N-Gage Opts To Give Away Lara, Not Bury Her

Thanks to Yahoo for reprinting a press release announcing Nokia has teamed up with Eidos to give away over 70,000 copies of the N-Gage version of Tomb Raider at this year's Sugar Bowl college football game. An Eidos spokesperson oddly opines: "Lara [Croft] has always been the number one video game heroine, and it's appropriate for her to be present at this year's Sugar Bowl where the national champion will be crowned", and insider suggestions that Nokia are pulling an Atari of sorts, in the face of allegedly limited demand for the N-Gage 'game deck' are, of course, fatuous. Meanwhile, GameSpy weighs in with some reasons to like the N-Gage, still suggesting: "Nokia's game deck has a lot going for it, and is in many ways superior to the system that has dominated the portable gaming market for over a decade: Nintendo's Game Boy (now Game Boy Advance)." Update: 01/02 16:46 GMT by S : According to a L.A Times/TribNet article, Tomb Raider on N-Gage sold around 3,000 copies in October, the last stats available to the reporter.

Comments

I liked it better...

[Ayanami Rei]

in the form factor of the Siemens S60. You know, where the keyguard slides off to one side and becomes two handed, with the screen in the middle. If they took that design, and made it so that it functioned primarily as a phone in the "compact" mode, and as the gaming system, webbrowser/email tool in the "open" mode, that would prompt me to go get one.

Re:It's the monthly fee dammit!

[GregWebb]

* Nokia are a European company
* Europe uses GSM _exclusively_
* The EU has a larger population than the USA and much higher cellphone coverage
* Over here we have 'pay as you go' plans - no monthly fees, just pay for the calls. Sure, the call charges are higher, but it's definitely better for light users and very easy for parents to control what their kids can spend. We also don't have to pay to receive calls.

IMO it's a silly idea because it's a ropey form factor for a console and has a significantly higher cost than a GBA SP and an average kid-spec phone like a Nokia 3310. Doesn't help that you have to remove batteries to change games or that the GBA was already there with a much bigger library, but I reckon the first two would kill it anyway.

Re:N-Gage...

[gl4ss]

the demo systems use different version of the os apparently(customised so that the users can't fuck it up, while it seems that it has enough quirks to fuck up by itself.). so the demo systems make a crappy job of demoing the system.. which is a shame.

series60 is a great phone-pda-mix-platform, and n-gage is the cheapest series60 phone(with the best placed controls for gaming) and it also has more ram than 3650/3660 making using opera on it more comfortable(3650 doesn't have enough mem to really browse with opera and keep an irc app open, ngage however does). also it makes changing from 3650/7650 to n-gage very easy(as the ui is already familiar as well are the apps available).

red faction sucks balls though, i have to admit.. tony hawk on the other hand is great on n-gage(seems like a direct port of the psx version, I just managed to open roswell, I've managed to rack up quite big amounts of playtime on it during the holidays). mp3 playing isn't a bad extra(and aac/mp3/radio seem to use different chip/parts for audio output from regular audio playing from symbian apps that afaik only can do ~16khz, so mp3's come out at 44khz all the same on n-gage, there's a rumour of sorts that there will be a lite version without the mp3/radio chip soon).

would I carry a gameboy around at all times, so that I'd have it in the bus/car/resteurant? nopes.. but I do carry my phone wherever I go, in it's price range n-gage is just unbeatable at the moment as far as multi use goes(and I got no quarrels about it's sidetalking, it goes quite well against my cheek and the buttons are available even while talking, for volume/etc). with gba you'd need to keep carrying around the charger as well(or use batteries, yuck, in addition to your gsm's charger), around here there are so many people with nokia chargers that if you're going to visit some relatives they will have a charger for nokias.

the original gba was certainly miles worse than ngage is for gaming, the display was just too bad in the original gba(and one can have more opinions than one about the shoulder buttons on sp as well). the result is that theres thousands and thousands of people who have a gba in their drawer but they never use it for anything.

the worst things about n-gage include that you can't supportedly copy multiple games on one cartridge, however that is a _very handy_ thing to do(even if you have to get cracks to do it). few games on one mmc along with several mp3's will keep you entertained a long way.

gba can't possibly offer the things n-gage offers, it can offer you games but nothing more while n-gage offers you opera, irc and hundreds of other apps(sure, these have NO value whatsoever for the 12y boy playing pokemon on his gba but they aren't the intended audience anyways - even though some younger relatives of mine liked rayman 3 quite a bit). these 3rd party apps seem to have been the main selling point among the people I know who have gotten themselfs a n-gage.