Tendo City

Quote: Our first port of call this morning was Nokia's expansive N-Gage booth, where around 10 of the 20 or so games that will be available at the system's launch are on display. Since all the consoles themselves were attached to rigid stands, it was occasionally difficult to hold the unit comfortably, but we did our best to have a go on each and every game available and can report that, if nothing else, they certainly look impressive.

The full list of games that we actually got to play on the N-Gage booth is as follows:

Major League Baseball
MotoGP
Pandemonium
Red Faction
Super Monkey Ball
Super Space Invaders
Tomb Raider
Tony Hawk's Pro Skater
Virtua Tennis
The title screen for a game called Virtually Board Snowboarding 2 was also apparent on a number of the consoles, but the game itself didn't appear to playable anywhere in the booth. Other games conspicuous by their absence, as far as we could tell, included Sonic the Hedgehog and all four of the games recently announced by Gameloft--Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Rayman 3, and Marcel Desailly Pro Soccer.

All the games we played had one thing in common: the fact that upon first seeing them, it's difficult not to be impressed. Just seeing games like Tomb Raider, Super Monkey Ball, and Pandemonium running on such a small screen is pretty amazing, and even though the resolution of the screen is lower than that of a TV, the appearance of all the games is only slightly inferior to that of most PlayStation games. The other thing that almost all the games on the N-Gage have in common, unfortunately, is that they were designed to be played on a 4:3 screen, and this, we think, is the upcoming platform's biggest failing.

Pandemonium, for example, requires you to run from left to right, jumping between platforms, for the most part. Fans of the PlayStation original we were pretty excited when the game was announced for the N-Gage, but when half of the screen is effectively missing and you're not able to see any distance in front of your character, the game becomes a slow-paced exercise in frustration as you edge your way through the levels, trying to not get caught by hazards that you have very little time to prepare yourself for. After enduring similar screen-format-related issues with the likes of Red Faction, Tomb Raider, and MotoGP, we decided that Super Space Invaders would be a pretty safe bet. We thought wrong. Despite the fact that the one thing the N-Gage really doesn't have is a shortage of is buttons, the platform's version of this arcade classic discards all the buttons to the right of the screen in favor of having you push up on the directional pad to shoot. Aside from the fact that this means you can't shoot and move at the same time, the mechanic just feels all wrong, and the fact that somewhere along the line a decision was made that allowed this to happen is frankly nothing short of scary.

It wasn't all doom and gloom at the N-Gage booth, of course. Rays of hope for the platform came in the form of Major League Baseball, Virtua Tennis, and Super Monkey Ball--all of which were about as much fun as N-Gage games are likely to get. In conclusion, companies working on games for N-Gage really should think long and hard about which games they'll release on the platform. The fact that Tomb Raider can be ported across to the handheld doesn't necessarily mean that it should be, and just because the N-Gage has around 16 buttons that developers can use to handle more complex controls from PlayStation games and the like, they shouldn't necessarily be allowed to do so.

Given that for the recently announced price tag of an N-Gage you could get your hands on a decent cell phone and a Game Boy Advance SP, the only features that Nokia's new baby really seems to have going for it are its Bluetooth multiplayer capabilities. But if you don't like playing the games solo, why should you want to share the experience with friends? We're not out to kill the N-Gage before it's even had a chance to arrive in stores, but the simple fact is that, like any gaming platform, its success will depend largely on the quality of the software available for it. At the moment, Nintendo's GBA SP and even conventional cell phones with their own minigames have nothing to worry about.