N-Gage 3: Deuce Bigalow Of Mobile Gaming?
Why? Why? Why do they keep doing this? I know that Finland doesn't have much else to hang its hat on, but even a herring could tell you this is a bad idea: Nokia is releasing a "next-gen" N-Gage platform this September, despite the horrific failure of the N-Gage and the N-Gage QD. And by horrific, I mean unspeakably and intolerably terrible - from conceptualization to implementation. I mean so awfully bad that I'd really hoped not ever to hear the faux-cool sounding name of this abomination again.
And yet...
So the third iteration of the least "engaging" mobile gaming platform since Gizmondo ate Tamagotchi is, as Aeropause put it, "[not] so much about the phone as the software for the popular Nokia Symbian operating system." The crux of the product seems to be a gaming platform that's downloadable for the new phone as well as a handful of current phones. This smacks of reviving the almost-promising N-Gage Arena online service, but nothing short of a miracle is likely to push through whatever subscription and high-bandwidth charges various providers are so wont to demand.
And then, of course, there's the DS. And the PSP. And the iPhone. Hell, even the ghost of a Nintendo phone fills me with less dread than suffering through another barrage of ineffectual ads for a system I don't want on a phone I don't need. Next!
Report: Next-Gen N-Gage Imminent [MoDojo]
[Via: Aeropause]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, Video Games on 7 February 2007
· Comments (3)
Other stuff like this: arena, finland, mobile gaming, n-gage, nokia, spamalot, symbian
WTF? GTFO N-Gage.
I'd be damned if I found that article I read just yesterday about how the N-Gage wasn't actually that bad of a console *or* phone, but marketing and game publishers failed it horribly. The article stated that by the time the good titles and the QD came out, the N-Gage name had already been killed by a slew of crappy launch titles, truly fiendish game distribution (small cards that went *inside* the phone, under the frigging battery!), disastrous marketing and resulting abysmal installed base (which could have been easily oompthteenfied -that's a word, look it up- by unlocking the games for the millions of technically identical S60 phones).
It also mentioned, that the name N-Gage was forever tainted and should not be used with any gaming platform ever again. And here we have the result...
Hey now! Finland won Eurovision last year. Eurogayers say "ooh!", American gayers say "wuh?".