Mark Wilcox's Forum Nokia Blog

Random musings on mobile software development...

N-Gage - first impressions

Sorcery-ltd | 29 April, 2008 18:31

For anyone interested in seeing just how far their favourite platform can be pushed, games are the place to look.

In case you've missed it Nokia's N-Gage service has been on a limited release for a little while now. It's limited in terms of supported devices at the moment but I've been able to try it out on my N95 (after upgrading the firmware of course).

I can see why there hasn't been a lot of fanfare and publicity yet. The client software in my phone has had a few of the developers old favourite "Kern-Exec 3" errors and also networking errors using my home WLAN that I could only fix by exiting the application and loading it again (plus when I held END to stop it using my GPRS connection before I'd selected WLAN the whole thing locked up and I had to take the battery off).

However, teething probelms aside, these are the best games I've ever seen on a phone and they are generally very playable and they all have a free trial. FIFA 2008 suffers from the classic problem of football games with very simple controls - there are a number of very repeatable ways to score, after a few games you've discovered some and then most of the challenge is gone. Not enough longevity there to tempt me to pay for the full version. The Tetris and breakout versions are classics but the trials are so short you barely get started (mind you, if you don't know these games already you've probably been living in a cave for the last 20 years, plus you can try other versions out for free on the web). Space Impact Kappa Base looks like a good 2D scrolling shooter it's just not to my taste. I might be tempted to pay for Asphalt 3 Street Rules (again the trial could be a bit longer to help decide, only 1 lap) certainly in preference to System Rush Evolution (although that's not bad either). My favourite so far, with extremely simple gameplay and great for 5-15 minutes on the train (not sure about longevity beyond that though - further playtesting required) is Hooked On: Creatures of the Deep - a very enjoyable mostly one button fishing game.

If I could provide one major piece of feedback it would be that the platform needs to allow the game developers (if it doesn't already, and if it does the games need to take advantage) to over-ride the system keys (e.g. for application switching and music player - send, end, copy/paste and cancel would be good to use for controlling the games too when customising the keys). These keys are placed around the directional pad on my N95 (many other phones too) and in the heat of a gaming session it's very easy to accidentally press one. This generally results in your game being paused while something else opens - not the best experience. I expect that app switching and the music key are captured before they even get to the game in the current architecture but this needs fixing. When the phone is being used for gaming, gaming needs to take over as the primary function. You only need one button or action to break out of the in game controls and return to normal control. This could of course be customisable for those that don't want it.

Overall I'd say not quite ready for the mass market yet but a very promising start.

Mark