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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
So, will cheat codes now give us extra lives and extra calling time?
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Just what we need. I guess it's not enough that all the soccer moms of the world mow down people like blades of grass as they drive while inattentively yapping on their cellphones, now we'll have to deal with their spawn trying to talk, drive and play Snake in 640x480x32bit res..
Why not just let cellphones be cellphones instead of swiss army knives full of useless doodads?
Now Ericsson better team up with Nintendo and Motorola has to seek help from Microsoft.
What's next? The mobile phone manufacturers teaming up with the movie and/or music industry?
And a 10 fold increase in road rage!
--JonnyBlog
Maybe they were attemtping a mathematical rather than logic statement. Its funny:
Sega - True = Nokia
Its not quite as funny though as the sign put up in my dorm.
"Diversity - ignorence = civility + respect"
Obviously this was created by Liberal Arts majors as it lacks a basic understanding of algebra, and placed on the Engineering special intrest floor. A comments under the sign was quickly added:
Diversity = civility + respect + ignorence
(btw the Liberal Arts thing was joke, no offense please : )
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Could this FINALLY spell the end of the gameboy? Nokia has , especially in Europe, and together with Sega's talent for software, who knows???
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.
The phone itself looks good for games with the D-pad, and I'm assuming you use the number pad for the button controls. This will probably be good for games like Super Monkey Ball and the like.
But...I still want something more.
I personally wouldn't mind a Gameboy Advance phone (with a backlight, damn it). This would be great for games like Pokemon, or a multiplayer version of Final Fantasy Tactics, Advance Wars, or other cool games - or even more staple style, like Hearts/Chess/Checkers, etc. Add a Gamespy/Battlenet style "find an opponent" feature, and you can have conviencience and online gaming - and if they get voice *and* data to work, you can talk to your opponent while you play.
Granted, I'm not a big fan of "online games for online gaming sake" (I hate most MMRPG's), but this would a) drive up them minutes for the phone company, and b) could actually be kind of fun depending on how they did it.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Obviously, this will need some confirming, but as Sega have already released versions of Sega, NiGHTS and Chu Chu Rocket for mobile phone platforms in Japan, I'm assuming we'll get those for this; if we do, I suppose I can kiss my job goodbye: online Chu Chu Rocket from my desk? Productivity doesn't stand a chance.
Well...now the Sprint cell phone commericial that I saw with Sega's Super Monkey Ball makes sense. I can't wait to get this. I need more games to ignore my work with!
Unstable Apps: Our Android Apps Don't Suck
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...
</Rant>
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Geek 1: My cell phones so old, it only gets 50 fps in Doom 3.
Geek 2: Yeah well mine's so old, it can only hold 5 hours of MP3s
Geek 3: Well mine's so old, it only has a 300MHz processor
Geek 4: Well MY cell phone is SOOOOOO old I can actually call people on it!
Geeks 1-3: Woah, dude that's old
So what we have here is a combination game system/mobile phone, which will stay constantly connected to the network and constantly within reach of the player, and which is now having games for it developed by the makers of one of the prime RPG consoles... ...Phantasy Star Mobile, anyone?
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Actually, Cingular was running trivia contests and announcements (read: ads) to their subscribers over their phones running up to the release of Spider-Man this summer. It was opt in, but a vision of what's to come.
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.
No Sony and Ericcson HAVE joined forces.
SEGA and Nokia have ALSO joined forced.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
A couple of reasons spring to mind.
Nintendo already make a profitable hand-held games console with a captive market. Clearly the demand exists for the existing product - meeting that demand has to be their first commitment. Adding telephone capabilities would increase the expense, weight and power consumption of Gameboy, which might play badly with the vast bulk of people who just want to play games. Not only that, but it would impact on Nintendo's bottom line - something they can ill-afford in a market where GameCube is only £130.
Secondly, Nintendo is a very conservative company and do not seem to want to take big risks with their products. They do not have experience with communications technologies (see the very slow release of networking on the GameCube). Furthermore, unless they wanted to create a brand new network, they would need to buy in the network technology, the billing services and so on. Working with another company means sharing the revenue and losing considerable control of the Gameboy market.
The Gameboy has a recognition value that other companies would kill to own. Nintendo own it outright - so they're happy. Why share?
And perhaps Nintendo is looking at the bottom line of the communications markets, all of the big service providers seem to be in the toilet; many services are deeply unprofitable - so is it even worth jumping in?
Best wishes,
Mike.