It's possible that the re-entry of WSOP is because it was one of the five demos included with the recently launched N96.

Hi Tzer2, firstly i must thank u. U r doing a great job by providing infos, news etc. about NGage. I am a big fan of urs and AAN. Keep it going.
I hav a request that can u update ur NGage games section with new screenshots/videos etc. for the upcoming games like Batman, worms, one, speed racer, Mgs etc... Thankx

The problem is that there arent any news, or images, or videos of the upcoming n-Gage games so tzer2 cant update a thing...

NGageGamer, thanks for the feedback! :-)

There are already quite a few Worms screenshots and the official trailer on its game page:

http://www.allaboutngage.com/games/i...rld_Party1.php

Unfortunately as Magalhaes said, the other games simply don't have any screenshots released yet. There are screenshots for some of them of Java versions, but they usually look totally different to N-Gage versions so there's not a huge point in linking to them.

I can only imagine that Nokia are scared of burning thier fingers again with this ngage thing and so are not making too big an effort as far as the really good games are concerned. I mean, just look at all those rubbish titles. The original ngage had some really GOOD games but, honestly, there's just nothing out now to grab any serious gamers attention. I used to play with my old Ngage until the cows came home. Now I cant find anything worth the effort or the money. I was so looking forward to the new Ngage and I check this site regularly for updates etc. Great effort by you, Tzer2. Pity its such a black hole, though.

speed racer and Dark Knight(batman) have been cancled it's been confirmed on the n-gage blog

a guy asks if they was cancled and ikona says yes.
http://blog.n-gage.com/archive/round-em-up/
this is bad news b/c theres other games gone quiet like these titles did
but on the other hand is this the start of nokia trying to take n-gage in a different direction and trying to get away from normal every day mobile games what are already on java etc ?

I actually had an original N-Gage, I remember what things were like back in 2003, and I can tell you it had RUBBISH games at this stage in its lifetime. It was the worst launch period of any handheld by far.

There weren't ANY first party exclusive games until about six months after the N-Gage launched (which was basically just Ashen), and the first really good games didn't come until late 2004, over a year after the N-Gage launched.

By contrast the next gen N-Gage platform already has lots of excellent exclusive games (Reset Generation, Creatures Of The Deep, System Rush Evolution, Mile High Pinball etc), it's doing a lot better than the original gen.

The original gen had three years of game support, the next gen only launched as an embedded app a few weeks ago (and as a download a few months ago). Give the next gen three years of support and I think you'll see a lot better games and a lot more games too.



(Thanks for the tip-off ccraig, you're really good at spotting these things!)

These games being cancelled isn't necessarily anything to do with Nokia at all, they're third party titles so the third party publisher can cancel them if they want to.

The only games Nokia has total control over are the first party titles which have the blue and white "Published By Nokia" screen when you start them up. All the others (Gameloft, EA etc) aren't in Nokia's control.

I suspect Glu Mobile cancelled Speed Racer for the very good reason that the film was a box office disaster, so the licence was practically worthless. As for the Dark Knight, who knows... (Incidentally apparently there is a 5800 XpressMusic phone used in the actual Dark Knight film by Morgan Freeman's character.) Glu Mobile's only game so far has been terrible, so I'm not too worried about them cancelling titles.

theres more to this what we dont know about b/c its funny how last week GLU anounced they was concentrating all there resources from now on to develop for N-gage and Iphone yet 2 games have been cancled .
Nokia as no control over the development of 3rd party games i know that, but they do discuss with the 3rd party's the game's that will be good for platform.
In a way i'm happy dark knight got cancled the normal version looked like a bad copy of streets of rage

You're definitely right that Nokia probably have some kind of veto on games, so if a third party title looks really awful they could stop it being released (that's what they did with a lot of games on the original N-Gage).

It could be that Glu originally wanted to just re-release Java titles on N-Gage, and that's certainly what World Series Of Poker looks like. But if they're concentrating entirely on smartphone platforms, which is what the announcement implied, they may want to do much more advanced games that use the hardware properly.

Are there any actual sales numbers?
It is strange that, e.g., for iPhone developers and publishers have disclosed some sales data (SEGA and Super Monkey Ball, then some small indie developers) and Nokia just keeps silent. As far as I can find, only sales charts are available, without any numbers at all.

It's not actually that strange when you look at how N-Gage is being rolled out.

If something is installed on a phone's main menu by default, people notice it and try it. If it's not on the main menu by default, most people will never install it.

The iPhone's app store is widely available on iPhones straight out of the box, which is how most people would find out about it. That's what Nokia wants to do with N-Gage, but they've only just started doing it now.

The first model to have N-Gage on board straight out of the box, the N96, only launched in Europe a few weeks ago and it will take a while longer for it to appear elsewhere. The next models (the N85 and N79) are just about to go on sale soon. The platform is only just starting, basically.

Once N-Gage is built into a majority of available S60 phones, I think that's when the platform will be properly launched and ready to be compared with other services. That should happen some time in 2009.