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In Defense Of The N-Gage
Thanks to IGN Wireless, who, not content with vehemently defending cellphone gaming in general, have decided to step up and tell us why Nokia's N-Gage is worth a second look. As they eruditely put it, "E3 was not exactly kind to Nokia and it's [sic] new N-Gage mobile gaming platform," and they go on to compare Nokia's phone and 'mobile game deck' to another neglected system: "A lot of it depends on whether or not gamers are willing to take chance on an unproven system, or whether they'll let hype from Sony's PSP or an improved GBA prevent them from taking the plunge. Which would be a shame, because that's what happened to the Dreamcast in the face of the PS2, and now everybody sits around and talks about what a great system it really was."
"E3 was not exactly kind to Nokia and it's [sic] new N-Gage mobile gaming platform
Slashdot editors could sure tell IGN a thing or two about how to write high-quality, error free write-ups
Quite frankly, the market is totally saturated. Yes, people will buy two or even three game consoles, but that's not so with handhelds, I don't think. With everyone and their dog owning a GBA, and everyone else much more excited about the PSP than this, no amount of good reviews are going to matter, even if it is a good system.
http://goldysmom.blogspot.com
The analogy seems totally hollow.
Sega Dreamcast: The first of the next-generation 3D consoles to come to market. For the year or so it was the most powerful mainstream system on the market.
N-Gage: Underpowered. Underengineered. Lame.
Saying "go buy an N-gage because Dreamcast was cool" is putting the lid on the fishbowl after the horses have escaped.
"...that's what happened to the Dreamcast in the face of the PS2, and now everybody sits around a talks about what a great system it really was."
Except the Dreamcast actually was a good system. This article fails to mention some of the fatal design flaws in the N-Gage. Like this one: in order to change games, you have to take the back plate off the N-Gage, remove the battery, take the old game out and put the new one in, put the battery back in, and replace the plate again.
Funny... some friends and I were just discussing local, wireless (bluetooth) gaming, and the lack thereof, just this week. I didn't realize the N-gage had bluetooth connectivity.
But, who wants their gaming platform and their cell phone to be on the same device? The last 2 cell phones I bought had games on them, but that wasn't the reason I bought them, nor was I very impressed when I finally poked around at them. Not that it couldn't be done... but when you combine devices, the interface has to become the lowest common denominator.
I think I'll pass on the n-gage, and wait 'til Nintendo or Sony implements bluetooth gaming.
Who wants a cell phone and a handheld gaming device in one?
Then I'll be locked with that cell phone for as long as I keep playing the damn games or I'll feel stupid for owning two cell phones. Or I'll feel stupid for paying that kind of cash for a device I only use for gaming.
If nokia had released a game only device that was as small and sexy as some of its phones (with bluetooth) I think this could of been a sucess. But the entire cell phone thing throws off the entire equation.
Another thing is that some places (canada) Wireless Telcos have exclusive rights to phones in the country, so this phone/console will most likely only be available through one company and it will fail miserably. People who already have cell phones will NOT buy this.
(Oh, and we'll be extremely curious to see if the same crowd that poo-poo'd the $299 price point has anything to say when Sony's PSP portable clocks in at a similar price.... )
My guess is an assured "Yes". Of course, it all depends on what the market will bear, and I don't feel that most people are ready to pay $300 for a hand-held. It's quite an extreme price. Personally, I'll be surprised if Sony's PSP comes in anywhere near that price point, though. Then again, I could be wrong. Maybe the N-Gage will be the hottest Holiday gift since Tickle-Me-Elmo. But, I rather doubt it.
One thing many posters have ignored is the price of a GB SP + a good mobile phone, namly which is going to be ~$100-$200.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Folks, the word 'dreamcast' doesn't appear anywhere in the ign article. Read for yourself!
I've been a reader of IGN for years now, and I gladly pay the annual subscription rate. Their writing is generally top notch (compared to the competition), and the reviews impart an honesty I appreciate as a game junkie.
/. article, something about it seemed very contrived. I'm an optimist, and I'd like to think that IGN didn't take a payoff for this. If they had, I'd wager they'd have made a much better case for the platform. A more realistic view (imo) is that they're planning on starting a N-Gage channel. From day one, IGN has been extremely negative toward the system, but it's still gained support from a few well-payed-off developers. It's quite possible that IGN has identified the system as a legitimate contender worthy of daily report.
