Give The NGage And Phantom A Chance?

Thanks to GameSpy for their 'Sole Food editorial urging gamers to take another look at the NGage and Phantom games hardware. Regarding Nokia's NGage game/phone hybrid, the piece suggests: "Gamers should be excited by what Nokia is bringing to the table. Mobile multiplayer gaming via Bluetooth and GSM/GPRS is a wonderful idea and definitely the future of portable gaming." As for Infinium Labs' Phantom console, the author is cautious but optimistic: "I'm not advocating the Phantom, but I'm very much fascinated by what Infinium purports it will introduce to console gaming: digital distribution. This is definitely the way gamers will buy games in the future." Reason enough to think again?

Comments

In a word, no.

[Snowspinner]

The N-Gage has justifiably gotten shitty reviews for its crappy controls, crappy looking screen, the worst system for loading games ever, is overpriced, and is just generally lousy. So, no, I don't plan on giving it a second look. While bluetooth multiplayer and a few of its features are nice, I intend to wait for them to be implemented on a device that doesn't suck.

As for the Phantom... ummm... it's best feature is the fact that DNF is going to be a launch game.

N-Gage might have a chance..

[Inoshiro]

Were it not a cellphone first and a gaming platform second. I've read the Nokia propoganda they send to the local video game chains. They expect people to come in, spend 450$ CDN on it, and then go home and play games that look marginally better than GBA games (note: GBA SP -- 150$ CDN) on a crappier button layout, while also required battery swapping to swap carts.

They expect that the bluetooth multiplayer and fact that you can upload your times in games via GPRS to their Nokia wireless service will be worth the 3x upfront cost. This is despite the obvious caveat that most cell plans with data transfer are stupidly expensive. The pamhplet says in bold, "User must have data transfer features on their cellular plan." I'm not paying an extra 10$ a month of cell fees for what I can spend half on (Xbox Live! centralized scoring and multiplayer) -- especially since an Xbox is only 250$ CDN. The extra 200$ I save not going with an N-Gage buys me Live! and a couple of games.

This mobile wireless niche Nokia wants to dominate doesn't exist. It won't exist for a few years yet, since GPRS and CPDP are still prohibitively expensive and unused by the general populace.

As for the Phantom -- only 1 company can be succesful on a the platform which is based around XP Embedded; Microsoft.