Did you happen to live during it? If not, believe me, pre-iphone "phone games" basically pale in comparison to stuff that came out for the new era of touchscreen smartphones.
I don't doubt that there were amazing games but it just wasn't the same and I assume those are great more so because they lean in to the platform's flaws.
Depends on the device. I had Tomb Raider on my PDA in 2002 and it looked and played just as well as it did on the PC back in 1996. Feature phones like the Sony Ericsson series obviously couldn't handle anything like Tomb Raider but they did an excellent job at stuff that looked reminiscent of the SNES era of gaming. I had a few Zelda-style action RPGs (not Doom RPG weirdly though) that were great fun to play.
It was released on both (there’s a link for the Windows Mobile version in your citation). I never owned an N-Gage though which is why I didn’t mention it (also my opinion of the N-Gage was never that high). However I did own a PDA.
Since we are talking about mobile ports of Tomb Raider, it was also released for the Sony Ericsson range of feature phones too. Albeit in name only because that version was a side on 2D dungeon crawler. I did own that game too but it reminded me more of Roland on the Ropes (Amstrad CPC464) than Tomb Raider.
From what I’ve seen there were some quality ports for the N-Gage. Sega Rally looked surprisingly good from the YouTube videos I’ve seen. But I still don’t regret never owning one since it’s firm factor was, frankly, ridiculous.
I remember being really cool in the early 2k's with a Compaq Ipaq PDA, PCMCIA GPS receiver that slid into the back and TomTom maps in my car. Most devices didn't have GPS then. Damn, they go for a pretty penny on ebay. Have to go dig those things up!
I find it exactly the opposite! There were excellent phone games back then, now it's all microtransaction, spin-to-win/scratch-to-win, ad-infested "experiences" with some inane gameplay on the side, engineered for maximum addictiveness.
Maybe, but there were amazing games on the Motorola A1000 which had a resistive touch screen. Scumm was officially launched on there, plus doom, gb and gbc emulators, plus loads of properly released games - I had a tower defense style war game and a driving game that used to blow people away.
I don't doubt that there were amazing games but it just wasn't the same and I assume those are great more so because they lean in to the platform's flaws.