Breaking the curse

Last night, John Gillooly was N-Gage’d playing games on mobile phones. We could poke fun and say he’s been slapping his Snake, but we won’t. Hopping the hedgehog is so much more appropriate.

The glitz and glam of last night's Nokia N-Gage pre-launch launch was swept away completely by an amazing sight – actual, bona-fide, N-Gage units, running real games (albeit alpha code, but playable). In this era of paper launches, it seems Nokia has taken a different route. After a very quiet announcement last year in Beijing, where only a few stock images were shown, it waited until the hardware was ready before screaming 'N-Gage' from the top of its lungs.

N-Gage is the culmination of years of mobile phone development, and a big move for Nokia. After rapidly making itself a household name in the mobile phone business, it has set its sights on the booming gaming market. For a couple of years now we've seen various small announcements about impending downloadable games, but this is the biggest move so far. N-Gage is a Series 60 Symbian OS-based phone; it is an MP3 player; a radio; and most of all, a mobile gaming device. And we're not talking about card games downloaded by SMS, we are talking Gameboy Advance-level gaming, and perhaps more.

For an unknown in this market, we were impressed by the games on show. While some companies are just obviously just dipping their toes in the water, names such as EIDOS, Activision and the biggie, Sega, are involved. Sega's title on display marks the return of Sonic the Hedgehog in a new version called SonicN. While the code was still early, Sonic still flipped around quickly and smoothly, and this should be a killer title (although it looks like the greatest Dreamcast game ever, Virtua Tennis, will be appearing on N-Gage.

Retro was a big theme, with games like Space Invaders, Bubble Bobble and the old platformer Pandemonium on display. But our eyes were drawn to two other games, an obviously extremely early snowboarding game and Tomb Raider, which was running on the tiny little screen sporting graphics comparable to the original PlayStation – all at a playable frame rate.

3D graphics on a mobile phone. Nirvana. And what's more, it makes N-Gage a much more real threat to the god-like Gameboy Advance. Sure, there are 3D engines that can be coded to run in software on the GBA, but this had the feel of the real thing – hardware 3D. Which sparked off some rampant speculation among us.

After we were informed that those sort of hardware specs were not being released at this point, and being denied a moment alone with an N-Gage and a screwdriver, thoughts turned to another, not-so-lucky Finnish company. A company that by all rights should be mentioned in the same breath as NVIDIA, ATI or 3dfx, if only it had ever brought a product to market. A company that developed primitive hardware T&L in the days of the Voodoo Graphics, who broke the bandwidth barrier years before the rest, who reappeared after another almost-product late last year with a solution for mobile phones, presenting their technology after software development sessions by Nokia at the famous Finnish demo party, Assembly. A company called Bitboys.

While Bitboy's solution would be looked upon with the same apathy as Parhelia in the rampant PC 3D race, mobile phones are an untapped resource. Others are looking closely at the market, with NVIDIA the latest company rumoured to be looking closely at appropriate solutions; and if Bitboys wants to break the shackles of past could-have-beens then it needs to be moving now. It also needs to find an appropriate phone maker as a customer. While the slowly increasing number of Taiwanese phone manufacturers may seem a good choice, ties are strong between a lot of the companies and ATI or NVIDIA through associated notebook, motherboard and video card businesses. Sony has partnered with others and purpose built its PlayStation graphics chips, and a modified PlayStation 1 chip could be a tasty option for them, especially with the back catalogue of games. Nokia are both local and massive, and the N-Gage having 3D graphics is a strong indicator that this is the case.

Bitboys solution is based upon the XBA architecture developed for the PC. Its chips are focused on optimised bandwidth, which is perfect for mobile application. More information on its Vector Graphics Core can be found here.

For now, it's pure ramblings after too many 'roulette shots' at the launch event, but it does have a strange odour of truth about it. But one thing is for sure, N-Gage is not the sure-fire flop we once expected it to be. Could this be Microsoft's Xbox happening all over again?

– John Gillooly