You were born but a hyped, sidetalking Taco. Then, after we had our laughs for several years, papa Nokia ditched your dedicated hardware and opened it up to phones of all kinds—as long as they said N-O-K-I-A on them. It was a smart move. Because you sell lots of phones, and if your gaming platform was to live, it needed to be on as many of those as possible. It looked ok at this point, as a platform and service. And the hardware was nice at times. But that didn't change the fact that no one I know ever talked about you, n-Gage, much less played with you. The button layouts, games and online vs modes never really came together as well as you'd liked in terms of people buying and using it. Why? I don't know. I guess, at least in America, we couldn't get the handsets for less than the price of 5 Nintendo DSes. But beyond that, you never had any games that people cared about, despite having signed up companies like EA so easily because papa Nokia was still number one. And every year at E3, your booth was like a buzz-vacuum. So, I can't say we'll miss you. We hardly knew you were there. But let's just chalk this up to more high end consumer failure to excite at Nokia, which has been a trend of late.

I'm done. Honestly, this much word count on nGage is charity, even as a farewell. See ya. Hope we never have to see you again. But the word is, you'll probably just fold some games of yours into a general app store. The dead never stay dead for long in the gadget game.

You can choose your hero from a swath of "legendary champions," whose ranks include a manic hedgehog, a space invader, a plumber, a bomb man, a Level 50 Elf, and some kind of Master Chief, among others. Every hero comes with a princess, and the object of the game is to rescue other players' princesses before they can rescue yours. You accomplish this task by building combo roads to other heroes' castles, firing cannons to defend your own abode from your opponents' roads, and using your special power to finally get the girl!

Nokia promises that the game will appeal to all audiences, from casual gamers—how these are going to get who the heck is Bomber Man, we don't know—to hardcore nerds. We hope so. The N-Gage platform has traversed a rocky road since its inception, and if there's any princess in need of rescuing by a wildly popular and successful hero, that's probably it.

The game is being developed by RedLynx, will feature a soundtrack by chiptune band 8 Bit Weapon and a price tag of $10 to $14 for the full N-Gage version of the game (the PC version will be free). Look forward to a Summer 2008 release.

Shen also noted that GPS functionality could be used for location based gaming, but stressed that they want to make sure that they are not spilling over the line that separates innovation from gimmicks. Obviously, we will have to wait and see if they can actually pull any of this off but, at the very least, Nokia fans should be pretty excited about the potential that the new N-Gage platform is bringing to the table. [NokNok]

"I'm not scared about anybody. The real question is how do they [Sony Ericsson] do it? Can they create a link between the PSP games and a phone? Can they do the multiplayer and online stuff? We've been doing this for two years and it hasn't been easy."

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N-Gage was a bit of a joke as a hardware platform, their booth at E3 always embarrassingly vacant. But the N-Gage platform on every mid-to-high end Nokia phone sounds like a better proposition than having to deal with side talking on a taco handset. If you've got an S60 phone, Symbian Guru says you can just unofficially download the app and give it a whirl. There's a lot more over at [AllAboutSymbian and Symbian Guru]

The new N-Gage gaming service, unveiled in August and due to launch this month, will now go live in December.

"Software testing is taking a bit more time than what we had expected," [spokesperson] Kari Tuutti said. "We are talking about a couple of weeks."

Already, over 6 million people have used MOSH to exchange files. Nokia assures that copyrights are protected by Audible Magic, a scanning system that checks files as they pass through the service. Clearly, that's not enough reassurance for WMG.

And if I might add: What the hell are 6 million people exchanging if not some variety of copyrighted content? Original demo tapes and manuscripts? Seriously. [Reuters]

The easy way to describe the whole experience is Xbox Live Arcade for mobiles. You've got an Xbox Live kind of system with usernames, friends lists, gamer points, profiles, and arcade-like games from studios like EA and Gameloft. What does this mean to you, the Series 60 user? Well, if you've got one of the select Series 60 phones released recently—they haven't specified which yet—or any new Series 60 coming up, you'll be able to load this suite onto the phone and start gaming.

Compared to the Nintendo DS and PSP, the games aren't nearly as good (of course). But compared to standard mobile games, they're great.

Here's how it improves on Xbox Live.

First, it's going to be subscription free. Nokia doesn't charge you for it, and the only thing you'll be paying is for the game itself (from the game providers). That is, unless game publishers decide to release something like an MMORPG and charge subscriptions.

There's also an emphasis on free trials (like XBLA) so you won't have to plunk down money for a crap game that you didn't want. Plus, there's going to be TV-out on some Series 60 phones, which means you can play these same games on your TV as well.

What's also cool is that some games will be cross-platform PC/Mobile compatible, meaning you can play with your buddies on the phone while they're sitting at their computer. However, you don't have to have a PC in order to play this—all this is over the air (OTA) downloadable.

The only thing we ask is not to be forced to buy a Series 60 phone to take advantage of the platform (we've got a billion other phones we're currently using). Or at least not have to wait 'til Fall for it to be released. – Jason Chen

N-Gage

Press Release [via Xataka Movil]

Of course, the games and their N-Gage v2 software platform will be embedded in Nokia Series 60 smartphones, not in the form of the much-maligned "taco phone" pictured above. Nokia expects this to be a big deal, predicting that the hottest mobile games will be on the N-Gage v2 platform by early 2008. Somehow, we're having trouble getting excited about this. – Charlie White

N-Gage v2 to launch in September [Mobile Entertainment]

N-Gage to debut at GDC - Nokia rules out optimised device [Mobile-Entertainment]
Also: Rumor: N-Gage: The Second Coming? [Kotaku]

Regardless, my N-Gage-loving acquaintance will be happy to hear that Nokia will be distributing games for it online. An online catalog of games can be found here and most will run between $25 and $40. To install the games just slap them onto a memory card and stick it in the N-Gage and install. Easy peazy. – Travis Hudson

Nokia Introduces Online N-Gage Game Distribution [MobileBurn]

We've been using Nokia's N-Gage as a punchline to (extremely nerdy) jokes for years now, ever since we first heard about Sidetalking—long before the N-Gage actually hit the market and, you know, failed. Ewan Spence over at All About Symbian's written a fairly long piece about how we should stop mocking the N-Gage and pay attention to how Nokia's been using what they've learned about mobile gaming with the N-Gage platform to sneak improved mobile gaming experiences onto their incredibly popular S60 phones:

Putting [Nokia] up against the heavyweights gives a raw number of roughly 4 million N-Gages shipped, against 17 million PSP's and a comparable number of Nintendo DS. But now ask yourself another question. How many S60 phones are going to ship in the next 12 months? Maybe 50 million? How many of them are going to be able to play these next generation of mobile games? Maybe 30 or 40 million? Those numbers are standing up pretty well against Sony and Nintendo now, aren't they?

We hate to admit it, but Spence does make some sense. But we're not going to give the Sidetalk jokes up, you'll have to pry our love for them out of our dessicated little walnut hearts after we're all long dead and buried.

The N-Gage at E3 2006 - Machiavellia Would Be Proud [AllAboutSymbian]

It can be safely said that Nokia has gone insane. First they have a strong presence at E3 ... for the N-Gage, and now they ban the word phone. Regardless the N-Gage phone multimedia computer still sucks.

The phone of the future: wired to run your life [Seattle Times]