Java ME was a really neat technology for its time. You could, in theory at least, run any app on any phone. In practice it was severely limited and the performance was often awful, but it was the first truly ubiquitous app platform way before Android and iOS.
Only very basic apps would run everywhere. As phones varied in screen size, resolution, RAM, storage, and indeed CPU speed. Universal apps were thus very basic. And any decent app, especially graphical one like games, would only run on a much smaller subset of phones. There were even services that had a hundred plus different phones to validate apps would run. Many developers kept a dozen or two on hand for testing. It was a painful era of mobile gaming.
Later on in J2ME's existence, console emulators were a thing. Around 2005 or so I remember playing Gameboy and Gamegear games at playable speed on my last, "dumb," phone, which offered better battery life playing them than my other handheld. I would have enjoyed a controller setup like this. Sadly, the developer of one of the emulators I used took his work offline to comply with onerous non-compete clauses of his new job, so the tech to play some of these games on old phones in 2023 is probably gone.
@@lakojake4215 And thanks to mores law your Smartphone has three orders if magnitude more memory, so it is measured in GB not MB, and fast CPU that also likely many orders of magnitude faster running at GHz scale on up to a dozen of cores, compared to relatively low MHz CPU with one core back then. While the integrated GPUs in phones aren't anything great, they are decent, and certainly beat the no GPU of the 2004 version.
@@lakojake4215 Android Java apps != J2ME; Phones of that era only had a limited version of Java with its own SDK. What Android has now is closer to what your desktop supports.
10:43 - the game runs smoothly for a reason. Note that some games started with a java splash screen and some with a loading bar like this one. So, this is not a java game, but mophun, a completely different platform. This is also the reason why the manufacturer made a gamepad for the phone, on which it would seem that java games work incredibly slowly and poorly. There were very few phones supporting mophun, and this is one of them.
I had this exact phone as a kid. Never would've imagined it would have been considered a "gaming" phone back then. I recall the display dying after a year or two. Criminal of you to not demo HoneyCave2 in the video, I played the hell out of that game as a kid.
Let's pause for a moment to admire the idea of Java as the gaming platform for phones: take what is an already woefully underpowered CPU and layer on top a slow runtime that also gobbled up RAM. With no standardized hardware-accelerated graphics APIs. Only a committee could make such a decision...
Or rather, I presume it was never designed as a gaming platform. For simple non-gaming "apps" for flip phones (whatever those might be) this could easily have been good enough.
@@Cooe.Although an improvement, it was still not sufficient, even compared to Palm, or Blackberry, which were a bare minimum of usability for most things.
@@martinlebl631 Sure, while nothing on what BlackBerry was doing w/ the 7000 series or Palm was doing w/ the Treo at the time (aka super expensive proper SMARTPHONES), Qualcomm's BREW was still massively, MASSIVELY better than Java/J2ME!!! IMO, it was WAAAAAAAY more than just a "slight improvement"! 🤷 I owned and heavily used BOTH versions of the famous Motorola RAZR v3, ala the original GSM model with the original Motorola developed Java based OS & J2ME apps, and the CDMA model using Qualcomm's completely unrelated BREW based OS & apps, and they were absolutely WORLDS APART in terms of performance, interface design, AND functionality!!! The original Moto designed user interface on the GSM RAZR both aesthetically looked AND practically functioned absolutely fucking GOD AWFUL by comparison! And the app selection w/ BREW, while unquestionably smaller, tended to be both notably higher quality and significantly faster in terms of their actual performance.
3:45 I love how the mini-SIM form factor is now considered the "big old SIM card of yesteryear". Does anyone remember when SIM cards used to be the size of a credit card? (I mean I guess they still are, but you usually just pop out the size you need.) EDIT: micro->mini
Yup, in my first gsm phone you slid a credit card sized sim underneath the battery. Conversely, there were also phones that had proto e-sim functionality. They used a sim cloner attached to a pc to flash it onto the phone. I think it was called softsim but it was a loooong time ago.
@@absalomdraconis Just looked it up and yes they were. It seems CDMA phones were much more secure and used spread spectrum rather than narrow band transceivers but couldn't do data and voice at the same time and had lower data transfer rates than GSM. The article also mentions that the e-sim could only be flashed once and then to use another you had to buy another phone rather than swap out a card. I think people got around that as Im sure some let you flash as many times as you wanted.
There were some awesome J2ME games. I was a huge fan of the Doom and Wolfenstein RPG games. It took the poor performance of the phones and really adapted the games to still be fun.
There was this doom style russian "counter strike" that nobody knew what the words meant in middle school(i'm brazillian btw), but it had bluetooth multiplayer, it was AMAZING to have multiplayer CS on phones, i remember at one point there being multiple sessions of ir during the lunchbreaks
@@AndreLuiz-zf6wqman I remember that Russian CS too!!! Hahaha and the Doom and Wolfenstein RPGs were my entire childhood and spent countless hours playing them! So many beautiful memories! 😢
@@AndreLuiz-zf6wq We had that in Colombia as well! Lol, I even remember the first guy who got it would ask other kids to do his homework for him in order to send the .jar but as soon as a couple had it they just started sharing it "for free" hahah, had some amazing times with it back in school
I remember in highschool (2006-2008) having one of those windows mobile Motorola phones (Q11 I think?) and playing Doom during class whenever I finished assignments early.
