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By Christopher Coleman |
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Mobile phone gaming is something I'd never really thought much about before . . . I'd seen the occasional screenshot of a game looking particularly ancient. I'd played the occasional simple monochrome game on my previous Nokia phone. I'd never really expected to be impressed by anything on a phone. I was wrong. Recently, I finally got around to upgrading my phone from a years old Nokia CDMA phone with small monochrome display to a rather impressive Samsung model - full colour screen, camera, MP3 player, e-reader, USB connection, rims, sunroof and nitrous injectors. It's rather excessive, but I like it. The phone's about as thin and lightweight as Nicole Richie too. The interesting part as far as this column is concerned? It plays Java games. The Samsung came with two games, an odd bunny rabbit puzzle game ("Bobby Carrot"), and a 3D skating game ("Power Inline X"). The technical qualities of these games are undeniably impressive for a mobile phone - sharp, easily seen graphics, and a decent (if a tad slow) 3D effect for the skating game. It's quite a leap from Snake 2 on the ol' Nokia CDMA phone, let me tell you. Bobby Carrot A nifty little simplistic puzzle game - you have various carrot patch environments, and you have to eat all the carrots and end up at your rabbit hole without retracing any of your steps. Seems pretty easy at first, but as you complete levels, more complexities are added, such as rotating gates or steel rabbit traps. It has a standard difficulty mode where you collect said carrots, and an advanced mode where you collect easter eggs. A game that's taxing enough to hold your interest for at least a little while, and doesn't require excessive manual dexterity makes it an ideal choice for playing on a mobile phone. I'd imagine my provider had that in mind when they preinstalled it. All right, you cynics, it's more likely they got it cheap from the developers. Power Inline X While I said this was technically impressive, I can't in all honesty say it was all that much fun to play. You can play as a male or a female character, and have to skate through various reasonably well represented if basic 3D courses. The 3D effect easily looks as good as anything a Game Boy Advance would come up with, if not a bit better. Unfortunately, once you start playing, things go downhill. The sense of speed is barely reasonable, but the control method is decidedly ordinary. The Samsung has a disc controller which can double for the numeric keypad keys one would normally use to control these games, and you'd think it would work rather well. Unfortunately for this game, the control is decidedly sluggish. If you do manage to get your character to skate up a ramp, the camera spins around to the side and you get to both watch the character peform a stunt (automatically) and lose your bearings while the screen reorients itself to the standard third person perspective. It's not all that great, kids - I certainly wouldn't have been happy if I'd paid to download it, and I'm still not happy it's locked content on the phone - meaning I can't delete it and get the space back. 24: The Mobile Game This was the most interesting of the games available on my provider's download site - at least that I could find within a couple minutes of browsing on the phone. I find that I rush around as fast as possible in the hopes that it won't cost me as much in data rates, even though I'm sure I'd be lucky to be spending a few cents a minute. Wasn't I supposed to be discussing the game? Based on the television series of the same name, this is an impressively presented set of various minigames which are linked together to form a fully realised story. Complete with small cameo images and text dialogue from various characters in the show, you play the part of an agent helping Jack Bauer and the team to investigate a threat from North Korea. The various minigames include a top down driving segment where you have to get from location to location and not crash into other cars too much (ever play the original Ghostbusters game on various home computers or consoles? Remember the driving segments in that?), an infiltration game similar to Metal Gear - you have various guards patrolling on fixed paths with a marked line of sight and you have to get past them all without raising alarms, defusing bombs, picking locks . . . even decoding scrambled transmissions. All told there's 10 different minigames, recurring at different points through the plot, and if you like, you can play them individually in training mode as well as during the game proper. If a particular minigame is failed or skipped, you incur a time penalty, and as you might imagine, there's an overall time limit for completing the whole story. When I first bought this, I ended up playing it for 45 minutes straight and damn near drained the batteries. This would've made an excellent Game Boy Advance or DS game, so it certainly surprised me to play it on a mobile phone. I highly recommend it at the equivalent of $US5 . . . hell, I'd be generous and say it's worth $US7 or 8. I'm just that kind of guy. Metal Slug: Mobile Impact I've always been a big fan of the Metal Slug series, ever since the first game came out on the Neo Geo MVS console system. Remember that? King of Fighters! Art of Fighting! Garou Mark of the Wolves! Err.. Densha De Fist! You get the idea - the system was extremely overrepresented in the fighting genre. Still, nobody can deny that Metal Slug was a classic, and to date there are 5 sequels on MVS (and various other platforms), a Game Boy Advance game, two Neo Geo Pocket Color games and . . . well, a mobile game. Metal Slug, as if you didn't know, is a scrolling shoot-em-up with amusing graphics and some rather impressive power ups. Imagine Contra, but with well crafted cartoony graphics, more screaming, more laughs and more laughs about screaming. As you might imagine, a mobile phone version of Metal Slug in less than 150k isn't going to quite match up to a multi-megabyte MVS cartridge, but (distinct lack of sound effects aside) it's rather impressive. It gets the point across well, with slightly small but accurate representations of your character, the enemies, POWs, the whole shebang. It looks a little odd at first with the vertical orientation of the screen, but you get used to that quickly. Boss fights are simplified as well - you face helicopters as bosses, at least for the first few missions. The number of extra weapons you use is cut back a bit as well - I've only found rockets, flame shot or heavy machine gun so far. The control method is reasonable, but a bit unwieldy for jumping and moving at the same time - you have to press the direction then the jump key one after the other in quick succession, and this can be a challenge at first. Also, when driving the Metal Slug in a later stage, it can be difficult to tell which way your gun is angled without watching the muzzle flash, and even then I found it difficult to tell if I was hitting the helicopter end boss or not. Fortunately for you, you have an energy bar (common to all the handheld versions of Metal Slug, as far as I recall) as opposed to the one-hit-one-life-lost difficulty of the original MVS games - you can occasionally pick up food to replenish this energy or gas cans if you're driving the Metal Slug. Also, to hold your interest, there are a limited amount of continues, and if you've blown them all, you get one more chance to proceed with your score reset before having to start an entirely new game. "Mobile Impact" has a few drawbacks, sure, but if you're a rabid Metal Slug fan and have a few bucks to waste, it's a worthy diversion. In the interest of indicating potentially biased reviewing, my ringtone is currently the Level Complete jingle from MVS Metal Slug 1, by the way! I'm really only just exploring the possibilities with mobile games now. My provider has a number of games for sale, $AUS7 each (approx $US5) as well as the cost to download the data (games seem to be between 100 and 400k on average), but I'm both trying to exercise restraint and to shop around a bit to see what's available. It still bothers me to be buying a game without any box or manual or cart or software media. What happens if the phone gets accidentally erased? It may be possible to hack the phone somehow, but the connection management software that came with it doesn't give you access to applications installed on the phone. Anti-piracy good, anti-backup potentially frightening. Lessons learned? Mobile games can be worthwhile, but don't go buying a phone just to play them. It'd probably be best to stick to games that don't require rapid and repeated keypresses or overly complex controls, as the keypad of the vast majority of phones just isn't up to the task. Finally, pay attention to the cost of what you're downloading - both the item itself and the data transfer charge rate to your phone.
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