I downloaded a few ones not worth talking about here, such as a crap Sonic infinite jumper, a Space Hulk port (which was good, just not interesting to talk about). I also had Wolfenstein RPG which was FANTASTIC but it was ported to iOS so maybe not appropiate for this thread? Anyway here are two ones I really enjoyed
PILLOWFIGHT
This was basically Punchout but with sexy ladies, and sex still sold to me back then. The game is actually pretty darn solid and worked really well for the format. Anything more complex would have been way too cumbersome and awful.
TORNADO MANIA
This game was the shit! It was another game that made good use of the format by having simple controls, this time only one button. When you weren’t pressing a button the tornado would rotate one way, and when held down it would rotate the other way allowing you to move about.
There were two modes, the destruction one is when you just go about destroying buildings and becoming biger (katamari inspiration there) plus there was a Utopia mode where you stole buildings with your tornado, then placed them in an Arctic base in a little SimCity style mode.
I never had access to early mobile games as a teen with handmedown technology, but they always came across as strange, almost futile efforts. I’ve aged enough to disagree with that old sentiment of futility, but it is still cool that people kept trying when there were better avenues for game development all over the place.
I think it’s okay to talk about those id RPGs even though they were ported. The fact that the entire platform didn’t die in obscurity is worth noting.
Most of my exposure to the older mobile titles is via HG101’s occasional mention of mobile spinoffs, like with Castlevania. There was also some crass guy living in Japan who did a video series on Sega games (I forget his site’s name…), including mobile games. That was the closest I’ve ever gotten to them, but it was valuable documentation. Even if he made a lot of jokes about women he didn’t like.
I played a version of Space Impact for the trap lord Nokia that had anime cutscenes in-between stages, I can’t find it anywhere, just the original one. Maybe it wasn’t Space Impact? I just remember it being really inspiring that anime was on a phone.
snake and scorched earth clones are video game standards and should come preloaded on smartphones like they used to be preloaded on dumbphones
I participated in a Nokia mobile game test once, back in the early 00s. It was basically a scavenger hunt type of thing. Everyone would get a message with a word on it, and you had to go snap a cellphone pic of an object you thought fit that word. You’d get points if people voted for your image in relation to the clue you were given. You’d also have to guess what word other people’s photos were based on, etc. I’m pretty sure there are dozens of board games that work like this, but running around NYC snapping photos was a fun afternoon.
For ages I had a Nokia branded rain poncho that was given to me that day in case of inclement weather. Think I finally lost/threw it away last year.
yeah hot damn wow that’s pretty surprising
there was a front mission mobile game that got partly-but-not-fully remade for the ds. there are a lot of series that got mobile games made and now they’re presumably just lost and that bums me out
is there any archive for this sort of stuff?
hell, as anyone googling this stuff can tell you, you can’t even find exhaustive lists of the friggin’ stuff, let alone anything resembling legit binaries. that said; some of it has definitely been backed up, but i don’t think anyone has publically compiled a library
Someone, I think it might’ve bern @T , linked to a Chinese site full of cellphone game downloads, but I forgot to bookmark it. I don’t know if it featured non-Chinese stuff.
Anyone ever play those Prince of Persia cell titles? I’m having a hard time imagining how they actually control, assuming they copy any of the design of the previous sidescrollers.
I did something like this a couple weeks ago. We were in teams, and we ran around the city getting missions from an app. We had to make drops, or pick them up, or find an agent around the city and tell them a passphrase so we would get a codeword. Sometimes you would even get a photo of another team, and told to follow them so you could sabotage their mission.
At the end, all the contacts took pictures that hinted where they were, and you had to race around finding each one to get all the codewords. It was pretty great.
There was a Duke 3D game for the Zodiac, whatever that was
