A phone just isn't enough

I was wondering recently just how mobile gaming is these days. By mobile gaming here I mean games you can play on a normal cell phone, not Gameboy, PSP or the like. There were a few things that brought this to mind. Most recently it was the session on the state of mobile gaming offered at the Game Developers Conference. But I was thinking of it a few months back when I upgraded my cell phone and saw what crummy games were on it. This is a far cry from the stories I've read about how mobile gaming has taken off in Asia. Something doesn't jive.

I'll start with my experience then get into what ever else I find out along the way. I upgraded from a Motorola i85s to a Motorola i830 a little while back. I'd got the i85s years ago and was excited to have the first phone in Canada with a Java Virtual Machine in it. I went so far as to buy the cable I needed to talk to it and dig up everything I could about developing for the phone. J2ME (Java 2 Mobile Edition) was pretty new back then and details were hard to come by. In the end I did get an environment set up with no help whatsoever from the company I bought the phone from (Telus - and Telus sucks, by the way). All I ended up doing with it in the end was modifying some sample code to handle a null pointer exception.

It's a shame I didn't do more, really, because if I'd done anything with it, I could have ported it to the i830 pretty easily. That's my impression anyhow, since most of the applications are exactly the same as they were back then. Only in colour. Oh, and the calculator has somehow actually gotten worse.

Let me collect myself. I get frustrated pretty quickly when I see this great hardware platform go to waste like this. Don't get me wrong, the i830 is a great phone. It's light, the battery keeps up, it's shiny... A phone is not enough these days, though. The interface to look up phone numbers is lacking. I can't store an address with a contact. There's no simple notepad function. If you can't get these things right, then what's going to make a user think about playing a game on the phone?

I tried the game that came with my phone. Some kind of off-road race. I wasn't impressed. I've been hearing for years that there's a big gaming culture among teen-agers in Asia. They must have some better programmers or some cheaper hardware, because the i830 definitely wasn't cheap, and I'm not seeing anything great pushed for it. Maybe it's just Telus dropping the ball and not marketing to a willing audience. I wouldn't be surprised at that. When I got the phone it crashed any time I tried to use the GPS. I had to tell them to flash it and waste half an hour waiting for them to do it. From what I've heard, this can be a catastrophic problem in places that use the GPS-aware E911 service. The phone apparently would crash when the user calls 911. No one at Telus seemed remotely concerned when I told them about this. Of course they advertise it as having a GPS. But they can't tell you anything about using the service.

Okay, gotta catch my breath again. This isn't supposed to be just an anti-Telus tirade. So... mobile gaming...

Here's a typical example of what's being passed off as a mobile game today. The description of Top Gun says it's "based on an exclusive global license from Viacom Consumer products." Why? All it is is a scrolling shoot 'em up with a crummy inteface (a phone keypad). Oh, because they use the names "Iceman" and "Maverick." Geez. I don't know Mforma, so I'm not trying to bash them. Maybe it's just the action genre. Maybe something like Connect Four would play better on a handset. Oh, and it says it works on the i830. So I could try it out. If I didn't use Telus - Telus sucks. If the platform isn't built for action games, don't build action games for the platform. The user won't be satisfied. I could see crosswords, puzzle games and maybe some custom eye-candy games working out well. I'll have to see what the feeling is at GDC. I know that of the cell phone games I tried at E3 last year, the puzzle-type games seemed much more promising.

Of course my other interest in this is how SVG is doing as a relevent technology on the mobile phone platform. It seems like every week SVG.org announces support on more phones. So far it seems to be out there, but not one of the cool technologies yet. There are APIs out for SVG Tiny (the SVG designed for limited devices) from TinyLine, Beatware and others. Java and SVG seem to go together for developers somehow. Any good examples of J2ME and SVG Tiny that are actually being used out there? I'd like to see them. Maybe I'll know a lot more in a couple weeks.