WHAT’S HOT

   Six games for one nice price!

SETUP

   Travel Collection setup requires nothing special.
Double-Click the icon choose an install location and go.

PROGRAM FEATURES

    Let’s sum the features up quickly: 6 excellent
games for the price of one. If that feature doesn’t grab you then read
on. Travel Collection also has high quality audio from the talented Jaybot7. If you
aren’t familiar with him, he provided audio for Pdamill’s Anthelion
and many others. The background music is mesmerizingly good and moody.
The graphics in The Travel Collection also standout. They are consistently
good throughout the 6 games.

Nice graphics & sound for every game.	Plenty of options, separate options for every game.

    Travel Collection’s
quality is apparent from the onset. After the splash screen you’re greeted
with a slick menu for choosing the the game you wish to play. The options
screen has options for Player Selection, 5 levels of difficulty, Hints,
and Volume settings. Travel Collection doesn’t skimp on options.

Game boards are skinnable!

    First up is Chess.
I love chess and play quite often on my Pocket PC, trouble is after
a couple of years I’ve only won 2 games. I can’t speak for the difficulty
of Travel Collection’s version of chess, but let’s just say my streak
of futility continues! It plays a sound game of chess. There are no
annotation capabilities or options for setting up the board, but I like
that it that way. This game is meant to be easy to get into and play,
just set the difficulty and go. If you’re looking to imitate Bobby Fisher,
look elsewhere.

Best looking game of checkers on the Pocket PC.

    I’ve never been much
for checkers, even as a kid checkers never did it for me. I actually
enjoyed playing Travel Collection’s version of checkers, because I won
a couple of games. Fortunately all of the games include unlimited levels
of Undo. It’s also possible to save your game at any point.

Take the corners!	Every game has it’s own help file.

    Reversi or Othello
for me, was great fun too. In fact I discovered I had the rules all
wrong when my friends and I played. We didn’t keep flipping the pieces
back over when we captured each other, we only flipped initially. That
probably explains why the game ended up in the boardgame graveyard under
my bed. Reversi was challenging for me, even on the easiest level. At
the highest difficulty, the A.I. does just as you would expect, it attempts
to anchor the corners.

Looks like something off of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

    Tic-Tac-Toe
was the surprise of the bunch for me. I was expecting the sterile version
I remember from years back. Tic-Tac-Toe requires probably as much thinking
as the chess game, which is considerable for me. I never thought Tic-Tac-Toe
could be a thinking man’s game. Obviously the computer is dazzlingly
more adept at this iteration of the game than us mere humans. This is
the best game of the lot.

Looks just like the game!	No graph paper needed, worth the price!

    The
last two games should be very familiar. 4-In-A-Row, better known as
Connect Four, was just as fun as I remember. The computer is very good
at setting you up, you have to be on your toes on all difficulty levels.
Dots was also a blast, I had forgotten how much strategy could be employed
while playing Dots. Besides, there’s no need to waste time making evenly
spaced dots on paper or searching for graph paper.

HELP SUPPORT

    Every game in Travel Collection has a short
help file included, which is plenty. With the exception of chess I can’t
imagine anyone not knowing how to play these games.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

    System requirements
are a Pocket PC with an ARM/Xscale processor, 2mb install and 4mb free
to run.

BUGS AND WISHES

   
For a version 1.0, Travel Collection was bug free. As with any good
piece of software the more I like it the more features I wish it had.
First of all I would like to be known as something other than "human",
in the games. Some facility for tracking win lose ratio would be welcome.
It would be nice to review my progress and statistics as I progress
through The Travel Collection games.

PURCHASING

    Travel
Collection has a few different purchase options, Handango,
Paypal
or Clickgamer.
The price is a steal at $9.99, for a game collection of this quality.

PROS

• 
  

  Highly polished and professional
  collection of games

• 
  

  Excellent audio

• Presentation and graphics
  are top notch
• 
  

  Price

CONS

• 
  

  No win/loss tracking or score
  keeping

• 
  

  No multi-player

• 
  

  Can’t name yourself in the
  game

OVERALL IMPRESSION

   Overall I was extremely impressed with The Travel
Collection. This is an A-List Pocket PC title, it has everything, dynamite
graphics, great value and a fabulous soundtrack. Hat’s off to the crew
over at Pocket Adventures. If this is representative of their work,
I can’t wait to see what the future holds. Travel Collection includes
a good mix of games, I can see it becoming an OEM pack-in with future
Pocket PC releases. It really shows off the capabilities of the Pocket
PC and Windows Mobile.