April 16th, 2007 by Arjan Olsder Posted in New Releases | No Comments »
Mobile Amusements has just announced the release of their latest game called Tommy Gun. Tommy Gun is one of the first titles which has been released from the back catalog of Amiga games which are owned by the company Software Amusements.
Tommy Gun is the latest jave/j2me game title to be released by Mobile Amusements and is a colorful romp through the crazy mind of an established games developer.
The title features a Tomato as the player in a side scrolling world that as it unfolds; greets the player with a somewhat quirky mix of operation wolf in cute an cuddly land and is the perfect analogy of a game snack for mobile phone gamers that play for 5-10 minutes on the bus or train etc.
Taking it’s roots from the 1996 Amiga classic version by Mutation Software (Adrian’s previous business name), Mobile Amusements have attempted to recreate as much as humanly possible in the confines of the j2me footprint in most common mobile devices.
Adrian states… “Had we been looking from the perspective of say Symbian devices only, then more would of made it through the conversion no doubt. However, j2me is not Symbian and therefore there are limitations in which the conversion was deemed to be undertaken. Porting lumps of the code from the long since archived 68000 assembler code to j2me was one hurdle, but forever up against the memory footprint of most devices and limited sound resources and a host of different screen resolutions as normal with a multitude of mobile devices made for an interesting development experiment with a new 2D j2me engine (now called ‘Rainbow Engine’ in house to give it a ‘proper’ name)."
Tommy Gun does carry the look and feel across from the Amiga original but with quite a few changes, as the original was also a two player co-op title. The latter was not really possible on the same device of course. The title is also an attempt to offer the mobile games consumer something new instead of endless puzzles and samey ideas; ok it’s a shooter, but worlds first on mobile featuring a killer tomato perhaps! And featuring some pretty crazy opponents like giant lemons and parachuting carrots in a cute supermarket, desert island and fairground settings.
"I got the original idea from playing Nam 1975 on my Neo-Geo back in the early 90’s and was inspired by the game enough to want to do a cutesy version on the Amiga in those days. On a trip to the local supermarket I thought why not set the scene with an array of vegetables fighting it out similar Nam 1975 style – Tommy Gun was born and released on Amiga about 6 months later in 1996.
Looking for new projects to take to mobile with a new approach and originally in mind as always nowadays, Tommy Gun was a natural project to choose in terms of what is and what is not really currently possible on a ‘wide’ range of mobile phones in Java.
I would like to look at porting some of my other Amiga titles perhaps into mobile phone versions, but there are limitations with some i.e. I’ve lost nearly all the graphics for 2 of them since then and would have to work off the floppy disk master versions to recreate them on mobile."
We are looking forward to see other Amiga classics enter the mobile market place.
