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Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land Hey, Nokia: just because your own experiment with handheld gaming went pear-shaped doesn’t mean you can go advertising other people’s games on your phones.
Act fast, N-Gage users. You only have until September 2010 to snap up games for the platform, as Nokia Oyj is putting the oft-ridiculed mobile platform turned mobile games service down for good.
Oh, Canada. You marvelous country with your marvelous Canadian things. While we’d never want to leave the country, Nokia has shuttered its N-Gage development outfit in the region.
Ah, N-Gage. Such a…tarnished brand. You’d think after two failed N-Gage handsets and a “who cares?” launch of an N-Gage gaming portal, Nokia would just give up. But they’re not.
The Nintendo DS is able to communicate wirelessly. So can Sony’s PlayStation Portable. Which is a problem for Wall Wireless, a company that claims they own a patent for said technology.
Nokia’s panel of experts has deliberated and ruminated on the subject of innovative mobile gaming and decided to award the top prize in the Mobile Games Innovation Challenge to Ghostwire.
Sturgeon’s Law states that “Ninety percent of everything is crap”. I don’t think I am being too controversial by suggesting that if Theodore Sturgeon had ever encountered mobile phone games he would have revised upwards.
The ZeeMote JS1 is a nunchuk-like Bluetooth analogue controller that we first covered back in October last year.
It was a nice idea, hampered slightly by the fact that games had to be rewritten to add support for the thing. Now Nokia has decided to embrace the ZeeMote by releasing downloadable software to let the controller work with almost any S60 app or N-Gage game.
The ZeeKey app is available for free download from the Nokia website and the mobile manufacturer has promised to bundle the app with selected handsets (presumably its more entertainment focused N-Series models).
Zeekey app for Zeemote available for Nokia phones [Pocket Lint]
PocketGamer got a look at a new accelerometer-based mobile racing game from Firemint.
As you can see from the video, Real Racing runs on the iPhone — and certainly confirms our hopes for that platform’s gaming prowess — but Firemint also have it up and running on a Nokia N95 (all the recent N-series phones have motion sensors built in).
Multiplayer races can take place over a wifi link, and your racing stats are automatically uploaded to the Firemint web site. Brilliantly, the game will also upload videos of your best times to YouTube and share your rankings via Facebook and OpenSocial into the bargain.
GCDC 2008: Firemint shows off awesome iPhone racing game [PocketGamer]
I’m not really sure how they do things in the US, but down here, standard mobile phone contracts last for two years. Once that time’s up, 99.8% of people go and get a new phone. Simple plan, everybody wins. OH. Except for anyone with a Nokia phone who actually buys games over their new N-Gage platform. See, the games are locked to the handset you purchase them on. If you break your handset, you’ll get them reissued, but if you upgrade to a new phone, you lose your games. Nokia’s explanation? Our policy is that the N-Gage activation codes only work on the device where they were first activated. As with any digital media there is a potential risk of piracy and this policy is one of the ways we are dealing with piracy and ensuring our partners receive their rightful revenues from our platform.
Way to go, Nokia. Didn’t think anybody could have a worse DRM track record than Microsoft, but then, records are meant to be broken.
Gamers ‘angry’ over new N-Gage’s DRM [Develop]
