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Hands-On With The Nokia N-Gage
CokoBWare writes "Finally! Gamesindustry.biz has done a hands-on review of the Nokia N-Gage cellphone/games machine. The results don't impress the judges much, but I suppose the consumer will ultimately be the judge."
The gameboy owns the handheld world. It is nintendos domain.
Better specs have not won the fight. The Neo Geo Pocket, TurboGrafx Xpress, Sega Game Gear and Nomad, Lynx, Game.com.
Many have come, many have failed.
Playstation Portable sounds like it'll be the first handheld to give the gameboy line a run for it's money. But I'm not banking on that either.
Nintendo promised some amazing new revolutionary whizamajig for next year. A successor to the GBA? A successor to gamecube? Who knows...
But, my bet is a portable gamecube. This is purely speculation, but it makes sense. The miniDVD format for GCN games has always been a bit of an enigmah - until you think about a handheld device... You could squish a gamecube into something handheld for the price of an nGage..
Maybe I'm dreaming, but hot damn that'd rock. Even if it was a different console, but they had "hybrid" games, ie, one version plays on the gamecube, a "lighter" version for it's portable sibling..
Anyhow.
Woe be to all ye who enter Nintendo's sacred grounds.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Actually i bet in a month or two after release there will be a side scroller variant that sucks really bad out for it:-p
thats generally how it works... good major console/pc game...
destroyed with a shitty handheld variant. Almsot makes you want to cry for all the fanboys that "must have it" and they are nothing alike:-p
I'm still a fan of convergence, even though i see it done badly so often. Kinda like horror movies. I can put up with a lot of Scream swquwls for one "Ring", and I can sit through a lot of MS Bob, NGage and fridges with net connections, for one good media and entertainment device that fits in my watch pocket and last several days on a charge.
remember listening to midi files over a 600 baud modem? in a decade (and a half) we have music studios under $1000 in our bedrooms, and we barely use them for more than websurfing...
Looks good for your age..
Having to dismantle the thing to replace the cards sounds super lame. Do you have to take the battery cover off a gameboy, remove the batteries, switch game, replace batteries, replace cover? No, because that would be retarded.
My Kyocera 7135 phone with built-in PalmOS has a nice side-loading SD slot, so what's the dilly-o with Nokia?
Those SD cards aren't just small and easy to lose, they break realllllly easily.
If they make it to nGage Advance, it'll have a handy side-loading slot, that autodetects the cartridge without powering off, just like my phone does now.
(Btw, this kyocera phone is a buggy pile of shit - it gets "fatal exceptions" when it rings and the battery cant last 24 hours in a stretch, lest anyone think I'm praising it)
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
it's not very easy to justify 300-400$ to a phone just for speaking, unless you just like shiny things.
fyi, you can get phones for much under that are perfect for 'just getting clystar clear sound', even in market areas where tying the phone and provider is illegal(that is, in finland for example). the 'crystal clear' sound hasn't been an issue for the last 5 years anymore(as long as the phone stays in one piece and doesn't break up), except of course in areas with poor gsm operators who don't think it's important to have good coverage throughout the nation(finland isn't exactly packed with population in the rural areas, but the phones work flawlessly). things like battery life(which you can't feel when buying the phone) and stylistic features and now real extra functionality have become the things to seperate yourself from the market.
the thing is.. it's also a s60 phone(and afaik, it's going to be the _cheapest_ s60 phone available, not sure on that though), allowing you to run symbian apps(c64 emulator, gbc emulator, read ebooks, read slashdot, wipe your ass, develop stuff for it with freely available tools, does your dishes, let's you get the latest news, use as a remote control for your pc through bluetooth, have bluetooth dongles at both work and home and use it as a data transferer.. it has pretty wide array of geeky uses), so it's not just a 'phone' anyways. it also has a memory slot for relatively cheap media(compared to sticks&etc) that's available too, easily in any pc store.
and as for why people buy cellphones.. they need to have it, it's no longer considered an option to have it, everybody has it and is pretty much expected to have one as well. when they get tired of the old phone(or if/when it breaks) they pretty much 'have' to get a new phone, some go for the looks, some go for the geek features, some go for the pop features and small size.
while i do agree(heck, i've heard that even nokias engineers agree) that it is retarded to have the mmc card under the battery(dunno, maybe the original design team thought that it would be only changed every once and then?).
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
...going to Infogrames/Atari and asking them to license the Atari Lynx. So much time has gone by that the whole design chipwise could've been compressed into a single modern chip which would've cut the costs down significantly. They could've added the chip to several of their mobile phone offerings and then spent some money into beefing up the networked games for the Lynx so that they'd work over the mobile network to find other players to compete against. Say what you want but *Todd's Adventure in Slime World* was a great game when you were playing against 7 other players. The same goes for *Battlewheels,* *Warbirds* and several other titles. The problem with the Atari Lynx was, compared to the Gameboy, it was difficult finding other friends/acquaintances that owned them so you could benefit from the network gaming unless several members of a local Atari Computer Users Group also owned Lynxes (like S.T.A.R. here in Sacramento did). But with the compressed Lynx chip spread over the whole Nokia mobile phone product range, that would never be a problem.
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
There's some key words missing from your statement: "top quality" and "well."
As in, "this is a top-quality gaming device that also does everything well that your phone does so you don't have to carry both."
Why are those words missing? Because it's not true. The convenience of one device matters not when the one device is vastly inferior to the other two. Classic 2D Sonic on a vertically-oriented screen? Insane. 3D Tomb Raider with no peripheral vision? Insane again. Look at that most-duplicated screenshot from N-Gage Tomb Raider. Think Lara's about to die because some stupid wolf ran at her from a side she (you) couldn't see? Yes!
Eventually someone will make an all-in-one device that doesn't suck. This is not it.