Lost Java-based Mobile Games

Right off the bat, when playing the jar game, it should match videos, screenshots, descriptions from official sites, gaming sites, etc. There should also not be any credits screens at startup (or end of game, rarely) which credit a company/group that had nothing to do with the game's development or release. Sometimes legitimate java games get injected with promotional screens or scene credits, among other things; in this case, the game is technically legit, but it's a tampered backup.

You can also check jar file contents, like you did. There are sometimes additional files or modified code in the package. The worst case of this is when morons inject code into the game to force it to run network-requiring ads on startup. When the ad server shuts down, the game file is pretty much no longer playable; worst is it's hard to remove the ad loading code as it's spidered pretty well into the game's functionality.[/QUOTE]

 

Are you sure that they are named like that? I've found these with multiple resolutions (high-end and low-end builds are included):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania:_Order_of_Shadows
Castlevania: Order of Shadows
Konami Mobile
2007

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania:_Aria_of_Sorrow
Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow
Konami / The Code Monkeys
2008

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlevania:_Dawn_of_Sorrow
Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow
Konami / The Mighty Troglodytes
2009

 

@SILENT_Pavel
Yes, the numbered Castlevania mobile games I'm looking for are not "Order of Shadows" or the Sorrow games.

In-game, these three Castlevania games are subtitled "Part 1", "Part 2" and "Part 3" respectively. All parts together form a complete cell phone remake of the original Castlevania title.



In the Verizon store though, the games were sold as "Castlevania 1", "Castlevania 2" (and presumably "Castlevania 3").

 

There's a game called Gradius NEO Imperial where you play as a big core, but I haven't been able to find a dump of it online.

 

Version/Generation 3 of a series of Castlevania mobile phone ports was recently found by kya of romhacking.net!

More specifically, he found the Chinese port of what is originally a Japanese mobile game released in 2004. For years kya had been trying to find the original Japanese version but when he decided to type in the Chinese name for "Akumajō Dracula" he finally struck gold. What kya found was Castlevania version 3 (or "generation 3") in Chinese and in three resolutions: 128x128, 176x208 and 240x320.

- Download link to the three .jar files

The .jar files are playable via the mobile phone game emulator "SjBoy ChingLish 2.0". Kemulator is not compatible with these .jar files.

Spoiler: Castlevania 2004/Gen-3 on SjBoy ChingLish

The emulator itself is shady. It's difficult to find trustworthy download links. Although the emulator itself doesn't raise any alarms from my anti-virus software, less than a minute after you've started the emulator a window will pop up with gibberish text. No matter if you click OK or exit the window, you'll be sent to an expired link...on Internet Explorer, even! This might just have been a forceful way to advertise the original source of this emulator hack (since it is the "unofficial" 2.0 version)...or it might be having some nefarious, as-of-yet unseen effects on your computer. Download this emulator at your own risk.

- SjBoy Special Edition - UnOfficial ChingLish Version 2.00

 

The controls in this mobile rendition are highly responsive and quick. In fact everything moves pretty fast and this greatly contributes to the port's difficulty. For an old cell phone game the graphics are great and I'm amazed that they've been able to compress the full Castlevania 1 game to such tiny files. Yes, the files contain the full game from the first stage to the final battle against Dracula. With the good graphics, tight-ish controls and the complete game available, this port comes close to feeling like an SNES or GBA title.

I haven't tried it myself (because I haven't bothered to navigate all the Chinese menus yet) but kya reports that there is a setting to disable the knock-back effect on Simon Belmont. I find this setting to be a welcome addition to such a difficult mobile port.


Over at romhacking.net, kya created an NES hack of Castlevania using graphics from this ver-3/gen-3 mobile port. You can play kya's patch if you download the latest Mesen emulator (0.9.5 and up) from http://www.mesen.ca.


Huge thanks to kya for making this great find!

With game piracy being more prevalent in countries like China and Russia, there are probably countless treasures yet to be discovered by the rest of the world due to the language barrier. I should take the time and try to navigate some Chinese websites.

To learn a little bit more about these old mobile phone ports of Castlevania, read this post I wrote over at thelifestream.net.

 

I had this game on my Sharp mobile in 2005 but R around there. In Japan we had loads of great games like this. In fact one of the best Valis games was also released only on mobile.

 

Weellll, where's your collection of cool japanese phones from the past with all the cool games on them?

Seriously though I'd love to buy a Japanese cell phone from that sort of era. That was the year I was in Japan and I thought the phones were so damn cool. The screens were huge and such high quality compared to ours at the time, and something about their flip phone designs were just so appealing.

 

I still have three of them. If you want to see them I can post a photo. Can't used the games on any of them though since they are all locked.

 

Actually I wouldn't mind seeing them I forgot they got locked up when deactivated...such a shame

 

I'll dig them out over the weekend

 

Since the J2ME scene is technically dead these days, I started to work on a preservation project in the form of a blog. Mostly covering Asian ports for old feature phones that didn't see a Western release.

One example is MegaMan 5 for J2ME. Westerners only got the first three titles officially, however Capcom's Chinese division went far to release at least the following two titles after them (even in Taiwan they didn't release MM6 during the pre-smartphone era.). Also some Konami games such as Survival Kids, they somehow managed to shrink the whole game into a mere ~160KB JAR file.

I am not sure if it's okay to post the link to my blog, since it contains Dropbox links to a couple of games I preserved, those are 240x320 versions by the way.

 

Meanwhile someone created a new j2me emulator.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/freej2me/
https://github.com/hex007/freej2me
https://imgur.com/a/2vAeC

 

One thing I should mention about the Castlevania game: it gives a NullPointer error on every Nokia phone I tried, all of them S40v5/6 models. Which is weird since I tested it on a SE W810i a long time ago and ran fine. I'm starting to guess it's because of the "Sogoyo" image it was added at the start, though that theory is likely discarded since I have another game with a custom logo right before startup and no errors happened when I tested it.