Game:

Mega Man (1987)

Duration: 14:01

236 views

9

A G-MODE recreation / reissue of old mobile phone games, this introduces "G-MODE Archives 05: Sukebooo Man". They've released quite a few reissues for the PC (Steam) and Nintendo Switch and it's good to see them getting ported from old defunct hardware for posterity. Of course, most of them have not aged well and this is more for novelty than anything else, but it's a commendable project and I hope many more old mobile phone games can be salvaged such as the BREW service titles, J2ME releases and older Android / iOS titles. There are a few games I really WANT to play such as Climax's 2006 iteration of "Lady Stalker" ("Waltz of the Labyrinth", which has practically been forgotten) and many Western Java games on mobile, to name a few, but this is a good starting point. There have been projects for years now slowly integrating old mobile titles for use in emulators.

That said, while this is a great recreation of 2004's "Get!! Petit I-Mode Appli" title, it is a very simple side-scrolling action / platformer title. Not to be confused with Fujitsu's "My Cloud" App service, "Sukebooo Man" (also known as "Skateboard Man") features twelve stages of intense jump and spin action. The goal is simply to get through the level as quickly as you can while catching items (burgers), avoiding obstacles (pits, birds and balloons) and performing tricks by jumping on green ramps. When you look back at games like these, it's truly impressive how far mobile phone gaming has come in such a short time (but at least these titles weren't predatory like many of the phone games we have today).

G-Mode has done what they need to on their part with a few basic configuration elements, the ability to scale up to 1080p and the ability to turn graphics filters on or off (though the in-game filter here is pretty good without making things blurry or too pixilated). The same jerky, low framerate is also here (for better or worse) and the game has gamepad support which doesn't seem to suffer any issues in terms of lag or latency. Even with the game's low framerate, it's easy to control for the most part, but you can't control things with maximum efficiency like most games in the 30/60FPS range. Our titular skateboard hero gets rating which will allow him to collect stars. These stars are needed to unlock new boards that are faster and allow higher jumps as well as to access the more advanced stages. Sixty stars can be collected for each board and then the game is pretty much done. While the game's marketplace describes each board's specs as "opening new routes" for each level, let's be clear here -- all twelve levels are the same with each board, but you can access SLIGHTLY different things which dictate how high you'll score with each board.

There really isn't much more to say about this one... you can press the R button to retry at pretty much any point and the game is relatively low stress as you gradually find ways to get the best scores, though the latter two boards do offer some challenge in terms of getting those five star ratings. Oddly enough, there was a "Sukebooo Man 2" released two years later that has yet to get the PC / NS G-Mode treatment from my understanding. From the looks of it, the game was superior in every way with three playable characters, special abilities, better level designs, new gimmicks and a "Goal Jump" which served as a final trick point to execute a pose... it also had a story of sorts dealing with a "Dark Skateboarder" which served as a boss battle with attack items. Only time will tell if it sees a release outside of those old defunct web services and their monthly fees...

You can get it at:

https://store-jp.nintendo.com/list/software/70010000030075.html

Enjoy.

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