What went wrong? Was it ahead of its time?
I would have totally bought one but just couldn’t ever find the QD model in stores.

The design was based on goatse and was retarded for playing games.

If you're playing a video game on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the kino

It was also retarded as a cell phone and you had to hold it up to your head sideways. Bad ergonomics for both gaming and phone usage. If you wanted mobile gaming there were better options although weaker graphically at the time. People were holding out for the PSP which had already been announced and whatever the successor for the GBA would be instead of risking their money on a non established system.

>>11855935
I'm sad he's gone.

>>11855923 (OP)
Ahead of its time? How? It had that weird Tomb Raider conversion so it was impressive for 2003 I guess
>>11855935
On your fffucking telephone

>>11855923 (OP)
only the cool kids could have it.
at the time, kids generally weren't allowed to have phones, let alone an expensive one.
other than that, every kid i knew wanted one for the cool factor alone. the games were appealing and it also doubled as a music andd video player, how cool is that!

It looked cool at first glance but at the end it's just a GBA.

>>11855923 (OP)
>Poor design all around, resembles goatse, taco form factor for talking, and swapping game cartridges on OG model necessitated removing the battery
>Awkward clumsy button placement and D-pad
>Insanely expensive at $299 compared to the GBA, cost more than every contemporary home console including the mighty OG Xbox
>Only available with a mobile carrier plan, cheaper option without cell phone functionality just for games was not offered which reduced its appeal even further for parents who would otherwise consider buying one for their kid instead of a GBA
>3D capabilities were impressive for a handheld in 2003 but it was BTFO by the DS and especially the PSP within a year of its release, especially since they both launched at a lower price than the Ngage did
>Ports often did not compare favorably to their PS1 or GBA counterparts and original 3D games often suffered from slideshow framerates or chunky visuals

>>11855970
The entire things seems like it was rushed out. Like they heard Nintendo/Sony were about to launch new 3D portables and they got desperate and immediately started mass producing whatever prototype they were working on at the time

>>11855970
>$299
It dropped to $199 very quickly and the QD was $99 with contract

>>11856014
Too little too late by that time. Everyone knew the DS and PSP were on the way by that point, the GBA was still cheaper, had better games, and felt more natural and comfortable to control.

>>11855923 (OP)
N Gage is not retro according to the board rules, as it released after 2001

>>11855923 (OP)
it was a power point presentation

I was an idort of the era, but the N-Word Gage was the one platform i wanted, but never got. There was that one mmo parody game that Sega released that looked pretty fun.

>>11855923 (OP)
The biggest problem is actually the potrait screen. Imagine playing Sonic Advance but with both sides of the screen significantly cut off
Well imagine no more! Sonic N is here to make that nightmare a reality.

>>11855923 (OP)
Could Final Fantasy 7 have saved the N-Gage?

>>11856054
Like the mods give a fuck at this point

>>11856054
It's on the phone platform which came out in 1864 so it's retro

>>11855927
>99.9999999999% of all popular games use a horizontal screen
>make a game device with a vertical screen

>>11856054

>>11855982
Wasn't it involved with the Swedish mafia or something

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40qhGCTfD94

>>11855945
>>11855970
>>11856185
they anticipated the now common practice of playing only one game for years.

>Have vertical screen
>Zero vertical shmups

>>11856202
there are symbian s60 shmups.
https://youtu.be/0WfgkBlyRbU
i played that on my nokia 6630, it was fun.

>>11855923 (OP)
>horrible button quality for gaming
>number pad + no shoulder buttons is a losing combination
>tiny vertical screen
>remove battery to swap cartridges
>pushing phone plans
>teens / adults didn't want to talk into a gameboy
>most little kids didn't have cellphones at the time
It had the 3rd party support to succeed if they focused it on being a console first but they designed it primarily as a phone.

>>11855923 (OP)
>>What went wrong?

>Vertical screen
>Way too many buttons for a portable gaming device
>Need to remove battery to change games
>Need to hold it from the side to place calls
>Insulted Gameboy owners, the people most likely in the market for such a device
>Was nothing more than a standard Nokia phone with encryption, people were able to decrypt the games and get them to run on any other Nokia phone from around the same time
>Needed a cellular plan, cellphones were generally not given to kids in that era
>Even if you was not a kid, a cell plan was not a cheap thing to get back then, especially for a gaming device

There was eventually a revised model that fixed the side-talking adn remove battery issue, but it still had far too many core problems in it's design, and it was far too late by then as well.

