Analysts: Keep cell phone games simple

In light of a recent Parks Associates analysis of mobile and portable gaming trends, a series of casual games have hit the market for cellular handsets and portable media devices.

Mobile handsets have typically been a repository for casual games, previously because of hardware limitations, but now because of the changing habits of the handset user. The Parks Associates study released yesterday, entitled "The New Frontier: Portable and Mobile Gaming," shows that even though multi-player and 3D games like those utilizing QualCOMM's BREW look impressive on new handsets, the real money is still in simple, low-investment time-wasters.

The study also illustrated which games are preferred by mobile phone users: 55% of those surveyed said they prefer puzzle and card games, and 30% said they would primarily choose word or arcade games.

Accordingly, EA Mobile has announced that more casual games will be available in the coming weeks on major mobile carriers: Pictionary, The Sims DJ, and ESPN Darts.

Pictionary is a mobile version of the classic board game that utilizes a phone's D-pad as the drawing tool. The concept, humorously ranked one of the worst things to make a Nintendo game about, may find itself better suited for the intermittent usage it would see on a cell phone than it did on the classic console.

The Sims DJ is part game game and part ringtone creator, where the player mixes samples of drum beats, bass lines, and effects to create songs in a Sims-related story mode that can be exported as ringtones. ESPN Darts offers various styles of the classic pub sport, including tournament and story modes.

Apple also unveiled an addition to its casual game repertoire for the iPod: the Sega Genesis classic Sonic The Hedgehog. The iPod's small catalog of licensed games also fall into the preferred categories of mobile device gamers: small, intuitive and quick.