Like many of you I own a smartphone which is capable of vastly superior gaming experiences than were available a few years ago. Back in the day the best you could hope for on a mobile device was Snake and even that wasn't a given that it would A) be preloaded on your phone or B) Your phone was even capable of handling any kind of gaming in the first place. So why did we have these phones in the first place was it for this:
Or was it to do this:
Yes exactly, you bought your phone, you topped up your credits for talk time and text messages and you went on your merry way only ever getting the phone out to use it for PHONE based activities and showing off your annoying as hell ringtones that by the way sounded nothing like the song they were so poorly imitating.
But then the winds of change rolled in and with it bought ever more core style gaming experiences to the mobile masses, the internet (in a very basic form) was now available on a large number of handsets and games publishers were seeing the very real benefits of putting micro versions of there top franchises on mobile platforms so everything from Call Of Duty to Tomb Raider had a shite mobile version available for around £3 for the world to be duped by. Nokia even tried there hand at manufacturing a game specific mobile phone called the N-gage this is what it looked like.
Looks ok i guess maybe the screen looks a little small and the buttons look a bit busy but hey its a games console right? It looks like a fully functional handheld gaming device yes? But wait its still a phone yeah? so how would someone looking to buy one now (they aren't available anymore FYO) make a PHONE CALL on this thing? Here's how:
Now bear in mind this picture is obviously a joke (the person in the picture Christian Nutt is actually a well respected US games journalist who coined the phrase 'Sidetalking') but you get the idea, this device was not built with phone users in mind but to merely make a quick buck off the growing trend of mobile phone gaming. The NGage was a failure both critically and commercially and it wasn't long before Gamestation etc were selling them new for around £40 to quickly and quietly get rid of stock, Nokia meanwhile have never fully recovered from this misstep and have gone from the leading phone manufacturer to an also ran in the mobile arms race.
It had become clear to everyone that mobile gaming was a joke and a fad that was soon to die out...... then this happened.
Ok so Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone wasn't the kick up the arse that pushed mobile gaming forward as much as every apple fanboy would love you to believe but like it or not it is the most popular smartphone on the market for a reason and mobile gaming would not be where it is now without it. lets just say then that the smartphone explosion is what has kickstarted this dying niche of gaming and sent it into orbit. App store and Android marketplace are full of games from every genre, with graphics that would make the nokia snake eat itself out of shame, and full game experiences. Never did I think as a 10 year old that I would have a magic device in my pocket that is not only a phone but will play Monkey Island with better graphics and I can use it wherever I like, make me a time machine so I can blow my own mind!
I guess the answer to the question I asked at the beginning 'Is phone gaming the future?' is maybe. Maybe because while its a fantastic way to get into gaming I don't see it ever replacing the core experience of the home consoles I guess we could say phone gaming is 'shaping' the future.
