Okay so 3D gaming is the Holy Grail as far as most mobile game publishers and handset manufacturers are concerned, but luckily, not everyone has jumped aboard that shakey and uncertain bandwagon. Two recently announced titles show that there's plenty of potential left in the kind of quick, silly game concepts we've come to love on mobile handsets. And as one of them involves fighting with elephants, it's worth taking a look.
First up, Sumea is about to launch Java title Jumbo Rumble, a three-player battle-'em-up where you must barge your opponents' elephants off the playing area. Interestingly, the action takes place on a single handset, with each participant using just one key to control their big-eared bully boy. Along with Rumble mode, there's also a Tag mode where one player is 'it' and has to chase the others. Sumea is releasing the game on a number of handset models and across all the major operators later this month.
Next, there's Pikubi an obviously Manga-inspired platformer-cum-beat-'em-up from French publisher, In-Fusio. Here you control the titular pink bird as he fights off incoming aliens with a range of kicks and punches. There are 30 candy-coloured levels, split over four themed worlds, plus a bunch of end-of-level bosses. This one's coming out on Orange's range of Ex-En enabled handsets very soon.
Pink birds, fighting elephants – this is the sort of thing that takes us right back to the dawn of videogaming, to surreal titles like Joust, Q*bert and Dig Dug, where questions of realism and the ability to 'relate' to characters were meaningless. Its easy to get all misty-eyed about the early eighties, but that was raw gameplay – abstract ideas were allowed to flourish and no one questioned them.
Apart from the offbeat titles that trickle out of Japan every year, the traditional games industry is now unwilling and unable to explore absurdity and surrealism. Mobile game developers, however, are free to wallow in it. Check out Morpheme's best-selling Balloon-Headed Boy, or Kuju's saccharine visual explosion, Rocket Girl. Want to see this kind of thing on your PS2? Better start reading Edge Magazine and hitting your local games importer for gems like Technic Beat and singing polar bear oddity Kumauta. Long live weird. Long live cute.
