N-gage

Was this shit even worth it back then?
I remember seeing a lot of commericals promoting it.

It was a wrong step in right direction.

It was always pure fucking trash. The controls were horrible and using it as phone make you look like a fucking moron. To change the game cards you had to turn the phone off completely and take out the battery.

I had a go on it at Gamestation and got bored after 5 minutes.

the only reason you'd use it to talk without a bluetooth headset is due to being a literal fucking moron, so that's probably why you looked like one.

I had one, but my parents wouldn't let me have a cellphone back then. I'd fucking kill for a phone with physical buttons and a dpad nowadays, fuck touch screens and mandatory controller addons.

Was really awesome for the time, had a decent port of THPS, Ashen was a great FPS made exclusively for the ngage with a cool scifi cowboy horror theme, a really good version of Puzzle Bobble which was my favorite arcade game, Red faction, and it even had an elder scrolls game in development which I was never able to find despite apparently being released.

The buttons were fucking stiff though and you couldn't play for too long without hand cramps. Also having to take the fucking battery out to switch games was retarded, but the revision fixed that.

If a similar phone were to come out nowadays I'd jump on it, every phone is the same lately.

If Nokia made it a phone first and a console second they would still be around.

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Oh shit that brings me back.
And to think people were ripping on the games of that era…

RIP Randy

And nowadays I see people sidetalking on their smartphones.

N-Gage was way ahead of the curve.

Bluetooth headsets did not exist back then.

Nah they did but they were rare as shit and nobody really knew what to use bluetooth for yet. I remember having one of the first bluetooth phones either the same year or a year before the n-gage came out.

*also probably expensive

No. Its a piece of trash.

i wish modern phones and people were as insecure and stupid as they were just a few years ago

holy fuck right in the nostalgia

Fuck, I loved games running on that. Back then Gameloft actually tried to make good stuff, even though it was just copies of popular franchises and licensed games.

They had a Castlevania clone, those Splinter Cell games, a somewhat beefy (for phones) ninja jRPG, some Battleship knock-off with upgradeable ships with different functions, etc.

I wish someone was archiving all that stuff and a good emulator was around, it would be a pity to see all those games get lost to time.

it had Elder Scrolls: Shadowkey and Pocket Kingdom
other than that it had nothing worth looking at

Good idea, horrible execution. It had several decent games and lots of ports from PSX but design and controls were so utterly trash that playing them was a chore. But the games were piss easy to pirate.

People with Bluetooth headsets look like morons. Only yuppies and whiggers use them.

It was like an inferior GBA and a bad phone had a baby. THPS was pretty good though.

Why did they have to be so right about everything?
Whyyyyyyy

Did the Fins even had someone who headed the abortion of a project that was experienced in both fucking Phone and Video game development? because this is like the 90s Virtual Boy or Game Gear, clunky, no style, no thought of long usage time because that piece of shit would eat battery, killed mobile gaming till that merchant made the Iphone.

Even though I shat on it at the time I still miss that companies used to make experiments like this. Now everything tech-related has just fallen to kind of a lowest energy state with every new product differing less and less from older ones.

i remember reading somewhere that the design used for the ngage was submitted as a joke, but management took it seriously. it's actually based on goatse.

There was also a Tomb Raider game, though I don't know if it was a port of an existing game or if they used assets to create a new one specifically for the N-Gage.

that phone in specific also had a really cool 2d tony hawk clone. I wish i could still play it

it really does resemble a goatse kek

It's the most extremely underrated phone ever, really.

Pros:
+better graphics and processing power than GBA
+cellphone and MP3 playing capability
+relatively good D-pad for a phone
+MMC slot
+easy to download and play pirated games
+durable and reliable as fuck, typical nokia build quality
+possibly the coolest phone design ever, looks like a spaceship

Cons:
-tiny screen
-a kind of underwhelming library compared to other consoles back then


Not the QD though. The QD was perfect, except for the screen which is still small.

That episode of Decline was based off E3 2004.

It's around 12 years old . . . Where has the time (and all the good Flash web animators) gone.

I need to rewatch the Decline series sometime.

No. It was treated the same way we treat the Ouya now. As a complete joke.

your Pros list is missing a big one:
+emulators

mock it all you want, this thing was the premier portable emulation device in the years before PSP hacking/homebrew took off and stole the crown away.

also cool but only included in the first model (non-QD):
+FM radio tuner

Oh man, that reminds me of those tv-tuner addons and other crazy-ass modkits for the GBA.

The NGage was basically a huge joke when it was released and it failed spectacularly


Christ I feel old

"user, your aunt bought you the Shrek 1 + 2 Gameboy video cartridge. Thank her."

If only we knew at that time that they were true prophets.

Sounds gay as fuck.

What the fuck is wrong with you britbongs?

Flash animation doesn't exist anymore because any idiot can get a webcam and launch a youtube channel that will make him hundreds of thousands of dollars in ad revenue

I really don't get why people hated it so much. The design is cool, the hardware is powerful, and the games were the most advanced handheld games available back then. It delivered everything that it promised. I was 8 years old when it came out and I was dreaming about it all day, enthusiastically reading everything about it in magazines. When I finally got to own that ngage qd, it was already so outdated, but I still love it.


satan's more gay

I got kicked off of the mediaminer forums back in 2004 for arguing with a mod over whether the DS could compete with it.

And the psp is better than ds.

Dude, you're comparing apples to bananas.

Pro:
+ Really Good Audio in the games, better than your standard mobile game as at the time mobile games were restricted to shit tier midi and wavs. Very few games used MP3 on Mobile.

Con:
- Controlled like a heap of shit in practice
- For the time whilst 3D games were novel, the fake 3D games on your standard mobile devices ran better and were more enjoyable.
- Battery Life was shit
- The display really wasn't that great, especially when compared to the high end Nokias of the time.
- Was a total bitch to work with as a developer.

That's just been my impression of it.

Other than the stigma of being a non-nintendo handheld, Cell phones back then were full of hidden fees and charges that made households avoid getting them unless super necessary.

The screen size wasn't too terrible in hindsight, but they marketed games like Tomb Raider and fucking sonic for the thing all the time, which really showed how big a problem it was.

I won one at some convention a long time ago. Pocket Kingdom was fucking great, but other than that it was a pretty awful little phone.

You couldn't play Elder Scrolls on a DS or PSP, so…. kinda.

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