Nokia is calling on mobile developers with new ideas to take part in its Mobile Games Innovation Challenge, and at least one winning game will be published by Nokia on its new N-Gage platform (which is based on S60 3rd Edition). Entries will be accepted from the 3rd of April 2008, so if you're interested it might be worth starting work now. Established developers and publishers can already apply to publish commercially on the platform, or find out more on the N-Gage developer site.
Popcap Games (or the online gaming equivalent of crack cocaine) have inked an agreement with Nokia to bring a number of their titles to mobile, and to use the SNAP
mobile platform to provide multi-player support for the Java based
titles. In rough terms, SNAP is similar to the N-Gage Arena, but
primarily for J2ME applications, and it can also be run by a network
provider as their own gaming portal (eg YourNetwork Gaming Portal, SNAP powered), which should make the networks as happy as the gamers.
MoCo News is carrying a number of reports from the Games Developer Confernece in San Francisco, including this keynote from Gameloft's CEO Michael Guillemot. With news that there was no Christmas spike in mobile game sales, he compared the current market to that of the end of life of a console - which should promise an upturn in 2008 as new hardware, techniques and greater public visibility will help drive awareness and (hopefully) sales.
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.
For those of you with an N81 (cough), Tetris and World Series Poker have just been added to N-Gage 1st Access. We'll have some screens and impressions for you very shortly...
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.
