Games on your mobile

Good gaming is no longer confined to consoles and handheld devices. There are some decent games on mobile phones, too.

Bounce Boing Voyage

If you're a Nokia phone owner from way back, you'll remember that Nokia used to have a 2D, side scrolling game called Bounce, featuring a red bouncy ball.

Fast forward to 2009 and Nokia brings us an updated Bounce, repackaged with 3D graphics. It's the first game to use the N96's tilt ability. And it's darn good fun.

At its most simple, Bounce Boing Voyage is a platforming game, where you tilt and tip the red ball through a series of courses, avoiding obstacles and challenges as you roll your way to save Pongpingy from the rule of the evil cube, Hypnotoid.

You'll be tilting your N96 from side to side, forwards and backwards to move Bounce left and right and give it a quick flick skywards to let him jump over obstacles.

It took some time to get familiar with the tilt action - if you tilt too vigorously bad things happen. In later levels you can transform into a bouncing ball, mud and a boulder as you roll around collecting pink- coloured bubbles.

While the increasing difficultly levels may frustrate some (and you'll have to install the latest version of Nokia's N-Gage application, which can be something of a mission itself), Bounce Boing Voyage is ideally suited for mobile gaming.

It's great fun in bite sized chunks. The addictive gameplay, appealing graphics and great use of the N96's accelerometers make Bounce Boing Voyage easy to recommend to N96 owners.

Spore (EA)

Spore for the N96, is based on the PC equivalent. You have to evolve from a single-cell organism to an entire civilisation, competing with larger species for nutrients and sustenance.

While the phone version is cut down compared to the full featured PC version, this is still pretty fun game for people who like slow-pace, strategic-style gaming.

In the opening levels, you guide your cell through primordial ooze, competing with larger, more dangerous creatures, progressing to more open levels.

You also get to upgrade your creation with offensive and defensive parts, as well as other appendages. The more you eat, the bigger you get.

For a mobile game, this one looks pretty good (face it, cellphone games will never look as good as full-sized console or PC games).

It captures Spore visuals nicely, and the only aspect that could be improved upon are the controls, which use the N96's D-pad for up, down, left, and right movement - there's no diagonal movement so avoiding some of the larger monsters is difficult at times. It won't suit everyone, but if you liked Spore on PC, you'll probably get a kick out of this.

- © Fairfax NZ News