Samurai Romanesque, J2ME, and the battle for mobile cyberspace

Reviews the cell phone game Samurai Romanesque. Players take a virtual journey through 15th-century Japan, engage other players in real-time battles, visit a thousand historical towns and villages, practice the art of Zen, and even have virtual children. This massive multiplayer role-playing game can accommodate half a million gamers simultaneously. Rendered in color, and resembling the graphics quality of the (8-bit) Game Boy, the game takes the wireless Internet to a new level of complexity and is a sign of things to come, that is, cyberspace on the go. Dwango built Samurai Romanesque on the Java 2 platform, Micro Edition (J2ME), a compact version of Sun Microsystems´ Java 2 programming environment. J2ME suits applications such as cell phones, pagers, set-top boxes, and other devices with limited memory and slow processors. NTT DoCoMo´s technology uses Sun´s reduced K virtual machine, but the company developed its own proprietary version of mobile Java.