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Fun Club Nokia is coming out with a handheld called the N-Gage. How will Nintendo respond?

HockeyBird

HockeyBird

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Nokia has just announced a gaming handheld and not only can it play games, but it's also a phone.

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Being able to call people goes beyond anything Nintendo's Game Boy Advance could do. Look how many buttons it has. The GBA only has two face buttons and two triggers. The lineup of games is looking stacked as well.

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Spiderman, Call of Duty, Splinter Cell. These are all heavy hitters. They even have Tomb Raider.

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Look at those graphics! What does Nintendo have? Some SNES ports? Golden Sun? Fire Emblem? It's gonna be an uphill battle. I think Nintendo should put our new hardware quick or else N-Gage is going to eat their lunch.
 
iu


What is this thing? It's got 2 screens, a touch screen, mic, wireless? This looks like trash, won't sell more than 10 million. Nintendoom!
 
"Wow I actually think this could be huge"


"This is genius. Nintendo needs to be watching. This is their future."


"This is such a great play by Nokia.

They read the market perfectly."
 
Pfff... imagine trying to make people play games on a mobile phone. Utter nonsense.

Unless I fucked up my 5-minute research, the N-Gage was the last "mainstream" console that didn't get at least one Madden title until the Switch came along.
 
It's funny as the N-Gage was the first to use plastic cases and flash-based carts before the DS in the portable space IIRC. I was really amazed at that back in 2003.
 
Oddly enough, phone gaming did become a dominant money maker eventually, just another example of trying something way too early, and too poorly.

I own one of these with the full US library, sadly, it's pretty awful even if impressive in ways.
 
I had one. They had already released the new model (QD?) at the time and were selling these ones for very cheap. The games actually played alright and there were some good ones, but the device itself was both a bad phone and a bad gaming device.

The worst thing was that the cart slot was blocked by the battery, so you had to shut down the whole thing and remove the battery to play another game.
 
I can never get over that in order to make calls on N-Gage, you had to hold it like a taco.
 
Man that GBA doom & gloom was absolutely hilarious when this thing was first revealed. Back then cell phones didn't get sold to minors, how the hell did Nokia think this was gonna be any success? Yet Nintendo haters jumped the gun right away just to say "GBA is dead and buried"...

It did get Civilization II and Xanadu Next and that hurt me a little.
 
9-Volt said:
Man that GBA doom & gloom was absolutely hilarious when this thing was first revealed. Back then cell phones didn't get sold to minors, how the hell did Nokia think this was gonna be any success? Yet Nintendo haters jumped the gun right away just to say "GBA is dead and buried"...

It did get Civilization II and Xanadu Next and that hurt me a little.
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I was 13/14 when N-Gage released and absolutely everyone my age had a cell phone. Smaller kids wouldn't have phones, but the idea of N-Gage was always to appeal to the "PlayStation audience". It was the PSP before the PSP.

Once people got their hands on the hardware it was also pretty clear that N-Gage only had nice tech going for it, but was otherwise very poorly designed. There was more ridicule (sideway phoning, having to take out the battery to switch games) than praise.
 
wrowa said:
I was 13/14 when N-Gage released and absolutely everyone my age had a cell phone. Smaller kids wouldn't have phones, but the idea of N-Gage was always to appeal to the "PlayStation audience". It was the PSP before the PSP.
Click to expand...
You could own one, but you couldn't go into a dealership and buy one. That was big misstep, to not provide your product directly to your audience. In contrast, GBA SP cheap and common enough for a 15 year old to go & pickup one.
 
yeah, idea was great, execution less so.
a better company with a different execution could have made it work (more iterative as phones where, but keep the core so that games work over different models, etc etc)
as it stands, there where to many caveats for it to be a success.
 
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9-Volt said:
You could own one, but you couldn't go into a dealership and buy one. That was big misstep, to not provide your product directly to your audience. In contrast, GBA SP cheap and common enough for a 15 year old to go & pickup one.
Click to expand...
yeah, that was one of the problems. well, i think her you could.
but even then, having it being software locked to not work as a phone till a provider unlocks it would probably have made it possible to sell it to minors.
the thing is, a handfull years later, every child teen had a phone, then there was a chance for it. i feel like it was just a hand full of years to early in its form.
 
0
By never releasing a Switch 2 until the Switch hardware becomes as old and obsolete as the N-Gage is today.
 
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Does anybody who actually owns this damn thing know if the games Support stereo audio separation via headphones?
 
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9-Volt said:
You could own one, but you couldn't go into a dealership and buy one. That was big misstep, to not provide your product directly to your audience. In contrast, GBA SP cheap and common enough for a 15 year old to go & pickup one.
Click to expand...

I didn't get a my first phone until 2004 when I was 15 but back then, flip phones are what every teen wanted. So even if the N-Gage could have been widely sold to young people, the form factor wasn't what people wanted in a phone.
 
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Weird af screen ration for a gaming device. A lot of screen space wasted on the vertical axis and a tiny horizontal space.
 
0
I remember trying out someone's N-Gage at school a very long time ago. I don't remember much of it other than trying Sonic N, which had at least half the framerate of the original GBA game.
 
0
Maybe they would have had a chance if they released the QD right away, avoiding many of the egregious design flaws the first "taco phone" had to deal with.
I remember how Nokia really tried to push the device with heavy marketing, back then the company still seemed pretty invulnerable. oh well.
 
0
Nintendo responded 15 years later by releasing Fire Emblem Engage, which will be a much more successful product!

;D
 
juuso said:
I had one. They had already released the new model (QD?) at the time and were selling these ones for very cheap. The games actually played alright and there were some good ones, but the device itself was both a bad phone and a bad gaming device.

The worst thing was that the cart slot was blocked by the battery, so you had to shut down the whole thing and remove the battery to play another game.
Click to expand...
That was one of the things they fixed with the “Quick and Dirty” QD revision, along with the infamous sidetalkin’.

They should have just released the QD first. They pulled a Microsoft and shipped the shitty first version. Never ship the shitty first version.
 
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It even looks like a taco. Selling my GBA right away to play some Tomb Raider on the go.
 
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wrowa said:
I was 13/14 when N-Gage released and absolutely everyone my age had a cell phone. Smaller kids wouldn't have phones, but the idea of N-Gage was always to appeal to the "PlayStation audience". It was the PSP before the PSP.

Once people got their hands on the hardware it was also pretty clear that N-Gage only had nice tech going for it, but was otherwise very poorly designed. There was more ridicule (sideway phoning, having to take out the battery to switch games) than praise.
Click to expand...
Everyone?!? I was 14 when it came out. Knew about 3-4 people who had a cell phone in my school out of 1200. It was so rare. Rural/suburban PA. And I think that was the issue. A $99 single time purchase of an SP was better than an N Gage and all that it entailed for an area like mine. Nintendo could reach Everyone from day 1. Literally all my friends had a GBA (some more than one). None had a cell--never had one til I was 18.
 
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I think the N-gage is a little too engaging with it's 8-finger controls for me, as if it's stretching a little TOO much if you catch my drift.
 
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