Jan "Jenkings" Škoda - blog

As part of my annual battery care process for my mobile phones, I took my Nokia 5230 out of the drawer. This model, in a white case with a blue back, was my first touch phone.



While the battery was discharging/charging, I decided to install a few more games, as I found an archive on archive.org that seemed to contain many games of various genres that would fit on the screen and fully support touch controls. The only thing I really hated was that these Symbian 5th generation phones supported playing older games for classic keyboard-based phones by displaying a sort of virtual keyboard across half the screen. Nice feature, but completely unintuitive controls. I can understand that there might not be a better solution for this, but honestly, playing these games with touch arrows is absolutely terrible. In these games, you usually make quick moves, clicks and combos using the keyboard, and this is simply not possible on a resistive (one-touch) screen.

So I was expecting a really good portion of fun with this, but unfortunately... it is really boring. There were only a few good games for this platform, including all five or six of Polarbit's games, then the labyrinth game with the marble on the table controlled by the gyro, the "big roll paradise", and maybe four or five other games I cannot remember now. All the other games I can remember were... boring. Maybe it's a resistive screen thing, but still...



So I went through all these new games that are billed as full-screen and touch-enabled, 100% tested, and discovered that a third of them don't fit the screen, don't handle the touch or something, and the rest of them are just boring. The only new one I found a bit attractive was Age of Empires 3, which I might give a try, but the others are just crap.