The Moto Q was fantastic. I had one in HS as well. I kinda miss having a tough smartphone with no touchscreen and whatever that thing was made out of was amazing, it would never break; you could throw that phone at the ground and all it would do is bounce and maybe scuff up a corner at most.
trust me schools cracked down on cell phones as soon as they were in teens and kids hands lol. i went to school in the 2000s and we would get them confiscated and then have to pay to get it back. not joking at all i had to pay 15$ to get my OWN cell phone back even if my mom came and got it . i wasnt even using it, it went off in my back cause the power button got pressed @@nmac101
Back in ~2005 I made a Wolfenstein 3D style raycaster for J2ME! The framerate was actually quite smooth but not much more than a maze to explore. I wonder if the .jar file is still out there somewhere
'Beefy' SIM. My very first phone in 1999 was a Philips PH301. Took a 'full size' SIM which was literally the entire credit card sized thing a SIM came in for many years - the whole thing went into the phone!
I still remember having a Sony Ericsson W200 in 2011-2012 and man it sure was still the golden era of Java Games on the internet. They were still everywhere and I used my cellular data (that I managed to crack from my Cell carrier back in the days) to download those Java games. It's a shame that aggressive copyright laws came after 2012 and killed all of those sites I used, they either were lost to time or became boring sites.
2000s mobile games are really overlooked there are some gems out there. but also some strange stuff like how they made god of war and cod and just cause for these things. its really strange seeing aaa games from 2006 to 2012 in 16 bit .you could argue that this is the last "retro" system ever since it can't do 3d even after the gba was discontinued. but you had to download the games so that is noting like "retro" gaming. and these days early 3d games also feel very old school but its quite different
I think there was a rather useful Gameboy emulator for Java. I remember running it on my old Sony Ericsson K510, albeit without sound. It was very, very slow. Nokia dumbphones could run it with sound (it used the MIDI piano for everything).
Man it's depressing.. I remember that one dude in classroom own a N-gage QD and plays tomb raider on it and we all watch him like some kind of alien from another planet.
I'm not sure many people used those specifically for gaming. There was the GBA, DS, and on the non-console side Palm and Windows CE PDAs and phones, which are all devices I think people who wanted to play games at the time would gravitate to. Also graphing calculators if you were a student. Although with that said, phones like this were more in the hands of the average person compared to those who were gamers or had smartphones or PDAs for business. That controller grip is pretty neat. Not sure I ever saw one for older feature phones like that.
Maaan this video unlocked good memories. As a child I used to play Java games like God of War, Resident Evil, Assassin's Creed, Miami Nights and so on, on my late LG GU230, oh God how I miss it.
Oh my, I bought my GF back then that same exact phone... I think I remember that it was quite "high end" for it's time. Can't remember if it was because of the color screen or the ring tones or the interchangeable face plates...
Mister action retro as someone who was crazy into phones back then i must tell ya: First off, thank you for the nostalgia And secondly, to avoid the bubble bobble thing (which is something we all faced in one game or another), you must find games that had the same resolution or lower than the phone's res. Back then there were already some websites very forward looking that not only had loads of games for download, as they also had different download options for different resolutions, and they even made the websites purposefully lighter and with such a layout that you could easily use on a phone as underpowered as they were. Love ya ❤
Awwww, my first phone. I really loved that, this phone was my spark for love of Sony Ericsson's phone (I had K700i, V630i, P1i, Xperia Mini Pro too). Also when I discovered there was a game pad for Z600, I really wanted one, but couldn't afford it as an elementary school student.
I dunno, in practical they couldn't do anything better than the Nokias from the years before and all the additions like J2ME were so crappy that basically no one really used it. Just imagine how many percentage of the flip phone users back in the day were able to copy something from their computer via bluetooth. And even if you were a tech nerd who could do it, in 2004 you already could get an used GameBoy Advanced for probably a similar price to this weird controller addon and then you could play the real Super Mario.
@@_sabot I didn't say it was practical or whatever, I said it was very charming, nowadays everything is a rectangular black slab, back then it was way more fun to go look for your next phone
Whoa. The Sony Ericsson Z600! I had the Z600i version as a hand-me-down from my dad. My first phone with a color display. Great phone. Good memories. Thanks for covering it! Never had the gamepad though 😅
My foray into J2ME was on my first phone, the original Moto Razr... Never could get it working with anything very good, so I just made my own Tetris game. I still have the source for it. lol
The BREW version of the RAZR was so, SOOOOOOOO much better than the original Java one. 🤷 Moto's user interface just kinda absolutely fucking sucked vs Qualcomm's.
