No really, stick with me on this one - just for a few minutes. I'm working on something mobile gaming related at the moment, which affords me the opportunity to survey the current state of the industry in quite some depth. And while there are still a lot of retro conversions, a lot of solitaire and poker games, and a few quite awful console translations, I've seen several truly enticing titles that seem to have come out of another dimension of thought - not a radically different dimension, just a dimension where designers consider the format for a while before, you know, writing the games...
For example, I like the look of InfoSpace's forthcoming Dirty Sanchez title (pictured, above left) - a selection of mini-games where you pass the phone between you and your mates (probably 'down the pub') and carry out dubious challenges. All Back To Mime for example, gets you to mime an action - if no one guesses what you're doing, you have to perform a forfeit suggested by the game, if someone guesses wrong, they get the forfeit. It's sort of like Cranium meets spin the bottle. And you can edit the challenges to make them dirtier if you like...
Anyway, the graphics have real style and the whole thing has this unabashed simplicity - it knows it's stupid, it doesn't seem to care.
I also like a couple of puzzlers coming out of Digital Chocolate - or more specifically, its European studio, Sumea. FotoQuest Fishing for example, has you swimming around a realistic underwater landscape taking pictures of various creatures, which you can then put in a digital snap book (or email them to friends). Remember Polaroid Pete on PSone? This is a more innocent version. It's for kids obviously, but too few games actually employ phone functionality, so I like it.
More obviously appealing is TowerBloxx (pictured, above right), which claims to combine Sim City with Tetris. The aim is to construct these precarious skyscrapers using different blocks - the higher you build them, the more tiny people move in. You can then post your highest population counts to an online server. The gameplay requires just one button. It looks funny. It isn't a conversion of a hit movie or PS2 game.
Meanwhile, 3 is launching perhaps the world's first 3D real-time multiplayer mobile games. Whoever saw that coming? Okay they'll probably run at five frames-per-second and will be impossible to adequately control on a teeny mobile phone keypad, but you have to hand it to 3 - they really do like to play.
Mobile gaming, eh? It's getting there slowly. They just have to figure out where exactly 'there' is.
