N-Gage on the Nokia N97

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by Clinton Jeff | on August 3rd, 2009 | 5 comments

One of the Nokia N97‘s touted features, is its support for Nokia’s N-Gage Gaming Platform.

While the platform itself might be dwindling in the last couple months, the N97 actually makes the experience a lot more fun. Although sadly, there are lots of inconsistencies in the UI.

How has the move from hardware keys to a touchscreen UI affected N-Gage on the N97 ? Read on to find out.

Now while getting N-Gage installed on the N97 is one thing, once it is, it runs pretty smoothly on the device. Since it does take up a lot of ram, dont expect to keep (m)any applications open in the background with N-Gage running.

To start up N-Gage on N97, you’ll have to head on over to your “Games” Folder.

In there, you’ll have to click on the “Games” icon (d’oh) to start up the N-Gage App.

Yes, I know, there are two things called “Games” that you have to click on. Anywho.

Once N-Gage starts up. you’ll notice it looks similar to the non-touch client but obviously with larger icons, and a couple things moved around to make use of the Screen real estate better.

Just like the non-touch client, the first page lists your last played N-Gage game, provides you a link to get more games in the showroom, shows you your N-Gage progress and any Arena Messages that might have been sent to you.

A new “feature” of the Touch-client is that it lists your three last played games on the right sidebar, for easier access to them. Great use of the screen real estate, and definitely makes things a bit easier.

At the top of the screen you have your navigation panes that list your downloaded games, gamer profile and score, friends list and finally the showroom. You can use the N97′s Dpad to scroll through this, but touch input works fine.

Player settings are exactly the same as in the non-touch client, so we wont go into detail about it.

The Showroom is the final icon in the Navigation pane and is basically the part of the client that lets you download N-Gage demos and purchase them if you would want to.

At the time of this post, only a few games from the N-Gage Catalog were available to download on the N97′s Client. While some games are just plain ol’ missing, apparently some games might have touch-enabled versions made specifically for the N97 and touch devices, which is the reason for the delay and will make its way to the showroom “soon”.

Downloading a game from the showroom is the same procedure as the non-touch client. Scroll through the showroom, see a game you like, click on it and choose to download it.

The client will prompt you, asking where to save the downloaded file to (phone memory or mass memory) and will continue the operation after you make a choice.

After that, it proceeds to download the game.

The nice thing about this procedure is that you can choose to hide the download status message and continue using the client normally. If you ever wish to check back on the status of your download, just head to the “my games” navigation pane.

Once the download is finished, the client will once again prompt you, to ask you where it should install the game to. We’d recommend Mass memory over phone memory, especially on the N97.

Once you choose that, the game begins installation.

When installation finishes, the client prompts you once again. you can choose to launch the game directly from there, or cancel and continue using the client.

And thats it for the N-Gage Client. Now coming to N-Gage Games on the Nokia N97.

Now, most N-Gage games (or atleast the games in the showroom at the time of this post) are not really optimized for Touch devices. They were created for Nokia’s Non-Touch S60 v3 lineup. As a result, none of the N-Gage games have touch-usage in-game and you have to use the N97′s hardware keys to control the game. This does bring a bit of inconsistency to the N97′s User Interface, as you’ll keep finding yourself tapping the screen sometimes during an N-Gage Game, only to realize “Whoops that doesnt do anything”.

On the N97 you move using the DPad.

And gaming button “A” and “B” are the backspace key and Enter key.

Unfortunately, you cant change which keys you want to use and you’re stuck with this default configuration.A pity considering how many keys the N97′s keyboard has (d’oh).

Still, it feels way better than the E75′s N-Gage control, so i suppose it could be worse.

Also, since the N97 (or any S60 V5 device so far) doesnt have hardware left and right selection keys, they appear virtually during a game, on the right side of the screen.

Which I found a little silly. Wouldnt these virtual keys feel better, oh i dont know, in the left and right side of the screen ?

Anyway, so this is how a typical game looks on the N97′s screen with these virtual keys on the right.

Games are kind-of letterboxed so they’re not stretched to fit the whole screen.

Still, it does look pretty nice on that large N97 screen.

Also, dont forget the fact that the N97 screen is propt up at a great viewing angle, which definitely makes gaming more fun on this device.

The N97 also has a built-in accelerometer, which means motion gaming is very much possible on this device.

Games like Bounce on N-Gage work with the built in motion-sensor and bring a whole new experience to the game.

Of course, it makes more sense to close the slider and play motion-sensor based games, or you’ll feel very confused at times.

The N97′s screen is very clear and bright, and hence makes games look great.

Of course game graphics themselves look only as good as N-Gage allows. Some games look a bit more pixelated because of the N97′s gigantic screen.

Here’s a short video showing you how N-Gage works and plays on the Nokia N97. This should sum up everything :

So is the Nokia N97 the perfect N-Gage device ?

Well pretty much actually. If you’re that dedicated to the N-Gage platform, you’ll love playing it on the N97. The no-touch-only-hw-buttons UI inconsistencies are annoying at first though, but you’ll get over it. Games look great on the N97′s huge screen. And even though the N97 does have quite a low level of ram, games seem to run fine on them.

Keep in mind however, the whole N-Gage catalog hasnt been released on the N97′s client yet. There are still one or two games missing. I’m curious to see what Nokia’s going to do with this.

Questions ? Do you have an N97 and play N-Gage games on it ? How do you feel about it ? Do let us know in the comments y’all.

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Author Description

Clinton Jeff

Clinton is currently based in New Delhi, India and is executive editor for UnleashThePhones. He is responsible for all editorial decisions, and covers all forms of Mobile and mobile-related accessories. Cj is addicted to caffeine, social media, and technology. Always up for a good conversation, you can reach him through the contact form, his website, on Google Plus or on Facebook or Twitter: Follow @clintonjeff