recommend the game to anyone but fans of rally racing.

News (Stupid Hotmail Tricks)

I've used Hotmail for about seven years now. In addition to my main account, I have three additional accounts that I use for various purposes (nothing illegal). Spam has always been a problem and was getting quite bad at one point, but over the past year or so, filtering bulk mail on my end and some of the anti-spam efforts on their part have resulted in relatively little of the noxious stuff entering my inbox on a weekly basis. Over the past week or so, though, I've noticed something weird that they're now doing. Nearly every time I send an e-mail, the messages in my inbox get deleted, and in their place is a message telling me to log in to my Hotmail account. I log in and am presented with one of those annoying-as-hell verification things where you have to enter the letters from a scrambled image. I know this is to prevent spammers from sending bulk mailings and using photographic scanners to get around security measures, but it's really annoying (By the way, I mostly access Hotmail through Outlook Express). What's especially annoying is that the letters are often hard to make out from the image, and I often have to make several attempts (I get a different image each try) before I'm able to proceed. Once I do get through, I have to wait for Outlook Express to download ALL the messages again and then finally send the message. Yes, I know I could get an account somewhere else (I have several e-mail accounts, including a Gmail account I opened about a week ago), but I've always considered Hotmail to be a significant part of my e-mail experience.

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Allen Gall’s The Week in Games  Copyright © 2005 by Thaddeus Computing Inc.