With a passion for Snakes and armed with N-Gage on his trusty Nokia N95, Ewan Spence was the logical choice of reviewer for the brand new Snakes Subsonic. Unfortunately, Ewan reckons that the three year old original is slicker and smoother in most departments and that the new Snakes implementation suffers from numerous design and performance issues. Here's the full review of Snakes Subsonic.
Read on in the full article.
After the masterpiece that was Snakes for the original N-Gage, it's been puzzling why Nokia didn't use the same developer Iomo for the sequel. Looking it up though, Iomo was apparently bought and then closed down in 2007, so that might have something to do with it. A lot of the former team at Iomo apparently then formed a new company called Finblade:
You can get the original Snakes directly onto your phone through Download! on most S60 phones, it's not just for Nseries.
If you can't get it that way, try going to the Nokia 5700 support pages where there's a version that works on all S60 phones:
http://europe.nokia.com/A4403831
You can install the above Snakes file onto your phone using the Nokia PC Suite.
I've only tried the demo for about 1 minute. So I don't have any deep thoughts yet.
However, with regard to the "now you see it, now you don't" issue: I actually thought it was supposed to be that way, i.e. that obstacles appear un-announced and you have to react to them quickly. I think its conceivable that this is what they had in mind. 😊 As I only played it so briefly I cannot recall though if you can get from the animation a sense that it was meant to be visible all along but was just not drawn earlier because of lack of processing power/bad programming.
Thanks Krisse for the 'all purpose' Snakes link. Gamesters might like to note that this page also contains free Golf and Casino games - both Java, but still worth a download.
i thought rafe would have done review on snakes:subsonic, since he was so glad to see it on display at GO:PLAY event in london.
either way its a fun and enjoyable great - just feels lil bit laggy in places.
I do have to agree about this new version of Snakes. This is the only game that I have purchased on N-Gage so far, but I have downloaded various demos and it seems like this game's graphics are the worst of any I have seen. Just for kicks, I fired up the old standalone S60 Snakes game. It has better graphics, better speed and better "just pick up and play" experience.
Now that I have played a while and read this review, gone back and played the original, I now regret my purchase.
Emo185, I think the main problem for Snakes Subsonic is that the original Snakes set such high standards for graphics, sound and gameplay. It's very difficult to live up to Snakes, it was so well-written.
If Snakes Subsonic had appeared out of nowhere, maybe people would be kinder to it.
eh, it's bad but it's playable...
I absolutely agree, this was one of the titles I was most looking forward to, as soon as it was available for download I installed it and loaded it up expecting great things, as I've been a fan of Snakes since the Ngage version, but alas, I was hugely disappointed, as you said, there are lots of little things that ruin it, it's hard to explain, it doesn't feel as smooth as the 4 year old Snakes, the graphics are dissapointing, the control, I just stopped playing after 5 minutes and haven't played it since, feel like I've waited ages for something that should've been great but I'm really disappointed. Hooked On remains the best Ngage game I have so far. Good review.