@CTIA: The New Mobile Games

CTIAI got the chance to play with several games at CTIA which until now I’ve only read about. I was impressed with the advances in technology recently…Some examples:
Mforma’s Spiderman had good graphics and smooth gameplay, and followed what I’ve come to consider the typical mobile game style. You have a little character that moves through a scrolling screen and you have to kill the bad guys and rescue the maiden…although in this case you can play Venom and eat the maiden…which isn’t entirely in character.
Skipping StoneOver at the iPlay booth I played Skipping Stone, which is one of the much-touted “one thumb games” that involves — you guessed it — skipping a stone over water. I was amazed to find it fun and quite addictive. You first click to decide the power of your throw, and then have to press the button at exactly the right time to keep the stone bouncing. Just when you think “Is this it?” you find out it isn’t. Things happen, I don’t know how many different things because what happened to me was the stone become invisible…with predictable results. A whale also comes along and gives you more power. The backgrounds are great too — happy manga type.
I tried a driving game — The Fast and the Furious — and was impressed at the smoothness of the driving. It won’t stop anyone buying a console game but fans of the form would enjoy playing it in their spare time. The cars can be upgraded, so you can play short games as races which are part of an overall longer game.
The last iPlay game I looked at was Metal Slug, the arcade game. It looks the same as the arcade game, and plays the same as the arcade game…it’s the best port to a mobile I’ve ever seen. Thinking about it, the fairly simple gameplay makes it a natural mobile game.
Doom RPGAt Jamdat I tried the Doom RPG game. Id Software decided that the first-person-shooter style of Doom would only disappoint if they tried to replicate it, so they went for a role-playing game. The map is divided into a grid and you move one square at a time…you talk to people, pick things up, attack and so on. The graphics are good and the game has a lot of elements of Doom…
The lady at the Jamdat booth also told me about the upcoming Socom mobile game, which will come out just before the console game and have a different storyline — in fact it will be a prequel. Good cross-promotion…
Finally I went to the Gameloft party and tried the games on trial there…there was a multiplayer racing game and a multiplayer first-person-shooter — I was very impressed with the quality and gameplay on both games. In fact, it was a step above what I thought was possible on mobiles…the smooth gameplay was console-like and there was no latency (there probably wasn’t that many people on the service, but still). Sure, the screen was still small and it was hard to use the controls because they were handset-based, but all-in-all it was pretty good.
It got me thinking…is playability the most important part of a mobile game? What I mean by that is: Is the fact that puzzle games are the most popular format on mobile phones simply because they are the most easily transfered to the platform? Console-style games are more difficult to port to handsets, but once they are actually successfully ported will they become more popular? Mobile handsets will never replace consoles but as more gamers get higher-quality handsets I think they’ll start to fill their downtime with console-like multiplayer games. Especially if the handset has the capability to play the game they’re probably quite likely to pay $10 for a game. Incidentally, the nice Gameloft PR lady pointed out that the company is trying to set up an ‘online’ community for those sort of games, like Xbox live…if it doesn’t have a lot of competition even in the online world it might do very well.
Our CTIA/MES coverage is sponsored by Motricity.

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