Comment on Here's a very good reason to emulate J2ME (pre-smartphone Java games)
AlolanYoda@mander.xyz 1 week ago
There are a lot of games tied to popular IPs stuck on J2ME! There are half a million Sonic games, including a version of Sonic Unleashed that if I recall correctly played something like Sonic Rush, a Ratchet and Clank sidescroller (is it called Going Mobile maybe?), I also remember Tomb Raider games there. I would love to look at an overview of the most interesting games in this platform.
I also have no clue how they were distributed? I remember putting them on my phone using less than legal means, but have no idea how you’d get them officially. Was it through one of those sketchy services where you could also get wallpapers and ringtones by texting a specific number?
Yes, I think it was through those services. You’d pay, receive a message with the link, and download the game. However, I’ve always done it the “alternative” way.
Although I had collected a bunch of them, I rarely found myself actually playing and enjoying them. The number pad, or stick, controls were atrocious and most games weren’t that great. My most played were card games and Frozen Bubble on the phone, Asphalt on my iPod Nano. Asphalt was really fun and with gyro controls.
Redkey@programming.dev 1 week ago
Yeah, you got it basically correct. I bought a few of these games back in the day, and while I think you could do most of it by texting codes to premium SMS numbers, I did it by setting up accounts on the distributors’ websites. I paid by credit card (my phone plan didn’t fully support premium SMS billing), and they sent a special MMS with the game package attached (not as a link; this was in virtually pre-phone-Internet days). I had to make sure that my phone had enough MMS space free to receive the message including the bundled game, or I wouldn’t get it.
One advantage of getting the games through a website account was that I could have the game resent to the same number as many times as I wanted. Since I didn’t know any easy way to back up the game locally from my phone at the time (or how to reinstall it even if I could), this let me free up precious space by deleting the MMSs and uninstalling games without losing my purchase.
I played some games on a lower-mid-range Motorola flip-phone, but mostly on an nGage. It was like chalk and cheese. The experience on the flip-phone was stuttery and the controls were almost always painful to use. But Nokia was the biggest phone manufacturer at the time, and they even published guidelines for how to make games for their various categories of phone. So a lot of developers supported those specific requirements because they were common and well-documented. The nGage could run S60-targeted games flawlessly, and often the controls were pretty usable (obviously). The only real negative was that since even S60 phones usually didn’t have multi-press keypads, a lot of developers didn’t write their games to support them. So if a game needed diagonal movement or the like, I still had to use the keypad.