Reviewing J2ME Games: 09 Formula Extreme

When you see the images of 09 Formula Extreme's car driving through rainy streets peppered with palm trees, you might not think it looks impressive, but the feel of this thing is powerful. There are gorgeously layered synth tracks throughout that immediately put you in the driving spirit, and the wonder of this game is that it uses your phone's gyroscope to control the steering. It feels amazing.

That is, until you realise that turning your phone too haphazardly also rotates the game entirely, which can cause horrible sudden stopping, when all you wanted was to make that steep turn.

Because of this, the game has a wonderfully conflicted feel. At first, the smoothness of the controls feel incredible. There's a succinct tutorial level which runs you through the basics, and it feels much more sophisticated, bright, and exciting than a lot of Java games.

The text is pleasantly blue, the colour of great calm, and you are invited to participate in the "Season 2009 mode", where you can choose from a selection of legally distinct versions of real racing teams to join. I chose 'Rad Bull', which is surely short for 'Radical Feminist Bull', but let it be known: there is something so beautiful about 'Henda' to me. 

Unfortunately, I came dead last. The screen-turning problem became much more prominent out of the tutorial, and so I lost control. I have to blame the game for allowing such dark things to happen in game while requiring gyro precision, but there is something about this humiliation that makes want to play again, to best the racetrack, sudden ninety degree screenturn or no sudden ninety degree screenturn. 

Tragic.

There is a remarkable attention to detail here, and none of the amateur charm and glitched-out scuffs I've come to expect from Java games. Perhaps there is more sophistication in the medium than we thought possible... 

The Labubu's Gaze

I have a bodyless labubu dangling from my bag, a counterfeit head that detached itself immediately on exit from its plastic wrapper womb maybe a year ago.  

On that day I had watched videos about how labubus were a harrowing consumerist icon in a way that seemed mostly undistinct from other toys and trinkets, and I became gleeful and insane at the prospect of opening up my own false labube. 

Her head accompanies me and bobs wildly as I walk, through warm parks with a thousand dogs, to the restaurant where I had fish and beer as advertised on an angler fish themed sandwich board (though my fish of choice was tuna). She is a special freak, speeding through the world. Seeing it all with those maniacal labubu eyes.

The expression of the labubu is her greatest asset. One eternal, angry gaze. Today, she watched me slap ketchup out of a glass bottle expertly. No squeeze, just sharp slaps on the flat bottom. I felt powerful in that moment. And the labubu head surely felt it. 

'Hey! Pikmin' is an Odd Pikmin Game

I've been thinking a lot about the beautiful joys of the 3DS, as one must, and I decided that yes, I must again commit to regular 3DS time. This is my duty. This is important. 

So, this week I have been playing Hey! Pikmin, a game released startlingly late into the console's life, in 2017. Yes. And it doesn't use the 3D, which personally hurts my feelings, because I do earnestly love the 3DS's 3D. Sometimes I play games with the 3D on. The 3D is for me, and I very much appreciate it.

Members of the Pikmin subreddit have called this game "okay" and "boring" and this is about the right assessment, I think.

Worldly-Trade-2846 weighs in.

The transition from neat little 3D environments - where you could clump several Pikmin together and accidentally drown them in a small patch of water and stuff like that - to a Rayman-style 2D platformer outing feels awkward. It's hard to pinpoint what makes a game feel distinctly like a mobile game, but there is a sort of feeling of stillness about Hey! Pikmin that, combined with a sort of zoomed-out and uncharming art style, really makes me think of unpleasant games I could play on my phone.

It's also because the gameplay feels samey very quickly. You slowly walk to the next leafy area. You blow your whistle to alert the tiny red men. You wait for them to bring you whatever item they have. By now, you're sleepy. And that's the essense of "game on phone". This questionable Pikmin game has that essence.

My beautiful drawing of a snooty Olimar.

But not everything mobile game-y is bad. I like, for example, the relatively simplistic, lightly puzzle-y traversal of the levels. They feel oddly frictionless, and so it can become slightly dream-like to press on with your Pikmin.

I also enjoy the humourous descriptions of all of your recovered relics. This is the most prominent characterisation in the game, and it's effective and delightful to read.

I am compelled by the Pikmin in this slightly off format, but at the same time, they tire me. I think I must lie down. 

