Tim Green files his thoughts from the Nokia Games Summit in Rome...
This column might never have been written. Well, it would have been, but probably by a colleague. Why? Because I’d be lying dead at the foot of the Castlello St Angello in Rome and therefore unable to supply any copy this week.Yep, I’ve been in Rome for the Nokia Game Summit, which happened to coincide with the Italian capital’s worst storms in living memory.
So there we were at the top of the Castlello under the cover of just a see-through plastic marquee, being battered by the worst that nature could conjure. Then the side was ripped out and nature was in there with us.
She was very angry, sending glasses crashing to the ground as the plastic wall (and its scary metal struts) flapped around with extreme violence. It was all quite thrilling, even if not one single exec was thrown from the top of the building.
Nokia must have been pleased about this. It would have been bad PR to kill 250 developers, operators and press, and a disappointing end to an upbeat summit.
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Overall, it was good to get some news about N-Gage after so much focus from Nokia on music in the last few months. Truth is, N-Gage had a difficult birth and is not yet fully formed. It’s only available as a full ‘out of the box’ experience on the N96, even though it’s accessible from about ten Nseries devices.
That said, N-Gage has its loyal fans. There are 400,000 registered N-Gage Arena members across 130 countries, and Nokia is serious about promoting the store, with plans to market it across 20,000 retail channels in India and Latin America.
It’s also putting real energy into product development. Reset Generation got some of the best reviews of any mobile game ever, and it was interesting to see female-friendly Dance Fabulous announced at the event too. The fact that casual fishing game Creatures of the Deep is the best selling N-Gage title to date is a reminder that the service is about more than fanboy RPGs.
