E3 - John Romero's Newest FPS, Via N-Gage

It seems that Nokia's 'mobile game deck', the N-Gage has lured John Romero and his Monkeystone Games posse back from reliving their 2D shareware glory days with Hyperspace Delivery Boy, and onto his 3D shareware FPS glory days, with their own adaptation of THQ's first-person shooter Red Faction. Here are links to the new Red Faction N-Gage trailer in MPEG-4 and Quicktime.Update: 05/13 15:58 GMT by H : We had a story on N-Gage a couple months back.

Wow--it's Doom on Mars!

[writertype]

Geez, look at the video--crates, ramps, all the old standbys. It seriously looks like Doom with mouselook, sans demons.

Earth to Romero--we've moved on.

N-Gage - facts

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked on the N-Gage briefly so here's some 'insider' info :)

• It's a phone running Symbian 6.1 which is shaped like a GBA (original, not SP) without shoulder buttons.
  
• The screen is 208x176. Yes, the screen is portrait, great for vertical space shooters, crap for anything else. It's really bright and really crisp, but much, much too small. It can do 4096 colours (RGB444) which is fine IMHO.
  
• It's got Bluetooth, no IR and GSM/GPRS.
  
• You can get games on Flash cards which it has a built-in reader for BUT the reader is on the back of the phone, UNDER the battery cover and the slot is obscured by the battery. You have to remove the battery to change your flash card!!!
  
• The 'getting-a-call-whilest-playing-a-game' senario that's been mentioned really wasn't that much of a problem for me. I was only using it at work, but I kept my personal SIM in sometimes (when my own phones' battery had run out). The transition from game to phone was pretty smooth (espically with headphones on) and the transition back was fine too.
  
• To use it has a phone you have to hold it like a big ear to the side of your head. The mike/speaker is along the top of the unit. Kinda hard to picture, but it encourages you to use the hands-free :)
  
• I have yet to see (i.e. we couldn't get it working and Nokia couldn't show us a working demo) more than 2 phones connected simultaneously via Bluetooth. Which kinda defeats the purpose IMHO. BT on the whole was really hard to get working in any real way, the API's and docs suck and the performance of the Nokia demos that we were suppiled with sucked too (<10 fps, but we were able to improve that significantly with some 'imaginitive' coding). Still even on the production phones (i.e. 7650) the total throughput was pretty lousy.
  

All in all I wasn't that impressed with it. The chip (ARM9) and board (some kind of TI OMAP) were very impressive, but the screen, controls and storage media really let it down. The OS is not well suited to writing games at all, which is a big no-no for a games platform. On the plus side, the CPU and RAM are really powerful for the size and battery. It can piss all over the GBA's ARM7 and various memory spaces. However, I think that the obvious design flaws and (probably) insane price will leave the GBA with little to worry about.