Just thought I'd update with a few initial impressions. btw, Stinkles is very awesome and I am now oath bound to troll his enemies.
You do indeed need a sim card to play the ngage. It was getting ridiculously hard to get a local cell store to give me a burnt out card, so I just bought the cheapest prepaid sim I could get with the idea I could have it activated if I wanted to try out the Arena services. My current phone doesn't use a sim based service.
The QD unit is pretty nice. Small and not that bad to look at in person. Most importantly in the short time I've played around with it I see that it really holds a charge well. At least when you just use it as games platform. Being able to hot swap your games and back in and out of titles to the vast array of other functions and save at most any time, etc. seem such obvious design functions when you have a unit that does it. And there really are a lot of functions on the phone even natively. With decent, albeit mono, sound it's pretty attractive even though the screen is a bit small. It is bright and also adjustable. Function and size wise it feels like a slightly larger dream gba. Not cheap like a gba, but solid with a bunch of little tech. Nice.
I messed around with some of the early cross-platform stuff like Sonic and Tony Hawk and it was just a waste of time. Sub par gba like iterations but with more slowdown. Not very compelling and just played out at this point. I imagine having one of these phones from the very beginning was a very different experience than being able to jump in with the gems. And there are indeed some gems in my short experience.
Rifts - Really my most anticipated title. I wish all the intriguing Western PnP rpgs got video game iterations because while I followed the design of many of them I really wasn't a basement rpg player for much of my youth. It's very faithful to what I remember of the source material. Just a ton of customization in your character and skills, weaponry, etc. Very cool. In brief playtime I would say it has nice presentation, a real faithful attitude to the game world, some occasionally surprising text and a few too many fetch quests. It does seem to be shaping up as quite an epic, lengthy mobile rpg though.
Glimmerati - It's great when a classic genre gets a new coat of presentation or humor. Glimmerati has that in spades. Basically a well done top down racer like Top Gears or Karnaaj on gba, it's a tournament racing game played out within the confines of a funny soap opera of the jet setting rich. Great sound, nice sprites and scaling,etc. just a great little game all around. I look forward to seeing how it justifies a "mature" rating from the esrb.
Pocket Kingdom - I think many will remember this one. It's a mmorpg lite by Sega that wraps itself in l33t speak and other internet humors. Grab territory, buy troops, rinse repeat. Some nice touches but I would guess that arena might add more to the concept than the single player portion does. Not terribly compelling at first.
Pathway to Glory - Holy shit. Hands down the best initial impression of any game on ngage for me. Great presentation, incredibly fun and well implemented strategy play...this is far better than I imagined. It's hard to explain how intricate the level of detail is in this ww2 simulation while retaining an ease of use. The fact that there is a sequel and a pirate <gasp!> game by the same developer on the platform would have made me buy one earlier probably had I tried it. Initially at least, it's that good. I bought a gba for Advance Wars and PtG is the game that so far convinces me the most that Nokia really found a source for at least a few games of comparable quality.
So it's really too bad that most will never experience some of this content. A lot of it was probably bad, some of it was probably better than it needed to be and at least a bit of it seems to be the equal of anything on other portable systems. If you are also a strategy fan I would definitely try out Rifts and the offerings of Red Lynx. It's a straight up shame most gamers haven't gotten to try their work (as far as I know). If Nokia can't come up with a marketable plan for their next console entry, that company needs to link up with someone who can get such excellence out to a wider audience.
Good stuff. When you consider that most of these games have a whole other aspect of multiplayer online gaming that I haven't been able to try yet the shame of the economics of the game business can get downright depressing. But I will explore it a bit further at the very least playing all of the Red Lynx stuff along with hopefully Catan and System Rush (a futuristic shooter).
Too much good western development wasted on a stillborn platform!
