Nokia N-Gage. Nostalgia post and building an emulator with games
Nostalgia is not only about Dendy, Sega and PlayStation, which every gamer of the 90s and 00s spent a lot of time playing! Very often this is a favorite mobile phone that serves as a multimedia system. And even though phones in the 2000s were not distinguished by large and well-developed projects with beautiful graphics, there were still devices that combined two worlds – phones and game consoles. We are talking, as you might have guessed, about N-Gage, which has become so beloved by many thanks to the opportunity to pass the time in virtual worlds, for example, with the PlayStation.
It’s an amazing fact, but almost all over the world Nokia’s attempt to compete with Nintendo in the market of pocket gaming systems was generally not particularly noticed, except for Russia and some CIS countries. Here their new (at that time) line of N-Gage devices was happily accepted and won people's love. Unfortunately, I did not own such a cool mobile phone, so I could only touch it by borrowing it from friends, but since I wanted to play Tomb Raider, Worms or Colin McRae Rally 2005 on my own phone, I had to dodge…
In those years, I was very lucky, as I was the owner of a Nokia 6600 – a “point-and-shoot”, as it was called for its unusual design. An amazing phone that even withstood a hit against the wall, absolutely without any damage (which cannot be said about the wall on which the dent appeared))). Eh, they knew how to make phones before…
The point is that my 6600 was able to run most games with Nokia N-Gage, which predetermined my pastime for many months to come – Bomberman, Pandemonium, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, Rayman and many other games became my constant companions in those years. But I have no memories of the Tomb Rider and Colin McRae Rally 2005 described above… apparently, they simply did not start or worked poorly on my device.
N-Gage is made on the Nokia Series 60 platform, which has proven itself on previously released phones Nokia 7650 And 3650and the appearance was taken from the player phone Nokia 3300. If we look at the product through the eyes of the buyer of those years, then for its time it was quite good and, despite certain shortcomings, was considered a worthy purchase (especially for a teenager). Judge for yourself: in addition to the ability to run technologically advanced games for 2003 (including projects in full 3D), N-Gage allowed not only checking your email, but also fully surfing the global web using XHTML or a WAP browser, and MP3 support allowed you to use device as a full-fledged music player and install third-party applications! But there is a fly in the ointment: one of the biggest drawbacks of the N-Gage is the presence of a speaker on the side of the phone. For this reason, when you received a call, you had to lean it not like any other classic phone, but on the side, which looked very stupid from the outside!
Interesting fact: N-Gage of certain batches came out with defects: the phone had to be reset to factory settings in order to avoid cyclic rebooting of the device (bootloop), which in times of no Internet everyone still had to guess.
The N-Gage SDK used C++, which made porting some titles amazingly easier. Tomb Raider, Pandemonium, Sonic, Tony Hawks Pro Skater, SSX: Out of Bounds were released almost in their original form. But this did not greatly help the sales of the device due to banal piracy, because N-Gage did not even need to be flashed! Methods for copying from the original MMS were found instantly, and the games were hacked almost immediately, which greatly helped not very wealthy users, given that the cards were quite expensive. True, in those years N-Gage was infected en masse from pirated application sites. Viruses, for the most part, were meaningless – they simply interfered with the use of the device, blocking various functions (like Bluetooth, GPRS or launching applications) and, as a rule, were destroyed by formatting, but, you see, this is not what you expect when downloading a pirated Tomb Raider))).
I'll play devil's advocate a little and explain why people used hacked games. Firstly, licensed games were sold very rarely, and therefore finding them, especially in small CIS cities, was a rather non-trivial task. In the West, the wrong distribution policy was initially chosen, which is why, as a rule, you had to go to a cellular operator’s store for a new project, and not to a gaming outlet. Secondly, this is a banal reluctance to turn off and disassemble the phone in order to change the card with the game to another. Agree, taking out the battery, inserting a flash drive with a game, and then waiting for the device to turn on is not the most convenient solution. Thank God, this problem was solved in the second version of the device (N-Gage QD), which was the most common in our country.
