NFSUG2 and NFSMW mobile BREW versions.

That Java version was fucking amazing.
Imagine full-on car customisation with visuals in a mobile game with full 3D graphics.
...in 2005
If I recall correctly, it was meant for Sony Ericsson phones, however it did run on most of the high-end phones at the time. Nokia phones had a software error, where some keys or combinations would crash the game, but since it would save itself on pretty much every step on the way, it wasn't as much of a problem.
The AI was very VERY fcking hard, parts were very expensive and there wasn't a lot of grinding room.
But it was great. Similar NFS mobile titles that deserve to be mentioned here are NFS Prostreet and NFS Undercover and a little later on NFS Shift, however none of them came close to how badass MW was.
sefan.ru should still have the downloads in case anyone wants to try them out.
(note: some of the later titles mentioned are Symbian exclusives)

A while ago I found this file on 4shared uploaded from a user who has BREW in the username. It's suppose to be the BREW version of NFS MW. Of course I did not immediately shared it considering the last time I did that it turned out to be a virus and the file doesn't seem to be like the other's BREW game I found on the internet (search for Kindom Hearts V-Cast files to see the files for comparison) However,after examining the files further I think this one is probably legit.

Here's what I got for NFS MW



This is the file I talked about

YouTuber KRZ ONE just released live gameplay footage of NFS MW for BREW. Check it out.

Current status of the build:
Total playable track races available (checked on quick race selection menu) for BREW NFS:U2 (at least on x86 debug build) at the current moment: 8

Circuit/Lap Knockout: 2 of 17
Sprint: 6 of 39
Drag: 0 of 10

1 sprint race track (2.76 miles sprint race on Bellevue Center) cannot be completed, because trying to drive past finish line - from 99% to 0% race progression and no race finish trigger from point B, it's missing something...

Context of this game for those who don't check into the articles

1.What is your role in the development of the Ideaworks3D's games you developed ?

I was basically doing the networking stuff, both the client code and the server. This involved rather a lot of low-level stuff; we did things in a different way to the way everyone does everything to do with networking to get higher performance.

2.How did you approach the publishers to start porting their games ?

By the time I started we already were known to most of the publishers (the first set of nGage games were just going out the door). I think historically the story was this: The company wrote something that they never used commercially that took the code of a Playstation game (copied off the commercial CD) and decompiled it into C. We combined that with a graphics library that behaved a lot like the graphics hardware of a playstation 1 and we were effectively able to run Playstation games on a phone without any assistance from the publishers. At a time when mobile games were all 2D java games, if you showed someone from a publisher their PS1 game running on a phone, that got their attention very effectively. When we did the port for real, we could then actually work with the real C source code rather than our mangled version.

3.What was the main challenges when porting console games to mobile ?

I guess the size of things was a major issue; mobile games were much smaller than even PS1 games, hence the need for keeping the size of things small and having the online stuff. We spent a lot of time thinking about compression, and tricks to make data files smaller. However, that answer rather assumes that you have a team that includes someone who's a complete genius at writing 3D graphics engines; from my point of view 3D graphics was a solved problem as Brian just gave us a library that did it, but that library was an incredible achievement.

4.From the NFS UG2/NFS MW credits, you are credited as the Airplay lead developer. From what I understand talking to Tim Closs a while back, Airplay is the company's SDK which helped making and porting games to multiple mobile platforms easier. Can you tell a bit more about your involvement with it ?

There's a bit of a confusion of brand names and code names here. Airplay started off as the brand name for the networking thing, and my credit for NFS games reflects that. We then started creating the SDK (I think Most Wanted might have used a super-early version of it) and marketing decided to use the Airplay brand for all our SDK stuff; we'd been making some attempts to sell the networking SDK, so the brand was seen as having some visibility already. The new Airplay logically consisted of a bunch of SDKs, the cross-platform thing Tim mentioned, the networking stuff and the 3D graphics part. I continued to look after the networking but also was pretty involved in the cross-platform thing.

