for 20 years I've regarded “phone games” as absolute dog shit, unworthy of even a second glance. i have recently discovered that this only applies to smartphone games - despite “resident evil for flip phones” being a cosmically hilarious phrase, it's actually a well worth drinking at and i recommend you “get into it.”

I've never seen a good smartphone game. yes, including that one. this is because you cannot make a good videogame on a device without buttons, yes, i'm including non-action titles. the only smartphone game i've ever seen that someone both gave a shit about and also was not ruined by the platform's limitations was monument valley and that was like 14 years ago. i think since the platform's limitations are as incomprehensibly vast as the stacks of cash you can make by doing fraud, everyone who actually gave a shit abandoned mobile in disgust like two years after the first smartphone app store appeared, leaving only a handful of indies making VNs that you can't find unless someone links you to them. not like that would be different on any other platform

anyway: touchscreens are so bad that all you have to do is look at a platform that is worse in every imaginable way except that it has buttons to see what a difference they make. the difference is staggering, you just suddenly see an explosion of interesting and novel ideas, even if said buttons are staggeringly miserable to use. i am speaking of course of Java 2 Mobile Edition, AKA J2ME, AKA The Games What Cames Before Smartphones

every flip phone (and candybar, and some sliders, but we'll say “flip phone” for brevity, and because it's funny) made after like 1997 had games, but the early ones were just snake and pong. i think starting in like 2002, if you bought a phone it'd come with like some horrible non trademark infringing tetris or match three title or whatever, but it was custom written not just for that phone but also that carrier. maybe your carrier offered a horrible little carrier specific app store buried 3 layers deep into the menu where you could buy three additional games called like Platinum Bowling, Texas Slots, and MI:3. the latter would mostly just be static ads for the movie, and they'd never add any new titles, because what developer would even accept money to develop for a platform so intrinsically dead on arrival

i have no idea when J2ME got introduced but it basically changed all of this. being java-based, it didn't matter what architecture or OS the phone ran, and in order to ship J2ME support, vendors had to deliver specific features, defined through profiles called MIDP and CLDC, which specced shit up to and including a complete playstation-grade 3D engine. as far as I can tell, this changed the phone software ecosystem immediately, since it was now possible for a developer to ship a game that could run on an enormous variety of devices with minimal changes.

it didn't solve every problem, of course. for some reason, all software seems to run at hardcoded resolutions, and since flip phones came in almost as many screen sizes as smartphones, including some with permanent landscape-orientation displays (samsung blackjack, etc.,) developers had to produce up to a couple dozen versions of each title - but I get the strong feeling that most of these conversions consisted of changing a few constants and calling it a day, and hey, it sure beats rewriting your whole game to another architecture, OS, and capability matrix 20 or 50 or 200 times over.

i always assumed that J2ME improved the software situation on paper, but i'd never really looked into it, because i assumed all the games were bottom tier garbage, shit out by clock-punching studios and not even reviewed by publishers, who simply wanted titles to stuff their app stores and didn't care what was actually in them. however, after watching a DNOpls stream a few days ago I became energized to finally investigate this properly.

i had actually initiated this like 2 years ago: I downloaded a massive collection of JARs (yes, J2ME games all come as JARs, it's hilarious) scrubbed from a bunch of well known russian pirate websites; for some reason non-smartphones were and still are massively popular in russia, specifically.

i was all prepared to dig into this, but i made a huge mistake: the first thing I did was scrape out every duke nukem game in the collection and play them all on a stream, and as one would expect (duke nukem being a comically dead and mismanaged brand by the time this platform existed) they were literally the worst games i'd ever played, barely qualifying as functioning interactive entertainment. in my defense, this didn't quite sour me on the platform, but it did make me pretty nervous about putting more time into it, so I set it aside.

then I watched DNO play like 6 resident evils, and like four of them were objectively fucking excellent, so i got my shit together, went back to the well, and started loading up Flip Phone Games.

holy shit. i was not ready for the depth, complexity, and in some cases love that I found in these. maybe i'm just burned by the modern state of casual / mobile gaming, where literally everything feels like a cynical cashgrab, but so many of these radiate care. i have always thought of “flip phone game” as a genre synonymous with born-abandonware, created by studios you've never heard of, whose entire career consists of taking pittances from movie studios to make tie-in sludge. there's truth to this, certainly, but i really expected a far lower standard of quality than I found even in the licensed titles.

to give you an idea: the first thing I did (as per habit when scrubbing a Big Pile Of ROMs) was to make a “cool” folder, for games I thought were cool. further taxonomical distinctions are impossible, but anyone can say whether a game is “cool” or not. I loaded up twelve games at random, and when I was done with those I had twelve files in the “cool” folder. i kept expecting to load up something bad, and it kept not happening.

the games were:

