Mobile Gamer

To be honest, I am not much of a mobile gamer. I always thought that mobile phones ain't too suited for gaming, as (as much as I love my Wii) I tend rather to deep games over casual ones.

But last Weekend, it happened. Tidying up my basement, I found a box full of my old LucasArts, or even Lucasfilm Games, Adventures. And thanks to me copying all the discs to CDs, they were still fully operational.

Now you might ask what this has to do with mobile gaming. And rightly so. To explain: I use the T-Mobile HTC G1, also named Google G1, and there's a neat little app for that phone: ScummVM. It's easily available on the Android Market and it's completely free of charge.

If you still haven't figured out the connection: ScummVM let's you play the old SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) games on modern hardware, and mobile phones.

I can't stress it enough how appealing it is to revive your old childhood gaming memories on the go, on the bus, on the toilet, you name it.

The best thing is: all the games look crisp due to the tiny screen, and Androids ScummVM is fully audio capable, so you can enjoy both the score and speech, especially of the late games like Full Throttle or The Curse of Monkey Island. Allthough you should use headphones, because the speaker of the phone doesn't only sound aweful, but as it's on the backside of it, you annoy everyone around you as they hear it much louder than you do.

Which brings me to the most important gripe of the G1: you can't use the headphones and recharge it at the same time, as both use the microUSB slot of the device.

Honestly though, playing those games on your phone has a few drawbacks:

1) Controlls are a tad uncomfortable: touching the screen performs a doubleclick, which is great for quickly navigating the games, but it's sucky for everything else, especially if you need precision.

2) Coming to precision: the trackball sensitivity is so low you get blisters on your thumb from turning it from one side of the screen to the other.

3) Right clicking is very uncomfortable with holding the camera button and clicking the trackball, especially if the keyboard is extended.

and lastly

4) You realise how short those old adventures were. Back as a kid, I could spend weeks with a game, but today, because some solutions are more apparent to me now, some are still stored in my memory and the easily available walkthroughs in the web, you only spend two to three hours per game.

Also, as closing words: is playing old PC software on a phone really regarded as "mobile gaming"?