Upon reading this article however, I was surprised at the tone of it. I'm glad it ended up as a
Regardless of the reason, the article is poorly written and comes off as a bit of a showcase piece. I certainly hope IGN doesn't continue this trend.
If you could be anything you want, I'll bet you'd be disappointed.
Personally, I cannot take seriously anyone who suggests that one can only be enthused about platformers and remakes of 16-bit games if one looks at the era through "rosy glasses".
Personally, I think my hobby died with the rise of the PSOne, and I'm left with the Gamecube as the third place console, but the only one that puts out more than a handful of games that are of types I actually enjoy. I could care less about Tony Hawk and Tomb Raider.
And lest someone mod me flamebait, I'm sure both of those are great games. I know people who enjoy them, at least. But I've just never gotten into them. They don't feel like the games I grew up on. They feel like a different hobby to me. Some people made the transition from that hobby to current video games. Some people started with Tomb Raider, and can't figure out what it is I like so much about Zelda.
But for me, if that's the future of video games, I'll be over here with my emulator, thank you.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
I've had the unfortunate opporunity to use an N-Gage myself at E3. It's not a good game machine by any means. The Game Boy is a SPEED DEMON compared to this thing.
... take this. To use the handset (not a HEADSET) to talk on this phone, you hold it to your head like a taco, sideways. The top edge of the phone rests against your face, and you look like a freaking idiot.
... either there are kickbacks for selling these things that go right into the salesperson's pocket (and that's all you're going to be able to get them to talk about), or they simply won't care to deal with the hassle, and will pretend it doesn't exist.
It's not a good cell phone either. I don't know what the hell Nokia was thinking, but they threw everything they knew about cell phones out the window when they designed this thing.
You want an example? OK
The price will probably be a non-issue with subsidies, but they're expecting to have this thing selling in stores like Electronics Boutique and GameStop. This is going to go one of two ways
I'm betting on the latter.
Regardless, I've already got a Series 60-based cellphone (the Nokia 3650), and rumor has it that it can play the N-Gage games too. Probably not as comfortably, but it'll play.
This is an article on IGN. It can't be taken seriously. While I'll probably be trolled for saying this, IGN is the world's biggest fanboy site. They don't give bad reviews because they are so excited to be playing the new game or using the new system they can't help but shout with glee.
IGN's one redeeming quality, and it's failing, is that it covers everything. There is no other site out there that I'm aware of that covers as many games as IGN. There is a reason nobody else covers so many games, and that's because you cannot give quality coverage of that much material.
-> Fritz
Spooooon!!!!!
Why is it the most ignorant posts get modded funny?
Having GONE to E3 I saw Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 1 running on the N-gage. Not some watered down thing. THE ORIGINAL in its 3D glory. This device is not underpowered for the market. Thats like saying the PlayStation was underpowered to compete with the SNES, because that is what we are comparing here for handhelds.
Your note about the Dreamcast does win the obvious award, but its irrelevent to the situation.
I'm not going to buy an N-Gage because I don't play handheld games, but your post is just not factually correct.
Problem is, the people who can afford the device and the service, are already old enough to feel stupid playing a video game on a tiny screen out in the open somewhere.
Of course the first rumors and reviews were all but encouraging, maybe the N-Gage is just slightly better than the GBA possibly even worse...
finally it doesn't matter because if I'll get a new cell phone in the next 12 onths, as I did yearly during the last three years (my cell phones are quite likeli to have tragic crashes), I will give a very close look to N-Gage.
Look at the businness model, there's no "give the razor sell the blades" things there, Nokia isn't after the hardcore gamers but the regular cell phone users who don't dislike to "insert a coin" once in a while.
if this can sell even N-Gage stand a chance.
For the simple reason that it'll be the only open handheld games console. You'll be able to develop games and software for it... for free! In Java and C++, no dodgy assembly language required!
When you couple this with Bluetooth connectivity and access to GPRS, dialling voice calls, sending SMS, I fail to see why people aren't excited. The platform is a bedroom developer's dream, and hence there should be a large number of innovative games developed for it - and its potential successors.
Not forgetting that there are thousands of J2ME games it can play out there already...
It's also worth mentioning that supporting this not-so-great game platform/phone is some of the worst, bordering on insulting, advertising ever.
