Got back from the world's premier mobile phone event in Cannes yesterday afternoon, exhausted after three days of wandering around the SIX exhibition halls, as well as the many hotel suites and private apartments hired out by companies unwilling to sully themselves amid the hoi polloi of the official exhibition. Saw some great mobile games out there. I also saw many thousands of men in sober grey suits talking about carrier-grade infrastructure services and advanced DRM solutions for W-CDMA networks.
Hopefully, it's the games you're more interested in, so here's a round-up of what the key publishers and developers had on offer.
Distinctive Developments The Sheffield-based developer was being enormously secretive due to a range of licensing deals that haven't quite been signed off just yet. However, MD Nigel Little did mention a new version of Michael Vaughan Cricket that will be out in time for the Ashes, and Freddy Flintoff cricket, a more arcade-style cricket title for later in the year. April will see the release of a Grand National tie-in, where you compete in the famed race, managing the horse's speed, stamina and jump timing.
Ifone I had my first go on the company's Java translation of Lemmings, which is looking very, very impressive. Due out on March 24 it contains 28 levels, and plays almost identically to the original, via a well-implemented point and click interface. Apparently, the company is looking at following up the release with a conversion of Lemmings Tribes or Lemmings 3D.
According to marketing manager Enda Carey, they're also looking into releasing multiplayer versions of turn-based titles such as Battleships, Monopoly and Cluedo but have to find a billing model that suits the player and the publisher. Earlier this year in the States, they trialled a two-player version of Battleships over a GPRS connection, but the engineers worked out that a complete game would cost each participant $15 dollars. No one's going to do that unless it's Nudey Abi Titmuss Battleships. So iFone is working with various tech partners to develop a subscription model that will give players unlimited access to a game for a fixed monthly fee.
For now though, iFone has Cluedo SFX, a Java version of the updated Cluedo boardgame, and – on a similar theme - Game of Life is out later this year. There's also another Monopoly tie-in to celebrate the game's 70th anniversary, and a couple of Atari bundles, bringing games like Missile Command, Breakout and Lunar Lander together into one Java download.
Finally, the company has secured some crazy licenses, including Lassie, Roger Ramjet and Rocky & Bullwinkle. The plan is to release sounds, logos and streaming video clips of each property as well as games. Roger Ramjet theme ring-tone anyone?
In-Fusio The French publisher was mainly showing off its new EGE games platform – a series of enhancements that can be embedded into the latest handsets to improve 3D graphics and multiplayer capabilities. It's far too complicated to go into here, but I'll blog about it later.
The company also announced four new titles: Age of Empires II, Rambo (a scrolling shoot 'em up), Football Fans (a new footie sim) and Tomb Raider (an Ex-En-enhanced collection of the three Lara Croft Java titles developed by Iomo last year). I also had a quick play of GBA conversion It's Mr Pants, which looks like fun.
Gameloft On the stand were Splinter Cell Chaos Theory looking just as polished as the previous titles in the series, and a surprisingly smart 3D version of Ghost Recon: Jungle Storm sadly only available on BREW handsets in the US at present. Indeed, Gameloft is going big on 3D this year now that higher end handsets can throw around enough polys to make it worthwhile - the 3D version of Asphalt Urban GT, for example, is really detailed and still maintains a workable framerate. Us Brits should see the first Gameloft 3D titles by the end of the year.
Also, hiding elsewhere on the stand was Sexy Poker, the company's strip poker title. They were telling me the best parts of developing this title were the long meetings in which they decided exactly what they could and could not show in different versions of the title produced for different regions. Obviously, this varies a lot from, say, Germany (anything goes) to Saudi Arabia.
Kaolink This is a French studio that's spent the last few years developing titles for other publishers – including Crash Twinsanity for Wonderphone, Tony Hawk's Underground for Jamdat and Sabre Wulf for In-Fusio. Now they're attempting to move out of the shadows with a new range of self-published titles. Among them are the visually impressive platformer Ancestral Bird, where your character morphs from a walking egg to a 'magnificent winged creature' as the game goes along. Due out on Java handsets in March it has lovely organic environments and some decent level design. The team was also showing a more conventional scrolling shooter, Biocide, with a survival horror storyline involving aliens invading a secret island army base.