5.Also from the NFS UG2 credits, you are credited as the multiplayer lead developer. How did you implement multiplayer in the game ? Is it just local multiplayer or was it online ?

It should have had real online multiplayer, but EA got nervous about the testing of it so we dropped it. We were annoyed about this so we 'forgot' to drop my credit!
The main trick we used to make this work (apart from some fanatically fast networking code) was that the cars didn't collide with each other (you could drive through another car). As a result, if there were any hassles with latency resulting in different phones not really agreeing about where all the cars were, this was unlikely to be too noticeable.

I really can't remember who came up with the idea, but I guess it was fairly obvious as we had some network infrastructure, we were generally trying to do things with ports of PS1 games, and Brew had a download limit that was way smaller than a PS1 game.
I really can't remember the exact details of the download thing, but as I said, we had a complete non-standard network stack. It started with our low-level alternative to TCP that worked round some bad design choices on early versions of Symbian, and also could go in a real-time non-reliable mode for multiplayer traffic. On top of that were a bunch of services for things like high score tables, multiplayer matchmaking, actually doing the multiplayer traffic and the download service. I seem to remember the download client did quite a lot of clever stuff to check how much of a file was downloaded and resume downloads, and it took me a bit of time to catch up with a bunch of speed features that a web server would have.

For nGage, the games were sold as physical memory cards that you bought in a shop. This was the major reason why nGage was a failure; the cost of actually getting physical objects into shops, giving the shop their markup and so on meant that the game ended up costing far too much. Also, changing the memory cards was a pain; if you got pirated games you could fit every single game worth having onto one card, but if you bought the official ones you had to faff about with cards to change game.
For Brew on Verizon, the phones had a dedicated button that brought up the app store, and that was linked to your phone bill. That actually worked as a buying experience which is why BREW rather dominated the gaming market, despite being effectively available on only one carrier in the world.

There was a bit of a split in the company at that time between the nGage/ System Rush people and the Brew / NFS people. I guess I was more on the NFS side. NFS developement was crazy; I have fond memories of it but I know I'm forgetting what was actually a very stressful time. Because NFSU2 was so critical on network features and it only worked on Verizon CDMA phones (which couldn't roam to other networks), for the later development we needed to go to to somewhere in America, so a bunch of us went to an apartment near venice beach in LA. Life there had its advantages (it's venice beach, we had a generous expense policy etc) but we were working incredibly long hours, EA were panicking about whether it would ever work, and it was a pretty intense experience.

We won the BAFTA for 'Best Mobile Game' twice, the first time for the nGage Tony Hawk Pro Skater, I can't immediately remember what we won for the other time, plus a bunch of other awards. I think that after that, the BAFTA people got rid of the category of 'best mobile game'; it was a bit silly comparing us to a bunch of companies doing J2ME java games. To some extent we arrogantly thought we were better than everyone else, and so we went to the ceremonies intending to win. Although we did drink a very large amount of champagne at the ceremony.

I don't think I expected it to get as big as it has. But to some extent some things don't change. It still seems to be dominated by 'casual games', things people are playing to while away time. I'm not sure that many people are feeling passionate about mobile games in the way that people do about their favourite console franchise.
Something that remains the same but has developed in a very strange direction is the whole business of getting people to download the game and getting some money. That was the big thing that brew did right in a very simple way, and Symbian and nGage did badly back then. Nowadays, games are all spending a fortune advertising to get players (I believe many companies spend more on advertising than development) and are either relying on advertising or in-game purchases to fund things.
Technically, it was obvious that mobile hardware was going to get spectacularly better, and that all phones were going to start having 3D graphics accelerators fairly soon, so in that sense things are fairly unsurprising. Today I'd guess a cheapish phone has better graphics than a playstation 2, and I would probably have guessed that 20 years ago. What is harder to guess is what people would actually want to do with that phone; people still seem to be playing things like candy crush, a style of game that never existed on the PS2.

Leon