Nokia N-Gage review

[Dan East]

[Dan East]

[Renocide]

[Alexander]

[Digby]

[Phantom]

We are actively preparing for the launch of the N-Gage. Some extra info: Red Faction sucks. I've heard from someone who played it that it is really slow. I'm glad the other 3D games also suck, as we have some 3D games ourselves that are completely fluent. I'm glad we can beat the Fathammer. I'm porting one of the games to PPC in my spare time, I hope my boss will allow me to release at least a demo.

On the 104Mhz ARM and the low res screens (176 x 208) full-screen texture mapping is hard (speed wise); we used some tricks to fill the screen quicker.

[drgoldie]

According to this review nokia did some really bad design decisions (such as putting the game-roms behind the battery as if it was a sim-card).

If all these complaints in the review are true and not exaggerated, i don't think the n-gage will have a bright future...

just my cents,
DANIEL

[Presto]

Anyone know what the expected cost of it is going to be? I know I won't be getting one, but I can't help being curious.

Were they trying to make sure the power was off by hiding the cartridge behind the batteries? Seems like a pretty stupid way to do that. They could've had a little flip-cover for the cartridge that also killed the power circuit and accomplished the same thing, and it would've been user-friendly.

Seems like a step backwards to me. Very sad.

[Phantom]

[mm40]

[Guest]

I played on a few NGage games at ECTS. Not as bad as I was expecting, but not great. The tiny, portrait screen, although very clear, just doesn't work too well for games, and there's just too many buttons to find the ones you need.... (yes, there's 2 raised buttons, but most games need >2)

I don't think anything runs at 60fps on it. Not even 2D games. (I heard somewhere that the screen only refreshes at 30hz?)

Tony Hawk Pro Skater:
Very decent port of PSX version, like the PSX version but a bit slower. Was playing the warehouse level, that looked just like it does in the first PSX THPS game. Very nice, really. Shame about the tiny screen and poor controls (trying to find the right buttons in a cluster of 9)

Tomb Raider:
Possibly the best 3D engine on it. Didn't see much of it, but it seemed to render quite cleanly and move at a good speed.

Red Faction:
Competent FPS. Reasonable speed. Didn't really impress, but I'm bored of FPSs....

Super Monkey Ball:
Disappointing. They've now removed all the texture mapping and it's still no faster than the GBA version (http://www.bluescrn.net/projects.php?page=monkeyball).... despite that much faster CPU

Sonic N:
Far too small, and not smooth. Screen aspect ratio is completely wrong for a Sonic game. And 2D Sonic games need to run at 60fps...

[MirekCz forgot his pass..]

Phantom:hmm, any details about those tricks maybe?:)


Personally I also belive that N-gage sucks a bit... they could at least use a bit faster CPU for it (ie 150-200mhz version), that would make it a bit better.. I won't even mention using the ARM/PowerVr cpu/3d accel combo, which would fly sky-high... maybe n-gage2 will use them.. hopefully

[Phantom]

Ehm sure, but it's nothing spectacular: First we clear the screen using a green color, then we draw the road segments, wich have nice green edges. It's not very apparent that we don't texture every pixel, but in most cases, we save over 50% this way. The race game runs at about 25fps on the N-Gage, and that's without any asm. I hope to add optimized ARM texture mappers later.

[Jadam]

[angedelamort]

The N-Gage is a really good cheap (for the price) nokia phone. It sure to be bad for games, but it's a lot better than the MS smartphone. IMHO, the N-Gage is only a test by nokia in the gaming world. We'll see later with the N-Gage 2 on symbian 7. I'm sure it will be really interesting.

At my job, N-Gage are really usefull. For example, charging nokia batteries, transfering stuff to a memory card, testing series60 games, etc.

but with the psp and the tapwave coming, there will be a lot of competition soon.