Late Night Wigglers

I always think the number one good thing to do for artistic joy is to find a way to lose your inhibitions, to not be precious with your decisions. And it's tough because it inevitably creeps back up, that guarded need to do things right, to make the mark you see in your beautiful, perfect mind. But I've always surprised myself in the best ways when I let loose and draw foolishly and hurriedly. I rarely do warm-ups, but they're always good.

So here are some gorgeous Wigglypaint drawings I made last night. It was just before bed, but I wanted to make a little drawing. I needed to. So I made this:

And for some reason, I haven't really tried colouring a flat background like this in Wigglypaint before. It looks elevated and alive. This is a beautiful, bright night. And the bunnies dance. Wow. 

I played with the shapes a little bit more than usual too. Like for this simple dog, I decided to use the thicker, blobbier pen. It sort of gives the dog a sense of calm simplicity. It feels somehow more primordial to see LARGER pulsing blobs. I can feel what it must've been like to be the hottest amoeba in the swamp. Mmm.

Another thing I really love is drawing slightly more realistic facial expressions. I have, truthfully, taken a lot of repulsive pictures of myself to aid in this practice. And that's just an extra nugget of fun you get with reference photos that you take yourself - enjoying the really ugly ones. I will not be showing you any today, but perhaps another time. 

And here is my simple favourite of the night, the dog leaving behind its pristine poo. Lovely. 

5 Crazy Movies

Here are some movies I've watched in the past few months, and some thoughts about them. This is mostly a way of clearing up a large folder of screenshots I've accumulated, because for a while I got really into taking screenshots as I watched (all for the blog), and then I didn't end up writing about every film because some of them were less interesting in the moment or whatever. Please enjoy my personal screenshots. They were taken with love.

1. The Great Muppet Caper (1981)

This is, as should be obvious, a joyous watch. Miss Piggy is a wonderful shy freak, inexplicably pretending to be a famous woman, until Kermie figures out the truth. The thing about The Muppets is that the jokes are constant and good. The effective humour really propels us through the narrative, and there's so much texture. Peter Falk is here. We're into gangster and newspaper stuff, as was the hot trend in 1981, and it's great. Just delicious.

 ★★★★☆

2. Marty Supreme (2025)

There's a real sizzling feel to this. Timothée Chalamet's Marty is an insane schemer, a ball of energy and rage who nevertheless maintains a certain winsome charm. He's a little weirdo and I hate him. But I love to see both the awful predicaments he finds himself in and the dizzying highs he achieves. What the fuck.

★★★★★ 

3. The Prince and the Showgirl (1957)

This is a weird movie that annoyed me, but it does reach a point at which it becomes sort of intriguing. At first, and really for quite a long time, the movie lingers on Marilyn Monroe's excruciatingly ditzy protagonist. We see her balk at the idea of romance with the stuffy royal bloke she's sent off to, but after a few shots she falls blissfully in love with him. So far, so bland, but once we move past this and into the murky, daytime cartoon politics of the thing, it becomes a sort of crunchy, weird little movie. Marilyn becomes a political actor and it all feels oddly absent. Weird movie. 

★☆☆☆☆ 

4. Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

This is a reverent movie about the noble flighty spirit of men at arms. A new woman falls in love with an absent, traumatised pilot and essentially has to come to terms with the fact that he will not commit to her or like, express things to her. It's very of it's time in the worst way, illustrated best by the scene in which Cary Grant dumps water over his ex-gf to extinguish her emotion and put her back in her place as a stoic woman stalwartly deferring to a stifling masculine atmosphere of repression. Truly miserable.

★☆☆☆☆ 

5. Chutney Popcorn (1999)

I watched this because I wanted to know more about the director of Freakier Friday - Nisha Ganatra - and this was her directorial debut. The plot here is that a lesbian decides to act as surrogate for her sister and her husband, but then their plans change. I thought the movie was sort of tonally weird, a bit trance like. The comedic elements weren't very strong, but neither were the dramatic ones, so I was left feeling kind of miffed. I enjoyed the little group of lesbians always hanging out and doing henna on each other, but I really felt that the emotional severity this film seemed to want was lacking. 

★★☆☆☆

Reviewing J2ME Games: 007

For a while I've been interested in J2ME games and their preservation in a world that has moved far away from the feature phones they were designed for. Their emulation is particularly interesting to me because it feels broken and weird in the way that a lot of older computer emulation feels. The graphics are often glitchy, the hardware you're using means that "button" interactions can work strangely and have unexpected issues. Everything feels wrong without that beautiful, physical numpad we've long since discarded.