I had a t316 and then a t616 and finally an s710a. Loved my SE phones! You need to find the Bluetooth car that you could control with the phone. Lots of fun times in high school with that guy
I still have a Sony Ericsson K610i lying around (a candybar phone, its flip counterpart was the Z610i), it came with a USB transfer cable out of the box, so sideloading J2ME apps was a piece of cake. And as soon as I got a compatible headset and a hefty 1 GB M2 card with its USB reader, the K610i also made a great solid state MP3 player. I wonder if that gamepad would run on it, I doubt it fits on that space 😅
this brings back memories in my college years when the Sony Erickson T68 was a flagship and gaming on java was a thing, didn't know they had a game controller attachment for those phones back then
the Jeff game looks like it could be fun, hopefully there is more to it. I had a Sony Ericsson phone with 3d graphics and came with a demo of mobile Splinter Cell, it was a platformer but still pretty good for a phone back then :)
I grew up with Java games and they even pushed me to be an indie dev. As we speak, Im working on a spiritual successor to Nokia's Space Impact called Astro Impact! De_Make and will publish a demo/ Endless Level later this week for Windows and Web. Some of the games I'd recommend (Im not sure whether they'd work on this device but...) Holy Wars: Sons of Enoch Asphalt 4 and 6 (Actually, All the Asphalt games on Java apart from Nitro) The Overtaker Collider 4D Alpha Zone 3D Joint Task Force Action Medal of Honor 2010 River Storm 3D 1 and 2 3D Contr Terrorism Might and Magic There are lots more!
Ha! You call that a big SIM? That's a mini-SIM (well a nano-SIM in a mini-SIM adapter). The original SIM cards from the early 90s were credit card size!
crazy how far gaming on mobiles have come the new iphone 15 pro and pro max being able to run resident evil 4 remastered and resident evil village natively on the phone
Bro I had a Nokia N Gage around that time. Absolutely leagues ahead of anything else on the market. Full 3D games and emulators for snes and genesis. School peers were rather mind blown!
A major problem with J2ME apps was that they could not scale to different resolutions You needed games that were built specifically for the resolution of your phone, and there were no standard resolutions or aspect ratios to mobile phones those days This is the problem you faced with Bubble Bobble On the flipside, I used to often play games built for smaller phones on my K608i with fat black borders on the right and bottom sides of the screen
I also wonder if the phone is bogged down by extra software? That era is just after the time I started only buying my phones outright. The first one I did that with was a Sony Ericsson that I had to import. I got it 6 months before it started showing up in Cingular (AT&T, I think they were still Cingular when I first did this) stores. And it had zero bloat, and tons of features that my carrier disabled in their version. It was kinda crazy what I could do with that phone. I wouldn’t exactly call it smart, but compared to what the US carriers were offering it was the equivalent of a genius. Long story short, I could see a situation where some of those games would run better depending on the source of the phone.
I would probably try this with the K600i, it was the last Sony Ericsson phone (thus most up to date Java runtime) to use the proprietary port this game pad requires. I don't know if it's officially supported with other Sony Ericsson phones or if it only works with the Z600 or 2004 era Sony Ericsson phones, but worth a try since K600i came out a year or so after. The Sony Ericsson Z800 is also a newer flip phone from 2005 also that uses the port and likely I imagine has a slightly newer run time, though not as new K600i but if you wanted to keep within the flip phone vibes.
You'll get application error when you transfer via Bluetooth for some reason, had that issues before but I tried download them directly to my phone using mobile data and they worked pretty fine.
I didn’t realize that the Ericsson play had a predecessor lol. I remember begging for that phone for years and I finally got one like 10 years after it came out
They eventually did something similar after the PSP's lifecycle, called the Xperia Play. Sadly, the specs were underwhelming and it did not sell. It was notable because it had a touch area (standing in for analogs) that was designed for both thumbs to play twin-stick shooters, something the PSP was ill-equipped for. I think it ultimately failed because Sony designed it to be too slow for PSX emulation, in order to sell remakes of old games for it. It could not compete with non-gaming phones with better specs.
The "native" game is called Mophun games, it's also available on Symbian with 3D graphics, early period of Sony Ericsson phone was notoriously slow, running Java was even worse.
Fun to see that seven years later, Sony-Ericsson was still investing in mobile phone gaming with the Xperia Play. Nice idea, TERRIBLE execution. They couldn't get the phone and gaming divisions to cooperate. It was like the left hand had no idea what the right one was doing.
Java got cool games like Heroes lore, galaxy on fire, blades and magic, age of empires, tales of the sword, worms 3d, virtua tennis and so on. Symbian is where the gaming is shaping into something reminiscent to modern smartphones. Some great games like skyforce, asphalt series and great emulators like Vbag(GBA), Vsun(Snes), Vnes(nes) and vboy(gameboy) plus pico drive for sega genesis. I lost count how many hours I spent playing gba games on my nokia n73 lol
I remember playing on my Sony ericcson around 2010 on long train rides into the night, coming home from uni. My most memorable games were Gungirl and SilentHill Shattered Memories. The phone is fully functioning today, albeit the batteries are really exhausted at this point. Cant say any of my modern phones could last that long. Obviously w@p doesnt work anymore, and i cannot connect to the internet, but the 1.5mp camera does a surprisingly decent job still, and my mom's been using the phone ever since.
