Midnight Bowling 3D Hands-on

Bowling, mobile gaming's best-known and most stereotypical sport, has always been the province of a single company: Jamdat. The Jamdat Bowling series is the unquestioned leader of the genre ever since the first game won US sales records in 2002 and 2003. However, no leader goes unchallenged forever. In recent months, Gameloft has gone toe to toe against Jamdat in pretty much every genre in mobile gaming, and it is now carrying the fight to Jamdat's traditional bowling bastion. Midnight Bowling 3D, Gameloft's upcoming bowler for V Cast phones, looks like it will inject some much-needed competition into the bowling genre.

Midnight Bowling 3D is Gameloft's latest entry into its "Midnight" series of casual games, which already includes the superlative Midnight Pool. These games are heavily stylized--often taking place in bleeding-edge Euro clubs devoted to the sport, with the players wearing only the hippest clothing and accessories--and they're really well-designed, too.

This is certainly the case in Midnight Bowling 3D. The game's looking tight on the LG VX8100. There are numerous bowlers to choose from, and they all have different statistics that affect your game. For example, finesse characters like Lee are much more proficient at "spinning" the ball into the pins after your release, while power characters like Rock can simply blast the pins into each other.

Although there are only a few characters initially, you can unlock additional players pretty quickly, along with new costumes and even new bowling balls. As you can imagine, there's a significant difference between an 8-pound ball and a 16-pound ball. The game also features a substantial "challenge" mode. You unlock these bonus challenges during the course of play by hitting small tokens with your ball. These challenges consist of special arrangements of pins, like the infamous 7-10 split, which you must bet on knocking down. It's a fast way to earn extra cash and unlock even more content.

Midnight Bowling 3D's mechanics differ from Jamdat's standard model. There's still a power meter, which lights on fire if you hit the max without going over. But then an aiming line starts oscillating from right to left, making the aiming process somewhat more difficult. Finally, there's the spin control, which can actually hurt you badly if you're not careful with it. In all, the bowling system seems to work well, although it's definitely harder to bowl strikes here than it is in other bowling games.

As cool as all of Midnight Bowling 3D's other features sound, its most impressive attribute is definitely its presentation, which is top-notch on our LG VX8100. The 3D models animate really smoothly, and the frame rate always seems to hover in the high teens--a very playable number. Also, the game's instant replay feature blew our minds. After you bowl a strike or a spare, a screen will pop up with a hearty congrats, and then it will let you replay your roll from eight different camera angles. The sound is also amazing. Each character gets a couple of phrases of digitized voice, and the crowd produces a different level of applause based on your performance in each individual frame.

Even though our preview build seemed mostly complete, we can't wait to play the retail version of Midnight Bowling 3D, which is shaping up to give Jamdat a serious run for its money. This game will be out in the next few weeks, so keep your eyes peeled for our full review.