Graviton: History

A good cell phone should have a joystick. There, I've said it. Manufacturers can't just throw some flimsy buttons together and expect people do develop good games for their phones. Sure, the graphics might look great, but the user interface is a big chunk of the gaming experience. Ruin that and you ruin every game that runs on your lousy device.

When Nokia released their 7650 and SonyEricsson followed with their T300, I thought for sure that phone manufacturers had come to their senses and that this was to be the standard for all new models. But no. Nokia's new and "improved" 3650 model was instead cursed with an unbelievably frustrating "joypad". And whoever designed the directional button of the Nokia 7250 should be swiftly removed from the gene pool.

Anyhow, there are some games that you simply can't play on a joystick-deprived phone without going insane. And at some point I thought I might as well encourage sensible technology by writing at least one such game. Something that took full advantage of a joystick. An idea that seemed to fit was the classic labyrinth game where you twist a couple of knobs to tilt a board and try to make a metal ball roll along a path without falling into a hole.

Here you can see the game, which I called "Graviton", running on a SonyEricsson T300 and a T610. It became a pretty good time waster. There are other cell phone versions of the ball-through-the-labyrinth game out there, but I tend to think that mine is the one that comes the closest to capturing the feeling of the original.

The emulated web game you can play for free, but if you want this game for your cell phone (assuming you've got one that supports mophun), you need to purchase it from some local reseller. A partial list is available on this page at the mophun site.

In case you'd settle for a two-level demo version, you can download one for free for the SonyEricsson T226, T230, T237, T238, T300, T302, T306, T310, T312 or T316 here: Graviton.mpn, or one for the SonyEricsson T610, T616, T618, T628, T630, T637, Z600 or Z608 here: Graviton610.mpn.