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Today we held a short interview with three individuals from the N-gage team; Erik Schmollinger - developer PR; Chuck Chopp - Media Relations; Vesa-Pekka Kirsi; developer thingy.
We got a few things cleared up, but there's still a shade of mystery to the device.
In the interest of brevity, here are the answers to the most pressing questions:
Sega's N-Gage exclusive (thus far) game Pocket Kingdom will be bluetooth enabled, and a strategy game of sometime (this is not fully confirmed - read with caution). It is being developed by someone within Sega Snap. Very little else is known about the title at this stage, unfortunately.
The phone will not be required online - that is to say, one can purchase the N-Gage, use it as a stand-alone gaming platform, and never pay a wireless carrier for cellular service.
As of now, there are no plans for different models of N-Gage, as there are with series-60 phones. But certain carriers may choose to modify their N-Gage product.
There will be no region specific games at this point. I do not mean to imply that there is potential for a territorial lockout. There will be no such thing - I'm referring to games released in one region that will not come to another. In the future, such a thing may come to pass, especially with sports titles, but this is based more on demographic than anything.
As far as making one's own amateur games, this cannot be done as a proper N-Gage game as such. One can construct games via the series-60, or java games - all of these will run on the N-Gage, but to make an N-Gage game is not so simple. Due to the encryption of the MMC format, N-Gage development will be restricted to licensed development houses only.
Extra levels, characters, etc will be downloadable and can be saved on an MMC permanently.
There are a lot of psx ports coming to the N-Gage. I asked them how difficult the current crop of companies were finding the conversion. Word is that the system has its own challenges, but is not significantly more difficult to port to than any other. So it's not as though it's easy to port psx titles (like Naomi to Dreamcast), this is just how it happened to go so far.
That old snow boarding game you saw during our GDC coverage has moved to the series 60 platform, and is no longer a proper N-Gage title.
Pathway to Glory is a massive multiplayer online strategy rpg, with historical military battles as the theme. This will be either an RTS or a turn based strategy - it's so early in development that those attending were slightly unclear on the subject. Again, this is Nokia's first published game - one which comes from a young Finnish studio. The game will have bluetooth and gprs multiplayer, and will showcase all of the N-Gage features. Being the first Nokia game, this makes solid sense. You can download historical missions, and play live against other users.
That's all for now, stay tuned for more specific games coverage in the following days!
Brandon Sheffield
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