• Shrek The Third: The Official Mobile Game
• Devils And Demons
• The Club
• Jimmy Whites: Snooker Legend
• Frogger: Beats 'n Bounces
• Dewy's Adventure
• The Dark Knight
• Castlevania 2: Dawn Of Sorrow
• The Simpsons Arcade Game
• SimCity Deluxe
• Alpha Zone 3D
• Medal Of Honor: Airborne 3D

for this to scan you have to understand my criteria. in the same way that i treat games on the zed ex spectrum as “wow, this would be great if you were a bored british teen in 1984 with three quid to your name,” the nature of a good flip phone game is the same as a good smartphone game: it's something to do while you're waiting for a bus. each of these games would be great to play while waiting for a bus, and if you have any doubts, just remember: none of these cost more than $5, and most cost less, in an era before anyone had ever heard of the idea of selling a game for $1 or $0. alright i'm going to review them now

obviously this one's aimed at kids, but the nature of a game you can play while waiting for the bus pretty much smooths over any problems that might present - and besides, if you're interested in a shrek game, you probably are not expecting Outer Wilds.

this game is a basic platformer with a very small viewport and a very large shrek, presumably for both child and marketing reasons, meaning that everything looks huge and the stages are very simple. you walk forward, jump on platforms, do ground-pounds to break blocks and kill enemies, perform donkey-kong-country power rolls, and you punch dudes. “dumbed down DKC” is probably a good descriptor of the gameplay tbh. at one point, I ground-pound some blocks, plunge into a underground stream with a strong current, and get swept through some bonus items before swimming up through some water with barrel platforms floating in it that i otherwise might have just jumped over, assuming it to be death-water. this is literally a thing that would happen in DKC.

the game runs at a low framerate: 12fps. this is exactly what i expected from all flip phone games, and probably what you did too. on its face it makes you want to write off the whole ecosystem, but consider two important points: 1) an enormous number of games are faster than this, running at 30 or in some cases 60 fps, and 2) the gameplay feels so solid that you'll be surprised when you learn the framerate is that low, because it doesn't feel like it.

the basic motion and jumping physics feel absolutely spot-on perfect. when you see that an action game is on a flip phone you expect it to be janky, but it feels like any other meat-and-potatoes platformer from the late 16-bit era, which is basically how one can describe the majority of J2ME games that I've tried so far: generally they are visually, mechanically, and conceptually on-par with midmarket GBA titles. i played three or four levels, and i don't know how long the whole game is, but it's definitely a good way to kill some time while waiting for a bus.

now, the constant tutorial messages from donkey do definitely give it a child-oriented feel, but this is actually a universal quality of the platform, and now that i've described one example game, we should talk about the elephant in the room: input.

let's remind ourselves how flip phones are laid out. you have the dialpad, two Soft Keys which do whatever action is listed above them on the screen, and then a four-direction D-pad with a center button. there are often many other buttons, but none are universal, and are thus out of scope because no game will ever use them.

none of these things is a clearly defined Action Button, and this puts J2ME games in an interesting position in terms of capability vs. discoverability. they have a load of buttons - more than the goddamn Intellivision, to put it in perspective - but none of them seem like the obvious thing to press to accomplish any given task, except, of course, the D-pad and it's center button. gleaming, unlabeled, clearly-context-sensitive, and clearly-central, the player will be drawn to it instantly, but it is not really the focus it appears to be.

it is the case that most games use the D-pad to control movement, and if you play them in an emulator, this will seem obvious and surprisingly practical, but there are several problems. one is that on real phones, the pad is an incredibly tiny and compromised little thing, intended for stumbling through menus for a few seconds, not performing Pulse Pounding Action. the other is that a game's complexity is heavily constrained by how many buttons are available on the controller, and this one is literally equivalent to the joystick from the atari fucking 2600, an input device so wretched and so goddamn pervasive that it's actually astonishing home videogames survived the 80s instead of being written off as a failed experiment three years in. oh wait. that nearly happened. hm. i wonder wh

to put it simply: the single-button joystick is an abomination, the bare minimum number of Action Buttons a player should have is two, and i will die on this hill. making a game work with only one action button is miserable, and much of the time it is impossible; limiting the player to an button means limiting the game to something much less than it deserves to be.

it is also, incidentally, why smartphones are so bad for action games in particular: you can maybe get the player's muscle memory to work a virtual joystick with one hand and a single button with the other, but reliably hitting two or more completely-untactile virtual buttons requires a level of surgical proprioception that most people are incapable of. as a result, smartphone games are divided sharply between early-DS type shit where you're touching all over the screen, and games that simulate gamepad-type inputs - and the latter is divided again into “games with a bunch of buttons you cannot hit reliably, so the game sucks” and “games with one big action button to make you feel like you're doing something, but most character actions are triggered automatically.”

hell, for the longest time all the smartphone hits were infinite runners, because devs just threw up their hands and said “fuck it, whole screen is button,” resulting in stuff like Jetpack Joyride, a tragedy in motion that is at all times visibly straining against the limitations of an input scheme so heavily compromised that it makes the fucking Atari joystick look luxurious

sorry, didn't mean to go into a fugue state there. moving on

after just one day of playing flip phone games in an emulator and coming away astonished by the depth of the games themselves, i knew i needed to pump the brakes before i got too many incorrect ideas in my head about what this experience was actually like. i therefore took a trip to the local used electronics hole and spent four hours digging through boxes of miserable, sticky, largely-verizon-based telephones; RIP. (the sticky washes off but i worry that the verizon is now inside me forever. i may need to get chelated.)

