Asphalt N Gage Games
THE WoS COMPLETE N-GAGE GAMING GUIDEIt's semi-complete!Hey there, viewers. When one is, in a rudimentary and mostly vestigial sense, a videogames journalist, one likes to keep abreast of the entire gaming scene.
And these days, the gaming scene comprises a lot more than just the four main gaming platforms and their boring, identical line-ups of formulaically dull licensed software in the Six Approved Genres. (Which, if you're keeping count, are driving game, fighting game, sports game, RPG, FPS and puzzler. Name me a current top 40 title that doesn't slot into any of those categories and I'll give you a packet of crisps. But anyway.)If you're looking for interesting, innovative or simply old-skool-type gaming, you have to search a little further afield.
The PC independent scene has a handful of gems, and there are some curios available through digital television (more on that at a later date) but for true, pure, classic-style videogaming you need to get yourself something portable. The Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS are the obvious ports of call, but one of the most overlooked, yet massive, areas of the world of gaming is that populated by mobile phones. With that in mind, your reporter put his adventuring hat on and went and bought himself a Nokia N-Gage.Mostly, I just wanted to use this picture from the Nokia website.The N-Gage was a deliberate attempt to meld a handheld games console to a mobile phone, and was first released in 2003, to almost universal scorn.
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And quite rightly so - the initial model was a big, clunky monstrosity with a bucketful of ludicrous design flaws, most notably that if you wanted to change games, you had to switch off and dismantle half the machine, including removing the batteries, in order to get at the game port. The N-Gage was also a horrible phone, which you had to hold side-on to your head to talk into, looking a proper Charlie in the process. Throw in an initial price tag of £300 and it wasn't hard to explain why it sold so few units that Nokia wouldn't even tell anyone the sales figures for fear of causing a catastrophic collapse in their share price.After waiting a few months for gamers to stop laughing and pull themselves together, the company came up with a redesign. Out went the need to pull the machine to bits to change games (now you didn't even need to switch the power off, a one-up on the likes of the Game Boy), out went the stupid sideways phone-talking, and out went a few extraneous features in order to make the phone a lot smaller and cuter. Suddenly, the N-Gage QD (the new model's name) was a halfway-desirable piece of kit, but it was too late for the fashion-conscious market and even the new pretty model died something of a death.
Nokia Ngage
Which is, of course, great news for gamers, as it means you can now pick one up for a fraction of the original cost. (WoS bought its QD for £79 from with no games, but at the time of writing will also flog you a 'SIM-free' one - which you can simply transfer the SIM card from your current phone into, without needing a new contract or number - for the same sort of price, or for £99 with a game of your choice.)But is it worth it? After all, there's rarely much of a future in buying bargain-bin end-of-line games machines, as anyone who picked up a cheap Atari Lynx will tell you. The N-Gage's dedicated software line-up is pretty thin, comprising just 40 or so titles, and there isn't much in the pipeline. However, the N-Gage has a future-proofing secret weapon, in the shape of its compatibility with both the Java standard and the Symbian operating system, which ensure that it'll run a dizzyingly vast array of games written for all manner of current and future phones. As a bonus, most of these games are dirt cheap (a fiver is the typical price), and it's those that we're mainly going to look at on the rest of this page.(Left) Gorgeous vertical shooter Sky Force.
(Right) Slick Boulder Dash clone Super Miners.The biggest problem that your intrepid correspondent faced, having bought his N-Gage and got a big bunch of games for it, was how to get the pesky things actually loaded onto the machine and running, for such information is documented absolutely nowhere, either on the Internet, in the N-Gage's highly unhelpful manual, or in the real world. But after a very considerable amount of research and blind trial-and-error, your reporter has managed to put together this comprehensive guide. WoS braved a great many illiterate chavs and incomprehensible txtspk messageboards before giving up and figuring most of this out for itself, so be grateful that you don't have to.YOU WILL NEED:- An MMC memory card. You should be able to pick up a new 256MB one of these on eBay for £15 or less, or a 512MB for around £20. Alternatively, get them in any high street electronics store (eg Dixons) for about twice as much.- An MMC memory card reader/writer.