N-Gage
Okay we’re going to give the Nokia N-Gage a little credit here. The idea of a mobile phone that was focused on playing games back in 2003 was pretty damn revolutionary. It’s just a shame that the technology and execution used by Nokia in creating the N-Gage was about as useful as a English to Russian phrasebook in downtown Quebec. The N-Gage was trying so very hard to display beautiful, even 3 dimensional, graphics on a small screen so it certainly set the bar high for itself. Then Nokia forgot that to do this, you have to actually make it work.
The stab at graphical fidelity which Nokia took may as well have come from a week old hot-dog because it broke so easily. Games were not the smooth experiences that purchasers hoped. They devolved into nothing more than somewhat shiny slideshows where gameplay comes second to crying at the controls for not responding. Nokia did manage to snap up Tomb Raider titles in order to pull the gaming populace towards their console but they didn’t spend any time or money wrangling any other big names. Consoles can live or die on their launch titles after all.
So it barely had a launch lineup and lacked the computing power to even run what it had. That isn’t enough for a console to have to fail though is it. So how about the fact it was nearly impossible to replace a game. The features of a console have a tendency to stick around if it’s successful. If the N-Gage had been a success, we would have likely been inundated with copycat consoles where you had to remove the battery to change a game. That and we as a unit of gaming lovers would have been stuck with consoles that barely ran their games.
You may have been ahead of your time N-Gage and you may have made your mistakes, but we’ll always know you for side talking.
