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Sega + Nokia = True
bdsgeekboys writes "Another press release from Nokia entitled "Nokia and Sega to take gamers to a new level of mobile interactive gaming" has been released today. This means that Sega and Nokia has joined forces to provide branded games for the Nokia's new mobile game deck device category. You can read the full press release and view an image of the Nokia N-Gage(TM) mobile game deck."
How long until they come out with a new Nokia phone with Sonic the Hedgehog?! I've abstained from buying a cell phone for years, but a cell phone with Sonic might break me!
I was going to submit this to /. when Sega put it up, but figured there wouldn't be much interest. It fits well with this story though: mobile.sega.com
People spend enough time hiding away in there mobiles... and the only game I know of that people really bother playing is snake.. whos gonna wanna play sonic the hedgehog on the keypad of a mobile phone? no-one for two long I bet.
moo
Are these games you can purchase and then play without using minutes? If the games are cheap enough I can see a market, cell-arcades. The advantage to Nokia/Sega, more people want Nokia cell-phones/plans. Multiplayer games will also give Nokia the added benefit of minute usage.
I have an old cell phone with no games whatsoever. Anyone had experience with the newer games like Monkey Ball? I know customers initially had to download Monkey Ball for US $3.99 and where given 30 days of play.
I wouldn't play these games unless I could buy them for a one-time fee and play them as much as I want.
Having developed a number of J2ME games for mobile phones, I find myself frustrated at companies such as Nokia, Siemens and co breaking standards to force developers to release separate versions of software for each manufacturer/device. This is no doubt holding up development of games and other useful apps for the mobile devices, and I'm sure that there's a case to be made against many of these manufacturers claiming to have J2ME compliancy.
I realise there's often a need for additional classes for features specific to a phone (vibration, backlights etc), but there are inexplicable deviations. For instance, the Siemens M50 has a rather "unusual" approach to creating an image object from a PNG file. Due to the limitations on file size and download speed, games tend to store all graphics in binary format, or more frequently all on a single PNG canvas - to be masked/chopped up as required. This is fine and works great, but Siemens decided that every external image should be resized to the phone's display - which kind of screws everything up. But wait, you can actually use their custom createImage method to emulate the standard method! Of course, this means it won't work on any other device though...
Nokia are as bad - the 3410 has a bug that means image clipping is 1 pixel out in each axis compared to other phones, so that's another "special" version. The list is huge, and totally defeats the purpose of using Java in the first place. "Run anywhere" is not the case here...
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Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Compared to Game Boy Advance, N-Gage's screen is too small and it has too many buttons. It's true that the controllers for PS2, Xbox and Gamecube have nearly this many buttons, but most games use only half of them. A better design for a mobile game/video phone or would be a few buttons along the side and a touchscreen covering most of the front surface that would disable during calls so you could hold it against your face.
With this comes DRM to your cell phone. Copyright will extend its ugly head into this. You should realize this.