> Why is it the most ignorant posts get modded funny?
I think the key is a witty tagline, ala "putting the lid on the fishbowl after the horses have escaped."
I tried making well-reasoned, well-researched posts. Nobody ever read them. You have to mix in a good 30% underresearched crap in order to get noticed.
The writer makes a good point regarding price -buying a cellphone on retail (without carrier rebates/subsidy)- Depending on the carrier adoption, that could really help sales.
Also the possibilities with Bluetooth, I can see some innovative multiplayer games, maybe add a feature that while you're playing solo, the N-Gage broadcasts and seeks new players within a PAN?? Imagine yourself playing Tetris against someone unknown in an airport sitting a few rows away....
IMO, the N-Gage is simply trying do too many things, and at the end, it might not do any of them really well Phone/Portable Console/PDA??? What's Nokia's plan to respond to changes? Will they be playing by ear?. Even the GBA has undergone changes (and it still needs two more face buttons and better sound), we also saw the same issue with M$ and the GIANT Xbox controller.
Another issue is credibility, Nokia is great at making cellphones, but in this industry, unless you are Nintendo (greatest 1st party developer), or Sony (greatest installed base - 3rd party developers) or Microsoft (stubborn marketing powerhouse with a lot of dough).
At the end, I think it's great, having the N-Gage, PSP & GBA head to head will only mean that I can pick up my GBA games for a cheaper price or force Nintendo/Sony to innovate.
Long live competition!!!
Ugh, this entire thing makes me sick, this article in particular. How anyone could defend this thing is beyond me.
First of all, the price. Yes, it's a phone, it plays games, it's an audio player but...it doesn't do anything of these things exceptionally well. In fact, it does all of these things pretty half assed. At $300, no thanks. I find it also pretty insane that the author of that piece even dares to speculate that the PSP will be launched at that price tag. In fact, Sony reps have publicly said it would be competively priced to the current GBA SP. One even hinted to me PERSONALLY that she wouldn't be surprised if they matched the price of Nintendo's system.
Lastly, the games...having read the press release and the FAQ packet that Nokia sent out...are they trying to generate excitement about this product or what? They're more effectively turning me off. A whopping 30 games will be out by the end of this year for the N-Gage. Another whopping 40 are planned for 2004. OH YAY. And at $30-40 a piece, per game...how about...NO.
Until I actually get my hands on one, I'd like to try to refrain from judging, but based on the facts I've been given, I don't see how I could possibly be interested in this thing. And unless Nokia flat out hands me an N-Gage, I doubt I know anyone stupid enough to shell out $300 for one.
..and I may have missed it, so don't shoot me if it has been said.
The price is always high on cell phones. What makes it cheaper and worthwhile to buy are the rates that carriers put on them if you sign up for a plan. You don't go to a Gamestop or EB to buy a cell phone plan. You go to a Cingular, a Verizon, a T-Mobile, AT&T booth, etc. These are companies that have allied themselves to the phone.
On top of that Gamestop and EB employees are not retail salespeople, they're register jockeys (I am one in my part time, don't feel insulted, admit it) who happen to have a hobby they really like and like to share with other people. We're not going to get commission from cell phone plans, so there's no incentive for us to push this over a GBA SP. If we like a system we do push it because we like it because it's good. It's a great system actually because it means we get to be honest with the customer. Now what's worse, I cannot in good conscience push a system that costs more than all the other consoles, let alone portables, and has games that cost nearly as much. We don't want to learn how to sell cell phone plans either, we want to sell games.
On the flip side, if nokia took these phones to typical places to sell cell phones, no one would buy them because they cost more than the trendy camera phones that already play mobile games. And none of these places really wants to sell the games.
Nokia would have been better to develop a system, comparable in size to a cell phone that was purely a game system. Distribute it in Games stores, then at the same time, sell the cell phone combined with the gamesystem in the cell phone stores. Game purists would be able to buy a cheaper system without feeling they lost the quality, while still being able to hit the cell phone combo market they're aiming for.
One thing has been said, no one that has recently bought a $200-300 cell phone (bought into the camera craze) is going to abandon that phone for another high priced craze item.
