Shoutouts to CRV (of GDRI) for figuring out the culprit who likely passed the formats over to Playsoft, after I had initially spotted the connection between the two companies.

Game list

Title screen of Battleship & Connect 4

Title screen of Pac-Man Kart Rally

Title screen of Tekken Mobile

As I found out the other day, "The Mighty Troglodytes" (the French studio behind the Legend of Spyro mobile games) made their last game in 2009, but it was not their end. At least one programmer went to work at "Playsoft" in Poland and took their tech with him. Here is the game list with TMT tech.

I would like to get back to this account in order to keep showing off my research and other accomplishments. Don't know for how long it will last because maintaining a blog is not in my habits.

Bump and Jump Mobile title screen

@clydemandelin.bsky.social Really sorry to pester you about old stuff, but do you have anything about Bump'N'Jump in your archives? I'm sort of an archivist of old Java cell phone games, and to my knowledge this game is lost media. Big fan of Legends of Localization btw.

Bar Top Field-Goal (J2ME, by Fugumobile)

Pepsi Football Corrida (J2ME, by Qplaze)

If I were to get a nickel for every J2ME game with a word salad title, I'd have at least two nickels.

It's an emulation bug of J2ME Loader. I think Sonic 1 Part 1 and Sonic Jump (aka Tectoy's Sonic Jump 2) sound even more bass boosted there.

web.archive.org/web/20131030...

On the topic of Mega Man feature phone games for MIDP (Western J2ME platform), I found the archived page of the publisher "8elements" that released Rockman mobile games in Asia: 1, 2, 3, Space Rescue, and the undumped localized ports of Rockman GP and Rockman Panic Fire.

List of games found

Monkey Ball gameplay image

Vectorman gameplay image

Virtua Cop gameplay image

Thanks to an accidental find by researcher Pirate Dragon, some never-before-seen Sega mobile games for J2ME cell phones can now be played. This includes Monkey Ball (full version), Vectorman and Virtua Cop.

For the first time in emulation, the J2ME Nokia phone port of the Sega arcade classic Fantasy Zone can be played without graphical issues (using nightly builds of FreeJ2ME-Plus), big props to AShiningRay. This is a faithful port of the game, albeit with squished graphics.

Upon recent re-examination of #J2ME cell phone related archives, I found stuff I wasn't aware of, such as:
- Doom RPG (Nokia 6280 version) unedited dump;
- #Rayman Raving Rabbids, version for old Nokia phones with tiny 96x65 resolution screens (see video).

Cancel culture is such an unfunny joke these days. If you really feel like ruining someone's life because of something they've said off-hand 4 years ago, then you're the problem.

Sorry for the absence lately, been busy AND having various tech issues.

Happy belated Easter. The J2ME port of the Euro retro computer classic Jet Set Willy appears to include an exclusive Easter egg room. I don't know how to access it the intended way, but I've gotten into it before on video using a glitch. (Spoiler alert on the video)

"Rockman - The blue bomber returns for his most celebrated adventure."

"Rockman 2 - Rockman is back!"

"Rockman 3 - Dr. Wily n his robot masters are at it again n only blue bomber can save the day in this perfect adaptation of the original console classic."

Continuing on: Rockman 1-3 for J2ME (not Mega Man!) were released in Indonesia and were available at least in 2012. These versions aren't preserved and few people know about them, and it's not clear if 2 and 3 are based on the JP/CN or the US/EU releases. (tysm to Pirate Dragon for the tip!)

I checked the North American J2ME release of Gradius Neo, and there's definitely something funny with its frame pacing, so no wonder the Japanese version also has issues on emu. The NA version differs in performance depending on emu settings, so I can test on hardware later and record a video.

Example of an archived Asian Sega store. Some of these J2ME games are lost media.

Various Japanese feature phone games got official overseas releases for Western J2ME phones (Nokia, etc.), most commonly in China, but sometimes in Southeast Asia (in English) and occasionally even in the Americas or Europe. Many of these were/are poorly documented, such as the Asian Sega releases.