>Was it ahead of its time?
Even though mobile gaming eventually took off, that only happened from casual slop and gacha slop, this thing was trying to replace the Gameboy Advance. On top of that it made far far too many mistakes in it's design to have taken off even if it wasn't.

I'd post that comic with Sonic explaining why the N-Gage made every mistake possible, but I can't find it anymore.

>>11856164
You are thinking of Gizmondo.

>>11855923 (OP)
I remember trying a demo version that had Pandemonium on it and I was amazed that a handheld could run such advanced 3D graphics. Up until then the closest I had seen was THPS2 on GBA. But there were no good exclusives so I didn't want to buy one.

>>11856164
You're thinking of the Gizmondo

>>11855970
IIRC they did mitigate the issues with sidetalking and having to take the batteries out in later versions but by then the damage was done. Taco phones were something people couldn't unsee.

I think it's like >>11855982 said, they decided being first out of the gate was their only shot and just rushed to get it functional even if it wasn't really ready yet. The N-Gage 1.0 reeks of compromised design choices

>>11856102
If they were just going to make their own games and emphasize arcade-style vertical shooters just to carve out their own niche or something I could kind of understand the portrait layout, although even that seems mildly insane.

But they actually knew they were going to want tot port a bunch of shit that was all designed for 4:3 displays and went with the portrait layout anyway, which is just madness. I cannot think of a single valid reason to do that. Where is the upside? How did no one involved stop and say, "hey, why do we want the screen turned the wrong way?"

>>11856629
My guess is that Symbian OS just didn't support widescreen and they couldn't bother modifying it to add support, so they just said fuck it and made it vertical

>>11856649
That's more logical but still indicative of a completely apathetic approach to the whole thing. It's a huge problem that required every single port to be compromised in some way, and they just decided it was fine and wasn't worth fixing? I'm sure it made their lives easier but you know, customers maybe felt a little different about whether it was important or not

>>11856649
that is correct but only partially true.
making 1 (one) phone that had a different aspect ratio/resolution would have compromised compatibility with every single existing application.
it was not small task to change that and certainly not worth it at the time.

>>11856102
>Sonic on the Ngage
>Sonic on the Game com
>Sonic on the Neo-Geo Pocket Color(this one was alright)
Why

ENTER

>>11855923 (OP)
Before you ever look at the awkward setup and annoying shape of the design that is annoying as both a console and a phone, It had to compete with the GBA. Which at the time was a pocket SNES/Genesis with some new shit as well and for $300.

It was at best a really fancy piece of jewelry for rich kids to show off how much money their dad makes. Of course at the time majority of phones were that, this was just the very niche game-themed one of those.

>>11855923 (OP)
Big ol' bag of design compromises to get the price down to that sweet sweet $299
>Screen is sideways because we need space for buttons!
>Cartridge slot is behind the battery because we cannot find another useful connector
>Phone receiver and speaker has to be on the long sides because they cannot fit in the same space as the buttons
>cannot compromise on the number of buttons

And I'm sure the guy at the top giving all the thumbs up and approvals is a middle aged boomer that never once played a game or understands game ergonomics, only what looks cool as a phone. Like make it sideways, add a music button for no reason, make sure the call and hangup buttons are on opposing sides so it looks cool on paper.

>>11856054
Does your Mom still iron your underwear?

>>11855923 (OP)
Same thing that happened with 3D on home consoles in the 90s. Everyone wanted to bring the first handheld to market with 3D video games. Just like in the 90s, half of the consoles that tried failed, and for exactly the same reason. The existing handheld (GBA) could do 3D good enough that people didn't want to buy the earliest 3D handheld, they waited for the good ones (DS/PSP).

If you really really wanted to play something 3D on GBA, Doom/Duke/Need For Speed for GBA were all pretty well received. No one was so dying for Tony Hawk's ports that they couldn't wait for the MEGAHYPED Metroid/GTA games that we were supposedly getting at launch for DS/PSP (neither was ready at launch, lol).

>>11857165
>If you really really wanted to play something 3D on GBA

>>11857191
GBA 3D is weird man. Most of the "technically 3D" games on SNES/Genesis weren't well known back in the day, other than Star Fox/Doom, but when the GBA was out people definitely knew and talked about these games, and the 2.5D shooter ports and racing games were regarded as having good graphics believe it or not.

I didn't know anyone who had Asterix or Driv3r though, those ones are kind of too much for the hardware.

I didn't have a phone at the time, so I actually kind of wanted an N-Gage. But not knowing all that business about mobile contracts and SIMs and stuff scared me off.