i returned home with a 2004 Motorola Razr V3 (comically: the first version of that phone) and a 2007 Ericsson Z750a, and immediately confirmed my suspicions: the games I'd straight up enjoyed playing with a keyboard were now considerably more clumsy, and in some cases had become effort-sinks.

the problem, as far as pure-action games go, is that the D-pad is not like the one on a real gamepad. it is not engineered to allow you to press multiple directions at once, and it's nearly impossible to press the center button and a direction at the same time, so even the most basic “mario run, mario jump” cannot be achieved reliably and comfortably. it's also really, really small, like shockingly small. but you know what input is much bigger, easier to hit, and right nearby? the dialpad.

now don't get it twisted: while the 2, 4, 6 and 8 keys form a set of cardinal directions that are much easier to hit reliably, they still aren't laid out in a way that makes multi-direction inputs or quick changes practical. you cannot lay your thumb across the dialpad in a way that lets you simply rock in whatever direction you like, as you can on a real gamepad, so fast action is still a huge pain in the ass. it's amazing how far away an inch seems when you're trying to backdash away from an enemy in Castlevania, but honestly it's annoying even in a turn-based game. in short, playing games on this universally blows and nothing can change that.

but the dialpad does offer one consolation prize: diagonals. the 1, 3, 7 and 9 form non-cardinals on the compass rose, and in virtually every game you can press those in place of the two corresponding directions. anyone who's played games on the early PC (81-85) or 1980s japanese home computers, none of which had dedicated arrow keys, will be familiar with this method: to walk right, you press 6. to jump to the right, you press 9. this is a genuinely good approach on a PC keyboard - right hand on numpad, left on space/ctrl/etc is honestly pretty nice. on a flip phone, it's not quite that nice, because you still need to get your other hand on an action button, and that's always hard.

while the center key on the D-pad is usually the default action button, almost all games duplicate its function on the 5 key, center to the dialpad. this is again easier to hit - but you can't reach it if you're using the numpad to move, since your thumb will be in the way, so you'll usually have to use the D-pad button anyway. sometimes though, it goes the opposite way, moving on the D-pad and attacking with the dialpad; keeping this straight in your head can feel like running a three legged race. worse, some games don't have identical functions for the numpad and d-pad; sometimes you have to hit 5, which forces you to find some nigh-painful Claw Grip technique to make the game playable.

so in other words, the flip phone UI is so awkward that there are two completely separate options just for the most basic player movement, neither one is really satisfactory, and both approaches interfere with both action buttons. great! but then we also have to consider the other action buttons.

no dev wants to make a game with just one input, and since phones have more buttons, they often get used. for one thing there's the softkeys: every game depends on them. they're usually used for the “yes” and “no” inputs to dialogs and for accessing and navigating ingame menus, but often they change function contextually during a game, so you really have to pay attention to them. but then there's all the dialpad keys that aren't needed for basic motion - *, 0 and # are fair game, often used for e.g. offhand grenades, switching weapons, opening doors or pulling up sub-screens, and in a game that doesn't need diagonal motion, 1, 3, 5 and 7 become available as well. That's seven additional inputs, eight if you count the 5/D-pad button, and if you add in a softkey (one is always used for an in-game menu but the other is usually available) then we have to look at the flip phone as a console with a nine button gamepad.

that's a ton of inputs! and the fucked thing is that some games actually use them all!!!!!!!!!!!! but of course this is a mixed bag: it's really cool that J2ME can support games with that much complexity, even cooler that devs actually took advantage of it, but honestly you're rarely pleased when you have to hit * to throw a grenade. it beats the shit out of only getting one weapon because you don't have a button to switch with, but ultimately, for a game on this platform to be fully approachable and un-frustrating, you want it to use as few inputs as possible.

Shrek The Third The Movie The Game was clearly optimized for mass appeal, so it does this. left/right to move, up to jump, down to crouch (press while airborne to ground-pound; hold and press a direction while on ground to roll) and action to attack are the only inputs. there's nothing on the softkeys or *,0,# and you never need to hit two buttons at once. this is as simple as it could be, and yet you're still given tons of health, tons of grace time, tons of space to see and react to enemies, and in fact, the action button is optional.

shrek can punch, but he can also stomp enemies like Mario do by just jumping or falling on them. this has the effect of removing the need for the player to press any action buttons, ever - you can punch, if you like - shrek even has a nice three-hit combo that feels good - but if you can't manage the necessary two-hand dexterity, you can play the entire game with just the motion inputs. this was of course the right decision, because the safest way to think of a flip phone is as a zero button joystick.

so, that's the input situation, and it's pretty rough, but fortunately, it's really most of the criticism I have of J2ME as a platform. it's pretty hard to avoid tbh, they couldn't tell vendors “uhhh make the phone more gamepad shaped,” but the quality of any given game pretty much comes down to “how well did they accommodate the input situation.” this is why Donkey keeps telling you how to walk and jump: not only are inputs on flip phone games not obvious, but there can be a shitload of them, or at the opposite end of the spectrum they can be combined to make input easier and simpler. therefore, every game needs to tell you how to play, explicitly, or you just won't know.

