Do you remember the first time you heard about the N-Gage? I do. It was an advertisement in EGM and it had a kid on a skateboard playing the game while jumping at the camera or something. It was horrendous. I'm not sure who they thought they were marketing it to, but I thought to myself that I'd have a good laugh when this thing fell flat on its face and went belly up. It pretty much did so within the first few weeks of its release when sales were terrible, and continued to suck thanks to a plethora of poor design choices. However, it kicked and screamed its way into 2005 (with a few decent games) until the system was basically replaced by smarter, better phones. Games still came out for the platform, but there wasn't really an N-Gage anymore.
Still, one last vestige of the N-Gage remained, keeping me from having my full laugh. The N-Gage store was still open and the community still existed. No longer. Nokia has announced that as of yesterday the N-Gage gaming service will no longer function and all of its games will be moved over to the Ovi Store. No further games will be pubhlished and on September of 2010 Nokia will put the final nail in the coffin by removing all N-Gage games from the Ovi Store as well. Don't worry if you happen to have some N-Gage games already because they will still work, but any community connectivity features will stop functioning.
I can freely laugh now at the failed attempt to capture the cell phone/gaming market. Am I being cruel?
Matthew Razak is Destructoid's Associate editor and co-founder of film site
Flixist. He began as community member "cowzilla" and was since sequestered to write brainy features material. He lives in Los Angeles with his beautiful wife.
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Contest:
2:00 PM on 10.31.2009
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"Okay, this is one gaming system I do not want at ALL".
It changed my life forever.
(In private, obviously.)
Hey, at least they probably knew what a HIGHER-up is...But yah, the N-Gage sucked, looked like it had potential at first then it just bombshelled, an idea with a bad implementation and a failed expirement.
Oh well, good riddance, taco shell phone and N-Gage QuesaDilla.
Honestly, I can't even give them credit for doing the wrong thing first. Crap Dpad and phone buttons as game buttons just don't cut it, and never really has for any mobile phone. I feel like the iPhone hasn't even done it right, really. Even with multi touch, you're still emulating a superior input method: an honest-to-goodness NES D-Pad.
I work as a mobile games tester and to be frankly honest, the best mobile gaming phone would be a DS Lite/i with a third screen on the closed top to act as the phone. Size, functionality, and the proper hardware to actually play a game that isn't Tetris or tower defense.
You think Sony fanboys are the worst? You had to see this guy.
I'm pretty sure there were cell phones that played games before the N-Gage.
And given that the iPhone lacks any buttons (and taco-shaped ugliness), I don't think Apple was inspired by the N-Gage...at all.
I think few would shed any tears for the death of N-Gage. I am surprised that it has lasted this long. I remember hearing about the death of the N-Gage quite a while ago. Didn't they stop making them in 2006 or something like that?
Ok, not really, fuck that thing. I just want a taco.
I wonder what wouldve happened if I punched him at the time?
Yeah, I looked that up afterwards and saw VBagX, haha. Still, the NGage was one of the first to support it with S60v1. I mean, I even had a mosquito repeller on the thing. I just discovered a little trick to get a few of those apps working on my N95 and I am very happy about it.
It was able to emulate nes/snes/gbc/gba games , and gba was the portal console of that age. How is that bad? instead of a gba you could get an n-gage and have a gaming console, phone, and the n-gage games too. I admit they didn't make many good games, but i remember a really good "war" game, like an RTS style. And of course, pocket kingdom! Had you seen until that time any other portable mmo game? If you don't know pocket kingdom, you sure should try it. it's awsome.