Your Friday game, whatever your smartphone

[slitchfield]

We do love featuring game reviews on a Friday (especially THIS Friday, mum's the word). Krisse brings us a review of a veritable Symbian classic - S-Tris 2, freeware for just about every Symbian OS-based smartphone in existence!

Read on in the full article.

[malerocks]

When I install and run the 320x240 version on the n93, it runs in an upside down mode on the screen. Plus the pad keys respond in directions of the games been installed in portrait mode.

Krisse, how did you get the game to work right in landscape mode on your phone?

I wonder why especially THIS Friday,Steve?

[krisse]

"Krisse, how did you get the game to work right in landscape mode on your phone?"

Ah, it seems Elements haven't updated their downloads page yet!

When I first got a load of their games for review, I told them about the N93 screen bug which affected some of the titles in horizontal mode, and within 24 hours they'd mailed me versions with the bug fixed. Apparently they've forgotten to put the fixed versions on the main download server.

I'll mail them about this to remind them.

In the meantime you might want to get the version of S-Tris for vertical mode. Vertical suits this kind of game even better, and the controls are so simple that you don't really need two hands, the d-pad is enough.

[JuhaN]

I hope the developer reads this forum... The game itself is GREAT! What's not so hot, is E90 compatibility. At the moment it's unusable on the external portrait QVGA-screen and plays in QVGA-window in the internal.

I hope the developer addresses these things at some point as S-Tris is a GREAT game.

=)juha

[krisse]

JuhaN, did you try installing the vertical (240x320) sis file on your E90?

To give Elements their credit, when I told them about the N93 bug they were very interested and fixed it very very quickly. I've mailed them to let them know about this review and the feedback from readers.

[JuhaN]

Originally Posted by krisse

JuhaN, did you try installing the vertical (240x320) sis file on your E90?

To give Elements their credit, when I told them about the N93 bug they were very interested and fixed it very very quickly. I've mailed them to let them know about this review and the feedback from readers.

Yes, I tried both versions. It's quite hard to explain but I try:

Vertical version
External screen: The vertical (240x320) game window is tilted 90 degrees, filling horizontally bottom 240 pixels of the screen and being cut of by 80 pixels from the right side.
Internal screen: The 240x320 game window is tilted 90 degrees and fills 320x240 in the bottom left corner of 800x352 screen

Horizontal version
External screen: The horizontal (320x240) game window fills 240 top pixels and is cut of by 80 pixels at the right. Just one would assume with 320x240-game.
Internal screen: The 320x240 game window fills 320x240 in the top left corner of 800x352 screen.

I would be more than happy if it would play vertically fine on the external screen. Everything more is a big plus!

=)juha

[krisse]

JuhaN, I've mailed them with the URL of this comments page and I mentioned your E90 problem.

[SwitchBlade]

I've tried the portrait version on my E90 and have the same issues as JuhaN. Although I thought that I'd add that the 2D elements and 3D elements of the game behave differently. The 3D elements seem to detect the size of the screen, so things like the EDGE logo appear in the centre of the screen on both the inside and outside screen, though it leaves a ghost trail as the screen isn't cleared behind the object as it moves. The rotating block at the game select screen appears "beneath" the 2d element of the screen on the inside screen, though appears in sort of the right place on the outer screen.

Though as JuhaN described it's rotated through 90 degrees and sitting in the bottom left of each screen.

[krisse]

Some good news from the developers, they just mailed me:

We've just uploaded the new versions of S-Tris 2 at out website
http://www.elementsgames.com/stris2/downloads.php

The new version fixes the orientation bug of the N93, and fixes the
orientation bugs of the E90 (as well as some other bugs).

[SwitchBlade]

The graphics problem on the portrait version is the same on the internal screen of the E90 but it works fine on the outside screen.

Maybe this will be the first communicator where the outside screen isn't actually left locked permanently.

[krisse]

Glad to hear it now works on the QVGA external screen at least!

The internal screen problem is possibly because the internal screen has such a weird resolution, as far as I know the E90 is the only device with that resolution. Just out of interest, are there problems with other third party games on the E90's internal screen?

[SwitchBlade]

That I've played with so far:

ScummVM: Two tiny screens rotated 90 degrees with naffed colours half the height of the screen, hard to describe, fortunately it has keys to rotate/stretch etc the screen so it can be brought to the right size, and opening another app over the top and exiting sorts out the colours.

Others like Frozen Bubble and 4Elements are fine until you change screens then they go to hell.

[krisse]

That does sound like the problem is the internal screen's strange resolution.

Perhaps Nokia should create a graphics mode where the E90 emulates a QVGA screen in the centre of the actual screen? The user could activate it before running the particular third party app, and as far as the app was concerned it would be just another horizontal QVGA S60 model.

It's a bit unrealistic to expect third party publishers to support a resolution used on (so far) just one very very expensive model.

[SwitchBlade]

A picture paint's a thousand words, not sure on fuzzy video mind:
The bug in action

What I don't see is why they don't detect the screen size of the device they are on and have the software stretch/shrink/etc to fit the screen as required. Having a different download etc for each different screen-sized device seems archaic and user unfriendly. It's worse than the whole "Is it crystal, or quartz, or pearl?" problems from the early days imho.

In the case-in-point here, the 3D engine clearly detects the size of the screen and adapts to it while the 2D engine doesn't (albeit rotated 90 degrees).

As a side thing for example 4Elements doesn't have an E90 specific version yet the screen in that when running on the internal screen is adjusted to give a larger view than the external screen affords.