Mobile Visions Software's Mobile Combat: a great game
Imagine the following scenario from Mobile Visions Software's Mobile Combat, the best Auto PC game yet:

The year is 2015. Road Rage by motorists has become commonplace on America's road system, and the police simply cannot handle the increase in drivers and modern day armament they have put on their vehicles.

In an effort to combat the malicious drivers on the road, American President Bill Gates has authorized a volunteer, federally backed vigilante group called DRIVE (Delegates of Rage In-Vehicle Equalization). This group has been commissioned to eliminate abusive drivers on the road, saving their vehicles when possible so they can be enlisted into the DRIVE force.

You have just passed your test and been accepted into DRIVE. Your car has been equipped with the state of the art Clarion 310C computer system. In addition to managing your weapons it comes complete with its own Combat Simulator to keep you on your toes when you aren't engaging the scum of the highways.

So begins the play of Mobile Combat, a speech enabled game for the Auto PC that simulates battles occurring between you in your vehicle and the bad guys in a variety of other vehicles. You choose what weapons and accessories you want to use and the type of vehicle you want to drive. Each vehicle has a set of three scored attributes associated with it: Armor, Power, and Handling. Each time your vehicle is attacked, one or more of these areas have their scores reduced. Of course, each time you score a hit on the bad guys their points get reduced. The first one to get to zero in one of these categories blows up and looses the round.

I found this game addictive. The first time I played it was on a trip to a meeting at Microsoft from my home about 100 miles away. I totally lost track of time playing this as I learned what weapons worked best in various scenarios and which was the best vehicle to use. I also received random insults from the "driver" of the other vehicle that came across a simulated mobile radio. I think my favorite insult was the, "This is too easy," just as I was about to be blown up with a 50 caliber machine gun.

There is way more to this game than I can write about here. It has a very well-done speech user interface, you never need to look at it except when setting it up, and it has good online help and great sound effects. You can learn more about this game and purchase it for $25 at http://www.mobilevisionssoftware.com.

MusicPlayer: MP3 playback for your Auto PC
Finally, someone has managed to produce an MP3 player for the Auto PC 1.0. This is a major engineering achievement. Whoever did this is a very talented programmer and deserves a big raise and stock options. It can be downloaded at a Web site entitled "Home of the Auto PC." There is no real author name associated with it. The current implementation basically takes over your Auto PC while it is working, turning off speech recognition. If you switch away from the player to another application, it stops playback. Also, it does not use the high fidelity output channel of the Auto PC so no equilization or other sound contouring is possible. Regardless of the shortcomings, though, it plays MP3 files just great from either CF cards or the CD-ROM. You can download this player from http://home.swipnet.se/autopc.