Tapwave Zodiac 2

The game's afoot

Tapwave ships a couple of basic games with Zodiac - Stuntcar Extreme and Solitaire - but I was able to try a number of the commercial titles, including Doom 2, Duke Nukem Mobile Edition, SpyHunter, Tony Hawks Pro Skater, Apache vs Hind and a selection of past their use-by date... er... 'classic' Atari arcade games.

Playback is smooth and certainly felt like it was running at a reasonable frame rate, particularly on vertical scroller Firehammer and the Elite-esque 3D space shooter Galactic Realms. A nice touch is vibro feedback - the console shakes when you get thumped in Duke Nuke, for example. Alas not all the 30-odd titles available support this feature. Ditto the stereo audio, which definitely sounds better with phones than without.

I was less keen on Zodiac's analog controller, which I found too sensitive for someone as used to a keyboard and mouse as I am. But such reactions are common among gamers who try new types of input device. After a while, I started to get used to it. More to the point, it's unlikely to be a problem for console gamers proficient on analogue PS2 or Xbox controllers.

Then there are the games. Prices range from $10 to $30, and there's a reasonable mix of genres. Too many of them, however, are oldies that have simply been dusted down and put to work on a new platform. I'm always up for a Doom 2 session, but frankly I'd rather play in on a desktop, particularly since this version lacks the hi-res art seen on other platforms. Heck, the game looks worse than my old Mac version circa 1994. Ditto Duke Nuke.

Do you really want to pay top dollar for games that look no better than they did on an early-1990s PC?

In fact, playing the Zodiac doesn't feel much different from playing the Atari Lynx I used to own in the late 1980s. Yes, the screen's bigger, the machine is smaller, and CPU fast enough to push pixels around sufficiently quickly to render 3D games at reasonable frame rates on the big screen, the lack to a true 3D accelerator means the visuals remain locked in past decades, a feeling reinforced by all the old games.

Maybe Tapwave hopes that the cash-rich early adopters it's pursuing won't prove so fussy or have a nostalgic hankering for the games of their youth. But if it's to make it in the mainstream, Zodiac needs more modern titles. The Zodiac is a better mobile gaming machine than, say, Nokia's N-Gage QD, but the latter has an impressive list of top-of-the-line, up-to-the-minute titles. Maybe Nokia paid developers to port them, maybe not. Whatever the reason, N-Gage has lots of games people want to play. Zodiac doesn't.