PDAmill's Double Release

[Darius Wey]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://www.pdamill.com/' target='_blank'>http://www.pdamill.com/</a><br /><br /></div><i>"Melonchi Minecarts is our brand new high quality Arcade Puzzle game for Windows Mobile Pocket PC devices. Journey back to Arvale to solve the mysteries of the Melonchi Mines with your favorite characters: Duncan, John DeMenchev, and Grwyth the Dwarf. Enjoy a unique and extremely addicting puzzle game including Gems, Minecarts, and Exploding Tracks while enjoying the visuals and ambience of the Arvale world! GameBox Boards is our fantastic, high quality Board Game Pack including Three Complete Games with selectable difficulty. Superb graphics, high-quality music and sound effects, and fantastic playability make this a excellent addition to your game collection and to the GameBox series. GameBox Boards is designed with the most intuitive versions of Chess, Checkers, and Reversi, easy for anyone to be able to pickup and play. While it also maintains a difficulty level that can challenge even the veteran Board Game players out there."</i><br /><br /><img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/wey-20070828-pdamillnew.jpg" /><br /><br />PDAmill has just released two new games for Pocket PCs. The first is <a href="http://www.pdamill.com/prod_mm.shtml?ref=prboxs">Melonchi Minecarts</a>, which should be a blast for Arvale fans. The second is <a href="http://www.pdamill.com/prod_gb.shtml?ref=prboxs">GameBox Boards</a>, the sixth title in the company's GameBox series. Trial versions of each are available, and if you like what you see, $14.95 will get you the full version.

[zehlein]

Well, at least the Gamebox Board seems to be an arguable colection of games. The playing strength of all three games is barely exceeding beginners level. And for all three kind of games there are freeware games out on the web that will give you a thrill as a decent opponent. Only good graphics won't do the job here, PDAMill!

[Jaybot]

The only minor complaints we have had so far is with the Chess difficulty settings. The Chess AI engine was ambitiously written from scratch and is constantly being improved which will be included in future updates.

I'm not a chessmaster myself, but I consider myself pretty good. On the hard difficulty setting I can win, but it definitely takes some thought. Easy is supposed to be easy, of course... and we've found a lot of complete beginners love the highlighted squares and find it a great tool to begin with.

For the record, we are definitely not trying to compete with any of the high-end chess games with the super-refined, super-strong chess engines; those are in a class all by themselves. We're simply aiming at the casual board game players with some fun, easy-to-use games in a nice package.

[zehlein]

Don't get me wrong please. Those three games might well be fun for beginners. I do like the graphics and sound. But you should state somewhere that this is the level they are aimed to - beginner level.
Everybody else might be a bit upset if he bought the GameBox and found himself winning at the first attempt at the hardest level as it happened to me. That was all I was writing about...
Besides, I didn't record my chessganes against your engine, but there where a few moves that pointed clearly out, that its understanding of the chessgame as such is really not good. Lashing out with the Queen and moving around the board aimlessly as well as moving the king(!) in a early stage of the game without a reason for it should really be corrected. Even more if your target group are beginners...
I volunteer herewith as a beta tester of an improved engine .. :)