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How to play IF on your mobile?

Posted: Sun Feb 21, 2010 8:15 pm
by Gunness
Recently I got myself a fairly new Nokia - decent display (320x240) though fairly small, but no QWERTY keyboard - they tend to be fairly useless, anyway, unless you have fingers the size of a hobbit. So it's not a PDA or an iPhone or anything along those lines.

What's my best bet if I want to play something adventure-like on it? Full word input takes too long, so it would have to have predictive parsing or something similar.
I never bought Twin Kingdom Valley, because I owned a stone age phone back then, and now that I want to buy it, the site isn't operating any longer.

Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 10:49 am
by Mark
That sounds more like a toy for playing point & click adventures on. No idea if you're into that sort of thing, but as far as I know, there are some p&c games for such a device.

Posted: Mon Feb 22, 2010 11:34 am
by Gunness
Yes, p&c is the more obvious choice and I tend to enjoy those, but I'd really like some text :) TKV was really neat in that it would try to guess your input based on its vocabulary, so if you started typing EX, it would complete your input as EXAMINE.
For lack of a better alternative, perhaps there are some interesting multiple choice text games out there?

Re: How to play IF on your mobile?

Posted: Fri May 28, 2010 11:02 am
by Samwise
These days I think it's less about the phone and more about what operating system it's running that determines the choice of applications and, hence, it's suitability as an adventure gaming phone. If it's a Nokia you have, it sounds like it might be running Symbian? I don't have a recent one of those so can't help from personal experience but you could perhaps try emulating a Spectrum:

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features ... phones.php

or getting Zaxmidlet, a J2ME Z-Machine interpreter, up and running:

http://sites.google.com/site/zaxmidlet/

Plus there's always ScummVM:

http://wiki.scummvm.org/index.php/SymbianOS
http://forums.scummvm.org/viewforum.php?f=7

Might also be worth mentioning that next time you upgrade your phone you might want to consider the OS carefully based on what kind of apps you want to run. An iPhone won't let you play ScummVM for instance, unless you jailbreak it because Apple won't allow third-party apps to run in the background. Symbian phones look like they should be well supported with ScummVM and Zaxmidlet but I don't know how well they run in practice.

I have an Android phone and I have to say both ScummVM and a beta version of Twisty, another Z-Machine interpreter, run pretty well. I'd certainly recommend it as a good adventuring phone ...

Sam.

Re: How to play IF on your mobile?

Posted: Fri May 28, 2010 12:16 pm
by Gunness
Thanks for the input!
My current phone (Nokia 5130) runs Nokia OS which may or may not be a derivate of Symbian, I don't know much about it.
The problem with the phone is that it only has a normal phone keyboard, not a full QWERTY one, so that makes anything like Inform games fairly tiresome to play (I tried a Java-based interpreter and gave up quickly). It's not powerful enough to run ScummVM.

So I'll just have to prepare myself better for my next phone purchase :) Too bad, really, that the Twin Kingdom Valley project didn't take off at all. I would have loved to see more games of this sort.

Re: How to play IF on your mobile?

Posted: Fri May 28, 2010 1:09 pm
by Samwise
Ahh, that handset runs Symbian Series 40 which is quite long in the tooth as far as modern Symbian applications go, unfortunately. Neither ScummVM or the Speccy emulator will work on that without modification.

Zaxmidlet is the only thing I know of that will and it sounds like that's what you've already tried, but aren't happy using it with the phone keyboard.

I think, though, that's probably the best you can expect until you next upgrade your handset ... (unless you want to peruse Nokia's Ovi Store or your network provider's own app store, if they have one, for native Symbian S40 adventure game titles).

Sorry, can't be more help other than to urge you to get an Android! :)

Sam.