Mophun games are one of the most cherished memories from my childhood. I spent hours playing those you mentioned, except Jeff. Also Honey Cave 1 and 2 were two of my favorites, alongside Deep Abyss, Get-Away (a kind of GTA 1 clone), Alien Scum, Minigolf, and so many more! 🥲
Tetris on my flipphone was the coolest thing ever to me when I was a teen. My freinds that played on theirs were always in a battle to see who could get rhe highest score.
I know these feature phones are relegated to yesteryear, but in some ways, I miss the good old days. Things were limited, but they were also just simpler. Today, functionality depends on notifications and alerts and the like. Your phone demands your attention rather than you choosing when you will attend to your device. I don't mean to seem reactionary. I just lament the amount of time I spend answering the psyren call of my devices. Too bad self-control is so hard. Excellent video. Did any of these games feature sound? Did you have the volume down?
I miss 2004 mobile gaming..I played so many java games on my phone. No ads, no WiFi requirement, no atrocious micro transactions and apps that sell your data to advertisers. This was indeed the golden age of mobile gaming.
I don't know how to feel on this, on one hand it seems like it would have been cool to have games anywhere you go with something you'd be carrying around anyway (although admittedly the quality of game probably would have been a turnoff, hell I know even with modern smartphones I don't play mobile games) but at the same time, wow this had to compete with the GBA? Possibly the DS and PSP (depending on how far into 2004 this was from and how long it lasted into 2005, I'm going to be honest I'm 30 and I don't think I was aware of this phone when it was actually around) Lol good luck with that
11:40 Jeff is me
Ohhhh
Should we be afraid of jeff
can't tell if jeff or jeff
Well why do you have nukes then, according to some meme i saw
@@LKComputes jeff
Java ME was a really neat technology for its time. You could, in theory at least, run any app on any phone. In practice it was severely limited and the performance was often awful, but it was the first truly ubiquitous app platform way before Android and iOS.
Only very basic apps would run everywhere. As phones varied in screen size, resolution, RAM, storage, and indeed CPU speed. Universal apps were thus very basic. And any decent app, especially graphical one like games, would only run on a much smaller subset of phones. There were even services that had a hundred plus different phones to validate apps would run. Many developers kept a dozen or two on hand for testing. It was a painful era of mobile gaming.
Later on in J2ME's existence, console emulators were a thing. Around 2005 or so I remember playing Gameboy and Gamegear games at playable speed on my last, "dumb," phone, which offered better battery life playing them than my other handheld. I would have enjoyed a controller setup like this.
Sadly, the developer of one of the emulators I used took his work offline to comply with onerous non-compete clauses of his new job, so the tech to play some of these games on old phones in 2023 is probably gone.
Android apps are Java.
@@lakojake4215 And thanks to mores law your Smartphone has three orders if magnitude more memory, so it is measured in GB not MB, and fast CPU that also likely many orders of magnitude faster running at GHz scale on up to a dozen of cores, compared to relatively low MHz CPU with one core back then. While the integrated GPUs in phones aren't anything great, they are decent, and certainly beat the no GPU of the 2004 version.
@@lakojake4215 Android Java apps != J2ME; Phones of that era only had a limited version of Java with its own SDK. What Android has now is closer to what your desktop supports.
10:43 - the game runs smoothly for a reason. Note that some games started with a java splash screen and some with a loading bar like this one. So, this is not a java game, but mophun, a completely different platform. This is also the reason why the manufacturer made a gamepad for the phone, on which it would seem that java games work incredibly slowly and poorly. There were very few phones supporting mophun, and this is one of them.
Myphone mophun than yourphone
I had this exact phone as a kid. Never would've imagined it would have been considered a "gaming" phone back then. I recall the display dying after a year or two.
Criminal of you to not demo HoneyCave2 in the video, I played the hell out of that game as a kid.
Let's pause for a moment to admire the idea of Java as the gaming platform for phones: take what is an already woefully underpowered CPU and layer on top a slow runtime that also gobbled up RAM. With no standardized hardware-accelerated graphics APIs. Only a committee could make such a decision...
Or rather, I presume it was never designed as a gaming platform. For simple non-gaming "apps" for flip phones (whatever those might be) this could easily have been good enough.
This is a major reason why Qualcomm looked at J2ME and said "Yeah... No. Fuck that noise." and developed BREW instead.
@@Cooe.Although an improvement, it was still not sufficient, even compared to Palm, or Blackberry, which were a bare minimum of usability for most things.
Nah, if it had been a committee, then every feature would've taken 5 to 10 years to get added and it never could've been used.
