Palm Pre Game Reviews: Dot Game Saves Millions of Trees, Planet

It’s true, the dot game and other games previously thought to be categorized as ecologically harmful to the planet (such as tic tac toe, hangman, or any other game that wastes paper and isn’t really that fun to play anyway) are making their way to devices like the Palm Pre, saving the planet one unused piece of paper at a time.

So my memories of the dot game mainly take place in a chapel on Sunday mornings when I couldn’t pay attention, thus resorting to this mindless lesser of two boredoms. It’s just a matrix of dots that cover a piece of paper, and each player must connect each dot together for each turn. If a player completes a box, that player gets a point; whoever has the most boxes at the end wins. This version of dot game does not allow you play another person on another Pre somewhere, but it does allow you to pass it back and forth to play your neighbor, thus saving the planet (unless you were just going to use the back of your church’s services program, in which case, do what you will).

The Palm Pre’s dot game also allows you to play the computer if you’re going to church stag. It has an easy-to-hard difficulty scale. Just start at hard, easy and medium are a joke (nothing like the dot game to get my intelligence all riled up and offended). The computer moves fast but it lets you know where it moved last by circling the latest move. It is a little strenuous to aim at the little tiny space with your finger where you want to drop the line.

One annoying thing about the game is that it defaults to not allow you to move where you want if there is a box somewhere with three sides that needs completing (this is called Require Box in the options which I missed at first). Part of the game is to pay close attention so you don’t miss opportunities, it shouldn’t default to this, but at least you can turn it off. It just makes your first game annoying.

You can play the game with several different aesthetics, I like crayon best; it makes you pretend that you are really saving the planet. Now start paying attention to the sermon you dirty hippie treehugger.