Poker Drops for the Palm Pre and Pixi

  
      One of the Pre’s greatest strengths is its ability to push polygons in Playstation 1 quality 3D games. These games are just as immersive and addicting on the small screen as they are on the, well various size screens. Only a few years ago cell phone games were simple diversions, hardly more engaging than Pong. The Pre and the Jesus Phone have changed the way we think of mobile games. Sometimes though, the most addicting, and valuable games are the simplistic ones with simple graphics like Poker Drops from Gobico Games. http://www.precentral.net/app-gallery/app-catalog/poker-drops

    Poker Drops is something like Boggle with playing cards. You are given a grid of playing cards and you must make poker hands by drawing a line connecting adjacent cards in either vertical, horizontal, diagonal or zig zagging lines. Each time you make a hand, those cards disappear and new cards drop in from the top. You keep making hands as fast as you can until the time runs out, racking up as many points as you can. Obviously you get more points for bigger and better hands.
    Poker Drops is surprisingly addicting. I couldn’t put it down for the first whole day I had it and every time I have a few moments of boredom, I load it up. Graphically it’s not stunning but it’s an attractive interface, and you can change the theme to one of several built in. You can also customize the rules to make your game easier or harder, quicker or longer. There are also many “Trophies” to unlock, similar to Achievements on Xbox Live. The Trophies range from near impossible feats of astonishing awesomeness, to epic fails so bad they’re noteworthy. The problem with it is that as far as I can tell, there's no way to share those achievements over Facebook and Twitter.

    The game can be a bit laggy at times. Sometimes it takes a few seconds to animate your move and you end up thinking that it hasn’t registered so you try the move again. The problem with this is that sometimes it actually did not register your move and you spend precious seconds waiting to find out. Then other times you find out it did in fact register the move and you waste seconds trying to do it again.
    The value of games like this are that you can play it in those short moments while you wait in line at the DMV, on your break at work, or while sitting on the throne. The games that make your eyes fall in love take a little longer to load up and generally are more lengthy gaming sessions. Especially considering I get a too many cards error and have to reboot my phone every time I try to play a 3D game, I really can’t jump in and back out of those games quickly when I’m stealing a few moments.
        Poker Drops’ creator Dave Balmer also created Wobble Words, which is the same game with words instead of playing cards. He now works for Palm in their Mojo SDK development team. http://www.precentral.net/gobico-games-developer-joins-palms-sdk-team Get it for only $2.