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Day 4 was an exciting one indeed! Having an entire day to devote to the show floor really makes a great deal of difference in how you view the place. If one takes time to carefully walk through the rows of exhibitors, there are some real gems hidden in here between the usual giants.
Some surprises today included a running demo of Ghouls & Ghosts Online, and a GBA Java player. Both of these will be covered in full......tomorrow. Sorry about that! There’s only time for so much each day. This time round, let’s take a look one of the bigger presenters; Nokia. In the following days as we finish the rounds in the main hall and get our videos up, I’ll cover the usual juicy underhyped diamond in the rough bits you’re used to seeing here. Oh, and Sony.
Nokia
Nokia made a great showing at the GDC, providing tutorials and information regarding how to develop for the N-Gage and mobile phones in general. The kiosk was home to a giant N-Gage which displayed the play and players of the eight or so N-Gage play stations which surrounded it. I took a brief tutorial with the system, to refresh myself on all the stuff we already know; the bluetooth technology, the wireless connectivity, the realone player, the built in mp3, the MMC flash cards, the radio, the button layout, the backlighting, all of that good stuff.
A few interesting things that I did not know – in order to change game cartridges, one has to remove the back face of the phone, and earth it from within the phone...it’s quite cumbersome and feels like an area where a bumbler like myself could easily break an N-Gage or two. Or at least pour some crap in the guts.
A Java player exists for the unit, but at this time they’re not sure whether or not it will be packaged with the N-Gage. It works on other Nokia phones, so it would be a shame not to include it here. I’d think they would want the N-Gage to supercede all other gaming phones, in order to maximize software support.
I’m very pleased to announce that the N-Gage will support homebrew apps as far as I could gather from my conversation with one of the reps. But I’m not entirely certain of this, because there was no mention of a free launcher or any sort of free SDK. This is something for further investigation tomorrow.
And it really struck me how small the screen was. It is a cellphone, but even so, it’s hard to compete against the GBA for a gamers money when your screen is so incredibly tiny. For games that use the full vertical orientation of the screen to their advantage, the difference does not feel drastic. But for a game like Sonic, which is actually letterboxed, it becomes a bit of an issue.
After my brush-up, I played all six games available at the time, none of which are complete builds (video on Sunday!). I’ll just run through them with some impressions.
 
Puzzle Bobble
It plays, but the bubbles are a bit tough to see. You can differentiate the colors with no problem (the screen for its small size does look very nice), but the bubbles were rather jerky in this build. We know how this will turn out, so there’s no point in discussing it much further. Taito is not going to screw up a Puzzle Bobble game.
Cart Racing
Not too sure who developed this one, but it came on the Taito cartridge, so I may make the association. Another thing to discover tomorrow. It was pretty rudimentary, and felt a lot like Atari Karts for the Jaguar. No other cars on the road yet, this was just to show off the pretty road textures and that sort of thing.
Pandemonium
One of the Eidos games on display. This is indeed full 3D, and looks very very nice on the small screen. The models look just about as good as they do in the PSX version (though the game is first gen), and it plays just how you’d expect. No trouble here.
Tomb Raider
This looked nice. The textures are very clear, the modeling is superb, and the action is free. The graphical excellence is naturally due to the scaling down of the game and the inevitable compression of detail, but even so it’s impressive. Far better than any 3D seen on the GBA thus far. The camera’s a bit screwy, but that’s Tomb Raider for you. This was the first N-Gage game I’ve touched where buttons other than the main two were assigned functions. One uses 5 and 7 the majority of the time, but in Tomb Raider you must press 8 to draw your guns. Very cool to have this many potential buttons on the face.
Snowboarding
This is a rudimentary game with a rudimentary 3D engine. There’s not a whole lot to it, but it plays. Not too many tricks to perform in this build, and they’ll probably redo the entire graphics engine, but there was a bit of lighting showcased which was nice to see.
Sonic
Yow. The screen is very, very, very small. Sonic, being entirely horizontally speed oriented uses a letterboxed 50% of the already tiny Nokia screen. But so far as I can tell, that’s the only complaint I would make about the game at this point. It plays fantastically, with great speed, decent music, all the sound effects, and classic Sonic gameplay. I was really impressed by the game, and played through two levels. Actually I was thinking about the game all day, that’s how much I enjoyed it (Editor’s note to self: nerd!). There was some nice rotation in there, I saw some transparencies, some deep/complex parallax scrolling...this will be one to purchase. It played like sonic. For all of the criticism one can heap upon the franchise these days, they really don’t get the handhelds wrong. It makes me wonder if Dimps is the one they outsourced this to. I’d put $5 on it.
All in all I got a good feeling from the N-Gage. I’m not sure that it’ll beat out the GBA (in fact, I’m sure that it won’t), but I do think that it will carve itself out a decent enough niche to survive for some time. Until I actually get my personal unit in May or thereabouts, this is about all I can tell you.
Update!
On Saturday I went back to tie up a few loose ends on the N-Gage front. There is no territorial lockout, so importing is indeed possible. But I get the feeling a lot of specialty distributors won’t get in on the N-Gage thing for some time.
It will run home developed series 60 cellphone games (and all other series 60 games for that matter). So amateur games may not be N-Gage titles proper, but will run on the system. Some tools are available on forum.nokia.com, but there’s no proper free SDK or anything like this.
Next: the GDC Awards show
brandon sheffield
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