Michael Yuan

It seems that all major game developers have ported their best 3D driving games from consoles to Java handsets in the past couple of months. For less than $10 / game, you can now enjoy “Project Gotham Racing”, “Need for Speed: Carbon”, “Asphalt Street Rules” and more on your mobile phone — all in stunning 3D graphics.

I have tried a couple of them on my Nokia N80, and have to say that they are exceeding all my expectations. In terms of graphics, well, they rival the original games on my XBOX. Of course, the keypad controls on the phone are not as good as the Xbox controller, the phone CPU is occasionally slow to render complex 3D scenes (i.e., buildings pop up ahead of you as you drive), the frame rate is probably low at less than 10 frames / second, and battery life is a concern if you play the game for a couple of hours a day. However, the ability to play photo-realistic driving games while you are in a boring meeting is priceless.

Now some people might ask: how is it possible to run photo-realistic 3D video games on a mobile phone? Isn’t the screen too small for that? Well, the mobile phone screen may be small but it certain has enough pixels to render complex graphics. My Nokia N80 has a resolution of 352×416 pixels — that is significantly greater than the resolution of standard TV signals. If you can play video game on your standard big screen TV, you can certainly play it on the high end phone! The screen shots shown above are at the lower 176×208 resolution.

With new devices like the Nokia N95, which provides hardware 3D acceleration support, Java 3D experience can only get better on mobile phones!

If you have a highend Nokia / Sony Ericsson phone and not done mobile gaming, you need to check out those games. They are truly eye openers.