Rayman Mobile Games, Part 1

January 24, 2015

Before starting on Rayman 2, there’s one more small area still to cover that I forgot about. Around 2002, there were three Rayman games released on mobile phones. You know when phones used to suck and you could play games with the keypad? Well here’s a hint, it doesn’t always make for an awesome gameplay experience. Also music is either nonexistent or it plays one very short loop and then silence.

1. Rayman Garden Nobody knows anything about this game. It was some kind of maze or puzzle game. There are no ROM dumps, and according to a Rayman forum I skimmed, the only way to get it is to buy an old phone from an online shop that has it pre-installed. But the wiki has this screenshot, and says that you have to escape Bad Rayman. Thankfully it’s not the very last Rayman 1-inspired game released. That honour falls to…

2. Rayman Bowling We know more about the latter two games on this list, and we have ROM dumps so you can even play them. There’s multiple versions of both; in addition to refactored versions for different screen heights, there’s a monochrome one for older phones and a pretty full colour one for your fancy feature phones. Much like Rayman 1 GBC and some of the educational games, this mixes in Rayman’s design from 2 (and partially 3) with environments from 1—I call it a spinoff of Rayman 1 because that’s the origin of almost all the game except his design. You can see more screenshots here, with most of the locations from R1 being represented, even with appropriate hazards to get in the way of your bowling. As a result, it feels faithful and adds some variety to this rather boring virtual bowling simulator. There’s a few steps to throw the ball, with position, spin, aim, and power needing to be done with good timing, which makes it hard to pull off, but it wasn’t too hard to get the scores needed to unlock levels.

3. Rayman Golf I love that Rayman has these sports spinoffs—just like Mario!—but they’re merely cheap mobile phone games that Gameloft spat out. Poor guy. This controls slightly worse than Bowling, and since golf is such a precision sport, I ended up with a quintuple bogey on the first hole. That aim modifier is super fiddly. It’s also very easy to overshoot or hit a ball askew into a water trap, so you end up with a less exciting experience. The environment is also very generic, a simple grassy forest with pretty much no connection to anything in Rayman’s world. So really, it’s not a Rayman 1 spinoff in particular, but since it was released alongside Bowling, I count it here. Like Bowling, it came in mono and colour versions. Not much more to say, really.

It’s not too hard to play these mobile games nowadays. If you can find a ROM on a skeezy site, get a java-based phone emulator, set up a controller to put the crazy number controls onto a usable button layout, configure the screen so you can see it better… then you just have to deal with badly programmed games with loose controls for a system that isn’t suited for them. So unless there’s something unique or special about them, or you really care about the characters in this case, or maybe you just want to play every bowling simulator ever made, then it’s probably not worth going to the trouble. The screenshots in Rayman wiki may be enough for you. Having said that, Bowling is the best of this small bunch with its obstacle course lanes and its strong Rayman connections, but that’s not saying much.

12:00pm | URL: https://tmblr.co/ZpvIwu1bUZ9K3

(Notes: 14)

Filed under: rayman