Anyone remember Turbo Grafx 16's portable little sister, the $300 Turbo Express? That was a WONDERFUL piece of engineering, especially for 1989 or whenever it came out. TG16 (console) used creditcard-sized cartridges and the same ones were used in the handheld. The Turbo Express had decent battery life (not Gameboy level, but much better than Game Gear/Nomad) but the $300 was simply more than anyone would want.
No one wants 2 handhelds. I can understand having an PS2 and a Gamecube, because they each offer so much (plus both can be bought used for little over $200 total on ebay or something), but for me, I only use handhelds in those rare instances when I need portable gaming (airplanes, sometimes on subways, etc), so since I use it only once in a while, why would I need TWO systems? A $100 GBA-SP plus two $30 games easily tides me over for those 5-hour sessions every few weeks/months. And if I'm majorly bored in line or something, just play snake or blackjack or one of the crappy-but-fun games on every phone.
Another reason the ngage is going to fail is you aren't going to be able to play this thing on a plane without causing a problem. Everyone will see you playing a game on a cell phone. Having the cell phone on is a (currently) major no-no. Even if its not transmitting they aren't going to take your word for it and will have you turn it off. The main reason I've got a GBA is to play it while I'm travelling.
[i]One thing many posters have ignored is the price of a GB SP + a good mobile phone, namly which is going to be ~$100-$200.[/i]
Not sure if many people know about the Pioneer Laseractive, but it was a Laserdisc player that you could buy add-ons for. The three add-ons that were released were a Genesis add-on, a Turbo-Grafx-16 add-on, and a Karaoko add-on. If you had the Genesis add-on, you could play Genesis games, SegaCD games, as well as special MegaLD games that came on laserdisc (guess how many of these actually came out). Similarly, the TG16 add-on played carts, TurboCD's and TurboLD's (Which were apperently completely different from the MegaLD games, and NOT compatible). This actually sounds like a good idea, since you'd be able to combine all your entertainment stuff into one unit.
However, the add-ons cost around $700 each. Naturally, everyone realized that buying an actual Genesis + SegaCD was about half that price, and the thing sold very poorly. It would make a nice collectors item these days though.
-"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men. No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man." -EH
Now that all of the obvious reasons for the N-Gage to fail have been covered in great depth (price, crap games, crap screen, poor phone talking design, crap media, need to take out the battery to change game etc.). I'd like to add another, slightly less obvious one, that I think might be far harder to fix when (if) Nokia ever get their act together: Nokia treat developers badly.
The N-Gage, as a games programming platform is a nightmare when compared to almost every similar platform. The operating system (Symbian 6.1) has all of the (over-)protective security features that you would find in a 'fully-blown' operating system (memory protection, HAL etc.) but none of the API's that are normally found in such environments to allow low-level access to the hardware that games need (such as DirectX).
While there are lots of work-arounds and blatant hacks for doing all these kinds of things, most of the API's involved are poorly documented (if they are documented at all) and coders spend alot of their time trying to fool the OS, when they should be making games. In addition to this Symbian is an OS with a fairly ridgid coding style and alot of it's own unique methodologies and conventions. These are often incompatible with existing codebases (in a standard Symbian application, which is in effect a dll, you cannot create global variables!) and developers existing work practices.
When compared to PalmOS, WindowsCE and the GBA the 'learning curve' that's required to put a game out on the N-Gage is pretty steep. Although it may be more geared towards gaming than any existing Palm or CE device, remember that the helix is on it's way (eventually) and there is already a large homebrew game development community associated with the PalmOS platform.
In addition to this Nokia provide no real technical support on any of these issues, there are no example workarounds or anything. And the existing homebrew Symbian developers are unfriendly, insular and unhelpful when compared to their PalmOS or GBA counterparts. The symbian documentation itself doesn't cover anything that is N-Gage specific. In fact, the first on-device debugger for the platform was only released recently, and by metrowerks. The SDK's available from Nokia have no on-platform debugger.
In short, even if the N-Gage was a really well put together platform, which people really wanted to buy and then pay more money for games on it, I still think that it would be a long time before a decent set of quality titles made an appearance.
Nokia can keep getting publishers to port existing titles to the platform (and I'd like to know exactly which way the money changes hands on a deal like that), but they'll never get any decent original IP on the platform until they start treating developers better. Of course, none of it really matters, as it's not going to sell, but when the N-Gage 2 or 3 or 9909 or whatever get's it right, then I'm sure that this will become an issue.