The Null Device

Mobile madness

Some selections from a website selling Java games for mobile phones:
Boobi Sisters: Boobi sisters went to farm to get experience. Their mission is to gather the cattle in a pen.
Butter Head: Butter Head is mail carrier in the Magic Land. One day, while taking a nap he looses his mail.
Christmas Eggs: Help Santa to catch all eggs at his Lapland chicken farm. Don't let the eggs to fall down!

This is one of about half a dozen Santa Claus-themed games on the site. But "Christmas eggs"? "Lapland chicken farm"? WTF?

Mobile Dolly: The cloned Sheep Dolly is based on the previous Frog Game which was a famous arcade game during the 1980's. It is a mobile phone game recreated with a cute character of sheep for the sheep year.

Yeah, it looks like a Frogger clone. The question that immediately comes into mind, though, is: what would a cloned sheep be doing hopping on lilypads and logs across a river?

Mobile Ttarzan: Ttarzan and Jjani live in the nature and study plants. One day, Jjani goes out to collect some plants and then is kidnapped by a monkey.

There are 2 comments on "Mobile madness":

Posted by: Ed http://asseptic.org/blog/ Fri Feb 27 19:33:20 2004

some of those descriptions seem jeff minter-esque. there's something charming about java games, it remembers me of the 80s game industry, developing stuff for the zx spectrum and the c64... there must be java emulators somewhere.

of course, if you're a borderline conspiracy theorist you might argue the cheaptune/videogame music trend is part of a meme engineering scheme by the telecom industry to make old games fashionable (not just part of a geek's museum), thus giving fashion-appeal to modern java-enabled phones.

Posted by: acb http://dev.null.org Sat Feb 28 01:20:25 2004

There are; though MIDP 1.0 is fairly primitive, and you wouldn't be able to get a decent C64 emulation on a 128x128 screen anyway.

The new Symbian futurephones, however, are a different matter. Apparently the Psion EPOC port of Frodo64 has been compiled on them.