Pipes (J2ME)
November 11th, 2008 7:35 PM PSTUpdated January 16th, 2009 3:36 AM PST
Rotate the pipe segments to connect all the pieces. Features a resizable board, randomly generated puzzles, and auto save and resume. Easy to learn… and yes, every puzzle can be solved.
This is a mobile phone game, not a Windows/Linux/Mac/whatever game. It should work on any J2ME-compatible phone. I have gotten responses from several people (thanks!) with several different phone models that worked. Rather than list them all, I’ll just say that I haven’t heard of any J2ME-compatible phones that didn’t work. A few examples of J2ME-compatible phones:
- Blackberry
- Most Windows-based phones
- Many Nokia phones
Controls
- Moving the cursor
- Directional buttons/joystick, or 2/4/6/8 number keys
- Rotating pipes
- OK button (usually in the middle of the directional buttons), or 1/3 number keys
- Adjusting the difficulty/resizing the board
- Select “Resize” from the menu
- Zoom in/out (new in version 1.1.2)
- # / * buttons
For the easiest installation, point your phone to mobile.kornhornio.net. If you don’t like that, you can always try downloading to your computer and installing over Bluetooth or whatever your phone supports.
Download JAD file to your computer
Download JAR file to your computer
I downloaded the game and have played it. I can’t read the help file. It’s a bit different than the old, original Pipes game. When does the stuff start to flow? How do you “Start a New Game”? All I can do is rotate pieces but there never seems to be a start/end with anything flowing, so how do I know if I win?
That’s a different type of pipe game. I think it’s commonly known as Pipe Dream or Pipe Mania.
In this version of Pipes, the goal is to connect all the pieces (by rotating them) into one big network of Pipes.
Hi there
Just wondering if there will be a version of this for the BlackBerry Storm. That would be awesome!
Hi Dom,
I don’t have any plans for a BB Storm version. If there is enough demand, I may consider it.
2 suggestion.
1) Is it possible to color the open ends of the green pipes in an other color?
2) What about a high-score counting the times all tiles have been rotated? Alternative using the solving time.
I like this game - and so my 5 year old son does. He plays it every evening when going to bed instead of listening a book that I am reading for him.
Thanks 4 it.
Ceryon
Este juego es magnífico! para resolverlo hace falta atención e inteligencia. Me distrae, me trae la necesaria paz en un momento de corte de la actividad diaria. Felicitaciones a sus creadores!! Daniel Hansen de Córdoba, República Argentina, daniel31hansen@yahoo.com.ar
love the game, i had it on every phone i own, on my newest phone the shadow 2009 the zoom feature doesnt work as the # is maped to the caps button. and * to the sym key. i like to see the features of the iphone ver on the j2me version.
Hiya. First thing i do on a new phone is install pipes. Great to play when you’re sitting on the loo! I have a number of sub games that i’d love to see you add rules for: Only allowed to touch a piece once. Spiral in using single-touch. Space invader down single-touch. Centre piece out. The tricky ‘once connected must stay connected’ rule. Shortest path from corner to corner via the centre. My favourite and strangest variation is the ‘liquid level’ where you have to single-touch set the pieces to allow the green to act like a liquid, flowing downwards and then sideways, not allowed to defy gravity! I am allowed to see the level before choosing a set of rules. It’s cool coz it encourages you to do more in your head! I’m just about to download your latest j2me version to play on my sony ericsson k660i. Thanks for entertaining me and saving my brain from stagnation! Cheers mate.
Hello. Great game. Had been looking for a good distraction for a while. Excellent game and well coded. I run it on several of my Nokia phones. Works flawlessly on all o them. Thanx for the game. Wanted to ask, are the levels predefined or calculated at run time? If calculated, i’m impressed with the quick rendering of new maps. Doesn’t seem to take any time at all.
Thanks! The games are always randomly generated at run time.
Hello Michael,
Thanks for the nice and interesting game.
There seems to be a problem on resizing the board size.
Suppose your board gets bigger than the screen size on zooming then on using reset, some of the pipe pieces remain bigger in size but some shrink to original size. I have tested it only on my 7310. Don’t know if it’s relating to my phone only.
Hello, my name is Henrik. I am a pipesoholic.
I use Sony Ericsson T610 for Pipes. Since it runs slowly at large grid sizes, I’d like to know if it is possible to play Pipes (J2ME) on my Windows XP laptop.
Hi Henrik,
You could use the emulator from the J2ME development kit, but that’s not the easiest thing to set up. There’s a Yahoo widget version here (not made by me) but it’s limited to 8×8 puzzles.
Hi, I love pipes and I’d like to give a suggestion. When puzzles become bigger it’s hard to keep track of what you have already accomplished. I suggest to add a function key to set a piece of pipe as “fixed”, like something similar to flags in minesweeper. Sometimes you know that you have a certain piece of pipe right, and in that case you could press a key to make it turn into another color, like blue, just so you know that you don’t have to rotate it anymore. If you do rotate that pipe then it turns red again. This is a simple feature that would mean a lot of help in bigger puzzles, because sometimes it’s hard to remember which tiles are ok, and which ones you need to work with. At some point, it’s nearly impossible to keep track of all you have done. Please consider it!
Michael, I am a .NET developer and I love this game…I was wondering if you where interested in developing a .NET version that could run on a desktop? If so i would be willing to donate my time to do the port myself!
Thanks for a great game!
It seems like Pipes iPhone version has a score or pontuation. Does this version has something like this? Or maybe a timer to say “You Win in xx minutes and yy seconds” instead of only “You win”?
It’s an adictive game and I can’t stop playing it.
PS: I packed it to a Palm Os version using Palm tools. If you’d like, I can send you a copy. Some JAR programs work fine when ported to Palm, others don’t. Pipes works as good as it was in common phones. Or even better, as the screen is a lot bigger!