Mobile games are games designed for mobile devices such as smartphones, regular phones, PDAs, personal digital assistants (PDAs), tablets and portable media players. Mobile games range from basic (such as Snake on old Nokia phones) to sophisticated (3D and augmented reality games).
Today’s cell phones — especially smartphones — have a wide range of connectivity options, including infrared, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and 3G. These technologies facilitate wireless multiplayer games with two or more players.
Because most mobile devices have limited system resources, the features of mobile games are not as rich as those developed for PCs or game consoles. For example, only one mobile device (as of late 2011), the Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY, has a dedicated game controller. In most mobile devices, the keyboard acts as a game controller. Smartphones have touch screen displays for user input.
Augmented reality games are the latest trend in mobile gaming. These programs combine real-world environments with advanced computer graphics to provide an augmented reality effect. For example, Sky Siege, where the player shoots virtual helicopters that appear to be flying around the room. In reality, a live image of the player’s room is captured by the device’s camera and fed to the display screen, resulting in an augmented reality experience for the player.
Modern mobile games typically require fast central processing units (CPUs), dedicated graphics processing units (GPUs), large amounts of RAM, and high-resolution screens. Most developers use a free cross-platform application development tool known as OpenGL ES to write games with 2D or 3D graphics.