I'm really beginning to worry about mobile games. I've played a heck of a lot of new ones over the past week or so, and I've noticed that very few developers seem willing to address the INTRINSIC LIMITATIONS of the mobile handset as a gaming device. Here is where I think things are going wrong…
For a start, many phones don't have joystick/direction pads, and those that do usually only offer four-way movement, so travelling diagonally is a no-no. Lots of games like Judge Dredd, Werewolf and FIFA 2005, do try to get around this problem by putting diagonal movement on the keypad, but this is a bit of a fudge in my opinion. I don't think I have fat fingers but when two or more digits hit the pad of my Nokia 6600 (not even a particularly small phone) genuine intuitive control over the game just falls apart. Should we perhaps be holding off on these games until phones with eight-way d-pads are commonplace? Or maybe not bother at all.
Also, very few mobile handsets allow you to press more than one button at a time. This means that attempting everyday multi-tasking activities such as running and shooting, running and jumping, or in fact running and doing anything else whatsoever, are out of the question. When beset by enemies, it's unjust to expect a player to stop, shoot, and then continue running – and yet so many games require you to do just that.
And don't even get me started on the limitations of J2ME, the mobile derivative of the Java programming language. If you've ever played a Java game you'll know what they are: 'music' that consists of little more than a few bleeps strung together into what can only be optimistically referred to as a tune, and animation that is often so sluggish you can make a cup of tea in the time it takes a bullet to reach it's intended target – on the other a screen that measure barely an inch and a half. Sun Microsystems is addressing the problem and many handsets now support a perkier new version of Java with lots more game-specific features, but I've yet to see many titles that exploit the benefits.
Of course, this is the reason why so many people are still playing Space Invaders, Pac Man and Tetris on their phones. These games were designed with a simple interface in mind. They lose nothing in the translation to a limited mobile format. Okay, it's great that mobile phones are now on the multi-format checklist for many new releases, but publishers really need to think about how their franchises are realised on this emerging format. If this market is going to develop, mobile gamers needed to be treated with a little respect. There needs to be an understanding of the hardware.
Ubisoft's relationship with mobile developer Gameloft is a brilliant example of how it should be done. The mobile translation of Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow is a 2D platformer – Gameloft hasn't tried to mimic the 3D visuals of the title's console counterparts. And yet the essence of the gameplay – sneaking about in the shadows, working out how to takedown enemies with as little fuss or noise as possible, solving mini-puzzles strewn throughout the locations – are all present. The pace is perfect too. When you arrive on a new screen, you're very rarely in immediate danger. You get time to analyse the movement patterns of enemies and figure out how you can get to them without being seen. Speed and lightning responses are not integral elements of the game dynamic so the sluggishness of the animation is never really an issue.
And of course there are plenty of new, original mobile games that understand and work within the limits of the technology. Just about everything that Morpheme creates is worth playing, because the company makes simple, funny, bright games with lots of decent ideas – the sort of games that built the home computer entertainment industry of the early eighties. Check out Balloon-Headed Boy or Phantom Mansion and you'll see what I mean. In today's Online section of the Guardian I rave about Sumea's Jumbo Rumble, a laughably dumb multiplayer elephant battle game which allows three players to take part simultaneously on one handset. Brilliant.
By getting ahead of itself and constantly outpacing the hardware, the mobile games industry is in real danger of completely alienating its audience forever. I mean, it's hard enough to actually download games without making them impossible to play, too. Vodafone Live! And the O2 Games Arcade are very good, but often mobile users aren't sure how much they're paying for the game, or where it'll download to on their handset, or if the title in question is actually compatible with their phone anyway. At least the major network operators are trying to make things as simple as possible - and with 3G set to launch over the next few months they really need to. They know (or at least hope) there's going to be big money in multimedia downloads – games, video, music – when this faster, slicker service is fully operational. They know they have to get things right.
But somehow things aren't quite right. Not yet. The mobile handset is getting pulled in all sorts of directions that it doesn't want to go in. 3D gaming? It'll arrive next year, and companies like ATI and nVidia are working on specialist 3D chipsets for the latest handsets. But I know that when these phones arrive, developers will immediately become too ambitious, attempting to jam in all the latest special effects, rather than sitting down and thinking, "okay, how can we use 3D visuals to really offer something new in terms of mobile gameplay? And should we perhaps start with flat-shaded polys before barging in with alpha blending, environment-mapping and multi-layered textures?"
I want to see more games that use the unique capabilities of mobiles, rather than games that try and ignore the limitations. Last year UK developer Macrospace launched Cannons ME an over-the-air two-player combat game allowing users from around the country to engage in tank warfare. This year, it is launching several more two-player games inviting you to hook up with strangers and play across the phone networks. French company Infusio is doing a similar thing via its ExEn platform. There have also been several Bluetooth compatible games (Bluetooth Biplanes, Pat Cash Tennis, Fatal Force) that let players in close proximity engage in two-player bouts. These really focus in on the intrinsic social connotations of the mobile phone.
I also like camera phone games like Elkware's Photo Pet where you have to feed your onscreen creature by taking photographs of specific colours. It's an idea that originated in Japan where clever game concepts that could only be realised on mobile phones are common. You may well have heard of the mobile fishing game that uses location-based technology to discover where the user is and then changes the in-game weather and time of day to match the real world environment. Then there is the burgeoning world of the location-based game which allows participants to turn cities into game levels. Botfighters for example.
But of course for western mobile developers – who do not have an audience so receptive to quirky ideas - it's easier and less of a gamble to hook up with a nice console conversion job - to try and squeeze a PS2 title onto as large a range of handsets as possible. It's classic short-term thinking and it is leading to a stunted industry. Let's face it, trying to accurately replicate console titles can, by definition, only ever lead to a diminished gameplay experience. Look at Game Boy Advance – some of its poorest titles are conversions of PS2, Xbox and Game Cube bestsellers. Its best are titles like WarioWare – designed specifically with GBA in mind.
Most gamers find it hard to take mobile games seriously. I find it hard to blame them a lot of the time. But then when I'm playing crazy stuff like Balloon-Headed Boy I realise that mobile developers don't need to seduce gamers. They have a mass entertainment device on their hands – there could be two billion mobile phone users in the world by 2006. What is needed are ideas that will capture the imagination of the typical non-gaming phone owner. Those ideas won't come from slavishly converting inappropriate games to a platform that isn't designed to handle them. These ideas will come when designers start to think about the unique properties of the mobile format. And when someone does hit upon a truly mass entertainment mobile phone experience, you can forget about the impact made by Space Invaders, or Tetris, or Doom, or Pokemon or The Sims. They'll be blasted away. I believe that - even now while I'm struggling to achieve diagonal movement on a simple footie sim. I believe it, but I'm still worried.
