Menneisyys

If you’ve ever played Jazz Jackrabbit by Epic MegaGames and/or other Sonic-clone (if you haven’t played Sonic yet, do check out this online Flash game to get a liking to it) platform games, you must check out the free (!) OpenJazz. You certainly won’t be disappointed (assuming you have a compatible device).

The author of the port is the well-known Ismail Khatib a.k.a. CeRiAl, author of the Pocket PC ports of the Sierra game interpreter (of which I'll write a full article in the near future) FreeSCI, Wolf3D, XRick and the Amiga Emulator UAE – free titles that I heartily recommend to all Pocket PC users.

The game itself; music, graphics, overall enjoyment factor

There isn’t much to be said about the game – you just go forward, jump, fire, avoid or shoot at enemies and collect bonuses / coins. (Give a try to the above-linked Sonic flash game to get the feeling.)

The game has great, stereo, non-repetitive in-game and in-menu music. They’re all tracked (.s3m) music and can be found in the home directory of the game if you'd like to listen to them outside of the game.

The graphics QVGA only (no hi-res rendering capabilities) and is great. It’s compatible with VGA devices in standard (SE) VGA; in native VGA, the game doesn’t start.

The game itself is really entertaining.

Downloading, installing, running

The game can be downloaded here. It can be installed anywhere, including memory cards.

First, before starting the game, you’ll need to set up your button configuration and preferred landscape configuration in OpenJazz Setup as can be seen in here.

Compatibility

(I’ve tested this on my numerous Pocket PC’s. Being not mentioned here means I haven’t tested the game on the given Pocket PC model.)

The game is fully compatible with the following devices (again, I’ve tested the game on all of them):

HP iPAQ 2210
Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket Loox 720
Dell Axim x51v

The game can only use the two application buttons on the top on the HTC Wizard (a.k.a. i-mate K-jam, Qtek 9100, MDA Vario, T-Mobile MDA) – that is, there’s absolutely no support for the red/green, big phone buttons, the two WM5 buttons on top of the phone buttons and the two buttons on the left/right side of the device. (Incidentally, despite what some people say about the “slow” CPU in the Wizard, the game runs just flawlessly on the Wizard – as with many other action/arcade, heavily scrolling titles.) This means that, as you'll have only two configurable buttons (or, with the Action button, three; but you can't configure the Action button to be the Exit/Cancel one), you'll have problems at, say, configuring the 'cancel/exit' or the 'change weapon' functionality. Hope this bug will be fixed before long.

The game is absolutely useless on WM2003SE HP iPAQ hx4700’s (here, I’d like to send a big thanks to the Smartphone & Pocket PC Mag staff for sending me a free hx4700!) – much as buttons are configurable, they are completely useless in the game – except for the sound recorder button.

It has other, minor bugs not interfering in the game; for example, the order screen was messed up on all my test devices. That's not a problem though as the game is free - this screen is here because the game is just an unmodified port of a shareware game.

Operating system compatibility

Unfortunately, the game isn’t compatible with PPC2k2 as can be seen in this screenshot. (Incidentally, as in the screenshot it’s only the setup app that seems to be totally incompatible with PPC2k2 and the main game itself is able to display at least the message telling the user to run the configuration utility, hoping the game itself will run with a configuration created on another Pocket PC, I’ve tried to “hack” a BUTTONCFG.DAT file from another PPC into the home directory of the game. Unfortunately, this didn’t help – the game executable itself is incompatible with PPC2k2.) It’s not compatible with MIPS/SH3 Pocket PC 2000 devices either.

On the other hand, apart from the hardware button incompatibility with some devices, it seems to be generally compatible with all WM2003+ devices.

Recommended links

In addition to the links above, I really recommend the Games section in the the Smartphone & Pocket PC Magazine Expert Blog for a lot of other game reviews/news.

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MS MVP- Mobile Devices.