Sure, the fact that new Game Boy games are coming out in 2025 is incredibly exciting, but I bet you didn’t think you’d be seeing a new game complete-in-box for the Nokia NGage?
Say what you want about Nokia’s entry into the handheld world (and Nokia’s stupidly timed release date competing with the Game Boy Advance), it’s still an interesting bit of kit and has a loyal cult following of gamers who still wonder ‘what could have been’ if the NGage had managed to defy all the odds and become a commercial success.
I had an OG nGage when they were still (as close as they would ever be to) relevant; I won it as a prize in a competition. And while I really liked it, I wouldn’t have bought one with my own money unless the price had dropped by at least 50%, and even that’s only given my personal positive experience with using one. As a regular consumer paying full price, it would certainly have been a hard pass for me.
The design seems to have been created by a group of mobile phone designers who once saw some pictures of a Gameboy Advance. I presume that the astounding decision to put the single game/SD card slot under the removable battery came from thinking that it would still be a phone first, and users would either install an SD card as a semi-permanent upgrade, or keep one game in the device until they finished it. I’ve only played one nGage game on mine (Tomb Raider), and the performance wasn’t awful but it definitely left something to be desired. They were probably leaning hard on realtime 3D as a way to differentiate it from the GBA, but I don’t think the CPU had quite enough power to make it responsive enough.
That being said, I used it happily for years as my main phone, and it generally outperformed all of my friends’ phones by a wide margin. The only problem I ever had with “side talking” was having occasional random idiots on the street pointing and laughing. Now we all hold big, flat slices of bread up to our heads, but everyone does it so it’s OK I guess. The phone call quality itself was crystal clear both ways. The speaker call mode was also miles ahead of any other mobile phone I saw at the time (or even any phone I’ve had since). I did get used to using it from my pocket with a microphone headset, though.
The nGage was a high-end Symbian Series 60 device with features much closer to modern smartphones than the more traditional, dedicated mobile phones that formed most of its competition. When it came out, BlackBerry was only just starting to expand beyond the enterprise space into the regular consumer market, and Apple’s original iPhone (which don’t forget was nowhere near as smooth and polished as they are now) was still 4 years away. Using the nGage with a headset actually worked out well since I often used it to listen to mp3s, a feature that many mobile phones still lacked at the time.
I could (and frequently did) surf regular, unfiltered, uncompressed websites on my nGage at a time when very few portable devices had that capability. And while I didn’t play nGage games with it, it was fantastic for playing J2ME and Symbian games, many of which offered a GBA-like experience (albeit on a smaller screen) thanks to the relatively powerful CPU. That’s not hyperbole; I was often also carrying a (frontlight modded) GBA around during that period, and switched my on-the-go gaming between them depending on my mood and what games I’d got recently. It also had surprisingly good battery life, although this may have been shortened when playing nGage games.
The nGage gets a lot of flak as a handheld gaming system going up against the GBA, and that definitely wasn’t any kind of fight at all. But it was an extremely capable phone for the time, and even as “just” a phone, it still had useful gaming leanings. I think that there was a lot of knee-jerk reaction about “side talking” at the time, and despite there also being some legitimate complaints (like the card slot placement), I feel that it’s doing a disservice to Nokia’s engineers to have it go down in history as a total, unmitigated disaster.
I had a couple of Symbian OS phones, I wish it would make a comeback
Isn’t this the device that required you to take out the battery in order to change the game?
It sure is but it also lets you do some side talkin’ so your greasy face doesn’t mung up that beautiful screen! It all balances out.
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Actually a great idea damn
Sidetalkin’!
Oh yeah, the goatse console
Woof. I wanna watch this but his hyperactive child editing style does NOT jive with me.
I’m shocked honestly lol in this day and age with TikTok ruining everything with those captions and flashy Look Here Don’t Look Away For A Second editing, Rerez seems incredibly chill in comparison
But then again that particular video is a little crazier than his usual stuff 🤣
That’s fair hahaha. I have never tokked a tik, I’m in my mid-30s and can’t stand most popular editing. The craziest I go is like… Brutalmoose. I don’t find his zany editing obnoxious, though.
The electric taco
That era of Nokia was just the best ever. I used to have a Nokia E70 phone, and it’s still probably my favourite phone I’ve ever had. That full physical qwerty keyboard was so good to type on, even compared to smartphones of today.
I missed this at the time, that fold-out keyboard looks incredible
I love stuff like this! I never had an NGage because the competing handhelds at the time were better. I’ve never even seen one in person.
When it first debuted, I remember the gamestop near me was selling it by itself for $399. I think that was 2003 or 2004. Something like that. I remember within about 9 months or so it was $100 and came with 3 games. A few months after that I remember them being like “Ok, $30, comes with 10 games. PLEASE just take these out of our store!!!”
I bought one.
Then I got home and found out you can get an MMC card (think SD card, before SD cards existed…and also much thinner), and you could download ALL the N-Gage games for free. You could even store like 20 games on 1 MMC card at a time. So yes, I had 10 boxed games, but I never even opened them. I just downloaded them so I wouldn’t have to remove the battery between game swaps.
Now they did also release an N-Gage XD, which is kind of like how Nintendo releases NEW DS after the original DS was slowing down sales. The N-Gage XD solved the issues of taco talkin, and needing to remove the battery. By this point it was already too late.
The fact that you had to remove the battery to change the game cartridge is absurd
This was said and true even even at the time. N-Gage did SO MUCH ahead of it’s time that it had a true chance to be a sale record giant to compete with the GBA (nintendos current handheld at the time).
It has so many quirks, and things that innovate that it feels like a nintendo product honestly. That is up until they miss the mark SO HARD with stuff.
First off, it has this really bizzare screen aspect ratio. It’d be great for arcade emulators…if it could run them. I assume any game post 1992 or so in arcades would be too hard to emulate on this. As a result, I never saw any arcade emulators on here.
Then there’s the issue you describe. Card reader UNDER the battery. No idea why they did this. Zero sense.
Then there’s the taco talkin. I have no idea who thought this up.
There’s no L or R triggers. They have a 12 button dialpad that they double as buttons, which works surprisingly well…but no triggers. So 1 and 3 are your default triggers, and it feels SO weird.
The fact that this was made by Nokia shows. It had amazing build quality. Phone OS for the time was top of the line. But it just has so much head scratching baffling moments that makes it very clear that this is designed by a phone company. Not a video game company.
You might like this channel then: https://youtube.com/@ngage-archive
You’ll find high quality captures of longplay of those old NGage games. There are only a couple dozen currently but I believe they want to archive all games this way - obviously that consumes a lot of time.
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