According to the BBC, gaming on the mobile platform is about to take off.
Being from the ZX Spectrum generation, I have been constantly amazed at the way the processing power has increased to allow sophisticated games to run on smaller and smaller devices. In the early days I remember trying (not all that successfully it has to be admitted) to program various games on the Spectrum platform.

Moving from coding in BASIC to machine language made a massive improvement to performance, but you could feel you were stretching the kit to its limits for relatively basic games.

I remember going to arcades and marvelling at the graphics and power of dedicated games machines, it seemed almost impossible to imagine being able to play games of that quality at home.

Now, of course, you can play the old arcade games in a browser window on pretty much any standard PC. There seems no difference between arcade machines now and games platforms like the PS3.

Putting the games onto a mobile platform seems to limit you to the equivalent of Spectrum games against the arcade machines again. Try playing Call of Duty 2 on the Sony Ericsson K800i - you are moving stick men around a 2D landscape with limited sound and graphics. Whilst even the ability to do this on what is, essentially, a low powered computer is impressive, todays games will require a large increase in power.

Screensize is another obvious limitation - I’ve attempted Lemmings on the K800i as well, but it is not well suited for small screens and small keyboards - a lot of the game revolves around timing and getting the cursor over the minute lemming at the right time and pressing the right key is definitely an art. The new generation of larger screen devices will no doubt help in this area (Lemmings would be good with the touchscreen devices!)

The phone does open up one avenue not available to most PC gamers though; and this is Wii style motion sensitivity. The phone is ideally suited to this form of control (although you may get some odd looks whilst playing the games).

So, it’s still early days for mobile games, but unlike when I was programming on my Spectrum, I have no doubt we will soon have PlayStation quality games to play on the train home. It may make commuting almost enjoyable.

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Tags: games, K800i, mobile, PS3, Wii

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 3:51 pm by Mat Diss and is filed under games, mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.