@@martinlebl631 Sure, while nothing on what BlackBerry was doing w/ the 7000 series or Palm was doing w/ the Treo at the time (aka super expensive proper SMARTPHONES), Qualcomm's BREW was still massively, MASSIVELY better than Java/J2ME!!! IMO, it was WAAAAAAAY more than just a "slight improvement"! 🤷
I owned and heavily used BOTH versions of the famous Motorola RAZR v3, ala the original GSM model with the original Motorola developed Java based OS & J2ME apps, and the CDMA model using Qualcomm's completely unrelated BREW based OS & apps, and they were absolutely WORLDS APART in terms of performance, interface design, AND functionality!!!
The original Moto designed user interface on the GSM RAZR both aesthetically looked AND practically functioned absolutely fucking GOD AWFUL by comparison! And the app selection w/ BREW, while unquestionably smaller, tended to be both notably higher quality and significantly faster in terms of their actual performance.
3:45 I love how the mini-SIM form factor is now considered the "big old SIM card of yesteryear". Does anyone remember when SIM cards used to be the size of a credit card? (I mean I guess they still are, but you usually just pop out the size you need.)
EDIT: micro->mini
Tht's OK except the SIM on this phone is a Mini-SIM, not a Micro.
@@BilisNegra I stand corrected, but my point stands, mini SIM is still a heck of a lot smaller then the original SIM card form factor.
Yup, in my first gsm phone you slid a credit card sized sim underneath the battery. Conversely, there were also phones that had proto e-sim functionality. They used a sim cloner attached to a pc to flash it onto the phone. I think it was called softsim but it was a loooong time ago.
@@meetoo594 : Those were probably CDMA phones. Some folks preferred CDMA, but the SIM card was always an advantage in favor of GSM.
@@absalomdraconis Just looked it up and yes they were. It seems CDMA phones were much more secure and used spread spectrum rather than narrow band transceivers but couldn't do data and voice at the same time and had lower data transfer rates than GSM. The article also mentions that the e-sim could only be flashed once and then to use another you had to buy another phone rather than swap out a card. I think people got around that as Im sure some let you flash as many times as you wanted.
My mom actually had one of those back in the day. Never knew a controller existed for them, but now I kinda want one.
There were some awesome J2ME games. I was a huge fan of the Doom and Wolfenstein RPG games. It took the poor performance of the phones and really adapted the games to still be fun.
I had an excellent Zelda clone.
There was this doom style russian "counter strike" that nobody knew what the words meant in middle school(i'm brazillian btw), but it had bluetooth multiplayer, it was AMAZING to have multiplayer CS on phones, i remember at one point there being multiple sessions of ir during the lunchbreaks
@@AndreLuiz-zf6wqman I remember that Russian CS too!!! Hahaha and the Doom and Wolfenstein RPGs were my entire childhood and spent countless hours playing them! So many beautiful memories! 😢
@@AndreLuiz-zf6wqbro I play that game too. But in english version, and I dont remember the title of it. It was a gem of a kind
@@AndreLuiz-zf6wq We had that in Colombia as well! Lol, I even remember the first guy who got it would ask other kids to do his homework for him in order to send the .jar but as soon as a couple had it they just started sharing it "for free" hahah, had some amazing times with it back in school
I remember in highschool (2006-2008) having one of those windows mobile Motorola phones (Q11 I think?) and playing Doom during class whenever I finished assignments early.
man, ur really lucky. my teacher doesnt even let me look at the time during class ;-;
The Moto Q was fantastic. I had one in HS as well. I kinda miss having a tough smartphone with no touchscreen and whatever that thing was made out of was amazing, it would never break; you could throw that phone at the ground and all it would do is bounce and maybe scuff up a corner at most.
trust me schools cracked down on cell phones as soon as they were in teens and kids hands lol. i went to school in the 2000s and we would get them confiscated and then have to pay to get it back. not joking at all i had to pay 15$ to get my OWN cell phone back even if my mom came and got it . i wasnt even using it, it went off in my back cause the power button got pressed @@nmac101
Back in ~2005 I made a Wolfenstein 3D style raycaster for J2ME! The framerate was actually quite smooth but not much more than a maze to explore. I wonder if the .jar file is still out there somewhere
I think I played that game back then when I owned a Java phone
The more "wrong" something appears, the most it suits this channel! 😊
"How can Jeff defend himself?"
A question for the ages, for each of us. How indeed?
'Beefy' SIM. My very first phone in 1999 was a Philips PH301. Took a 'full size' SIM which was literally the entire credit card sized thing a SIM came in for many years - the whole thing went into the phone!
I still remember having a Sony Ericsson W200 in 2011-2012 and man it sure was still the golden era of Java Games on the internet.
They were still everywhere and I used my cellular data (that I managed to crack from my Cell carrier back in the days) to download those Java games.