People, broadly, don't care about these games. Where the early era of iPhone games has a certain nostalgic aesthetic for some, these games have been largely cast into the dungeon of disrespect. It's mostly because they're bad games. Many of them have clunky controls, ugly visuals, and the sort of barebones gameplay that wouldn't intrigue an amoeba, let alone a human child. But this, of course, is part of their legacy, and sometimes - just sometimes - there's a hidden gem waiting to be found.

Now, I'm quite into stats and logs and things - Last.fm scrobbles, Letterboxd reviews, and the gamer records of Backloggd - but Java games are not included in the database Backloggd uses (the Internet Game Database, or IGDB), so Java games are ghosts floating over the great expanse of certified legit games. That means I can't review them on there. They simply don't exist in the system.

Here, though, I am allowed to write about these games, and so here is game number one for you: 007.

See?

Something that happens often in Java game emulation is this thing where the screen displays most of the game in the corner. It's because they're just little baby games. They need to sit in the corner. 007's text is in Chinese, so I can't really access the plot here, but you're a guy with a gun and you have to shoot other guys with guns. Cool.

This is fine, it's a simple platformer, but your movement keys are also the keys that change the direction of fire, so it's easy to mean to move your gun so that it hits a guy to the top right, but actually just jump over to him and die.

The music is relentless and upbeat. It doesn't match the game, but it does create a certain madness in the player. When you die, three glitched versions of your body may appear. 

Frightening.

It's a tough game and not much of a fun one to continue. You really feel like you've seen it all in the first five seconds. There's more guys to kill, but I don't think I want to. The most interesting part of this game is its use of Leon and Claire from Resident Evil 2 on its title screen.

Oh is that Leon? Is it Leon shooting these guys? Wonderful.

First Impressions of Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream

I heard on the wind, a whisper. It said, "Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream demo on Nintendo eShop now!" I knew what I had to do. I had to download this demo onto my own Nintendo Switch and make myself, my mii, ready for her island.

The demo feels, as you'd expect, remarkably like the old Tomodachi Life on the 3DS. The same charming sounds and expressions of pure madness are here, filtered through these beautiful, smooth new graphics and a slick little island that we now must fill with little people. It's lovely.

One thing I noticed immediately is that, of course, it's not as into its touch screen. On the 3DS, there was a lot of emphasis on picking miis up and shaking them about and such. Prodding them. It was a wonderfully tactile experience, and they've translated it here into more of a computer interface thing - you interact with the miis via cursor, rather than directly as the stylus allowed. This feels a little bit odd because I'm so familiar with that earlier control scheme. I want to tap on that screen and feel that keen sense of direct interaction, but it's understandably pulled back for the Switch.

Still, the controls feel buttery smooth, and the overall experience reminds me of the pleasure of booting up Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the first time. Nintendo have headed towards a meticulously crafted, satisfying rounding off of every mechanic and visual. It looks and feels good as hell.

What I don't love is the level of tutorialising that bombards you. I can't remember how much the previous game badgered you with tuturial info at the start, but regardless, it feels like a bit of an overstep. This is true of a lot of Nintendo games, and I just wish they would focus more on communicating game mechanics and controls in more intuitive ways, because even with a short demo, I just wanna get right into the game. The entire demo spends its time throwing explanations at you. It's not the most fun way to explore a new game.

Living the Dream follows the same general structure as its predecessor - you add miis to your island, you give them food and stuff, and that's more or less the deal. You're free to dress them up and introduce them. I made a version of Peter Griffin for my island, and he seems happy.

Once you've introduced three miis to the island, the demo pretty much ends there, and you can no longer really talk to them. They'll just say stuff about the FULL GAME to taunt you, and their happiness levels can't grow. While I suppose the slice of life nature of this game meant that it made sense to cut you off in this way so quickly, I do wish they'd left it a little bit more playable at the end point. For completing the demo, you get a hamster outfit to transfer to the full game, which is iconic and good, but it would have been nice to be able to play around with my three miis a little bit more.

I suppose I can buy them different outfits, but I can't speak to them unless I wanna hear "HEY BUYING THIS GAME IS REALLY COOL BTW YOU CAN DO ALL SORTS OF STUFF IN THE REAL GAME". Okay. My miis are salespeople for this thing. But I just don't think Peter Griffin would say that.

Will I be getting the full game? Almost certainly. Peter needs my help.