EcoWarrior latest in mobile gaming

This year's Frontier finalists mainly boasted mobile applications with a business or productivity bent, but local developers are showing there is plenty of scope for less work-oriented applications, such as sci-fi role-playing games.

Take EcoWarrior, for instance, a futuristic fantasy game where the mobile-wielding player is tasked with saving a polluted and dying world.

The game is the product of Telecom's Dzone application developer programme and was dreamed up by David Wright and Jake Despotovich from Catalyst IT.

Available to those equipped with a Telecom 027 handset, EcoWarrior is unusual in that it adds text messaging and voice-calling to a mobile web-based game.

The episodic game has players progress through missions by answering questions through mobile phone web page screens.

The gamers are sent codes and messages via text message and can dial into an 0800 voicebox which has pre-recorded messages relevant to the game.

Set in the year 2134, the aim of the game is to battle the Devil 2 Corporation, avoid its deadly robots, destroy the enemy and save the world.

Outside Japan and Korea, mobile gaming has been slow to take on, but games like EcoWarrior hint at the potential not only for consumers' mobile entertainment options but for the businesses trying to derive revenue from the applications.

Since November, when the game was launched after four months of development, EcoWarrior has notched up 1.1 million page views and 33,000 unique players.

* The winner of the Frontier trans-tasman application developers' competition will be announced in next Tuesday's Connect.