Asphalt 4: Elite Racing

Asphalt 4: Elite Racing arrived in 2007, at a time when phones could barely do much more than make calls and send texts, yet it still delivered arcade racing with licensed cars, flashy crashes, and smooth 3D graphics that felt like a small miracle on displays with resolutions in the tens of thousands of pixels. Gameloft built on the previous entries in the Asphalt series and took them a step further - adding more detailed tracks running through cities and countryside, a wider selection of licensed cars from several manufacturers, and a career mode that took players through a long string of races, championships, and one-on-one duels.

As a mobile title, Asphalt 4 was built for short play sessions - waiting in line or riding the bus - with a single race lasting just a few minutes, controls simplified down to the bare minimum of phone keys, and a nitro boost on hand to give at least a taste of the feel of big arcade racers like Burnout. On the limited hardware of phones at the time, where every kilobyte of memory had to be conserved, it was a compromise between visual appeal and smoothness, but that exact combination made it one of the most successful mobile racing titles of its era and cemented the Asphalt series as the genre's mobile standard even before touchscreen phones arrived.

Why play it: Anyone who wants to experience what mobile games looked like at the peak of the keypad-and-Java phone era will find exactly that in Asphalt 4 - fast, visually flashy racing without unnecessary complications, playable in short bursts anytime, anywhere. It's also a nice look into the series' history before it moved on to touchscreen controls and the more open game worlds that later entries brought.