Here is my review of the QuestVM engine together with the Space Quest II game. Ewan and Rafe please read it and tell me what to think in order to correct it before I send it to the developer.
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QuestVM Technology Preview
Phone tested: Nokia 7650
Application Title: QuestVM Engine (Technology Preview)
Size: 81kb Installed - 46kb Compressed
Developer: MobilePhoneQuest
Game Title: Space Quest II
Size: 635kb Installed - 375kb Compressed
Mobile phones are not what they used to be. Advances in technology brought us the first phones with colour screen, Java and other little goddies. Nobody (well ok, some might) could imagine that a mobile phone can be more powerfull nowadays as a desktop computer some years ago. But being powerful is not enough. Software is what made the PC platform strong and Software is what will make any mobile phone platform strong; and Series 60 and Symbian OS might just win this battle.
About more than a decade back, I bought my first Sierra adventure game.It was called Kings Quest I. The magic of this type of games was that you could interact with objects in a virtual world and not just -shoot- -bang- -your dead- -I win-. Then after the Kings Quest successful series, came the Leisure Sweet Larry series, the Police Quest series and finally one my favourites, the Space Quest series. Those days playing adventure games was a MUST and for a great amount of time Sierra was the leader in the market. However, I could never imagine that I would be playing the original Space Quest II on my phone, sitting in a Metro train, going to Univeristy. Half way through my journey I lifted my head, realised what a privilege it was and smiled. I was one very happy man.
QuestVM is a port of the Sierra Interpreter engine that is needed to play such games. It is ported by MobilePhoneQuest and runs successfuly on the Series 60 platform. We tried it with my very own copy of Space Quest II on our very own demo especially for Allaboutsymbian.com. The engine itslef just takes up about 81kb (46kb compressed) of flash memory. Space Quest II itself is 635kb (375kb compressed). The game runs in fullscreen mode and is very fast. Everything is the same, from the credits until the introduction clip. Although this version has sound disabled, we can imagine that this will be supported in later versions. You can also access the original menu bar of the top of the screen like in the PC version by pressing the "1" key on the keypad which emulates the <esc> key of the PC. As we said this version is a technology preview and many features are missing like save/load. However, just having the game on the phone brings enough joy.
So how does inputing words and commands work? Well the answer is, just fine. It is like writing an SMS. Key response is quite smooth and a heavy SMS user can write very fast. Movement of the character is done with the joystick. The "emulation" of the <enter> key is done by pressing the joystick down and as we said earlier the <esc> kay is 'emulated' with the "1" key. I played some parts of the game and found it like playing on the PC. The font of the text boxes is quite small due to the size of the screen but it is readable as you can see from the screenshots. All in all this port of the Sierra engine is like it should be. Fast, smooth an playable. When the final product comes out it will be a must have. Until then I am rubbing my hands and waiting for the day when I will be able to play all my favourite adventure games on my boring journeys with the Metro train.
Rating: 89%
MaleBuffy