It's a recurring theme - I had a look for some of the developers of these mobile games yesterday, and often there's no trace of their existence on the internet. Rockpool Games, which has a few Sega credits to its name, had a lifespan of just 6 years, being supposedly killed off due to the global financial crisis. I bet there were plenty of others that suffered a similar fate (or which couldn't make the transition to iPhone/Android), which is crazy - I remember a huge push for mobile gaming back in the day, to the point where the big names were more enthusiastic about its prospects than the Game Boy Advance, but from a modern internet perspective, you'd think it was a niche thing nobody cared about. And I mean granted, we as potential customers didn't care about it back in the day (because having the correct handset and internet and whatever was needlessly expensive back in 2003/04/05), but with so much promotion, it's weird that virtually all traces of the fad have disappeared.
Okay every wiki is doing this and I think they're wrong. Take a game like Sonic the Hedgehog Golf (which didn't even have a Sega Retro page until this morning). Our (incredibly limited) coverage suggests there was one version. Turns out there were six, all optimised for different screen resolutions: - 128x128 - 128x160 - 176x208 - 176x220 - 208x208 - 320x240 I would expect to see (at least) six different JAR files, and six sets of screenshots, but most resources either ignore the fact there were multiple versions, or favour "the best". Retro should be documenting (and maybe even hosting?) all of them. Resolution can determine how playable a game is. If the sprites are the same size across all versions, you're going to have a big advantage on a 320x240 phone than a 128x128 one - this might be factored into the design, creating subtly different games. This gets messy if each carrier offers six versions, but it's better to represent that mess than pretend it doesn't exist.
Wait wait hold on let me explain. When I mentioned that we should be documenting not only carriers but also device distributions (like in that big iFone list for Sonic 1 Part 1 that Pirate Dragon posted), what I meant was that there were not six versions of Sonic 1 Part 1 for various resolutions. Instead there were over 30 versions of Sonic 1 Part 1 for high-end devices, and over 5 versions of said game for low-end devices (talking about dumped versions only, there must've been more undumped ones). Those were of course different in resolution, but also there could've been some APIs used only in one versions and not another, or some kinds of device specific optimizations, or some stuff could be present in one version and removed from another (for example Samsung and Motorola versions of Sonic 1 for 240x320 don't have backgrounds but the Nokia and Sony Ericsson versions for the same resolution do). It's worth documenting provided someone has time. I described the minimum on the Sonic 1 (J2ME) page, which is that S1P1 has high-end and low-end versions which use two different gameplay engines, with the low-end version naturally being the more primitive one. BTW, the sprites were usually rescaled between versions, which must've been painful to do for various resolutions, but that was J2ME dev for you.
Making distinctions between every phone is an option too. 30+ versions would be a nightmare to cover, but that's not a reason not to cover them I once got close to doing something similar for Sega's old PC games - having a crazy comparison page where each graphic option is turned on and off. The only thing that stopped me was that I couldn't pause the emulation on precise frames (that and some of it was a bit redundant, even for us). But if Sega supported a bazillion slightly different phones, we have to acknowledge it, even if it is a hassle.
I once came across a Rayman 3 java video where the resolution was like 96 x 64. Literally. And it was nigh unplayable: you couldn't read the text bc the emulator had them massive singular letters and the game played a lot faster and differently. It seems that video got deleted and I can't find videos on the 128 x 128 version either
Yes, there were color and monochrome phones with 96x65 or sometimes 96x64 screen resolutions and Java. Various Rayman games were released for these (Rayman Bowling and Rayman Golf have dumped monochrome versions for Nokia). I haven't seen Sonic games for such phones, not sure about Sega games in general (the lost Motorola Timeport games are technically J2ME games as mentioned, but not in the usual sense). Also, the big text, high speed and saxophone are representative of outdated or poorly set up emulation. Those would never happen on a real device.
I feel like this should have been solved years ago: http://web.archive.org/web/20120111185104/http://www.gameloft.com/mobile-games/sonic-advance/ There are two versions of Sonic Advance (Android) - a decent one by Sega for Japan, and a less-decent one by Gameloft for everywhere else. This was spotted back in 2012 but because nobody edited the wiki, the information was left to rot in the forums. Again. Supposedly Gameloft's version may be derived from their J2ME version (which also isn't very well documented). I understand why semi-obscure Sega games might not be documented (and of course NEC Retro is a total mystery), but this is Sonic Advance - that game was popular! And actually good!
There are also Windows Mobile versions of Sonic Unleashed and Sonic All-Stars Racing from Gameloft that are dumped, I've not played those but I assume those are based on the J2ME games. No idea about the Blackberry versions. I've not researched Sonic Advance J2ME thoroughly, but I've looked at the data inside the JAR in the past, it doesn't look anything like a typical Gameloft game (like the aforementioned two), so maybe it's kind of a source port like Sonic 1 and 2 (high-end).
