Free mobile game

But it got me thinking, why aren’t mobile phones being used more for this kind of thing? Pre-release type applications that prepare you for a console or PC game’s release, I mean. You could be building monsters, creating an RPG party, tuning a car, scouting footballers, or designing a tennis kit even more retina-shredding than the lime-green effort Rafa Nadal wore at Queens last week.

You’d do this in a mobile app, then upload the results to the publisher’s server, ready to download to your console or PC when the main game comes out.(Memo to Sega: I would happily pay a fiver for a full nerdtastic Football Manager app that lets me spend the month leading up to the PC release combing through lower-league players and free agents to build a shortlist. Do it.)

The publisher gets a nifty way to build / capitalise on anticipation for the console game, or even generate some extra revenues. Meanwhile, us gamers get something to do in the long weeks leading up to a hot new game on another platform.What’s more, this would finally give the hardcore players who sneer at mobile a reason to do something game-related on their phones. Who knows, a clever bit of ‘Try More Games’ marketing within such an application might even get them to, well, try some mobile games too.

It seems such a logical thing to do, yet nobody’s done it. They’ve talked about it, though.Several years ago, EA’s mobile boss at the time was floating the idea of downloading a FIFA player to your phone to train up using a mini-game, before re-importing them into the console version.Connectivity has been one stumbling block – something that’s gradually being solved with the wider proliferation of flat-rate data tariffs and handsets designed for, well, data connectivity.

And while Spore Creature Creator itself looks too technically and graphically complex to squeeze into a mobile app, many of the examples I listed earlier (cars, sport kits, scouting) could easily work.EA is one publisher clearly waking up to the general idea of an application that comes out before a main game. Here’s hoping it – and other publishers – see mobile as an increasingly viable way to do this too. But, hey, what do you think?