Transport Tycoon - free Pocket PC game
Who wants a great and free Windows Mobile game? Well… everybody, ain’t it?
That’s the reason why the guys over ESoftInteractive ported to the PDA arena the cool free open source version of the famous 90’s PC game, Transport Tycoon Deluxe.
Tower Bloxx - Digital Chocolate
Like in every great love story, let me start with the foreplay.
My Sony Ericsson cell phone came branded by Vodafone (yes, I’m an European). As such, it had pre-installed several demo games. Digital Chocolate’s Tower Bloxx was one of them.
I twiddled the demo version for a brief while, found it interesting but not exciting and left it alone. Lately, though, I became more and more annoyed by the numerous demo games on my phone and the fact I wasn’t able to remove them (the phone is branded by Vodafone, remember?). So I decided to just buy the damn games from the Vodafone portal hoping the full version will replace the demo version. It didn’t. Still, this gave me the opportunity to bask in the glory of Tower Bloxx, the full version game.
Needless to say, I fell in love with it.
Yahoo Go available on Windows Mobile
We’ve already had an article on Yahoo Go . Yahoo still hasn’t released a Sony Ericsson J2ME version so that we could test it. But they did release a Windows Mobile version that any smartphone owner should test. It’s still in beta (actually gamma), but looks nice. Could this be enough reason for me to buy a Windows Mobile phone? Not yet, but it time.. who knows…
Chess and Backgammon - multiplayer games from Real Dice
In our latest article on PDA games, which discussed Real Dices’s Multiplayer Championship Texas Holdem, I promised to come back with a few words on Real Dice’s other games. Here I am.
EIDOS ACQUIRES ROCKPOOL GAMES
(directly from the PR manager for Eidos Interactive, here’s today’s scoop:)
Eidos Interactive, one of the world’s leading publishers and developers of entertainment software, has reached an agreement to acquire Rockpool Games, one of Europe’s leading developers of games and content for wireless devices and Rockpool’s two sister companies; Ironstone Partners and SoGoPlay.
The deal will see Eidos acquire the company’s Manchester studios along with 36 staff. All three companies will become an integral part of the Eidos New Media division, building additional resource and critically adding the expertise of an internal development team.
Rockpool Games has built a commendable reputation as an independent mobile content developer and was a finalist in the Mobile Entertainment Awards “Best Developer” category. Many of their recent game developments have received critical acclaim by the press including a series of ten-out-of-ten scores in the last twelve months. Rockpool has been entrusted to develop mobile content for some of the most-important brands in the sector including; Worms™, MotoGP, Ronnie O’Sullivan and Toca Race Driver™.
V-Rally 3D
I wrote few words about Collin McRae Rally and I’ve mentioned the PC version. Most of the times, the mobile version is just a little teaser and a pale copy of it - at least it usually happens.
I honestly don’t know if V-Rally 3D has anything in common with the PC V-Rally, but you should forget that one. In this case, the mobile version is the bomb and leaves the PC version in the dust.
Created by FishLabs and distributed by iFone in 2006, VRally 3D is a spectacular game: as they say on its official page, 3D graphics and a true 3D physics engine for the ultimate rally experience. But all this comes with a cost: over 500 kilobytes in size for a mobile game is a lot indeed and makes it playable only on high-end devices. But this shouldn’t stop you: after all, this is the game I show my friends when I want to make them grasp the future of mobile games, or at least how a good one should look like.
3 tracks, 4 cars. It might not seem much, but thorough the 4 championships you’ll get to unlock a better (not necessarily faster, this is rally, not NFS).
And now comes the good part. In a beautiful 3D environment you get the chance to slide taking turns “by the book”, watching out the clock. The gameplay is superb, except for minor FPS losses - nothing too annoying though, I’ve seen much worse - the tracks become more and more difficult, you get to drive the car on dusty gravel in the desert, on tarmac in Germany and on ice and snow in Sweden. The grip changes accordingly, so you’ll have to adapt your driving style to the road conditions. Every unlocked car feels differently so again you’ll have to adapt.
I won’t hide the fact that ever since I played for the first time the game I’ve fallen inlove with it. So far no game was that close to my gamer heart. It’s not perfect, so I cannot give it a perfect score, but close. 9.5 out of 10. Beautiful, simply beautiful.
[tags]iFone, VRally, mobile, game, midlet, review, java, V-Rally 3D, FishLabs[/tags]
Top game at IMG Awards - Triangler
Who said gaming is for the lazy guys?
I didn’t play Triangler, but this is definitely a game I’d like to join in. Check this out:
Two teams of 5-to-100 players play a two-hour match in a city or rural area. The object of the game is to enclose enemy players with 2000-meter equilateral triangles formed by you and your team buddies. Using advanced location-based and presence services you can locate yourself, your team buddies and enemy players, learn about the availability-for-making-a-new-Triangle status of your buddies and publish your own status.
What’s this? Well, it’s the best game over at 2006 International Mobile Gaming Awards, at the 3GSM forum in Barcelona. The game also won the Most Innovative Game prize. Created by Dutch research institute TNO, and more specifically by Oskar van Deventer, one of the world’s most prolific designers of mechanical puzzles. (he also designs one-player computer thinking games - see www.clickmazes.com)
Although the number of players seems a big, looks like a pretty cool game to play with your college mates or your local Meetup group. Just imagine the excitement of capturing a 40 person group, all while running around town and sending army-like messages to your team members. Also imagine the looks on the faces of the local anti-terrorist squad after being alerted by panicked neighbors…
Read more over here and the official website
Multiplayer Championship Poker Texas Holdem - Real Dice
With all the rave about internet massive multiplayer games(World of Warcraft being probably the best-known example), it’s no wonder that people started getting interested in massive multiplayer mobile games as well.
Meet Real Dice, one of the first mobile gaming startups targeting the massive multiplayer community, with the creation of Real Dice World, a subscriber-based community giving access to multiplayer games against gamers around the world.
Read the rest of this entry »
Eidos Interactive
The PR representative for the mobile division of Eidos Interactive has sent us the following press release, that we’re glad to publish to our readers.
Second Life on the mobile phone, soon
A Techmeme article informs us about a mobile gaming news that definitely deserves being featured here: according to this Reuters article , Comverse Technology, has created in the last 6 months an application that runs Second Life on Java-enabled mobile phones, along with other software that allows integrated SMS and instant messaging and the streaming of mobile video directly in-world.
To quote Steve Jobs, this is huge.
Although Raph Koster points us that the technology is probably based on taking snapshots of the Second Life environment and streaming those to the mobile client, I find it hard to believe. Although more difficult to develop, it is much more likely that the mobile client is actually rendering 3D Second Life models, with textures and all. Off course, such a mobile gaming client would be very resource consuming, and will probably run only on very powerful handsets.
The future will see how this goes. Given Second Life’s huge recent adoption rate, taking into account that the SL client has recently gone open-source, and since Comverse is in negotiations with various carriers, I guess in a couple of months time we’ll start seeing Second Lifers exploring their virtual domains on the go as well.
If you want to read more on the subject, take a look on Startup Squad and 3pointD as well, they have some very interesting insights on the scoop.
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