I recently remade two old Alien Shooter J2ME games by NET Lizard for PC — the 2D version and Alien Shooter 3D.

NET Lizard made quite a few Java mobile games back in the feature-phone era, especially shooters and 3D games. Alien Shooter was one of their more interesting releases, so I wanted to see how these games would feel if they were adapted to modern PC controls instead of being limited by old phone keypads.

For both remakes, I tried to keep the original gameplay and level design intact while modernizing the controls. The default framerate is also increased to 120 FPS.

Alien Shooter 3D

This one benefited the most from simply replacing the original phone controls.

It now uses a normal modern FPS control scheme, so movement and aiming are much smoother. This also makes the game considerably easier — a lot of the difficulty in the original honestly came from fighting the controls.

The game itself is surprisingly decent for a J2ME FPS. It has a bit of an old-school Doom-like feel, and considering the hardware it was designed for, I think it holds up pretty well.

There are also hidden areas inside some walls, although they're not particularly hard to discover since the doors are shown on the map.

Alien Shooter 2D

The 2D game is a different story.

Even after improving the controls, it's still pretty difficult, so I made a few additional quality-of-life changes:

• You can now crouch and shoot while using weapons other than the pistol.
• I added some fall protection. A few platforming sections are extremely high, and one bad fall in the original could basically force you to restart.
• I added a chgod cheat code. If you get stuck or just want to explore the game, you can use that.

My goal wasn't really to redesign either game, but to make them more comfortable to play today while keeping most of the original J2ME experience intact.

If anyone here played NET Lizard games back in the day, I'd also be curious which ones you remember.

2D remake:
https://github.com/Feiyang0102sso/alien-shooter-2d-remake

3D remake:
https://github.com/Feiyang0102sso/alien-shooter-3d-remake

Gameplay:

2D:
https://youtu.be/lYy9PWdaHpg

3D:
https://youtu.be/1BhsrRPXFbk

I built KinIRC, an IRC client for Java ME (J2ME) mobile phones.

I originally made it for my own use because all the IRC clients I could find had issues or simply weren't comfortable enough to use, especially when it came to readability. So I decided to build my own, and now I've released the source code so it can remain available to anyone interested in old Java phones.

Source code: https://github.com/somixit/KinIRC
Download the JAR: https://github.com/somixit/KinIRC/releases

KinIRC has been battle-tested, but I'd love to hear how it performs on other devices. If you try it on real hardware, please let me know which phone you used.
And if you share a picture of it running on your phone, you'll absolutely make my day!

Some of its features and highlights:

• Two languages: English/Spanish
• Lightweight: only about 130 KB!
• Multitasking: easily handles 10 channel windows on a Sony Ericsson W200i, a phone with very limited hardware, connected over 2G.
• Advanced battery-saving features.
• Memory management: a memory slicer designed to keep things running smoothly even on memory-constrained devices.
• Highly customizable: plenty of settings to make the client your own.
• Excellent readability: designed to make IRC comfortable to read on small screens.
• Custom actions and quick shortcuts for faster navigation.

It's been very stable in my own testing, but if you find any bugs, please let me know in the comments

I built this for myself, but hopefully someone else out there will find it useful, too.