Since this issue is focused on games and education, I thought I'd spend some time looking at the freeware sites listed on our Best Sites page (http://www.pocketpcmag.com/_top/bestsites.asp). I wanted to find the sites that had the most titles in these two areas. I came away amazed at the large number of free titles-and quite impressed with some of the sites. We'll take a look at the best offerings, first covering games and then education.
Pocket PC freeware sites for games
Hundreds of free games are available for the Pocket PC from a number of download sites.
Pocket PC Freewares
(http://www.pocketpcfreewares.com/en)
Far and away my favorite site for free games is Pocket PC Freewares. The site not only reviews each title and rates it on a scale of 1 to 10, but also lets you sort the titles in a variety of ways: by popularity, rating, date, and name. If you sort by Popular (by clicking on the column title), you can see which have been downloaded the most, giving an indication of what's good. A real advantage of this site is the rating system. Unlike other sites that have user ratings, these are ratings done by the editors, who review each and every title. If you sort by rating, you might find a game that got a high rating, yet may not have many downloads, perhaps because it's new.
Pocket PC Freewares
At the time of this writing, the site had about 300 games in 4 categories (Action, Classic, Misc, and Reflexion). Doom is the download king in the Action category, with over 50,000 downloads, followed by The Nutcracker (43,500) and Pocket Quake (29,000).
The Pocket PC version of Doom is the most popular action game download on Pocket PC Freewares.
Chess 2.0 is the most popular in the Classic category, with 32,000 downloads. (It requires that you have the Microsoft .NET Compact Framework on your device. The latest devices have this. To determine if yours does, download and install Chess. If it doesn't run, you need to install .NET Compact Framework on your Pocket PC. You can get it for free from Microsoft. Go to their download site (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads) and do a search on ".NET Framework Version 1.1 Redistributable Package."
FreewarePPC
(http://www.freewareppc.com)
This site had about 250 games as of this writing. The strength of FreewarePPC is its division into 13 well-organized categories. There's even a category for Game Utilities that includes items such as a Texas Hold 'em Calculator that helps you to determine winning starting hands depending on the number of players in the pot.
Freeware PPC
It's difficult to gauge the popularity of the titles, since the site doesn't indicate the number of downloads. However, there are user ratings for about a third of the titles. (Note that this site does have annoying pop-ups, which occur even though I have pop-ups turned off in my browser.)
PDA Gold
(http://www.pdagold.com/software)
This site has both commercial and free software, and does a good job of letting you view only the freeware titles-170 free games in 6 categories as of this writing. You can view the number of downloads as well as user ratings, but there's no way to sort by these. One of the categories is Game Emulators, which has several programs that emulate gaming devices.
PDA Gold
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