The portable gaming world is littered with brave failures: the Atari Lynx and Sega Game Gear and Nintendo Virtual Boy all live on in infamy. Sitting with these is the Nokia N-Gage, the Finnish phone giant’s attempt to steal Nintendo’s portable gaming crown.
Unfortunately the original N-Gage device looked like a cross between a Batman accessory and a plastic taco, and when it first appeared in 2003 it cost around twice as much as the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. These factors conspired to make it bomb – the Game Boy Advance outselling the Nokia product 100-to-one in the N-Gage’s first few weeks on sale in the US. But all credit to Nokia – after producing a second, marginally less ugly, but still unsuccessful N-Gage handset, in 2005 the firm decided to turn the N-Gage brand into a ‘platform’, and use its regular Symbian-based phone handsets for the hardware.
This second-generation N-Gage platform has now launched on the N81 and N81 8GB handsets, and is set to appear on six other N-series phones in coming weeks and months (Nokia doesn’t yet have a precise date. The vendor has clearly put some effort into making this N-Gage a success: as well as a significant number of Nokia own-brand games, the firm has signed up many of the biggest names in gaming, including EA, Vivendi, THQ and Gamesoft.
The games
Nokia has lined up some big-hitting games for N-Gage, including Fifa 08 from EA Sports, Worms World Party, war game Brothers In Arms, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed – and the ever-popular Tetris. Nokia is announcing new titles almost weekly, so check out the N-Gage site for the latest releases.
While the range of titles will be key to the success – or failure – of the second-generation N-Gage, the acid test is of course how playable the games actually are. Because if If FIFA 08 plays like Minesweeper, the rest is irrelevant.
Fortunately, our early tests suggest this playability is pretty good. The N81, for instance, incorporates a two-way controller around the earpiece – combined with the D-pad and other buttons, this offers a good range of control for software such as football games. As ever, your mileage may vary with playability, but Nokia seems to have thought this one through.
The graphics are pretty snazzy as well; a pre-release demo of Fifa 07 showed realistic players in a 3D environment – and, as we know, Fifa 08 is a substantial improvement over last year’s version. The other demo on offer –Space Impact – was a fairly standard shoot-em-up with smooth and pleasant visuals and gameplay.
This generation of N-Gage is not backward compatible with older N-Gage games – but Nokia says it is porting many previous offerings to the new platform.
N-GAGE 2.0 QUICK GUIDE
• Software platform for mobile gaming
• Compatible with Nokia N-series handsets: N73, N81,
N81 8GB, N82, N93, N93i, N95, N95 8GB
• New users can download and install N-Gage platform
through GPRS/3G, Wi-Fi, or a PC link
• N-Gage platform download is free
• Trial game versions are free, full versions paid-for.
http://www.itp.net/reviews/details.php?id=3278