oh, and since most of these games seem to have been digital-delivery-only, there was no chance of anyone having a manual. anyway, back to the reviews!

this is a Diablo clone. i found a review and it just opens by saying it's a diablo clone. nonetheless, the reviewer (and me) recommends you play it anyway.

unlike shrek, which is basically a typical GBA license title (if perhaps a little simplified) this is definitely a mobile-first design. unlike diablo's open world, Devils And Demons takes place in a series of small stages. they're made to look like part of a contiguous larger world, but each one is basically a little arena with a simple goal: get to a particular spot without dying, kill a certain number of enemies, defend a control point, etc. it is absolutely the kind of bite-sized entertainment you want when you're waiting for a bus that could take five to twenty minutes to arrive, you hadn't intended to be out long enough to bring a more serious entertainment device, and mobile internet is in its infancy so you can't just stare at a website.

despite its minimal expectations vis a vis the player's attention span, Devils And Demons makes a valiant effort to include as much Diablo flavor as it can fit. the basic gameplay loop - walk, find guys, swing sword - is solid, and in fact, if you happen to have one of the few touchscreen-based phones that came out in this era, it even supports that; playing this in an emu (KEmulator, by the way) feels exactly like playing a small Diablo that runs at 20fps. on a normal flip phone however, you'll steer your boy around with the D-pad/numbers - but only in cardinal directions. there are unfortunately no diagonals, because those keys are all used for special actions. like Diablo you have various spells and special moves which you trigger using the extra buttons; I haven't played too far in, but I suspect all six orbs at the bottom become skills that bind to those keys.

you even have sub screens for character, equipment, and the skill tree. you can't DO much in them, it's mostly just for fun-fun, but you do get to choose your path in the skill tree, apparently! this is a perfectly cromulent diablo clone for java based flip phones.

i have only played a little bit, I need to play more to make sure there isn't anything i'm missing, but THIS thing is fucking WEIRD.

this appears to be based on a game of the same name, sold on conventional consoles. did i mention that a lot of J2ME games are “ports”? not really though; this isn't like back in the GBA days when e.g. Tony Hawk Pro Skater for the GBA was a nearly flawless copy of the original THPS, just converted to 2D isometric view. while lots of games on J2ME have the same names as conventional titles, as far as I've seen they're rarely attempts to actually port or clone the original; more often they're reimaginings, or completely new and unrelated entries in the franchise.

this one goes WAY further than most though. The Club was a third person shooter for PC/PS3/360 which I have never heard of in my life and am now kind of fascinated by, but as far as I can tell, the gameplay is largely conventional 3D shooting action. J2ME The Club on the other hand is a strange twist on a rail shooter: stages are played in top-down perspective, and at first you might think it's a Hotline Miamilike, but you have no direct character control! your boy moves on a predetermined path, and you can control how fast or slow he goes, and you can rotate his torso; that's it, otherwise you're just along for the ride.

as you walk through the stage, Bad Guys appear. you can rotate to face them, the three blue arcs showing your field of fire. you don't need to press an action button to fire though; if you're pointing near a dude, you'll blast him automatically. so gameplay consists of simply rotating back and forth to point at groups of enemies as your man walks through a neighborhood or whatever, and making sure you turn quickly enough to blast them before they blast you. at the end of stage one your boy walks to an intersection and stops, and for 10 seconds or so you are attacked by waves from all directions and have to fend them off. then the stage ends.

this shit is so strange! i've never seen a game like this, it's like a rail shooter meets smash TV - which makes some sense actually, since The Club is apparently yet another of those games with a plot based on an exhausting dystopian future bloodsport.

the reason i look at the games nobody ever talks about, like “zed ex spectrum titles that aren't the dozen or so that everyone names when you bring up the zed ex,” is this right here. as far as I know this is an utterly unique game, i've never seen anything quite like it. is it fun? well, i don't know that i'd spend $15 for it on steam, but i think it'd be a good way to kill some time while waiting for a bus.

this is a pleasant little snooker game. again, it has the vibes of a midrange GBA title, nice smooth 30fps animation (on a decent phone,) vibrant sprites, charmingly cheesy character portraits, and it even has a live trajectory preview. in a Serious Pool Experience you'd probably turn that off, but come on - this is a game you play while waiting for a bus. you'd really rather get more hits than misses, and since you're staring at a tiny, low-res phone screen, precision just might be impossible. there's a betting mechanic which insists that,

“To reach the top, you've got to take risks. Do you feel lucky today? What's your bet for this match?”

my favorite thing about this game is that i think it taught me how to play snooker through nothing more than the little “hit this ball next” icon.

recently i watched a youtube video (no i can't remember who the youtuber was i'm sure you can look it up easily) attempting to cover all the frogger games made after frogger. they mentioned this one for two seconds and called it “lost media,” which is interesting because if you simply google “frogger beats n bounces download” you get a whole page of results. this is because nobody respects phone games.

have you ever seen any list of “all the games” in a franchise that included the mobile-only entries? probably not; almost every franchise had mobile-only entries in this era, and nobody ever mentions them. we think of flip phone games the same way we think of Tiger LCD handhelds or a $10 watch with a picture of mario on it: a way to dupe a child into thinking they have gotten more of the thing they want, when there's either no more of that thing, or it costs $60.

this point of view is undeserved, and also super ironic, because the thrust of that video was “all the frogger games after frogger completely miss what makes frogger fun,” but this game actually gets it. it turns frogger into a rhythm game! that actually makes a lot of sense!!! frogger is based on highly quantized motion pitted against an unceasing global timer - it already is a rhythm game, if you think about it.

