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This year in London there were three companies all offering handheld games machines with a difference – they all offer to do more than be simply a games machine. Nokia, who’ve been in the business for a while now with the N-Gage, Tapwave with their Zodiac PDA, and newcomer Gizmondo, with their handheld unit simply called ‘The Gizmondo’. While Nokia actually don’t ever use the phrase, these systems can all be loosely called ‘convergence devices’, a phrase which Gizmondo and Tapwave were certainly falling over themselves to use. I don’t intend to tell you which one is best for you here, each system has a lot to offer, and each system is different.
Nokia
Nokia Press Conference – 12:30pm September 1st 2004
The Nokia press conference, held in a function room on what seemed to be the longest corridor on earth (I truly am saddened that it was never clear enough to get a shot from one end to another) was the first stop for Insert Credit’s intrepid reporters, not least of all because of the free lunch. The buffet included such oddities such as Parma ham and olive on scones, and, in fact, pretty much nothing the mostly vegetarian staff of IC could eat – but I’m not a vegetarian, so I had my fill. Before the press conference even started our outsider, renegade status as the bad boys of game coverage was brought to the fore as the webmaster of another, highly respected website proceeded to ignore me when I said hi to him. This is what we in Scotland would call ‘being dingied’.
Well, he dingied me. Unless the accepted response in London to the conversation started “Hey (Name)! How are you doing?” is to say, “I’m fine” and sit down and quite pointedly ignore the speaker. So no web link for him, and a grudge held by me. I guess this is something I’ll get used to.
The press conference itself was somewhat a disappointment, considering I’d set myself up for girls tied to Ngage units or possibly, just maybe, anything of interest at all.
Ilkka Raikkonen, Nokia’s Senior Vice President of Games, appeared to run through some stats, which we were probably supposed to make our own conclusions on, considering his seemed to be insane. The most lauded statistic, that Nokia had shipped 1 million N-Gages since sales of the platform began eleven months, didn’t really go into details on if that was 1 million in the hands of consumers or of warehouse attendants. Everyone was too polite to ask. Even with Raikkonen noting it took the ipod 17 months to reach that milestone, no one was goaded into asking. Then again, you can’t make a phone call on an ipod, eh?
As a demonstration of the strong portfolio on offer, Raikkonen invited onto the floor a tiny Belgian man who I can only assume is the team leader for Asphalt: Urban GT, one of the hot new games coming out soon for N-Gage…Yeah!
This dude was tiny. In this image don’t let perspective fool you – he’s standing on that guy’s shoulder. Seriously.
His tiny Belgianness didn’t distract too much from his spiel on an N-Gage game which… Was about as exciting as polystyrene chips. A street racer with real car models, a Gran Turismo-alike mode, and 4-player multiplayer over bluetooth. Oh, and some global tracks, like Tokyo and Chernobyl (That’s Chernobyl, Ukraine, as the level select so helpfully stated, if you were confusing it for some other Chernobyl.)
Watching this played on the big screen by a miniscule Belgian man, and realising this was the sum extent of the Nokia press conference, I truly wondered what I and tens of other journalists had come to this room expecting. Something other than statistics and a description of a fairly ho hum driving game? We hadn’t all came for the buffet – no one was touching the scones.
I guess the revelation that Gameloft, a somewhat respected producer of traditional downloadable mobile phone games was producing a game specifically for the N-Gage, was something worth noting, if nothing else.
Nokia
While it was true the Nokia press conference was somewhat a disappointment, the next day we had the good fortune to talk with Damien Stathonikos and Janna Heinonen about the N-Gage and the games they were showing.
Now I don’t own a mobile phone. When I come down to London, I borrow one so I can stay in touch with the people I care about, and in that at least I respect their use.
The irony that as soon as I sit down to talk with them my mobile phone (Thankfully, a Nokia) rings isn’t entirely lost on me.
I guess the oddest thing about the N-Gage is how relentlessly positive their PR is. Okay, that’s not really odd at all – It’s Public Relations. If I were to say to you that I really, really felt that these people believed in the N-Gage, you’d just put that down to their manipulation skills.
Well consider me manipulated. The most notable thing, the most obvious thing, is that it’s now looking like Nokia really aren’t ever going to give up. They’ve revised the N-Gage once already with the QD and admitted they expect further revisions of the hardware down the line, but expect there to be a next generation N-Gage at some point (imagined in the far future, I guess.)
