N-Gage Launched Globally10.04.08

finally nokia launched n-gage completely.It should be noted that at the moment N-Gage is only available for consumers that have the Nokia N81, Nokia N81 8GB, Nokia N82, Nokia N95, and Nokia N95 8GB. If you have one of these devices you’ll need to download the N-Gage application – this can be done either through your PC and then transferring to your phone or just going straight to the moblie website.

It will be interesting to see how N-Gage fares over the coming months. Speaking at the GDC Mobile conference last month Michel Guillemot, president and CEO of Gameloft was adamant that the mobile games market wasn’t slowing down. However, he did point out that there are potential pitfalls for customers. When purchasing a game there’s likely to be an additional cost from the bandwidth used for the download. In some cases the service provider charges more for the download than the actual game.

With that in mind I did try and see if I could figure out the price of FIFA ’08 from the N-Gage website but couldn’t spot the cost anywhere. It does say in the FAQ that you should check with your service provider for data transfer fees and of course any online play will be charged accordingly. My advice is to download the N-Gage application and games to your PC and transfer them on to your phone through a USB port – why pay more when you don’t have to?

The games offer a free trial after which you can buy an activation code if you want to keep playing. It’s important to note that this code only works on the mobile phone the game was activated with. If you change phones at some point and you don’t want to leave a game behind you’re going to need to ring N-Gage support to get a new activation code.

The first set of games being offered for download are EA SPORTS(TM) FIFA 08 by EA Mobile; Brain Challenge and Asphalt 3: Street Rules by Gameloft; World Series of Poker (TM) Pro Challenge by Glu Mobile; and Hooked On: Creatures of the Deep and System Rush: Evolution by Nokia Publishing. A further 24 games are due to be released by the end of this year.

I’ll leave you where I started, with thoughts of FIFA ’08 - there's a nice demo on the N-Gage site. The graphics don’t look too bad to me considering it’s on a mobile device. I’m a little less sure about how easy the game play will be – perhaps somebody will bring out a mini playstation type controller to plug into the phone.