Frogger: Beats 'n Bounces puts the titular green man on a five-lane vertical track, traveling upwards one hop at a time, to the beat of a MIDI soundtrack (more on this later.) on every beat, you can choose to move to an adjoining track, or zap a bug with Frogger's tongue. that's it, as far as i've seen; a simple, all-ages rhythm game that anyone could enjoy. and i think you would choose to enjoy this, if you tried it - the art is pleasant, the levels are surprisingly long, and while it's no Crypt of the Necrodancer, once again you would not want to get that deep into a game while waiting for a bus. the one criticism i have is that sometimes you can't tell if things are going to hurt you, and some of the things that do hurt you seem… surprising.

by the way, did you notice the Konami name on this? that's not just the publisher, Konami actually developed it. rather than just punting their big name franchises down to no-name studios and collecting the royalties, Konami actually spun up multiple wholly owned mobile studios, in both the US and Germany. fascinating!

this is another “port” of a conventional console game, Dewy's Adventure for the Wii, and it's the closest thing to “THPS for the GBA” that I've come across so far. i mentioned earlier that most ports are not like that, but this one is very much just a conversion of a contemporary 3D game into isometric 2D, as far as i can tell. i have never played the Wii title, nor have i gotten deep into the mobile version, but i watched some youtube footage and i get the strong impression that they basically cloned all the mechanics as best they could.

this works pretty well! the game looks fantastic, the sprite work is excellent, and on a decent phone the game runs at nearly 20fps and feels buttery smooth. movement and attacks are immaculate; on an emulator with a good controller this simply feels like a GBA title. on a phone… well, at least the ones I've tried have been kind of awkward. this game really wants a proper d-pad to play right, and i found myself running off ledges and into enemies a lot. on the other hand, this uses sonic adventure type combat where you just hit action twice to jump, then zip down and attack an auto-targeted enemy, and since you can chain attacks into combos by just hammering the button, you can clear out a bunch of enemies pretty easily without a lot of micromanagement.

i will say: i think the transformation mechanic is a bit much. you can press * and # to transform Dewy from his water form into either fog (cloud) or ice, and i'm not 100% sure if this is mandatory for e.g. puzzles or optional; throughout the first few levels it has seemed optional but that might change. now on the wii i'm sure this worked really well, but here i really feel a bit too overwhelmed by the basic gameplay, which already strains the limits of the platform, and i can't really get myself to remember these exist or use them effectively. a shame; i wonder if they could have made that work better.

all the same, with its bright artwork, cute characters and bite-sized levels, this would be a great game to play while waiting for a bus.

it goes without saying that a lot of J2ME games are licensed - but frankly we can say that about every console released after the SNES. probably half the playstation library was in reality tie-ins with TV shows and movies most of us don't even remember. anyway, here's The Dark Knight

released in 2008 to coincide with the film, this is a really good Batman game. the artwork is phenomenal, the world is dark, batman's dialogue is excellent (“i can't tell you, you don't know what the boss will do to me!” “think about what i'll do to you” is solid stuff) and mechanically it's fantastic. emulator says the framerate is 26fps; i think it's probably double-buffered and really running at 13, but it doesn't matter. once again, motion is fantastic, the multilayer parallax scrolling makes the city look enormous, and the background art is terrific. as i write this, i'm watching trains pass by in different directions on three different background layers. great, great stuff.

like all batman games made after the NES era, you can get overwhelmed by the combat and movement systems. there are so god damn many. batman has all his tools, and you're expected to use them all, but due to the narrow field of view this can sometimes be difficult or, worse, feel pointless. for instance, batman can't jump; all his vertical motion is done with the grappling hook, but much of the time you literally cannot see what you're supposed to be hooking onto. instead, you have to watch the HUD at the top for a tiny yellow icon indicating that you can use the launcher.

the launcher itself is quite complicated. once you pull yourself up into the air, you can then swing in either direction; this is easy at first when you have obvious landing points, but soon they start having you take leaps of faith into empty air, at which point you have to choose to either hit action to put batman into a glide, or watch for another grapple point so you can do the Spiderman thing and swing repeatedly. this feels kind of not-batmanny to me, and it's hard to know when you're expected to do it. the saving grace is that there's no fall damage, but it feels kinda crappy to do this cool swing and glide only to watch helplessly as batman glides down past the thing he actually wants, then have to go back and do it all over.

