I've always fancied myself as a decent pool player (well, decent enough to have placed in extremely minor tournaments!), and when I found out that I could play Pool on the Palm, I just had to get my hands on the game so I could hone my pool skills.

Pool 1.14 is the pool game I'm talking about here. It's a simple game, with minimal yet more than adequate graphics, and it's a fun game to have on your Palm to while away the time. Maybe you've always wanted a pool table in your own home but couldn't afford one, or maybe you're just a pool shark and want to play the game every waking minute of the day. Whichever category you fall into, Pool offers a little bit of something to everyone.

Pool is a nice, small app, and takes up very little space on the Palm. It only takes up 17kb of Palm RAM, which is great news for all you game fans out there. At least it doesn't suck up a big chunk of your precious Palm RAM! There isn't a color version out yet for the Palm IIIc. Instead, the game plays as black-and-white on the new color Palms. The game runs noticeably slower on a IIIc though. The graphics are simple, but detailed enough to keep your attention. The pool table is just a simple rectangle with cushions on its sides. The balls are white with a black stripe ('stripes'), or black with a white dot ('solids'). The black ball has a tiny "B" in the center to identify it by. The animation is pretty cool --- you can see the balls spin after they've been hit, and the game is grounded solidly on the law of physics. The angles of collisions are rather accurate, and the momentums of collisions are also quite accurate.

The game is easy to play, even for beginners. You just tap your stylus on the white ball, take aim, draw back, and let go. You can play the game in 1-player, 2-player, or 2-player IR mode. All these modes work well (I get a little confused about the 1-player rules though), and it's great fun to pit your skills against a fellow Piloteer using the 2-player IR mode. One thing missing is the vs. computer mode. It would be nice to be able to play against the Palm, since it gets boring playing the game by yourself after a while. Take note that the rules that this Pool game is based on are English/European rules (which explains the spare after the foul), and not American ones. A 'FOUL' sign appears if you should make a foul shot, but I feel that it lingers around for a tad too long.

Other options include speed of the table, and rebounds off the cushions. You can also define the spin on the cue ball before you take a shot. For example, if you want the cue ball to have english, just tap on the spin control ball on the bottom right corner of the screen. The default setting of the game has a fast table speed and medium cushions, but I found this too slow for my taste. Hard cushions mean more rebounds, and more fun! I changed the settings partly due to the lack of power I found when using the cue, especially on the break. The power on the break is downright pathetic, and really doesn't break the setup much. You can also change the view of the pool table by using the Up-Down hardware buttons. This confused me somewhat, since I could never remember if the Up button that rotated the table clockwise or counter-clockwise. The ability to rotate the table came in handy though, especially when taking corner shots. An extra view I would like to see is a 45-degree angle, since some shots are easy to take at that angle.

There were several other aspects of the game that I didn't quite like. One was a 'black hole'-like effect on the white ball whenever it got too near a pocket. The strange thing was that if a non-white ball was at the same distance away from the pocket, it wouldn't get sucked it. However, the white ball would. This annoyed me a great deal, and just didn't seem consistent to me. Another thing was that the sound that accompanied the game was extremely grating. It's a strange combination of high-pitched noises, and there's no option in the game to turn off the sound. Thankfully, you can do this in the General Preferences menu on your Palm. On the bright side, there was a useful help feature in the game, albeit a short one. It describes the most important features in the game and how to use them. Great for first-timers who are clueless about how to rotate the table or use the cue.