Steve Litchfield muses on the Java games scene and reviews two smartphone titles that have caught his eye, with a full 3D flight sim and a superbly polished Backgammon implementation. And they're both 100% free. I take back everything (well, most of the things) I ever said about Java....
Read on in the full article.
I agree, Java games are much better now, not just in terms of the chunk of RAM they take up, but also in terms of their quality.
One of my favourite phone games is City Bloxx, which is included on many S60 smartphones such as the 6120 and 5700. I played it loads and loads, and I assumed because of its high quality graphics and smooth animation that it had to be a native Symbian application. But no, it turns out it's a Java application written for S60 phones, and a darn good one too.
What I predict will happen next is for web-based Flash games to get good enough to compete with phone-based games.
Incidentally, I know some people think City Bloxx is a really boring simplistic game, but if you play it in the strategy mode it becomes very challenging and very interesting indeed:
http://nokiagaming.blogspot.com/2007/07/city-bloxx-perfect-phone-game.html
FreeFlight looks awesome on the E90's internal screen! Thanks for pointing the game out...
Freeflight is terrific on my E70. It doesn't exit cleanly to menu on the "9" button, I have to keep crashing but I really must get back to work now !
Update
It correctly re-orients the joystick in open (keyboard) mode and the 9 button does work from the QWERTY keyboard
I wonder if you could connect it to Google earth somehow !
Thanks for the heads up on both of these games. They are both really fun to play, and well executed...
There is one thing wrong with the backgammon game though... The first thing my friend (who also has an N95) asked was, "can you have two player via bluetooth?"
That would be so sweet... Could you imagine games like backgammon, battleship, chess, poker, etc, etc, etc, all having multiplayer options via bluetooth or internet connections. It would be so sweet, and seemingly, pretty easy to create (as the graphics would not need to be too intense). I could see myself at the pub with my buddies just BLOWING time...
Anyways, here's to hoping we get some good multiplayer board games on our phones in short order... And please, any pointers to games as described above would be greatly appreciated.
Regards,
Phono
Does FreeFlight have a home page?
Phono,
keep your eye on the new N-Gage platform. It will include many casual games, and will seek to integrate multiplayer/community experience to great majority if not all games. So your dream is very likely to become reality. 😊
Also, there's a neat little vibration "rumble" when you land (or crash !)
Thanks for the tip, FreeFlight is awesome!
And about bluetooth multiplayer, Snake EX had it via bluetooth, it was fun playing with my friends, the good old 6600 times...
Nice backgammon game but way too easy on "easy" setting. Trouble is, I'd want to see how it played on harder levels compared to say ZingMagic's Backgammon before investing any money, as I'm a scrooge like Steve! 😉
I tried Free Flight on my Sony Ericsson W950i and it just exits after the Java splash screen comes up, without any error message or anything.
Anyone else seen this?
Well I am most glad to hear about this as I am a big fan of Backgammon I hope this new feature allows me to play it online.