this is especially bad when you find out that you weren't supposed to have taken the vertical path yet; levels often have objectives on the ground and in the air, so what you should actually do when you encounter a grapple point is to ignore it, proceed forward until you're stopped, then go back and start exploring additional paths. some might see this as a good thing; i feel like it detracts from a solid batman experience.

as far as “pointless,” that'd be the combat mechanics. you can hide in a doorway and jump-attack guys! it looks super cool… but guys go down effortlessly with three punches, so why bother? you can also land on them for a takedown, or sneak attack, or stun them and then perform a Glory Kill that takes like 5 full seconds to wind up and land. these are neat at first, but quickly become an unnecessary timesink; you get irritated when you trigger the glory kill accidentally.

you know what though? i don't think WB or DC forced the devs to put these things in. i don't think they're executive mandates, i think they were put in by devs who liked batman and wanted to make him do cool stuff. the game radiates passion; it is no “Sunsoft batman where he has a gun.”

this is basically a remix or reimagining of Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow. if you hadn't played the DS game in a while and you fired this up, you'd go “oh wow, they just ported it to phones!” but this isn't really true. this game is completely different, but that's kind of a good thing. it would be tough to play the original on a low-res, portrait phone screen with all the complex enemy behaviors and tight combat, so what TMT did here, i believe, is they stripped down all the background art, then designed new levels that feel like the originals, but are simplified, made more vertical, and generally adapted to work better on a phone screen. the result is sort of like if you tried to remake the game from memory.

this game plays great; the music sounds spot on to the original, although it's sadly been truncated so the songs loop much sooner. motion is smooth and feels fantastic, though again it can be kind of tough on a dialpad, since it's pretty close to the original game in terms of tightness and precision. i miss platforms a lot when playing on an actual phone. the thing that really bugs me though, if i'm honest, is the severely abridged progress mechanics. you encounter the first boss like four screens in, and it's the same first boss as in the original game, but he's much easier in every imaginable way. this makes sense, you're playing on a damn phone while waiting for the bus; you don't want a Real Challenge. and yet, it does feel a little… cheapened.

on top of that, you level at an ABSURD rate, i'm talking every three or four basic enemies you get a level. it gets exhausting. there's also no inventory system that i've noticed. i have to admit, i wish this was just a little bit deeper. this one was developed by a third party and only published by konami, and it's possible they were just given a very long leash to strangle themselves with

notably, this is not the only Castlevastle on mobile. Aria of Sorrow was ported by “The Code Monkeys” but unfortunately it's an example of a really bad J2ME title: atrocious framerate, unoptimized sprites copied straight from the original game, some with awful black borders, and just a general feeling of apathy. on the other hand, most of the original systems are retained basically intact, so it's impossible to say whether it's good or bad.

there's also Order of Shadows, a completely original, in-house-developed entry in the franchise, which is unfortunately just… not great. it's hard to pick specific reasons because the whole game is just kind of crap; the artwork all looks bad and un-vania-ey, the particle effects look out of place, the music doesn't sound remotely like it belongs in a castlevastle game, and the mechanics are garbage. basic motion and attacking feel worse than any other CV game. RIP

this is an incredibly curtailed version of the simpsons arcade game. i put it in the cool folder mostly because i'm amazed it exists at all. i hate to say it but this kind of drains most of the joy out of the simpsons. the sprites and backgrounds are all drawn from scratch, and while homer is basically on-model, the other characters aren't, and the backgrounds are all dull and lifeless.

the game basically follows the course of the original, you start on the streets of springfield and end at burns' mansion, and along the way you fight a wiggum and a quimby, then you fight burns in a little robot, so that much is intact. everyone looks like shit though; i couldn't screenshot because the game crashed (wow!) when i tried to replay it to get pics, but the bosses look pretty rough, and there's only three of them. i think there's supposed to be like 9, but about 80% of the game is missing; there are no levels between the streets and the mansion, and both are pretty damn short. you can finish this entire game in less than 10 minutes.

that's bad enough but almost everything else is missing too. you can only play as homer; there is only one enemy, a generic suit guy; none of the background characters or events are there; there are no pickups or throwable weapons; you're basically homer walking through a generic, lifeless city. it's kind of depressing to be honest, and it's made worse by the near total lack of sound. there are no SFX at all, not that unusual for J2ME games, but it's not like they were impossible. the occasional “woo-hoo!” when you pick up an extra life really would have improved things. and musicwise, all you get is a middling MIDI rendition of the main theme which plays on the menu on a loop, then plays one time whenever you pick up a health item. it's all very hollowing, tbh.

i included it here mostly because of the credits, which are surprisingly personal and even include a comic book store guy reference. whoever ironmonkey studios were, they liked the simpsons; i wonder why this game ended up so damn disappointing?

whoops!! something is afoot!! the game i just played was not the one most people saw!!!!

after i wrote the above review i got Mad Suspicious. i went looking for reviews of the game, and found people saying it was actually quite good. i watched a youtube video… and saw a completely different game!!!!! so then i went back to my roms folder and checked; the JAR i played was 116KB, but most of the other copies i had were nearly 700KB!! so i loaded one up and WOULDN'T YOU KNOW IT, THERE'S A MUCH BETTER VERSION

