As you may have gathered from my blog posts over the last few weeks, I’ve recently joined the next-gen gaming revolution, thingy. I finally bought an Xbox 360. I am once again, albeit slowly, catching up with the world of big, grown-up, high-end graphics gaming.
“But what has this got to do with mobile phones?” you may ask.
Well, I’ll tell ya. According to TechCrunch, a company called OTOY has done something I never thought I’d see. They’ve taken the game Crysis, renowned for being one of the most visually stunning games ever made (and needing an immensely powerful machine to actually run it), and actually got it playing, in all its visual splendour, on a mobile phone.
I’ll say that again, it’s one of the most graphically intensive games ever made, being played on a mobile phone. Yes, I was doing my shocked face, when I heard that, too… but before I go on about how they do it, I’ll let you have the same ‘how the hell did they do that??’ I experienced:
Crikey…
The way it actually works is dead easy, just like it says in the video, because it uses server side rendering, just like you get in browsers like Opera Mini. All the meaty grunt of rendering the game is done by remote servers, and what’s streamed down to you is just a video feed of the game actually being rendered, as you play it, on their servers. So, in other words, you can just start up a web browser, and play something as high intensity as Crysis or GTA IV, completely within the web browser on your phone.
Of course, you’ll need a bit of a software patch to link up an Xbox controller to your phone, but OTOY say they’re working on other control methods, like jiggling the phone if it’s got an accelerometer.
Basically, folks, this could be the big gaming revolution moment for mobile phones. Imagine something with a massive screen like the Toshiba TG01, running a game as graphically jaw-dropping as Crysis…
It boggles the mind, it really does. One word of warning, though, I’d play it over WiFi; I dread to think what your bill’d be like for data usage on something like this…
More news as it happens! And be sure to subscribe now to get all the latest action from the world of mobile phones!