Afishionados,

A couple weeks ago I upgraded my cell phone to the Samsung Blackjack. It’s a “smartphone” running Windows Mobile 5 and has a lot of cool features. It has great Internet and Email capabilities, and I can even use it as a wireless modem with my MacBook to surf the Internet at DSL speeds. Awesome.

Today I found the best use for the phone yet. Anyone who’s a fan of adventure games will remember the classic Lucas Arts games of old (the late 80’s and early 90’s) that ran via the SCUMM^TM gaming engine.

The games were (and remain) some of the most fun and entertaining games that I’ve ever played. They were simple, funny, and actually rather challenging at times. All the games were played in the same fashion, in that you had options at the bottom of your screen to “Look At”, “Use”, “Pick Up”, “Talk To” and so forth all the interactive elements of the game’s environment. As computers grew more powerful, so did the games. Originally offering only subtitles for dialogue and MIDI soundtracks, the games eventually shipped with better graphics and actual sound files of spoken dialogue.

Unfortunately, Lucas Arts hasn’t released a SCUMM game for many years, and it’s extremely unlikely that they will anytime soon. The public masses demand super high-res 3D action killing games, so the “adventure game” genre is all but extinct.

The good news is that the SCUMM engine is available as an open source (i.e. completely free with no strings attached) download from www.scummvm.org. So if you have any of the old Lucas Arts games lying around, you can once again play them using today’s technology.

Having said that, I was very excited to learn that SCUMM has been ported to Windows Mobile for use on PocketPCs and Smartphones! Since the Lucas Arts games were always designed as “point and click” titles, they work great on cell phones! MUCH more entertainment value than the lame, bundled version of Solitaire. Bleh.

Let the gaming commence!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 8th, 2007 at 5:17 pm and is filed under Apple Mac, Awesome, Gadgetry, Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.