It's a shame that aggressive copyright laws came after 2012 and killed all of those sites I used, they either were lost to time or became boring sites.
thats still a minisim. a full size sim is the size of credit card. i remember the original startac having a credit card sized sim.
your channel is a gem
Taking a break from Starfield and seeing this, some crazy whiplash
Yeah because Starfield look like a 2004 game 😂
Never been here before but this video was recommended by the algorithm. So far so good a think I'm going to Sub
2000s mobile games are really overlooked there are some gems out there. but also some strange stuff like how they made god of war and cod and just cause for these things. its really strange seeing aaa games from 2006 to 2012 in 16 bit .you could argue that this is the last "retro" system ever since it can't do 3d even after the gba was discontinued. but you had to download the games so that is noting like "retro" gaming. and these days early 3d games also feel very old school but its quite different
I have fond memories of the Splinter Cell mobile games. They adapted the mechanics really well.
It could.
@@harythanossudibyo6993?
Heck, I found out that the last official Sonic J2ME game was Sonic Runners Advnture, a 2017 smartphone game.
There games cost almost nothing to develop and were effectively just advertisements for the full home release.
When you said "beefy SIM card", I figured you meant the credit card sized ones, not the mini ones.
The credit card sized ones were used in those massive bricks of 30 years ago. This is a decade newer...
@@BilisNegra I'm aware but I just wouldn't call a mini SIM beefy even in comparison to a nano SIM.
I'm always surprised these old phones never force you to faff about with the hell that was Blue Solei.
You've brought back some cursed memories.
@@LordVarkson Sorry m'lord!
I think there was a rather useful Gameboy emulator for Java. I remember running it on my old Sony Ericsson K510, albeit without sound. It was very, very slow. Nokia dumbphones could run it with sound (it used the MIDI piano for everything).
It was MeBoy I think
Fun fact: that's still not a full size SIM, that's a Mini SIM. Full size SIM cards were the size of a credit card.
RIP Jeff.
Wish I could make it to VCF Midwest. Have fun and safe travels, Sean.
Man it's depressing.. I remember that one dude in classroom own a N-gage QD and plays tomb raider on it and we all watch him like some kind of alien from another planet.
Tetris Mania is still my favorite version of the game from back in the J2ME days. They had a "cascade mode" which I wish would've become standard.
I'm not sure many people used those specifically for gaming. There was the GBA, DS, and on the non-console side Palm and Windows CE PDAs and phones, which are all devices I think people who wanted to play games at the time would gravitate to. Also graphing calculators if you were a student.
Although with that said, phones like this were more in the hands of the average person compared to those who were gamers or had smartphones or PDAs for business.
That controller grip is pretty neat. Not sure I ever saw one for older feature phones like that.
Maaan this video unlocked good memories. As a child I used to play Java games like God of War, Resident Evil, Assassin's Creed, Miami Nights and so on, on my late LG GU230, oh God how I miss it.
Oh my, I bought my GF back then that same exact phone... I think I remember that it was quite "high end" for it's time. Can't remember if it was because of the color screen or the ring tones or the interchangeable face plates...
probably the screen lmao
I had the phone. It was the color screen. This was when everybody had the Nokias.
Mister action retro as someone who was crazy into phones back then i must tell ya:
First off, thank you for the nostalgia
And secondly, to avoid the bubble bobble thing (which is something we all faced in one game or another), you must find games that had the same resolution or lower than the phone's res.
Back then there were already some websites very forward looking that not only had loads of games for download, as they also had different download options for different resolutions, and they even made the websites purposefully lighter and with such a layout that you could easily use on a phone as underpowered as they were.
Love ya ❤
Awwww, my first phone. I really loved that, this phone was my spark for love of Sony Ericsson's phone (I had K700i, V630i, P1i, Xperia Mini Pro too).
Also when I discovered there was a game pad for Z600, I really wanted one, but couldn't afford it as an elementary school student.
Who remember games from fishlabs? They had 3d game engine called Abyss. Galaxy on fire, deep, robot alliance games were best j2me games.
that's a very charming era in phone history
I dunno, in practical they couldn't do anything better than the Nokias from the years before and all the additions like J2ME were so crappy that basically no one really used it. Just imagine how many percentage of the flip phone users back in the day were able to copy something from their computer via bluetooth. And even if you were a tech nerd who could do it, in 2004 you already could get an used GameBoy Advanced for probably a similar price to this weird controller addon and then you could play the real Super Mario.
@@_sabot I didn't say it was practical or whatever, I said it was very charming, nowadays everything is a rectangular black slab, back then it was way more fun to go look for your next phone
Whoa. The Sony Ericsson Z600! I had the Z600i version as a hand-me-down from my dad. My first phone with a color display. Great phone. Good memories.
Thanks for covering it! Never had the gamepad though 😅
I would say that J2ME games truly flourished during the mid to late 2000s. So many awesome games were released in this period.
My foray into J2ME was on my first phone, the original Moto Razr... Never could get it working with anything very good, so I just made my own Tetris game.
I still have the source for it. lol
The BREW version of the RAZR was so, SOOOOOOOO much better than the original Java one. 🤷 Moto's user interface just kinda absolutely fucking sucked vs Qualcomm's.