THIS one deserves the name The Simpsons Arcade Game. it's all here - the background characters, the pickup weapons, the bosses, and all the levels. the playthrough i saw on yt was nearly an hour long! i could say more but i don't need to: this is simply the arcade game, and if you wanted to play that on your flip phone, you could do it in 2009. wow!!!

i have no idea what's going on here! both games are developed by Ironmonkey Studio but they look NOTHING alike. the first one i reviewed says it's version 1.3, this one says it's version 4.2, but this can't be a simple version difference. the first one looks like an alpha, but it also looks like it was actually released. was this for phones with far less memory or something?? i don't know!! the one thing this is still sorely missing is SFX but again i will address that later; it does at least have multiple music tracks which play throughout the game. nothing feels sad or lifeless about this one. you would play this while waiting for a bus, and then on the bus, and then maybe some more at home.

they ported simcity to phones

so this is really interesting, and really the synopsis of a mobile port if you needed one. it's definitely simcity, but enormous chunks have been taken out. SimpliCity, if you will. for instance, while you do need to build power plants, there are only two types (coal and nuclear) and you do not need to build power lines. i think simply having a plant, somewhere on the map, is enough. when you build zones, you don't drag a rectangle to pick an area, the game just gives you a 4×4 stamp. both these decisions make a ton of sense, saving tons of awkward keystrokes and speeding up the building process. likewise there's just one type of road, no rail or freeway, every category of building only contains one or two entries, you get the picture. the map is also tiny, barely larger than one screen, and i don't think it can be bigger.

despite all these limitations, the port team - “EA Mobile Montreal Team” - made sure to include the crucial elements. the basic RCI meters are here; population, happiness, tax rates, demand for various services. there are also natural disasters. this is all i know, because for some reason the game stopped running on the emulator. i can't make any sense of it, it worked fine for a couple hours when i first played it; now if i load it up, it just hangs as soon as i try to get into a game. i had to load up a russian version to get these screenshots, and i'm 99% sure it's been cut down to target some highly constrained phone platform, so there might be more to the game than i realize.

regardless, the UI is kind of a masterpiece. in an interesting departure from most J2ME games, movement is only possible on the D-pad, because the entire dialpad is shortcuts! you get to the build menu with a softkey, the other takes you to tax rates and other behind the scenes stuff, but numbers 1,2,3 take you to demand meters, 4,5,6 adjust simulation speed… i can't remember what the others do, but it's all designed for maximum efficiency, and it works. this is exactly as much simcity as you'd like to play while waiting for a bus.

okay i need to preface this by saying that i simply do not get got by “it's doom, but for a platform previously thought incapable of that!!!!” because every single game of that type is dog shit. the various “OMG DID YOU KNOW THE AMIGA CAN RUN DOOM AFTER ALL” games are bad. not sorry, they look and play like shit, you just can't do doom on a processor slower than a pentium and make it any fun.

what's interesting about this game is that it's doom for a platform that is capable of far more than doom. hell, J2ME has Doom RPG, which is in some ways considerably more complex than the original game! (it's also good, play it.) but really, J2ME phones are capable of playstation-grade polygonal graphics at 30fps, there is no need to make Doom for Flip Phones, and yet that seems to be what's happened here. i'm pretty sure this is a raycasting engine and there are several indications that it's either derived from doom or was written as an exercise in reimplementing the doom engine from scratch. check out the minimap; you don't do that by accident.

as far as gameplay? oh, it's crap, honestly. it's really hard to make a good FPS on a platform like this, and i think they made a few poor decisions. for instance, in an attempt (presumably) to give the player good precision aiming ability, the default turning speed is INCREDIBLY slow. the longer you hold a direction, the faster you turn, but it starts out at an absolute crawl, and the result is that you're going to get shot a lot by enemies you should have been able to snapshot. to compensate for this, the 1 and 3 keys make you instantly turn 90 degrees - but that really should have been 45! this is kind of unforgivable and i imagine in later levels you just die constantly because you can't get yourself turned fast enough. ugh!

the art is also not amazing. i suspect the gun sprites are screenshots of 3d models from e.g. counterstrike, the enemies are kind of vague and blocky and probably also stolen from something else. the level design is bizarre and nonsensical, but, you know, that's really where the doomness shines through. if you call a game a “doom clone” or “doomlike”, it better have monster closets. when i find a keycard it better be on an illuminated plinth, and when i pick it up i better hear a distant wail of machinery as a door opens somewhere, informing me that i'm going to get ambushed by two assholes when walking through a hallway i had written off as safe. this game has all that.

it also has the most interesting (if not good) ammo management system i've ever seen: your pistol has 10 rounds that recharge at about one bullet per half-second. this is not great, tbh. the first tier enemies take about four hits to kill, so if you don't miss at all, you can take out two in one mag, which is good because you never meet just one enemy. the second tier (“shotgun guys”) though require like 6-8 shots, and they STILL come in pairs. not only are you guaranteed to get riddled by one guy while you're killing the other, they don't even stunlock very effectively, and even after you kill the first guy you're gonna have to immediately dash away and hide to wait for your bullets to regen.

