Cruise the Caribbean in a bid to save your father from pirates in the lates N-Gage game, out today.
Sail from island to island and do battle on sea and on land, with a wide variety of units, resources and terrains.
There are multiplayer options as well, via Bluetooth or N-Gage arena.
Nokia have announced today the upcoming release of Habbo Islands, a N-Gage game designed to connect the Habbo Hotel Community.
Habbo Islands offers an exotic, fun-filled adventure vacation to both existing Habbo Hotel users as well as people experiencing Habbo for the first time.
There will be twenty adventures set in four environments but unlike the original, online environment, (and unlike the focus of many of the N-Gages other games on multi player environments) this will be a single player affair.
There is certainly a wide existing user base to which this game will appeal and Nokia are no doubt hoping to boost N-Gage sales to a new audience.
Asteroids, Battlezone, Black Widow, Millipede, Missile Command, Red Baron, Lunar Lander and Super Breakout.
All old Atari titles now released by Nokia on the N-Gage platform under the title Atari Masterpieces, Volume 1.
Will anyone want to play these classics? They do fit well on a small screen, so maybe.
Volume 2 will follow next year.
EA sports have announced that mobile versions of the following games are in production:
Harvest Mania
Word Whomp™
World Class Solitaire
Squelchies
In addition, mobile games gased on FIFA Street, DEF JAM® and SimCity™ are being developed.
Artificial Life, Inc. have announced they are to release an artificial boyfriend who will ‘live’ on your mobile phone.
Aimed at the 15-30 age market, the persona interacts over the 3G network, and has an independent life with other artificial friends and are rendered in full 3D.
The previous release of V-girl won the Ericsson Mobile Application Award in 2004 for best mobile game. The game needs to be supported by your network provider as it continually updates over time (rather than downloading all the data in one go).
If you are looking for a mobile girlfriend, hop on over to V Girl for a demonstration.
The N-GAGE ACADEMY, is newly launched by Nokia. Primarily an advertising opportunity, there is a free mobile phone game download available, with the aim “to teach mobile phone users how to download and share games”.
The game is available for selected Nokia phones, and not just the N-Gage. There is also an online space invaders style game that you can play on the site, that might afford a few minutes distraction.
In this interview in the St Petersburg Times, James Gosling of Sun Microsystems makes some interesting observations about the future of Java, programming and as a result, cell phones.
Two I liked that there is 100% penetration of cell phones in Brazil (due to government subsidies) and that half of Brazil paid their taxes by phone last year!
There is a report on Spong that Commodore, the company that made personal computers and consoles, is set to release it’s back catalogue for mobile phones.
This follows in the wake of Atari and Sega, amongst others, releasing their older arcade games. Whilst it will add variety to the mobile format, the games can hardly be said to be cutting edge!
More interestingly, the BBC have an interview with Thor Gunnarson of mobile game developers Ideaworks3D, talking about the future of mobile gaming, and of bringing up to date PC games to the mobile format. Games such as The Sims and Need for Speed Underground 2 that will only become viable with 3G and a flat rate charge for data download. This would enable the data for games to be grabbed as needed by the device, rather than having to be stored in the phones limited memory.
Gunnarson describes how this works in NFSU2, where the game “relies completely on network-based storage and only pulls down levels, cars and characters it needs at that point in time. It’s constantly shuffling data back and forth.”