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A Whirlwind of Game Design
conq writes "BusinessWeek has a feature on the videogames design students were able to create in 24 hours. From conception to completion. The games are quite basic but it is fascinating what they are able to come up with in so little time. From the article: 'The teams' challenge was to collectively create a mobile-game masterpiece using a "mystery ingredient" -- random verbs and nouns -- to guide design.'"
The annual SpeedHack competition has been around for six years already. The only difference is 3 days vs. only 1 day.
The original link is to the images and captions. Here's a link to the actual article.
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/mar20 06/id20060317_074043.htm
The phone hacking was fine. The server setup was, while sort of a hack, also fine and fast. The browser-end actionscript was super fine too. The NETWORK LATENCY sucked balls.
The real constraint with phone games is the input device, not the games themselves.
No, not really. The biggest constraint is development time and carrier/publisher politics. The biggest technical problems are phone bugs, memory limitations, and J2ME.
While the input is a bit restrictive, it only takes a little creativity to use it well. (and of course willingness to change the game to fit the input methods available)
What phones need is some kind of tilt sensitivity (for example), which would be easy to make games arround, and easy to interact with.
There was a demo of exactly that at E3 last year. At ATI's booth they had a prototype phone with tilt sensors running a 3D snow boarding game. It was pretty cool. No news on any commercially available phones with this capability.