How many parents are going to buy Serious Sam, look at the back of the box, read the big, bold type where it says "System Requirements," see that just about every Palm OS device is covered, and then take the product home only to find out that it won't run on the old Palm handheld they gave to their kids? I was hoping to try this out in conjunction with a nifty piece of hardware that only works with a Visor, but no go. Serious Sam won't work with my old Visor Deluxe. There are a few Palm OS devices on that laundry list that aren't necessarily going to run Palm OS 3.5 or be able to upgrade to Palm OS 3.5. Global Star could and should have done the homework on that.

Also, there's one minor glitch in the installation process. There's a message that pops up telling you to use Palm Desktop to install the files. Although you certainly can do it that way, it just seems a little faster to me to cut to the chase and use the Palm Install tool.

Austin Powers Pinball
Austin Powers Pinball is just plain fun. I can and did spend hours wasting time with this little gem. Maybe that's Dr. Evil's plan for taking over the world: get enough people to buy this, and who needs a stinking laser? There are nine different tables, each of which features a different character from the Austin Powers movies. The Dr. Evil level is pictured in Figure C.

FIGURE C

Stop Dr. Evil's plan for world domination with a little pinball.

My biggest problem here was one of contrast. Due to my installation woes detailed below, I installed this on a monochrome Visor Deluxe. It's pretty easy to lose track of the ball and lose the game, especially on the Mini Me table, pictured in color in Figure D.

FIGURE D

The Mini Me table looks great in color, but is, of course, less impressive in monochrome.

This is a product definitely benefits from a color screen or even an enhanced resolution monochrome screen, such as the one found on the HandEra 330.

I didn't have any problems with the system requirements here. In fact, Austin Powers Pinball ran just fine on my Visor Deluxe. The problem I had was with the installation process. For some odd reason, if you have multiple users on your user list, Austin Powers Pinball defiantly selects the first one and that's it. You can't choose another user, no matter what sneaky PC tricks you try to play (nope, can't do anything with RegEdit).

A massive file that contains all the .PDBs for Austin Powers Pinball is installed to your PC, and you choose from among the nine different table layouts. This program then sends the appropriate .PDBs to the Palm Install Tool for the first user in your user list, and that's that. Fortunately, that wasn't a big problem for me on my Visor Deluxe. However, I didn't have the time to reconfigure multiple things to get Austin Powers Pinball running on my CLIE, which is a shame, since I would really have liked to have been able to play this game in color.

Summary
I like these two games. Both of them have their virtues. Serious Sam is, in spite of my ineptitude, a good solid arcade-style shoot-em-up, and Austin Powers Pinball is really quite a lot of silly pinball fun. However, I kind of have to wonder about a company like Global Star which seems to have quite a bit of money behind it, but is lacking in some crucial areas, such as quality assurance and proofreading. If you have a good basic product, but you can't get some of these other things right, it just isn't enough.

Product availability and resources For more information on Global Star Software, visit http://www.globalstarsoftware.com. For more information on Palm handhelds, visit http://www.palm.com. Easy, flexible article reprints ZATZ now offers a quick, easy, flexible and inexpensive way to use article reprints in your marketing and promotion efforts. You can now get article reprints for a one-time fee of only $200. For details, visit http://mediakit.zatz.com/reprints.

Michael Compeau is a Contributing Editor for PalmPower Magazine as well as the VP of Business Development and Planning for Cutting Edge Software (at http://www.cesinc.com), a subsidiary of Mobility Electronics.