Title screen

Gameplay screenshot 1

Gameplay screenshot 2

Gameplay screenshot 3

Keitai Shojo: Ayano Spirits is a game released in Japan by G-mode for feature phones, and is part of their dating sim series. Also of note, however, is the dumped Chinese-language version released on J2ME by Joymaster. The game takes up almost 1MB of storage and has nice effects and music.

The Sum of All Fears (2002) title screen

"You are Jack Ryan, Deputy Director of the Central <...>"

"1. See what the lie of the land is with Israel? 2. See what the <...>"

"Golovko says: Listen, Jack. I am here because I need some advice, and maybe some help from your <...>"

Here's a J2ME game I've not heard of before - Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears. Unlike other versions, this is not a shooter, but a monochrome graphical adventure where you choose between political decisions.

It's what you get for having so many device versions in 5 languages separately. These demos or ad-supported versions were surprisingly commonplace on J2ME, and many of them can't go in-game anymore.

Title screen of WWTBAM 2010 Part 2

Cutscene screenshot of a 3D rendered view of the game show hall

"Fastest Finger: Earliest first, put these US presidents in order. A: Bill Clinton. B: Jimmy Carter. C: Gerald Ford. D: Ronald Reagan."

"Bad Luck! You've scored 0 bonus points."

The J2ME game Who Wants to Be a Millionaire 2010 Part 2 is remarkable for having over 1700 preserved versions of the game, though all but 22 of those are "dead" trial versions from the now-defunct J2ME section of the freeware app site GetJar.

The game itself is a simplistic implementation with now-dead online high scores and slightly ugly rescaled graphics, but it's always interesting to see overseas ports of Japanese-developed games (complete with filenames in Japanese written out with the Latin alphabet). (2/2)

Gameplay screenshot of Puzzle Bobble for Sprint

Some emulation news, a while ago asdf @oldphonepreserv.bsky.social dumped the previously-lost Puzzle Bobble for Sprint (J2ME) from a Samsung SPH-A900, and today Shinovon (author of KEmulator nnmod) pushed the fixes to make it playable on his emulator. Big props to everyone involved as usual. (1/2)

Screenshots of the mysterious Bouncy puzzle game: gameplay, high scores, name entry and level.

During research, I stumbled upon this document that shows off a game in Carbello's "Bouncy" series (no direct relation to Bounce by Nokia) with puzzle gameplay. I'm not sure if this game has had a release or if it's just a demo for educational purposes: web.archive.org/web/20240915... (2/2)

Title screen with the game's logo

Portraits of four characters preparing to race. "Piloti pronti? Avviate i motori"

Starting a tournament race on the school table

Starting a head-to-head race on the lunch table

The classic Micro Machines racing game series has a J2ME entry developed by Carbello (Sweden), which is a decent game for an early-ish release. 3 versions are preserved, but, as it sometimes happens, the best version is in Italian. The other 2 lose in performance or content. (1/2)

Main menu of the low-resolution (128x160) version

Intro cutscene

Talking to a character

Gameplay. Note that the graphical bug above the HUD is not due to emulation, it's present on phones as well.

There is a lot, and I mean a lot of game files to work with, and not many people to look through those; needless to say, there have been random discoveries that have taken me and some others by surprise. One of my favorites is this teeny-tiny Doom II RPG version for phones with low-res screens.

Sony Ericsson K800i, a phone famous at the time for its excellent Java game performance. (Pic: GSMArena)

Hi folks! I'd like to revive this account and try to post regularly about Western J2ME (Java ME) game preservation. There are various blogs on this website dedicated to the highly active scene of Japanese phone preservation, but interesting things happen in relation to Western games as well.

sicon

why would you need that when you have sonic advance j2me

flawless port

FASE 2: BLUE SKY ZONE

what sup bluesky