WVGA Games for Windows Mobile Smartphones

A great Windows Phone game can be hard to find at times. But the one reviewed here today is a real gem, and best of all it's completely free. Totem Star Lite is a easy but fun puzzle game for the Windows Mobile platform. Totem Star Lite plays perfectly on the WVGA resolution, and as an enthusiastic gamer who loves the new WVGA devices, and games that work on these phones I just had to test this free game.

The game itself is available for free directly from the developers website (Touch Dimensions). Where you can download it as a .cab file for your phone. The cab file can be either downloaded directly to your mobile phone or copied over via your operating system with Active Sync or Bluetooth. This WVGA game needs you have Microsoft .NET Compact Framework 3.5 installed on your Windows mobile 6.1 or 6.5 device. You can install it by searching around in the search engines and the Microsoft website.

This WVGA compatible game that was previously known as "Dream Catcher" but for unknown reason was renamed to Totem Star Lite. In this game you lead the destiny of your fellow tribesmen through the stars or so say the creators of this game. Totem Star is set in the Native American desert sunset. The goal of the game is to draw patterns around stars of similar color or shape. You can also make combination in as the authors say - 'an infinite variety of patterns' which in reality will is quite finite. But there are a lot of combinations possible and a lot to be found out in the game play.

Totem Star Lite does not have a steep learning curve at all, but you will find out soon that the game is much deeper as it seems to be from the beginning. The goal of the game is to make a lot of patterns from the stars that spawn randomly in the nightly heavens. The patterns can be found in the bottom right corner of the screen. Just below a totem pole that you have to fill up to have your fellow tribesmen build more buildings, which results into a new pattern and a better high score.
Sometimes a certain star color is not available and you can make combinations to force it to spawn and complete your goal. The combinations you can make in the game can be read on Touch Dimensions website that you can find with any search engine.

The game play is fun, and keeps you busy for quite some time. The background music is is very nice and the entire feeling of the game is just great. Though these days it's all about finger friendliness of applications and games this one actually plays better with the stylus. This is because you have to draw patterns between sometimes close by stars and having your finger in the way does more harm then good. The game plays fine with your finger if you are not that worried about getting the best high score that while playing with a finger. In the options menu of the game you can see your current best score and switch between music/sound disabled or enabled. Other then that it's just a great little WVGA game that works perfectly on all devices it was tested on, QVGA and more. Make sure you try out this great and best of all - free game.

I've been playing some great Windows Mobile games recently on my Touch HD (WVGA 800x480) and the Touch Pro 2 with the same resolution. Whenever a game for Windows Mobile comes out that supports this resolution I get so happy and remember that iPhone and Android users have thus var been limited to HVGA which is allot worse resolution then our beloved Windows Mobile Cell phones.

I will be making an effort posting all fun WVGA games i encounter, and hope to share with you some fun in using Windows Mobile.

Resco Snake, remember good old snake? I'm sure you played it on either your own or a friends Nokia phone. The simplicity of the game made it fun, it was easy to pickup and fun to use. I mean a game on your phone shouldn't be about a hard to use interface or an even harder story mode you have to follow right? No it doesn't, it has to be able to get picked up fast and be fun for a period of 10 minutes to basically whenever you feel like quitting. Well, this is such a game. When you start you can choose a level you want to complete. Choose from the autumn, spring, winter and summer sub-stages. From here you can complete a level and the game will save your progress, so after finishing level 1 you can safely quit and start level 2 the next day or week if you aren't much of a gamer. The game controls feature the use of G-sensor (also called accelerometer) that nearly all new HTC WVGA Smartphones have these days. So you control the snake by moving your device around, you have to a get used to it a little bit at first. After a little while the controls feel natural and its a great crowd pleaser. I'm sure anyone will enjoy the game, feel free to try it out for free at Resco's website.

A lot of people often ask me what the problem is with Windows Mobile game development. Why is there so little know about this and why are there so few great games available for this platform? I'll try to answer this question here and hope to inform and educate as much as possible.

Windows Mobile is now quite an old platform, some ten years ago Windows Mobile was first introduced on devices they call PDA's (personal data assistants). Later came the first windows mobile phone which didn't work all that well, because it was more a pda then a phone. But Windows Mobile has come a long way since then. It offers full business integration and recently there has been more and more multimedia centered devices coming to the masses, HTC has allot to do with this, they have been releasing some impressive devices the last few years.

We are now on the verge of Windows Mobile 6.5 and phones like the recently announced HTC Touch HD2 aka HTC Leo (http://www.htc-smartphone.net/htc-leo-the-best-windows-mobile-phone-to-date/ for more information).

With these new devices game developers have woken up and WVGA gaming is picking up for these new devices like the HTC Touch Pro 2, HTC Touch HD and the Diamond 2. Recent gems like SPB Quads (find it on this lens!), SPB Brain evolution, Resco Snake and Resco bubbles we can finally see that it is completely possible to have entertaining games on the Windows Mobile platform.

With the release of Windows Marketplace closing in together with the first release of Windows Mobile 6.5 devices 7th of October let's hope there will be a surge of great applications and games coming to the platform. With iPhone os and Android putting pressure on Microsoft let's hope Microsoft in turn pressures and assists companies to reach for higher goals and continue this trend of quality increase we've been seeing since a year ago.

Crossing my fingers and hope to see alot more Windows Mobile news in the coming year!