I spoke recently about Nokia and the slow emergence of the next generation of mobile gaming. At that point, the Nseries devices had one or two custom N-Gage games in the ROM. Nokia have put on a strong showing at this week’s E3 gadget-porn exhibition conference. Still proudly showing off the N-Gage brand, Nokia have brought a number of impressive titles to Lon Angeles.
No longer seen as being in competition with the likes of the Sony PSP and the Nintendo DS, the experience gained in marketing the 'N-Gage classic' pair of devices is clearly showing. Confident programmers, a thorough understanding of multiplayer and connected gaming over a mobile connection, and knowledge that only being in the gaming market for a number of years can bring. The games are split along two lines. The first are the ‘full’ games, in C++, and the second are the Java based games that take advantage of the online experience Nokia now has. The full C++ games first of all. As many of you know, or can read comments and see the problem, the latest Nokia S60 devices are all using S60 3rd edition. This means there is no binary compatibility with the original N-Gage. In short, you can’t take the code of the original N-Gage games and put them on an N93. And anyway, with a number of the first games (e.g. Puzzle Bobble), you’d really want to bury them so far underground that people forget about them.
And of couse Nokia aren’t selling the phones as loss-leaders. That role has been passed onto the networks – and with SNAP, Nokia have provided them another revenue stream to recoup that subsidy. So yes, please carry on and have a giggle at the N-Gage. I can see a lot of people treating Nokia as a bumbling magician, but never forget that magician can always turn round and suddenly produce five tanks, on stage, apparently from nothing.
The move to S60 3rd Edition has been telegraphed for a long time though, and the developers behind these flagship titles aren’t bedroom coders. You can be sure that each game has been programmed in the modular way that Symbian has always recommended. Keep the game engine separate to the drawing routines, to the processor calls, and so on. So while the code-base may be measured in Megabytes, it’s highly doubtful that an entire re-write would be needed. And given that they knew this would be coming, later titles such as Snakes and System Rush would be ready for the change.And you should all note that the aforementioned titles are shipping in the firmware of the N70 and N93. So it’s fair to say that Nokia have a massive number of titles, ostensibly from the N-Gage, that are ready to rock and roll over the entire Nseries range (and potentially further). Titles like Warhammer. Like Civilisation. Like Atari Legends. Like “One” (which gets a deserved sequel). Now, the other titles are probably less flashy, but are actually more important in the short to medium term – and are also much more attractive to the carriers. These games (Creatures of the Deep, Pocket Aces, Pro Series Golf and Space Impact) are Java titles, but come with online support through the SNAP mobile gaming system.
Just before the N-Gage was first launched, Nokia picked up a number of technologies from the Sega Dreamcast home console, and one of them was the Internet/multiplayer technology SNAP. Work on the N-Gage Arena was already progressing and, while a lot of the experience (and hardware) went to the N-Gage, the system was targeted to provide multiplayer support to Java games, and as a toolkit for Java developers (SNAP is one of the first third party pieces of code that make it into Sun’s Java Toolkit, not counting the JSR’s). It also offers a white label solution to networks and allowed them to get a piece of the action in mobile gaming.