Interesting fact: N-Gage supported MMS memory cards up to 2 GB, but the optimal size at which everything worked stably was 1 GB. And this, let me remind you, was in 2003, when phones like Siemens SL55which had 1.6 MB of memory!!!
By the way, if one of your friends had the same phone (or it supported games from it), you could arrange multiplayer fights via Bluetooth. I still remember playing Explode Arena and Worms with my friends and it was really cool!
The first generation had stereo sound, an edge-mounted speaker, two 2.5mm Jacks (stereo, headset/microphone, and radio antenna) and did not have the ability to replace MMS cards with games without turning off the phone. In addition, there was a fairly extensive range of accessories, including interchangeable housings.
Nokia, having realized many of the mistakes made when launching a new gaming device, released an updated model a year later, which they called Nokia N-Gage QD. The second generation was cheaper, but for this we had to give up many of the features of the first model. The radio, stereo output, as well as the MP3 player, which was previously installed by default, but now had to be downloaded from third-party companies, came under the knife. In addition, the appearance was redesigned (in my opinion, the QD became more beautiful, and most importantly, much more compact), Hot Swap was added (MMC cards could be changed without turning off the device), the battery capacity was increased, and the speaker was moved to the front side of the phone. But in the second generation, the RAM was not increased, which was quite sufficient for most gaming situations, but some games, like the same The Elder Scrolls Travels: Shadowkey (the most technically advanced game on N-Gage), ran at 10 FPS. Even if I started TES by killing the phone application and overclocking the processor, I managed to get about 15 FPS, which, as you understand, is not enough for a comfortable game. By the way, I remember well from those times that it was best to run high-performance games like TES on small memory cards (about 32-128 MB) so that they would not slow down so much, but I don’t remember, so that one of my friends is driven this way for the sake of greater productivity.
One of the biggest problems was not its technical execution or errors at the concept stage (remember the same speaker on the side), but its price of $299. This is why not many people could purchase this device. And if you add to this the cost of the games themselves (from 30 to 50 dollars), it turns out to be quite expensive. All this led to the development of piracy, which, in the almost complete absence of any protection, hardly allowed the Finnish company to earn a lot of money. If we consider the N-Gage as a gaming device and look at its competitors, the Game Boy Advance was clearer, more reliable and had more games (although it did not have 3D), and the PSP and Nintendo DS, although they came out a year later (at the same time as the N-Gage) Gage QD), were significantly more advanced devices, with larger screens (in the case of the DS, even two), more beautiful graphics, as well as other cool advantages that greatly distinguished these consoles from their competitors (for example, a touch screen and microphone on the Nintendo DS).
N-Gage boasted a lot of really cool games like Pathway to Glory (turn-based tactical strategy about the Second World War), which became the most successful game on the platform; Asphalt Urban GT, which first came out on N-Gage and became one of the most popular races on the platform (but many of us in those years became acquainted with it in the form of a simplified version for regular phones); yes, even an MMO game (!) – Pocket Kingdom – existed on this system!
Trailer Asphalt Urban GT 2 for N-Gage
But Nokia did not stop there and, wanting to provide the most favorable conditions for gamers, was not too lazy to create the N-Gage Arena service – a full-fledged online community with the ability to purchase games and download updates for them, read news and announcements of upcoming projects, and so on. A sort of Xbox Live from the early 2000s for Nokia products. Despite the fact that it existed for 7 years, it was not particularly popular. The feature of the service was the ability to publish your gaming achievements in the world rankings. It’s a pity that rarely has any game gone further, for example, allowing you to play your product online. It's funny, but in those years there were news reports that with the help of N-Gage Arena operators and retail chains will be able to hold gaming tournaments under their own brand, but I haven’t heard of any such event. And you?
Unfortunately, the phone failed to bring in big sales and the project had to be cancelled, but this Nokia experiment remained in the hearts of many of us, giving us many happy hours with the N-Gage in our hands. Thanks to him for this!
If you, like me, love to get nostalgic by launching projects you spent a lot of time on decades ago, subscribe to the Old Favorite Gamer channel. There I try to create all the conditions for this. For example, this time I posted the N-Gage emulator for Windows, Linux, Mac and Android with detailed instructions for launching it and a large archive with games for it!
