http://www.wired.com/news/e3/0,2879,67582,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_4
LOS ANGELES -- While next-generation consoles and cutting-edge graphics dominate the floor at E3, if you look around the edges, away from the crowds, you'll find a number of companies hoping that the next big platform will be one that you may already have in your pocket: the mobile phone.
Cell phones are largely unstandardized and often more than a decade behind the times in rendering power. Nevertheless, there are plenty of game producers banking on them.
Mobile-phone gaming has historically been driven by casual games, ports of old arcade games, and simplified versions of sports games. True to form, those genres are in heavy attendance at E3. Namco's booth for instance, is staffed with people in uncomfortably warm
Pac-Man-shaped head wraps showing off
Pac-Mania, an isometric offshoot of the arcade classic. At other booths there were enough versions of solitaire and similar card games to satiate even the most boring grandmother, and more flavors of mobile phone golf than you can shake a 3-wood at.
Meanwhile, a steady stream of console hits are headed to cell phones, albeit often in heavily altered form. Developer/publisher In-Fusio has scaled-down versions of Age of Empires and Banjo-Kazooie on display. The oddest port may be the one just announced by Jamdat mobile: DOOM RPG, a turn-based tactical version of the groundbreaking first-person shooter. If there's a mass of gamers waiting to play turn-based versions of decade-old shooters on their cell phones, Jamdat has their number.
Games based on movies are also as popular in the mobile phone world as they are in the console world, with tiny video versions of Peter Jackson's King Kong, Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds and Revenge of the Sith all making appearances.
If there's one word that lights up the eyes of marketing directors and PR professionals, though, it's "3D." While phones powerful enough to render true 3D are currently a tiny minority of phones currently in use, the developers and publishers are declaring themselves ready to handle the technology when it hits critical mass. "Right now, the number of phones that support 3D games is very small," says Sanette Chao, communications manager of Gameloft, the producers of the 3D racer Asphalt: Urban GT. "The majority of phones are 2D phones. Give that another year, and that's going to completely change."
Also of interest to developers and publishers -- and, they hope, of interest to gamers -- is tighter integration of multiplayer. Gameloft is pushing into the world of real-time multiplayer action, allowing players of games like the mobile phone version of Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon to compete simultaneously, rather than in the turn-based gaming more common to mobile phones.
In an intriguing move, In-Fusio is working on integration of web gaming and mobile phone gaming with Neopets Mobile, a wireless gateway to the popular virtual pet web game Neopets. In a move certain to delight some Neopets fans and infuriate others, the mobile phone interface will not only allow players to check on and care for their pets, it will also allow them access to exclusive areas, items, and pet species not available to those only accessing the game through the web. Web-only gamers will be able to see the exclusive rewards earned by mobile gamers, but won't be able to get them without buying Neopets Mobile. So even if the hardcore gamers don't get into mobile phone gaming, maybe the hardcore collectors will.