>>11856741
I actually recall Sonic on the Game.com as "ok." Not great. Still slow and I think flickery. But not the worst on the system.

>>11856629
My guess is they were just thinking in terms of it being a phone. Phones generally had vertical or square screens, they were not a game company, they likely never even stopped to consider "Hey, wait, games generally benefit from square or horizontal screens". Again, these are the idiots who made a device where you have to pull out the battery to change the game.

Though like >>11855982 said, it was likely rushed out, and also likely made with a mostly phone mentality in mind with games being an afterthought/not something they even knew how to design for. The fact that it wasn't even special and just a standard Nokia Symbian device where the games were prevented from running on their other phones just by simply being encrypted instead of it having any soft of additional gaming hardware installed seems to support this rushed out theory.

>>11856686
So have a few N-Gage specific apps? They already tried to make it's game software exclusive by adding encryption that only the N-Gage could support, and it's primarily a phone, not a PDA or whatever. Phones back then did very little, it's not like they had an entire app store with millions of apps. Worst case scenario make any non-N-Gage-Specific apps run with empty borders on the left and right.

>>11856837
>It had to compete with the GBA
Still hilarious that part of their strategy to try to compete with the GBA was to basically claim "GBA is for babies!"... to their protentional consumer base which likely had a GBA. Because insulting your customers worked SO well for >>11856824

>>11856741
The Neo Geo one was a remix but not a port, right? It's pretty cool.

>>11856649
>>11856686

I think it's more that Nokia were designing a phone first and console second, and to make the thing landscape or wider screen would have cost more in terms of software design and manufacturing.

I bet there's an early design or prototype that had a wider screen that various approval processes got rid of quite quickly due to cost.

>>11857493
The could've just made the screen sideways

I liked the N-gage. I think it's unfairly shit on by being compared to consoles of the era, when it should've been compared to phones of the era.

>>11857496

It's an operating system issue - Symbian was made to be used portrait, you'd have had to develop it not to be which would have meant an extra cost. The brief was probably 'we need to make a games machine, but only using existing assets'.

Looking at the other phones they had at the time:
https://mobilmania.zive.cz/uploadedfiles/780081562.jpg

You'll notice that none of the phones with the same colour screen operating system are in landscape - the only ones that are are the 'communicator' phones, and briefly the 5510 (which was black and white).

Looking at the S60 software platform the N-gage used, it didn't even support operating at different resolutions until 2005:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S60_(software_platform)

The issue really is that they never really intended this to be seriously considered as a games machine, or they'd have developed it as such.

>>11855923 (OP)
It was extremely expensive when it launched, $600 IIRC. Form factor was awful. Might have actually gone somewhere if the revision was the launch model instead.

>>11855936
>If you wanted mobile gaming there were better options
Lmao get the fuck out of here. Besides the bigger library GBA was SHOCKINGLY inferior to the N Gage to an embarrassing level. N Gage was too ahead of its time and for that it suffered.

Is the Bomberman N-Gage game good?

Actually on that note, there seemed to be a fuckton of Bomberman games on 2000s phones. Any of them noteworthy, discounting ports?

>>11858039
This is incredibly weak bait. GBA wasn't the only handheld option either, retard.

>>11857407
oh yeah, WE SIDETALKIN'

>vertical screen
>worse than a GBA spec-wise
>godawful controls
>ZERO front-facing speakers ON A CELLULAR PHONE

>>11858061
Bomberman 3d for Java phones is nice.
https://youtu.be/IV7nZTSG7SI?si=wGc3sysNN22G624W

>>11855923 (OP)
>Was it ahead of it's time
Yes, now that everyone emulates on their phone. I had an n-gage as a preteen and I absolutely loved it. Tony hawk and tomb raider and sonic n came free with the bundle and I got red faction at some point. I thoroughly enjoyed every game and I still play thps on ngage at least a few times a year. I suppose tomb raider, red faction and Tony hawk were better refitted to the screen orientation. Sonic n was hard to get adjusted to and I would rather just play the GBA version. The worst game is probably call of duty which has the choppiest frame rate of all the fps(which there's a nice handful of them). Athens is the best and I really enjoyed red faction as a kid. Splinter cell is barely passable and it's kinda cool playing these 3d games on such a device, at least it was when I was 13. Having one now and playing all the games I didn't get to play is a little lackluster, but overall I'm glad I get to play these games at all. Worms is good, shadowkey is pretty cool, urban GT racing iirc was cool. Rift was neat. Really no horrible games besides call of duty.

>>11856741
Sonic was also on PalmOS and at least 2 different 2000s era Edutainment handhelds.