Virtual bowling on your Treo

Love to bowl? Have a Treo? (Or any Palm OS 5 color device?) Well, then thank your lucky stars you're reading Robogeek right now. The latest PalmSource Newsletter arrived today, plugging several current software specials, but the one that caught my eye was Bowling Deluxe (on sale for $10 now through Monday). Basically, it's a virtual bowling game for your Palm, but it's pretty damn addictive, and takes up less than a megabyte of memory. There are three modes of play ("Stroke", "Simulator" and "Arcade"), three levels of difficulty, and you can adjust your foot position, throwing power, spin, angle of attack, and the weight of the ball. At first glance I gotta admit it looked kinda stupid, but it's actually quite satisfying and rather well designed. (You can download a free ten-day trial version if you want to try it out.)

But if that's not quite hard-core enough for you, behold Ultimate Bowling Fighter, which got a rave review over at Treonauts.com today. It's twice the price and hogs several megs of memory, but is considerably more tricked out in terms of letting you choose from multiple characters, bowling lanes, etc., and generally offers more elaborate design and (comedic) animation. Unfortunately, it's only compatible with hi-res Palm devices, so it won't play on my Treo 600 (but will on the 650). Sure looks cool, though.