The mug on the background made me try to clean my display xD
I had a t316 and then a t616 and finally an s710a. Loved my SE phones! You need to find the Bluetooth car that you could control with the phone. Lots of fun times in high school with that guy
Wow, sony had a perfect opportunity to use their PS1 controller button layout and just went with the most generic ABCD button layout.
New merch idea "What is Jeff? Who is Jeff"
I still have a Sony Ericsson K610i lying around (a candybar phone, its flip counterpart was the Z610i), it came with a USB transfer cable out of the box, so sideloading J2ME apps was a piece of cake.
And as soon as I got a compatible headset and a hefty 1 GB M2 card with its USB reader, the K610i also made a great solid state MP3 player.
I wonder if that gamepad would run on it, I doubt it fits on that space 😅
That's flippin' incredible!
this brings back memories in my college years when the Sony Erickson T68 was a flagship and gaming on java was a thing, didn't know they had a game controller attachment for those phones back then
Okay THAT looks like something I would have loved in 2004.
the Jeff game looks like it could be fun, hopefully there is more to it.
I had a Sony Ericsson phone with 3d graphics and came with a demo of mobile Splinter Cell, it was a platformer but still pretty good for a phone back then :)
Brought to you by flip phones!
As soon as you said Game Gear, I finally realized that it's the handheld that the Steam Deck reminds me of.
This video was flipping good👍
I remember having a old flip phone back when I was in kid. Those phone were awesome.
I had exactly this phone with the Spiderman Shells
That is a MINI sim. The big chonky ones are the size of a credit card.
I grew up with Java games and they even pushed me to be an indie dev. As we speak, Im working on a spiritual successor to Nokia's Space Impact called Astro Impact! De_Make and will publish a demo/ Endless Level later this week for Windows and Web.
Some of the games I'd recommend (Im not sure whether they'd work on this device but...)
Holy Wars: Sons of Enoch
Asphalt 4 and 6 (Actually, All the Asphalt games on Java apart from Nitro)
The Overtaker
Collider 4D
Alpha Zone 3D
Joint Task Force Action
Medal of Honor 2010
River Storm 3D 1 and 2
3D Contr Terrorism
Might and Magic
There are lots more!
I like how the game controller labels the buttons as A, B, C, and D to match the Java ME LCDUI game keys.
You need the N-Gage.
The Xperia Play and the whole Playstation Mobile saga is an amazing side-story in handheld gaming.
Ha! You call that a big SIM? That's a mini-SIM (well a nano-SIM in a mini-SIM adapter). The original SIM cards from the early 90s were credit card size!
crazy how far gaming on mobiles have come the new iphone 15 pro and pro max being able to run resident evil 4 remastered and resident evil village natively on the phone
tmobile still does offer 2g so you could possibly get that on network lol
This is amazing.
Bro I had a Nokia N Gage around that time. Absolutely leagues ahead of anything else on the market. Full 3D games and emulators for snes and genesis. School peers were rather mind blown!
A major problem with J2ME apps was that they could not scale to different resolutions
You needed games that were built specifically for the resolution of your phone, and there were no standard resolutions or aspect ratios to mobile phones those days
This is the problem you faced with Bubble Bobble
On the flipside, I used to often play games built for smaller phones on my K608i with fat black borders on the right and bottom sides of the screen
Still better than modern mobile games
Not sure if that’s compatible but the gamepad would have been really nice for when they started shipping virtual tennis preinstalled
I also wonder if the phone is bogged down by extra software? That era is just after the time I started only buying my phones outright. The first one I did that with was a Sony Ericsson that I had to import. I got it 6 months before it started showing up in Cingular (AT&T, I think they were still Cingular when I first did this) stores. And it had zero bloat, and tons of features that my carrier disabled in their version. It was kinda crazy what I could do with that phone. I wouldn’t exactly call it smart, but compared to what the US carriers were offering it was the equivalent of a genius. Long story short, I could see a situation where some of those games would run better depending on the source of the phone.
Bruh, Sony did have a controller for the Clié PDA.
I would probably try this with the K600i, it was the last Sony Ericsson phone (thus most up to date Java runtime) to use the proprietary port this game pad requires. I don't know if it's officially supported with other Sony Ericsson phones or if it only works with the Z600 or 2004 era Sony Ericsson phones, but worth a try since K600i came out a year or so after. The Sony Ericsson Z800 is also a newer flip phone from 2005 also that uses the port and likely I imagine has a slightly newer run time, though not as new K600i but if you wanted to keep within the flip phone vibes.
You'll get application error when you transfer via Bluetooth for some reason, had that issues before but I tried download them directly to my phone using mobile data and they worked pretty fine.
Honestly that controller is like the stone age equivalent of those telescopic ones that plug into the usb c port of your smartphone.
I didn’t realize that the Ericsson play had a predecessor lol. I remember begging for that phone for years and I finally got one like 10 years after it came out
Flip phones were before my time but J2ME games become one of my favourite rabbit holes to go down
holy fuck I need one. I need one with a pi compute module for its guts, working sim, and a full linux environment.
Remember playing Bubble Bobble on my Phillips GX10 camera flip phone and it was soooo good!
