As first party titles (i.e. published under Nokia's name), both games are titles that might have previously been part of the N-Gage platform. However, despite the closure of N-Gage, Nokia has continued to commission game development, providing showcase titles, technology demonstrators and brand/marketing tie ins. Other recent examples include Ovi Maps Racing (review), Inclusion and Climate Mission.
Rovio is best known for its recent hit Angry Birds, but has a long history as a mobile game developer, producing a number of widely admired title. It has produced a number of games in the Bounce series for Nokia, most notably Bounce Boing Voyage and Bounce Touch.
Ovi Maps Challenge
Ovi Maps Challenge is one part branding exercise, one part educational application and one part quiz game. It tests your geography knowledge across a number of mini games: matching the flags to country names, locating landmarks on a maps, ordering countries and cities in population order and so on.
The game has two playing modes, action and quiz. In the first, the aim is to answer as many questions as possible, in the time allowed. In the latter you have a set number of questions, but a limited amount of time. The two styles require a different approach - rapid fire versus careful consideration. The level of difficulty depends on what mini game you are playing - some are quite easy (e.g. choosing three countries from a given continent), but some of them are more difficult (e.g. matching countries to their outline).
In order to give the game a longer shelf life and encourage repeat play, there is a passport section that measures your progress. As you play the quiz and action rounds (at the continent level), you will collect countries. This gives a goal to work towards and keeps you coming back for more, it certainly has the 'one more round' syndrome captured nicely. Once you have 'collected' a country you can see its vital statistics, which are also used in the game. In theory, if you memorise all the country data, you'll always know the answers when playing the game! In practice, remembering the population of some of the more obscure cities in the game is far from trivial.
The core game is free to download from the Ovi Store, but there are also add-on packs available (Europe, America, Africa, Asia), which extend the game with additional playing areas. Each pack costs £1/€1 and is a clever way of collecting some extra revenue; this kind of freemium model is something that I expect to see a lot more of in the future, especially once in-application billing is supported by Ovi Store.
Ovi Maps Challenge may not have the graphical wow of some games, and some may baulk at the educational element, but it is slickly implemented (in Flash Lite) with easy and intuitive gameplay. It's a great example of how a well thought out mobile game, with relatively basic gameplay, can be just as pleasing as more technically sophisticated games.
Bounce Boing Battle
Bounce Boing Battle is the latest addition to Nokia's Bounce series of games, that stretches right back to the era of the Nokia 9210. Bounce games generally involve a bright red rubber ball navigating through some kind of landscape or platform. This time round, things are a little different.
The game, which is played on two different phones, connected over Bluetooth, offers a Bounce style variation on the classic game Pong. Players bounce a ball between each other - batting it back and forth - with the aid of paddles. The ball disappears off the top of your screen and reappears on your opponent's screen (you can almost imagine it jumping the Bluetooth ether).
However, rather than having a movable paddle, players must draw a line, off which the ball will bounce. The challenge is to draw your line in the right place, at the right time. The more times the ball has been exchanged, the faster it gets, which means the longer the rally, the more challenging the game becomes. It's a clever concept and is obviously ideally suited to touchscreen phones. Sadly, there's no option to have an AI opponent, Bounce Boing Battle is only available as a two player human game, which does limit playing time.
Bounce Boing Battle can be downloaded, for free, from the Ovi Store.