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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."
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?
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
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?
"Why not just let cellphones be cellphones instead of swiss army knives full of useless doodads?"
Because I don't want to carry around a phone, a PDA, a Gameboy, a camera and a dictaphone when I can just grab this one handy device that does it all. If you're so certain you don't need any of those features stick to your old phone, just don't whine so much about it.
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
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
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