I think I had this phone. Maybe not this exact model, but one close to it. And it's the first time I ever see someone else using one.
I was 7 in 2004 and I don’t remember seeing that at school. At all. But kid me would FREAK OUT 100%
Sony missed an opportunity with the gamepad back then. They could've slapped the PlayStation branding on it.
They eventually did something similar after the PSP's lifecycle, called the Xperia Play. Sadly, the specs were underwhelming and it did not sell. It was notable because it had a touch area (standing in for analogs) that was designed for both thumbs to play twin-stick shooters, something the PSP was ill-equipped for.
I think it ultimately failed because Sony designed it to be too slow for PSX emulation, in order to sell remakes of old games for it. It could not compete with non-gaming phones with better specs.
this thing is an absolute nugget
oh man I had that phone, I broke it trying to disassemble it, I still got the remains, loved gaming on it
funny thing about this is the controller addition to the phone was ahead of its time but razer and all these smartphones made it better
The "native" game is called Mophun games, it's also available on Symbian with 3D graphics, early period of Sony Ericsson phone was notoriously slow, running Java was even worse.
I'm so impressed this has a colour screen.
Fun to see that seven years later, Sony-Ericsson was still investing in mobile phone gaming with the Xperia Play.
Nice idea, TERRIBLE execution. They couldn't get the phone and gaming divisions to cooperate. It was like the left hand had no idea what the right one was doing.
Java got cool games like Heroes lore, galaxy on fire, blades and magic, age of empires, tales of the sword, worms 3d, virtua tennis and so on.
Symbian is where the gaming is shaping into something reminiscent to modern smartphones. Some great games like skyforce, asphalt series and great emulators like Vbag(GBA), Vsun(Snes), Vnes(nes) and vboy(gameboy)
plus pico drive for sega genesis.
I lost count how many hours I spent playing gba games on my nokia n73 lol
I owned one of those between 2004-5. It came with a great mini golf game!
I also owned that PowerBook between 2005-7
These framerates are glorious. Who needs 120+FPS when you can play at a glorious 5 FPS!
More like you miss youth in general.
@@BilisNegraI think we all miss an era with less ads bro
OMG I thought that gamepad was a joke when you first showed it up
HAHAHHAHAHA
Crazy that people had games in 2004!
I remember playing on my Sony ericcson around 2010 on long train rides into the night, coming home from uni. My most memorable games were Gungirl and SilentHill Shattered Memories. The phone is fully functioning today, albeit the batteries are really exhausted at this point. Cant say any of my modern phones could last that long. Obviously w@p doesnt work anymore, and i cannot connect to the internet, but the 1.5mp camera does a surprisingly decent job still, and my mom's been using the phone ever since.
Mophun games are one of the most cherished memories from my childhood. I spent hours playing those you mentioned, except Jeff. Also Honey Cave 1 and 2 were two of my favorites, alongside Deep Abyss, Get-Away (a kind of GTA 1 clone), Alien Scum, Minigolf, and so many more! 🥲
That's not a 'big old beefy SIM', that's a Mini SIM. The 'big old beefy' ones were the full credit-card sized SIMs that 90's phones used.
yeah. back in the day, sony ericsson was a beast to play java games. v-rally 3d was running smoothly even on low end phone like k310i
Fun stuff and bonus points for the Rodney Mullen fun facts! 😄
Makes me appreciate my extensive Nintendo handheld collection
Tetris on my flipphone was the coolest thing ever to me when I was a teen. My freinds that played on theirs were always in a battle to see who could get rhe highest score.
>Calls Mario "Mary-o".
Goodbye
I know these feature phones are relegated to yesteryear, but in some ways, I miss the good old days. Things were limited, but they were also just simpler. Today, functionality depends on notifications and alerts and the like. Your phone demands your attention rather than you choosing when you will attend to your device.
I don't mean to seem reactionary. I just lament the amount of time I spend answering the psyren call of my devices. Too bad self-control is so hard.
Excellent video.
Did any of these games feature sound? Did you have the volume down?
I miss 2004 mobile gaming..I played so many java games on my phone. No ads, no WiFi requirement, no atrocious micro transactions and apps that sell your data to advertisers. This was indeed the golden age of mobile gaming.
I don't know how to feel on this, on one hand it seems like it would have been cool to have games anywhere you go with something you'd be carrying around anyway (although admittedly the quality of game probably would have been a turnoff, hell I know even with modern smartphones I don't play mobile games) but at the same time, wow this had to compete with the GBA? Possibly the DS and PSP (depending on how far into 2004 this was from and how long it lasted into 2005, I'm going to be honest I'm 30 and I don't think I was aware of this phone when it was actually around) Lol good luck with that
i dont think they were really competing considering lmao
My favorite pre-smart was a Sony Ericsson . Great little flip phone with a gorgeous display.
Edit: TM506 was the model.
I never saw this dedicated phone controller. But remember, by this time, the Nokia N-Gage was on the market.
I'm going to look for a J2ME emulator so I can experience Jeff.