20/08/2003 Interview with Roman Pedan from PDArcade.
What part do you play in PDArcade and has it been as successful as you would have liked?
There are several people who work on PDArcade, Michael K is the owner and Ben T posts the most news (There is a Staff page with the entire staff). Everyone tries to help out the site in everyway possible. I am most active in the news front although I have posted my share of reviews, interviews, and articles for the site. I try to help out by reviewing and covering the games that are for more high-end devices since I am the only one in the staff who owns an OS 5 Clie. I am very happy with the growth of PDArcade. The new forums have really increased the amount of members that we have and their interaction. There is always room for improvement, though. For example, we are working on making each news article create a thread in a News forum in our message boards.
What's the BEST PDA game you have played to date?
WOW! This is a very hard question. Considering the amount of Palm OS games out there (sorry, I don't own a Pocket PC), picking one is nearly impossible. Right now, I am really enjoying Kingdom 2.0 which is very similar to Civilization as well as NesEm the new nintendo emulator developed by Kalemsoft. A very nice freebie which is always improving is X3. I haven't played Table Tennis 3D in a long time but that used to be one of my favorites as well.
How many PDAs have you owned and what do you own now?
I have owned a grand total of three PDAs. These include the Palm V and the Vx. I recently made a BIG (probably the understatement of the century) update to the relatively new NX60. The NX60 is a great PDA and is perfect for Palm OS games (except for the bad sound API). Even so, I am really looking forward to get my hands on a Tapwave Zodiac!
What's the best song you have ever heard?
There are so many songs that to choose one would be insane! I recently saw the movie Chicago and really enjoyed most of the songs in that movie. Any person of music would love to see that movie. As for one song from the movie, I can't even pick that because they were all great!
Do you have any special plans for PDArcade?
There are plenty of things that we are thinking about adding to PDArcade. We are trying to add more and more interactivity to the users, but unfortunately some of the things that we want to add are difficult to add without the knowledge of PHP so it may take a while. Other than the update, we will add hardware reviews-of devices such as the new Sony game controller, the Tapwave Zodiac, and any other gaming device that we can get our hands on...after all, almost all Palm OS devices are becoming better and better at playing games. We have also been thinking of adding video reviews to the site. This is easy enough to do with my new Sony Digital Handycam :), but it would take a great deal of bandwidth which we currently do not have. We may host the files on a website such as fileplanet in order to provide our users with such a service. Another cool thing which we will be adding in the very near future is a direct way of buying software from our site. There will be a link in each review that will allow the user to order the software directly from Handango! Other than what I mentioned, I have to say that we are always open to suggestions and there might be a few surprises along the way!
If you had to choose which platform would come out on top eventually, would it be Palm, Pocket PC or the SmartPhone?
I would choose the Palm OS with Symbian being my second choice.
Your dream PDA feature would be...?
If possible, I would love to have a built-in keyboard foldable-type keyboard in the shape of a UX series as well as a built-in web-browser which is as powerful as IE 6 but can use multiple windows at the same time (the way that Netscape 6 does it).
Do you know how many people visit your site and which part of the world the majority are from?
I am very happy to say that we are always accumulating new users and almost each month we receive more hits than the previous month. This month, we have consistently received around 6,000 hits a day and on average receive around 160,000 hits per month with a peak of 325,715. I am very happy to say that we have already tripled the amount of hits that we received all of last year! I believe that the gaming market will grow significantly this year, with the release of the Zodiac, PSP and other gaming devices. Hopefully, this growth will mean more hits for our site.
Anything you would like to add?
PDANews24 is a GREAT site which I visit almost daily! Thanks for putting all of the time in by updating the site and helping the Palm community! To PDArcade users: Please join our forums and contribute! It makes us very happy :).
Thanks to Roman for taking the time to answer my questions- if you want to keep up with the latest mobile gaming news make sure you visit PDArcade once a day:)