New plans hope to revive the N-Gage

Nokia's NGage platform didn't exactly light the world on fire in it's last appearance, clearly aimed at the Nintendo generation they hoped to build a mobile phone that was also a gameboy-like device. An ambitious idea, as at the time the Gameboy Advance was going great guns unchallenged by the future PSP at that point in time.

The trouble was that it simply didn't take off, games didn't have the variety of the gameboy's catalogue and back then the device didn't have much differences from your bog standard java games on mobile phones.

Well Nokia have had time to lick their wounds over this and have come back with a better idea and new implementation of their NGage brand. The good news is that mobile phones have come on greatly in the last few years and are more than capable to provide the graphics and speed for mobile gaming. As well as this Nokia is adopting a completely new approach to the NGage platform, they are making it completely software based, compatible NSeries handsets all have the application pre-installed and is due to be activated globally in the coming months.

The platform offers much more than the previous iteration, with a community section that compares your scores to other gamers it has an almost Xbox Live feel, something proving more and more popular with gamers these days.

At the moment the NGage application is installed on all NSeries handsets such as the N81 and N95 8gb in demo form, Nokia has released a "first look" version for the N81 which allows mobile phones owners to sign up and start playing. By removing the added overhead of niche hardware hopefully the NGage platform will come back better than ever.

So the N-Gage redesign has been out for nearly half a year now, and I have used it occasionally and thought I'd revisit this hub and give my two cents on it.

The general layout is neat and clear, there was some confusion over having multiple logins, I think I ended up with two names and passwords! Other than that it looked alot like the Xbox live for mobile phones that they promised. There's a gamercard-like page that shows how many games you've got as well as the points system that has been done on the xbox too.

The selection of games is woefully sparse though, possibly a reason why not much noise has been made over this redesign. I would expect more than two new games cropping up over the space of two months so there wasn't much room for me to test the different games.

The only one I bought was "Hooked on: Deep Sea fishing" which has aamazing graphics for amobile phones, eve nwether effects like rain water running down the screen was good looking enough. I don't even like fishing but still enjoyed this quirky game.

Now there seems to be a few more games but with such a lacklustre launch and long development times for games it can seem a bit pointless, being able to download the game in full and play it in a demo form is great, as then you can choose to buy the game or rent it for a few days.

Overall it's a great aggregated way to buy games on your phone, as opposed to various "free ringtone" sites spamming your phone once you buy one game!