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So you’ve got a few minutes to kill, but you’re nowhere near a console or handheld game system. If you’ve got a wireless phone, you might have a way out of that predicament….

ROCKY GETS A SLY BOXING GAME

Skyzone has followed up Sylvester Stallone’s final film in the Rocky boxing series with a mobile version. Rocky Balboa is a somewhat standard boxing video game that puts you in the hero’s gloves for a run-up to the championship. Can you take the jabs and uppercuts that go with it?

At the start, you don’t have a lot going for you in the skills department. That means you have to head into the training ring to build up your abilities through three activities: sparring practice, strength training and speed training. Though it would be difficult to call Rocky Balboa an RPG, these exercises gradually earn stamina, strength and speed, respectively. Only when you have adequate ratings on each of the 100-point scales should you consider hitting the ring for a real match.

The game’s controls are pretty intricate for a mobile game. There are three key punches for each arm (jab, punch and body punch), as well as an uppercut and block while you move Rocky around the ring with the directional pad. Additionally, while the 3-D graphics look pretty good for a small handheld device, it’s not like a Punch-Out where you always see your opponent from a first-person view. Here, it’s easy to move Rocky into a position where he’s blocking your view of the action, which makes it difficult to know the opportune times to dodge, block and punch. It’s a playable game, but coordinating Rocky’s offense and defense is far from smooth.

That said, I can see boxing fans taking to Rocky Balboa and putting in a little bit of training and even taking on the occasional boxing match when they have a chance, which will make for a durable contest over a long period of time. And then, whether there’s a seventh Rocky flick or not, maybe the next mobile game based on Sly Stallone’s eternal underdog will be more polished and streamlined for the benefit of gamers who are not serious boxing fans.

NEW LEMMINGS ON THE LAM

If you’re a game veteran, you’re already familiar with the Lemmings series. For those fans, Glu Mobile is introducing a new version for mobile devices, releasing this month, called Lemmings Return. To be honest, there’s nothing special about this one in relation to previous titles, but if you are into the Lemmings games, that isn’t a mark against it. It’s simply more of the series’ familiar and entertaining puzzles.

For Lemmings newbies, a quick explanation: Each level is a puzzle with a starting point where the Lemmings spawn, and your goal is to get them to the exit point. Of course, there are a bunch of obstacles— hills, valleys, walls and so on — that you must navigate around (or through) in order to blaze a trail to the exit. To accomplish that, you must convert some Lemmings into a different sub-species, such as a builder (to get over a canyon) or digger (to carve through a mountain). In some cases, you’ll need to sacrifice a Lemming (like when you change one into a bomb), though each puzzle displays what percentage of the total group must survive to reach the finish.

Completing a level can be a real challenge and there’s often some trialand- error involved on the way to that solution. Additionally, some of the puzzles require timing in transforming a Lemming into a new sub-species. As a result, a certain amount of experimentation will be required. But all that’s a good part of what makes this game fun. Lemmings Returns is a classic game with a lot of style that does the franchise proud

Scene It Is Believing

With games like Dig Dug, Galaga and Pac-Man in its catalog, you’d think Namco Networks would do nothing but bring out variations of its classic coin-op titles for the mobile-game market. As it turns out, that thinking would be incorrect, as its recent release of Scene It? Movie Edition definitively proves. It’s quite a bold step for Namco to try to recreate Screenlife’s popular DVD question-and-answer game on a small mobile device, but it’s clear that it works—when your handset works.

The premise is simple: The player (or players; we’ll get to that in a second) is faced with four rounds during which they are asked four movie-related, multiple-choice questions. Players get points for answering correctly, a time bonus (higher the faster you answer) and a “streak” bonus for chaining together correct answers consecutively. Question types vary from figuring out which movie starred three specific actors to identifying a film from a still image, a piece of the movie’s poster (which increases in detail as time ticks away) or from a roll of its credits. There are also trivia questions regarding video clips that play out on your handset’s screen. It all has a sharp, polished look, and even the video clips played cleanly on the Sanyo MM-9000 phone that Namco provided for testing.

There are also a few game types: single- player matches in pursuit of the best score, “hot potato” pass-around competition for two to four players and a mode called “Nonstop Play.” All of the modes—as well as posting of high scores to the various available leaderboards— require connection to a game server, which worked in my case for everything except the Nonstop mode. I’m guessing that that mode needs a more stable link to the network than I was getting through Sprint at my office location (which is generally one or two bars of signal strength).

If you’re a trivia buff, you’ll really enjoy Scene It?, and with Namco claiming more than 1,000 questions at the start—with new packages of questions slated for occasional release— you shouldn’t get tired of it