Tradewinds  ::  Podz  ::  Letter of the Week 

Riding the winds of trade

On the various gaming platforms, there have always been trading games like Starflight on the PC (for you oldschoolers), Master of Orion, Elite (which we actually had briefly on the Pocket PC until David Braben killed it), and a slew of others.

Tradewinds from Astraware is probably the first decent trading game I've seen so far on the Pocket PC, and it's definitely the first one I've been able to get into. The game takes place on a faraway world resembling Earth during the 19th century or so. You get to play one of four characters, ranging from an upstanding merchant down on his luck to an out-and-out pirate, each with slightly different game play. Game play involves hopping from port to port on a rather small map, buying various goods at a low prices and selling them at higher prices elsewhere. Goods range from the cheap to the amazingly lucrative (and illegal) "dream dust." The game flows pretty well as you build your little empire by trading, building more ships to carry more goods, building warehouses, and fighting off horns with pirates.

Although game play is pretty straightforward, Tradewinds allows for a fair amount of strategizing. Although you can simply jump around from point to point and rely on luck, you can also do research at local taverns to find out what the hot deals are and where the pirates are. It's also necessary to balance profitability and risk: you'll need to make sure you have enough ships to defend yourself when attacked, and you'll need to make sure you have enough guns. Adding guns, however, reduces the amount of inventory your ships can carry. Warehouses can store goods but have pitfalls of their own and need to be guarded.

Tradwinds is a lot of fun, but once you get into the upper echelons (i.e, the "Master Trader" rank), the delicate balance holding the game together seems to break down a bit. Your ship will get attacked on almost every trip, and the battles themselves become a bit tedious as they often involve large numbers of weaker ships. I found myself purchasing some of the smaller ships by default, since ships can be hard to come by in the game. I think the combat aspect of the game would be improved by restricting higher-ranking players to larger and more sophisticated ships. It would also be helpful if the player could upgrade his or her ships to bigger and larger ones, instead of having to buy more and more ships. Although it doesn't have a great deal of lasting value, Tradewinds is a mostly solid trading game and worth checking out if you enjoy the genre.

Podz

Podz is based on an older concept, although I never played the original game. It's sort of like Bejeweled on a string: a winding line of balls makes it way along a track, and your job is launch a ball from your gun and shrink the line by making a match of three or more balls of the same color before the line makes its way to a hole at the end of the track. Once a ball enters the hole, it’s all over. Podz has 25 levels, and the track is very different in each level. Podz has a back-story of aliens trying to make their way to the center of the Earth, but this is the sort of manic game where the storyline doesn’t matter. The arrangement of the track and your gun in each level creates interesting strategic possibilities: in some levels, for example, you can shrink the line right as it enters the screen; in others, you'll be scrambling to keep up as the twisting line takes up more and more of the screen. There's never a dull moment in Podz, due to the differences between the levels and the exceptional use of power-ups: some will freeze your gun, some will slow your gun down, others will allow you to slow the line down and "nuke" all balls of a certain color.

Podz offers three game modes, better than adequate graphics, and good audio. Earlier versions of the game had slow menus, but the developer has been continuously improving the game to make it more playable. One thing I'd like to see (and I made this suggestion to them) would be to have the d-pad control the gun. Currently you aim with the stylus and fire by pushing up on the d-pad. This works OK, but it wreaks havoc on your screen protector, and I'm sure it's resulted in a few scratched screens on devices not equipped with protectors. It would be better if you could aim with the d-pad and have an overlay or an arrow showing where the ball will go based on the current angle, then letting you fire using one of the buttons.

I struggled to get the hang of the game at first. Podz is the sort of game where you need to be firing all the time and thinking several steps ahead; it's not like other color-matching games where you make one move at a time and then think about your next move. Podz really is a lot of fun once you get the hang of it.

Letter of the Week

From Cheryl:

Hi Allen. It's Cheryl again. :) Guess you are probably getting tired of hearing from me right about now (I suppose you could blame all of the new game releases for my frequent chatter). Anyhow I wanted to tell you about some really Awesome customer service that I recently received from the LDW software company. Lest you think that I am only full of complaints, I want to set the record straight. I am critical, yes, but when I get great service I notice that too!!!

Here is what happened. LDW just released Fish Tycoon. I am sure that you remember their earlier offering, Plant Tycoon, as you did a review of it a while back. Since I am a big fan of Plant Tycoon I immediately ordered the Fish version from Handango the moment I got the new release email. I honestly haven't had a minute to try it out yet, but it seems to be similar to Plant Tycoon, only with fish. Well, you can imagine my unhappiness when within an hour of ordering the new game for $19.95, I received an email from LDW offering repeat customers the game for $10 off at $9.95. *Sigh.* My enthusiasm cost me again, or so I thought. I sent an e-mail to LDW telling them that I had already purchased the game before their announcement. I wasn't really expecting them to do anything about it: I just wanted to whine a bit.

Well, LDW emailed me back that they wanted to refund the $10 to me via Paypal, and within a short while my Paypal account was indeed credited with the refund. I am very impressed, as the discount was offered only if one ordered from them directly, and I had used Handango. They still honored the discount and made things right. You really gotta appreciate good customer service like this these days: it's rare. A real person answered my email immediately and went out of their way to assist me with a problem that I mostly created by myself. I truly can't say enough about what impressive customer service LDW offered. I would highly recommend them to anyone! Not to mention that their games are pretty cool too!!!!

Cheryl

Sounds like good customer service on their part. I haven't dealt too much with that aspect of the market since I get most of my software for free and haven't really had many technical issues with software I've tried out. They just dropped me a line about Fish Tycoon, and I'll probably be reviewing the game in a few weeks. I've always liked fish and aquariums, so it'll be interesting to see what they’ve come up with.

Allen

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