At the Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Fransisco Glu Mobile and Nokia unveiled a number of new N-Gage games. The Dark Knight ties in with the new Batman movie and sees you fighting to eradicate crime in Gotham city. SPEED RACER, also tying in with an upcoming movie, is a racing game while Super Slam Ping Pong is a fight title in the style of Super K.O. Boxing.
Playyou, the social gaming network that lets you build your own games (Hmmm, why does that sound familiar) has a nice Q&A on their blog with Kars Alfrink, who does consulting work with them. Partly it's to highlight his upcoming talk at the Games Developer Conference on Casual Social Gaming, but also about Playyoo's Games Creator software.
Yamake has broken cover, in the latest N-Gage press release. A 'game creating game,' players are able to pick and mix their own games from a range of mini-games, add in their own skins, themes, text, sound clips and movies from their PC. These can then be uploaded and shared with the rest of the Yamake community.
Gamasutra has a fascinating editorial by Russell Carroll, from
Reflexive Games, talking about the amount of piracy in casual games and
what measures have proven effective. The scary number is that piracy
runs at up to 92% for their titles, and rather than one pirate copy
equals one lost sales, Reflexive found that they had to stop one
thousand pirate downloads to gain one extra sale.
This weeks All About Symbian Insight, #12, focuses on N-Gage First Access (the pre-release version of the N-Gage client and select games). In the podcast Ewan and Rafe talk over their first impressions and some of the choices Nokia have made in strategy, positioning and pricing. This weeks Insight is a shortened version as we're busy get ready for MWC next week.
Following on from today's launch of N-Gage First Access, Ewan, in 30 minutes with the N-Gage First Access client gives us his first impressions of the system and a summary of the user experience of the N-Gage client. In the piece Ewan covers installation, game installation and the community features of the client application.
A pre-release version of Nokia's new N-Gage gaming platform is now available for Nokia N81 users. N-Gage First Access lets N81 owners download the pre-release version of the N-Gage application (through which all N-Gage activity takes place) and try and buy select N-Gage games. Other N-Gage compatible devices will be added to the service in due course. Read on for more.
Over on All About N-Gage, we're getting excited about an unconfirmed video which appears to be a trailer for Worms on Next Gen N-Gage. It's from a fairly reliable source, and it features the N81 plus graphics never seen on the original gen N-Gage version. Worms publisher THQ has already said they're supporting Next Gen N-Gage, so a new version of Worms would make a lot of sense.
In All About Symbian Insight # 7 (AAS Podcast #55) Steve, Ewan and Rafe look back at 2007 and pick out their highlights from the year. We cover the Nokia N95, a resurgent UIQ and Nokia's Ovi announcement. In the second half of the podcast we turn our attention to 2008 and make a few predictions.
A small but interesting morsel from the folks at Projectnext.eu: If you have the latest version of Nokia PC Suite installed, and rename any file using the extension .n-gage it will automatically adopt a Nokia application icon, and right-clicking on it will bring up an option to install it. This option doesn't work of course, but the fact that it appears implies that PC Suite has already been designed with the Next Gen N-Gage platform in mind.
It's nearly the end of 2007, so we're presenting a short and sweet round-up of seasonal S60 3rd Edition themes in honour of the upcoming New Year. Don't forget the Champagne and assorted party snacks! UPDATE: We've now added PiZero's freshly-created collection of New Year themes. SECOND UPDATE: The legendary Babi has now come up with a New Year 2008 theme, which we've added to the article. THIRD UPDATE: As if to complete the trilogy, P@sco has done a New Year theme as well.
It's possibly the biggest and best game ever created for S60, has texture-mapped 3D surfaces, innovative puzzles and gameplay, a fabulous soundtrack and it's exclusively available for S60 3rd Edition and S60 2nd Edition phones. It's Lament Island, and it's reviewed in detail here by our very own Krisse, who awards it a coveted AAS MegaGame award. Highly recommended.
Nokia today announced a new first party game for the Next Gen N-Gage platform called Dirk Spanner, which uses a phone's camera to control the game (apparently you can look round locations by just moving the phone). Find out more over on All About N-Gage...
In the last Friday gaming spot before N-Gage launches (well, that's the theory anyway), I bring you Attila's review of Stolen in 60 Seconds, plus Krisse's review of Quartz 2, both top notch games with wide Symbian OS device compatibility. Have fun with them and let's hope we have even bigger fish to fry come next Friday and Christmas!
