Bounce

Bounce was among the most popular titles Nokia added to its phones in the early years of the new millennium, built on the simple but addictive principle of a bouncing ball. The player controls a jumping ball moving through platformer levels full of springs, platforms, and obstacles, needing to time jumps correctly and use the ball's physical behavior to overcome traps and gaps, otherwise the ball simply falls off the playing field and the level restarts from the beginning.

Unlike arcade action games like Snake or Space Impact, this was a more thoughtful platformer with puzzle elements, where quick reactions alone weren't enough — the player needed to plan the trajectory of bounces ahead of time and predict how the ball would behave after landing on a slanted surface or a spring. The colorful graphics that phone models of the time could already display added to the game's appeal and set it apart from the plainer monochrome titles of previous years. Like other Nokia games, this one too was pre-installed and free, becoming a favorite pastime on the go and during breaks without the player having to download or pay for anything.

Thanks to its combination of simplicity and clever level design, Bounce earned a place among the most fondly remembered mobile games of the nineties and noughties generation of phones. Today it's available only on period hardware or via emulation, as no official remakes ever made it to modern platforms.

Why play it: it's a great choice for anyone looking for a relaxed platformer with physics that phones of that era could rarely pull off, even though today you can only run it on an old Nokia or in an emulator.