in short, this game is not great, but it's fairly doomy in ways that you might like, and since you're given a pretty decent amount of health and lots of medkits, it's more playable than i'm giving it credit for. i think you'd enjoy playing it while waiting for a bus.

i almost didn't include this one but I realized none of the other games I'd covered were actual, polygonal 3D. honestly i think 3d on this kind of platform is more a burden than anything; 2D games work really well with limited controls and tiny displays, 3d is often just a gimmick. that said, if you feel that way you can simply play the non-3D version, which is the exact same game but in 2D.

this is a straightforward, mobile-ized, casual-ized WW2 game. you move through streets, autotarget guys, shoot them, sometimes throw a grenade, and you are given tasks like “blow up the flak cannon.” it's nothing remarkable, you can easily imagine it shipping on the DS or something. the reason i bring it up here is twofold: one, the game's controls and AI are optimized well for flip phone awkwardness; you can move and attack with the D-pad, using just one hand, and not get killed because enemies give you lots of grace time to fire and they stunlock easily, so you could enjoy playing this while waiting for a bus even if your other hand was occupied holding a shopping bag. the other reason though is because it's incredibly performant.

this runs in emulation at 60 frames per second, and on my Ericsson, it looks like it's hitting somewhere north of 20. if i had a better phone, i'm sure i'd get closer to 60, and that's just super wacky to see on a device of this vintage. other 3d games i've played have not run this well, so it seems there is a lot of room for optimization in the J2ME 3D environment; given that this was developed by Ironmonkey, the same people who ported the Simpsons Arcade Game - and quite well, as we found out in the end, squeezing an entire fairly-authentic experience into less than 700KB - i think we're looking at some devs who really put their backs into learning and adapting to this platform. i should make a point to find out what else these people made.

these are by far not all the J2ME games i've played. i'm considering starting a review site, because i'm not wasting enough of my life on trivialities. i'll call it good for now though and move on to some wrap-up.

first, a thing i really like about J2ME: games can, and do, save themselves frequently. this makes sense given that phones die, and you often have to stop playing when the bus arrives.

second, a thing that kind of sucks and kind of rules: while J2ME games are CAPABLE of sound effects, almost none of them actually have sounds! i strongly suspect this is because of the extreme space constraints: my Ericsson phone has, like, 8 or 16 megs of memory. you can add more, but these vendors know people aren't going to do that, not in 2007; and that space is shared with texts, photos, music, etc. so games REALLY have to be tiny. i have not seen one over 700KB, and most are between 100-300.

this is great because if you get a flip phone (which i know you will, now) you can just beam them over from your PC with bluetooth! this is the right play; on some platforms it's the ONLY play. since the games are so small, they transfer pretty damn quick over BT, and you can fit quite a few into a phone even if it has no memory slot. hooray!

but if a game is only 100K to begin with, they're not going to want to pack in another 64K of sound effects. so almost nobody does - virtually every game i've played has no sounds other than music. why is music okay? because it's all MIDI; while i'm sure you COULD write a tracker for this platform, the samples would be bigger than the game, but flip phones all have general midi for playing ringtones etc. so J2ME titles just leverage that.

this results in two comical outcomes: 1) dorky MIDI renditions of well known tracks from blockbuster games, and 2) the occasional game which uses MIDI for sound effects. at least one of the resident evil titles plays a bongo noise every time you fire your gun. it rules, but i have to admit, it's the biggest downside of the platform. much of the time you're just hearing… nothing.

and… that was probably kind of normal. these were mostly the days before A2DP bluetooth, so if you wanted to listen to normal (non-phonecall) audio on your flip phone, you were gonna have to bring a wired headset. few did this, and you didn't want to listen to a bangin konami soundtrack on the tinny little speaker on your phone while on the bus, irritating everyone, so every single game on the platform - all of them - asks on startup if you want sound, and defaults to no. a lot of devs probably looked at the effort to implement better soundtracks or SFX and said “what's the point, nobody's going to hear it.” understandable, but still unfortunate.

play J2ME games! you can easily find huge collections by just googling “J2ME game archive” or w/e. when internet archive comes back you can grab some huge zips on there. unfortunately they're a fucking mess; they're all scraped from russian websites with poor quality controls, sometimes sorted into nonsense taxonomies, sometimes by platform, sometimes other ways. often you'll just find 60 copies of the same game and have to drag them into your emulator one at a time until you find the one that's in english, has the right resolution, isn't landscape, and so on. but it's worth it in the end to see a frontier of gaming that very few have paid attention to. you might even have an objectively good time!

my one tip is this: don't buy a RAZR. they're really old and will not run anything well IME. the ericsson z750 is a good choice it seems, but i'm sure there are much better options you can get on ebay for $10. make sure you get a first party charger, back in this era they were all DRMed! make sure you find out if the phone will work without a SIM card, many will go into complete lockdown unless they detect a SIM from the carrier they were locked to! make sure you have a method for transferring data, these things don't have wifi! make sure you know how and WHETHER you can install third party JARs! flip phones sucked and anyone who says otherwise is wearing rose tinted glasses so don't waste a ton of money, dip your toe in first and make sure you don't get burned.