"If someone from Nokia is reading this and wants feedback on Next Gen N-Gage, it would be nice if they could do the following:
- Make all the games properly explain the controls for the phone model they're running on, eg. games on the N81 should all say what the gaming keys actually do. Even nicer would be a model-specific diagram with arrows pointing to each button saying what it does (the game can detect the phone's model number, so it could also know which diagram to load).
- Allow people to customise the controls. This is something that computer games have featured since their dawn in the 1980s, and it would be bizarre if this option wasn't available on N-Gage games.
- Allow people to choose which landscape they want to use (d-pad on the left or d-pad on the right) in all games. The FIFA demo allows this, but the other demos don't.
- Discourage third-party publishers from time-limiting or go-limiting on demos, especially those with complicated controls. Obviously a third-party publisher can do what they want, but they have to realise that the target audience of the new N-Gage platform is very casual, possibly including people who have never played commercial games. Time-limited or go-limited demos often mean potential customers never get to know what a game is like."
The Nokia N81 - Gaming, issues, demos and to-dos
Published by Steve Litchfield at
Over on sister site All About N-Gage, Tzer2 reviews the Nokia N81 in detail, concentrating on its suitability for game playing in general and N-Gage games in particular. The three demo N-Gage games (FIFA, Asphalt and Space Impact) are all reviewed in detail and there's some important advice for Nokia in terms of what's left to do when preparing the rest of the N-Gage game catalog.