New York Nights: Success in the City

New York Nights: Success in the City
Developer: Gameloft Publisher: Gameloft Platforms: J2ME Released internationally: March 7, 2005 This game has unused graphics. This game has unused sounds. This game has unused text. This game has debugging material. This game has revisional differences.

New York Nights: Success in the City (or just "New York Nights") is a J2ME game developed and released by Gameloft in 2005. Due to its success (with more than 4 million downloads), an iPhone port of this game was made in 2009. It has very cartoonish 2D graphics and is quite similar to The Sims.

Unused Graphics

Social Sims

There's an unused entry for the GET MORE GAMES! option named Social Sims, including its own unused logo, and what seems to be a placeholder text. Logo is stored in the file logo_simulations only in the first versions of the game. It might have been a publisher label for Sims-esque games that never saw the light of day.

It can be enabled by adding URL-SIMULATIONS property to MANIFEST.MF file

Virtual Phone Options

There are 8 different options in the virtual phone menu, however, two additional unused icons are present in the HUD graphics at the b resources file.

Used	Unused

Unread Message Icon

An unread message icon exists for the messages option in the virtual phone. However, every time you receive a message it automatically opens, as a result, this icon can never be seen in-game.

Dizzy

Apart from the hungry (apple) and tired (zZz) icons, there's an additional unused icon intended for when a character feels dizzy:

More Games Menu Charset

A custom charset is made for the GET MORE GAMES! menu, but only a few characters are shown:

The tick and the down arrow from the bottom icons, aren't used either.

Hidden Park

If we look at the original map background of the earlier versions of the game, We can see at the top of the map a park that is always hidden by the HUD and can't be seen in normal gameplay.

Unused Menu Sound

There's a sound for menu option switching whose MID is loaded when you move through the menu, and its load is logged to the stdout, but this sound never plays for some reason.

Unused Text

Debugging Log

A big amount of debugging messages are sent to the stdout during the gameplay. They are different depending on which version of the game you have.

To do: Examples? Full documentation of all the log messages?

Other Text

All of the game's strings are stored in the 0 file, but some of them aren't used anywhere.

• The following strings at the beginning of the file were meant to select the GAME SPEED:

Normal

Fast

Fastest

Slow

Slowest

• In the final game, the GAME SPEED value is chosen from 1 to 6 instead.
• There are also three unused options;

  AMBIANCE SOUNDS:

  CREDITS

  ACTIVITY SPEED

  .
• There's a string

  Select your phone type:

  with a list of some phone models that depends on the game's version. However, your mobile phone is automatically detected in the final game (And printed to stdout).

Revisional Differences

Different revisions of the game were made for different mobile phones and different screen resolutions. Apart from said resolution changes, some other changes were made:

Map Background

In the first versions of the game, the map background is a static image of a Metro map. Later versions of the game change the static background to an animated city image.

1.0.1	1.1.5

Unlocked Actions

When you talk to a friend in the game, some of the actions (like flirt) are locked or unlocked depending on your friendship level. Later versions of the game have locked actions appear on grayscale icons, while earlier versions have all the actions, no matter if locked or unlocked in colour, meaning locked and unlocked actions are undistinguishable until you try to select one.

Bonus Minigame

A degradation effect was added to the bonus machine minigame in the later versions of the game.

1.0.1	1.1.5

To do: Find more differences (if any), and try to find the exact version in where those changes were done.