Games for mobile phones have moved a long way from th eearly days of Snake on Nokia phones. The processing power of modern mobile phone is now sufficient for many favorite computer games of the 1980's and 90's to be played on the handset.
The challenge of modifying games to fit the small screens and processing and memory constrains of mobile phone shas led to the development of many variations to the core programming languages such as Java, these variations are are used to maximise the performance of the game on a particular set of mobile handset designs. These divergences form the standard Java engines leads to the incompatabilities between handsets and adds dramatically to the cost of producing a sophisticated game which can be played aon all mass market handsets.
Games engines have been developed to provide abstraction between the underlyiing handset platform and the game programmer, making the game code far more portable between devices, and simplifying the coding for different types of input deveices, e.g. touch screens, scroll wheel's potinters ans buttons.