The N-Gage itself, in the form of the QD, really is quite nice, when you get down to it. It doesn’t look so stupid. What it lacks in features compared to the original (no MP3, no radio) you have to come to terms with you gain in not looking like you’ve got a Frisbee impaled in your head (Sidetalkin’ is still funny). If you’re willing to put in the effort, there are a variety of emulators that make it anything from a Gameboy to a Genesis. And, to be frank, if you’re wanting to play games on a phone (The only, truly the only reason to get an N-Gage over any other phone) it’s the only one which makes it bearable. Trust me. I’ve handled nearly every phone available in the UK and not one has an interface for gaming. But you have to want a phone as much as you want a games machine. But, speaking of which, how are the games they had on show?
The Elder Scrolls Travels Shadowkey (Bethesda Softworks)
Anyone paying attention will know that attempting to make a first person RPG with hundreds of hours of open-ended gameplay playable in 15-minute spurts on the train on a phone is probably batshit insane. But, the more you think about it, the more kind of perverse sense it makes. While not exactly pick up and play, as long as it offers the ability to save anywhere and resume any time, the somewhat simple dungeon hack gameplay of means you should be able to keep picking it up and putting it back down.
Uh, unless you’re like me and forget what you’re doing if you stop playing any game for more than two days.
Bomberman (Hudson Soft)
Well, this is really just classic vanilla bomberman, really. I’d say Nokia dropped the ball on this one, as it doesn’t have Arena online play, but 2 player by bluetooth. 2 player! I mean, that’s alright, I guess, but 2-player bomberman is the game you only want to be playing when the other two players have already got blown up. It works, it’s cheerful, fun and addictive and the type of game made for on the move, but the opportunities for multiplayer have got to be small without online, and to me, that’s all bomberman really is.
Pocket Kingdoms (Sega)
Now this is much better. A weird and creative new IP from Sega, this either proves how Nokia have managed to make Japanese developers rally round the N-Gage (a system not officially available in Japan), or that Sega are just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping it sticks. The fact that Pocket Kingdoms is maybe the only game I’ve seen so far that uses the N-Gages strengths rather than treating it like a simple games system. The massively multiplayer, ‘always on’ system means it’s natural if you’ve got a few minutes to log on and check and prepare your kingdom for another battle. The player sets up battles but he has no direct influence over them, and they play out in a kind of cute Paper Mario kind of way. The one thing that has got to go is the battle speech. A list of tired clichés, on winning a battle one of my knights actually said ‘Pimpin’ ain’t easy’ which is… Nonsensical at best.
The proof, however, is in being able to play it online against real players, something no one will be able to do until it’s released. Against the AI it has a certain stat builder kind of charm, but the idea that online it would be a constant struggle for terrain across many fronts may mean the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts.
Xanadu Next (Falcom)
The fact that Falcom are making games for the N-Gage is more interesting than the fact that Sega appear to be putting effort into the game they’re making. Xanadu Next, sadly, appears to be a very bog standard isometric view RPG. It’s got the look of Diablo, but the fact that Falcom and Xanadu are completely alien to most gamers means that this coup may not turn out to mean anything at all. On a crowded show floor it didn’t hold my attention, anyway, and I couldn’t see myself getting my phone out of my pocket to play.
Asphalt: Urban GT (Gameloft)
The subject of the press conference of the day before had to be thoroughly tested. Well, it’s… A street racer with real car models, a Gran Turismo alike mode, and 4 player multiplayer over bluetooth. Oh, and some global tracks. Yeah.
It’s playable, that’s for sure. But sickeningly generic.
There were many other games on show that I wasn’t able to spend any time with, some of them of questionable interest, and a surprisingly heavy bent to the military (Tom Clancy’s Military Jargon: Technical Codename, Pathway to Glory, Operation Shadow) which I guess is a symptom of the times we live in. The games not on show do give me hope that the N-Gage can continue to offer something to gamer on the move – a version of Settler’s of Catan from Capcom has been announced, as have games such as Civilisation, and of course King of Fighters.
So I’ll admit it. The N-Gage isn’t a system I believe in whole heartedly, but I can’t say that it’s a system that I don’t think has its place. And Damien and Janna[1] certainly believe in it.
[Next: Gizmondo]
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