SemperAptus.com - Monopoly and Scrabble: Wireless Gaming for the Pocket PC (Review)

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Monopoly & Scrabble

For those of you die-hard gamers that prefer a more commercial brand of entertainment, Handmark Software has ported Hasbro's line of popular home games to Pocket PC. Now you can enjoy Monopoly and Scrabble wherever you may be, and whenever you desire a challenging and fun diversion to bring back your childhood.

MONOPOLY - A GOOD TRANSLATION TO THE SMALL SCREEN

Monopoly is my favorite of all of the Hasbro games. This classic property trading game benefits from the Pocket PC's graphic interface beautifully representing the board and playing pieces. And speaking of pieces, each player can select which playing piece should represent them. The top hat, thimble, and racecar are among the six pieces you can assign to human and computer players. Another feature that profits from being on the Pocket PC is the "auction mode," where you try to outbid your fellow players to buy property at a bargain.

However, a previous version of Monopoly for the Palm-size PC included enhanced start-up screen graphics and superior audible feedback. The enhanced audio included the race car's horn or the dog's bark, to inform you of who's turn it is while rolling dice and a cash register's "cha-ching" sound to make the game routines entertaining as well. We were saddened to see that these features were not included when the Pocket PC port was created.

The Monopoly board, though small, is wonderfully recreated on the Pocket PC.

SCRABBLE - BETTER FOR SINGLE-DEVICE PLAY

While Monopoly is intuitive to play, Scrabble is even easier to use in both single player and multiplayer modes. In addition to the standard game, you can perform entertaining functions, such as shuffling your tiles to suit your mind set, or using the official Scrabble Dictionary to check whether "google" really is a word. The game will tell you what each word is worth before you play it and even offers hints if you get stuck.

You can play in Tournament (strict) mode or Friendly mode where you can choose to accept words that may not be in the Scrabble dictionary. One feature that has been improved upon since the Palm-size PC version, is that you can now hide your tiles when you play against other human players on a single device.

Scrabble offers a rewarding gem of a recreation on the Pocket PC.

INFRARED MULTIPLAYER MODE - HELPFUL OR HASSLE?

Through special "turn at a time" beaming, you can play with multiple devices. Monopoly suffers from the need to tap once each turn just to signify whether the current move should be performed on this device, or another Pocket PC. This incredible nuisance could have been simply solved by designating whether each player was "home" (using this device) or "away" (using a different device) on the player set up screen. Oddly enough, Scrabble includes this very feature. Also, the Palm version of the software supports Bluetooth, but the Pocket PC version does not. In all, the multiplayer features seemed like an afterthought with their poor execution and difficulty in use.

	Pros: Excellent to have a commercial property available for Pocket PC. Great graphics.
	Cons: Ridiculously poor sound. Multiplayer mode (the point of this review) is, honestly, crap. Extremely high cost for such poor production quality.

Buy Monopoly | Scrabble
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