Mobile Phone Gaming (and a little something about the Samsung Wave)

Mobile phones aren't exactly my cup of tea when it comes to portable gaming (I have my DS and PSP to keep me company there), but there's been a pretty good supply of games coming out for these phones that I can't help but be intrigued by what they can actually offer.

I recently got myself a Samsung Wave, Samsung's new flagship phone that debuted side by side with their new Bada OS. Now the phone itself is pretty slick, has a really good camera and runs very very smooth. I mean, I haven't had the pleasure of toying around with today's smartphones but from what I've tried, oftentimes they felt sluggish when compared to the inevitable iphone. The Wave on the other hand feels just as smooth and the screen is something to die for! It looks like they slapped a really good LED HDTV in there for the screen, its that good.

Moving to the nerdy stuff, this phone packs hardware that can give almost any modern phone a run for its money (yes, even the new iphone 4). Unless I'm wrong, this phone contains the same cpu as the iphone 4 (a 1 ghz custom designed chip that's leagues faster than the usual snapdragon cpu in some android phones) but a more advanced gpu. More like a 1.5 version of the GPU of the iphone 4, so that should mean better game performance. Unfortunately from the many Gameloft ports I've tried on this phone, they seem to depict the opposite (read: really shoddy framerates). Please Gameloft, put a little bit more love on your ports. Maybe Bada is to blame for being an OS in its infancy stages, but other games seem to run just as good as their iphone siblings so c'mon, at least put a little bit more effort and don't just do it for the quick cash-ins.

Anyway, paid apps just arrived here in the Philippines and I was able to purchase both Twin Blades and ExZeus for my Wave and let me just say, these games look awesome for phones! I may be a bit behind since these were already released on other platforms before, but at least I didn't have to shell out a fortune just to have a phone that can run them.

Epic's Project Sword, aka Unreal Engine 3 drool, on the iphone 4, courtesy of IGN

Mobile gaming seems to be hittng a high note nowadays, with big time developers jumping aboard and testing the waters. ID has their latest engine running on the iphone 4 at perfect 60fps and Epic just released an amazing iphone playable demo of unreal engine 3. I hope though these developers and publishers give other competing mobile phones some love since they are more than capable to doing what the iphone's capable of.