I know little about the Chinese neck of the mobile woods, but apparently Sega of China themselves developed the versions of OutRun and Fantasy Zone for their BREW-based phones around 2005 (?)
I split out the Sonic Advance Gameloft ports into Sonic Advance (Gameloft)... ... but uh, something tells me we might have to split further. Yes that is an officially licensed version of Sonic Advance... that can't do slopes.
I always love seeing these low end J2ME games. It's hilarious seeing just how much gets sacrificed to get these games to run at all. Kinda strange that they couldn't do slopes at all though, seeing as even the lowest quality versions of Sonic 2 had slopes. Granted, they're by different developers.
If you told me in 2010 that 14 years from now I'd still be finding undocumented Sega games... ...well okay I'd probably believe you but seriously: This isn't a total unknown - it's Bare Knuckle Mobile, though this Chinese version, ζδΉιζ³, isn't on the wiki. I suspect a lot of mobile development was outsourced to Sega of China - the name turns up often, and if their produce is anything like this one... it could be fascinating. Because while Bare Knuckle Mobile looks like Streets of Rage 2, it's actually a pseudo-remake of the original game, with the bigger sprites from the sequels. A lot of effort was put into this - I'm going to guess the hardcore SoR fans already knew, but these are the sorts of projects that slip through the cracks when communities don't work together.
Yeah this isn't good, lads. The lowest of the low The highest of the high. So it turns out this is an absolute mess. Sega Retro is currently oblivious to a J2ME port of Crazy Taxi, which is terrible not just because there are two, but that I'm looking at 18 different JAR files - 11 for the "2D" version, and 7 for the "3D" one. I guess even in the latter days, J2ME developers couldn't make the graphics scale, so were forced to release 324789234 versions. We're lucky in that attempts have been made to make sense of this, but not lucky enough that the attempts fully succeeded - as said, there are collections on archive.org, but they range from "incomplete" to "too big to use". There's also another crime being committed - an expectation that you'll be playing J2ME games on an Android phone through the "J2ME Loader" emulator, so which means cherry-picked versions uploaded in Android APK packages, rather than proper archiving or documentation. There is hope though. I've been using KEmulator nnmod which is very workable... once you faff with resolutions. I've also got a source of JAR files that doesn't entirely suck. I mean sure, the site is optimised for phones because we live in wacky land, but its search function is better than dealing with massive, unorganised archives. It even tells you target platforms (even if the screenshots don't match), though it doesn't have everything. Anyway lot to think about. This could take a while.
Hi all, sorry for the absence. Yesterday I was busy getting a video cable for my Samsung SGH-D880 and being excited about that. Now I can record Samsung real hardware videos (in addition to Nokia real hardware videos) in low quality for now. Sega of China was an existing company, I've seen Sega of China-branded J2ME port versions of Puyo Puyo Fever DX (Puyo Pop Fever DX in the overseas version). At the same time I've seen Sega J2ME games officially released there by ForceGen and BMIT, two companies that I have no idea about. Take a close look at ForceGen's logo in the first screenshot. Anyway. Indeed, Dedomil is a good site for this kind of stuff, and so is SEclub (which often has separate JAR selections from Dedomil so both are worth looking at). Neither have everything, so for the rarest games you sadly have to resort for the archives. Sorry for not telling you about this in the first place, I didn't really think of it. I also don't think it's worth splitting Sonic Advance (Gameloft) any further. I know for Sonic Unleashed (Gameloft) there are about 4 types of versions (I speedrun the game, so we had to go through several of the versions to establish version types), and while a comparisons page with detailed descriptions and screenshots is very well worth it, I don't know if there's a need to fragment it like that.
I didn't even know those existed until today. There really is a Sega game on damn near everything (we need more columns variants)
The House of the Dead: Nightmare. There's also an English version of this, but I can't find any evidence this released in the west. My assumption is this was for Hong Kong and/or South East Asia. Looking on SmarTone's website (by 2007 known as SmarTone-Vodaphone) they had a subscription service for Sega games as of 2007. Unfortunately the Sega webpages weren't archived. We don't get much archived until 2012, when Sega's subscription service is no longer listed. There are Sega games for sale though, here's Head On and Pengo. And also PuyoPuyo Fever Mini (Wide screen version). Again, unfortunately the majority weren't archived. I think it's likely that Sega's subscription service was based off of Sonic Cafe (I think Head-On is only known to have been released in Japan). So it's possible that lots of Sonic Cafe games got J2ME ports for Hong Kong.
Be careful what you wish for This is meant to be optimised for 352x416 screens, but uh... it isn't. It's also meant to be called 2 in 1 Sega Puzzle Pack but it's not called that either.
