All About N-Gage - Gsm Technic Service

Gameplay

For those who have been on another planet, the Sims series is essentially a computerised dolls house where you can take care of people and/or animals usually in a normal-looking domestic environment. Sims 2: Pets on N-Gage concentrates on bringing up a puppy in a small bungalow with a back garden and nearby pet supplies shop.

The breeds available are Chihuahua, Labrador, Mutt (aka mongrel or mixed breed), Pug and Whippet. There’s also a special robot dog you can unlock if you progress far enough.

The game begins in a very promising fashion with options screens that let you customise the owner and their dog. You don’t control the dog directly, but you can call it to you, teach it tricks, play with it and take care of it.

In essence this is a small collection of mini-games:

- Ball & Frisbee Throwing: You throw a ball or frisbee for the dog to catch by clicking at just the right moment on a sliding scale. Click at the wrong moment and the dog doesn’t catch anything. Gameplay is identical for throwing balls or frisbees.

- Teaching Tricks: Basically a two or three step dance mat game without any music, use the direction pad to click in the directions shown on screen in order and the dog gets closer to learning a trick such as sitting or rolling, and then praise it afterwards. Do this often enough and the trick is learned, with the dog able to perform it when selected from a menu. There are 10 tricks to teach in all, but the gameplay is virtually identical for all of them.

- Dog Patting: Similar gameplay to teaching tricks, but there’s no actual trick at the end of it, just a happier dog.

- Dog Cleaning: Again, similar to teaching tricks but all you get is a cleaner dog.

- Discipline: If your dog does something naughty such as scratching the carpet, a timer appears on the screen and you have to click the direction pad button before it runs out. This makes the owner talk in a stern voice, and eventually the dog learns not to do whatever it did.

- House Training: The same gameplay as discipline, but involving the dog peeing or pooing while indoors. Eventually the dog learns not to do this and is house trained so it only does its business outside. Remember to clean up after the dog by clicking on the pee or poo.

When you combine the duplicates, it means there are actually only three minigames, none of which vary or demand any skill, and they don’t get more difficult or interesting over time either.

In theory simulation games like The Sims are meant to sidestep conventional gameplay by offering a customisable world which you can shape to your liking, but Sims 2: Pets for N-Gage doesn’t do this. You can’t customise the owner or their flat at all, and you can’t buy the dog anything except a bed, ball and frisbee (and even those are from a very limited selection).

Another comparison one might make is with Nintendogs, where the sheer joy of seeing the puppies playing together can be enough in itself, but that isn’t the case with Sims 2: Pets because there’s only one puppy per game. There is no interaction between dogs. Sims 2: Pets also has a far more limited range of locations with just the living room, kitchen and garden.

A third comparison might be with Tamagotchi, where the pleasure comes from simply taking care of a creature and watching it develop, but that doesn’t really happen in Sims 2: Pets as the puppy never changes and it doesn’t seem to require much taking care of either. This reviewer’s puppy ate once a week according to the in-game timescale, and there was never any pressure to balance one need against another.

Sims 2: Pets doesn’t have bad gameplay, its problem is that the gameplay is missing. It’s not an arcade game, it’s not a “sandpit” game, it’s not a collect-em-up game, it doesn’t pass muster as a puppy simulator, and it’s not really a proper virtual pet game either.

There is incidentally also a human career aspect but it’s so minor that it’s barely worth mentioning. You get a wage every day which you can use to buy toys, food, shampoo or beds for the dog, and if you get promoted the wage goes up. Promotion seems to happen automatically as long as you keep taking care of the dog, and very soon you reach the top of the career tree so money ceases to be a problem.

There’s also a list of “goals” which earn you bonus cash, but that too isn’t really worth talking about. It’s an ever-changing list of four things you would do anyway like patting the dog, throwing it a ball, giving it a bath etc, you don’t really need to even look at it to earn these bonuses. Even the bonuses themselves become insignificant once you’ve been promoted to very high salary levels.

Graphics & Sound

The graphics in Sims 2: Pets are generally very good, with nice bright colours, and smooth fast 3D. Most importantly of all, there is adorably realistic animation for the puppies. The locations are also nicely designed, especially flourishes like the Japanese objects in the kitchen, though it would have been even nicer if there were more locations. Some textures do look pixellated but the smoothness of the 3D makes up for this.

The interface works well too, with a single menu and a series of objects in each room that let you choose an activity. Although this sounds awkward, the camera moves so quickly and smoothly, with an automatic selection system, that it actually feels very intuitive.

There are also some very nice graphical touches too, such as the slow motion catch the dog makes of frisbees, and the way you can see what your dog is dreaming about, which will be familiar to anyone whose real life dog has growled or “run” while asleep in the corner.

The sound is very good, with nice effects, music clips and speech. The speech is the usual Sims gibberish, which you’ll either love or hate. However, although the speech is good, the range of phrases in the game is far too small and gets annoying very quickly. As it’s gibberish anyway it might have made sense to chop it up into groups of syllables, and let the game assemble them into words at random, allowing for a much larger variety of phrases.

All the breeds in the game, including the unlockable robot. Incidentally, pugs don’t look anything like this…

N-Gage Arena

There’s no multiplayer of any kind, though there is a league table of high scores. However, as points are laughably easy and very boring to obtain, all that the table tells you is how long certain people have been able to put up with Sims 2: Pets.

A word about N-Gage Point Pickups in Sims 2: Pets is also in order. This reviewer played for about 3 or 4 hours in total, by the end of which they managed to collect 980 out of 1000 possible NGPs mostly without even trying (and the remaining 20 were apparently unobtainable due to a bug). This is ludicrous, no other N-Gage game lets you get all of its points so easily and so quickly. It devalues the entire concept of point pickups.

TV & Keyboard Test

Some N-Gage-compatible phones (e.g. Nokia N82, N95, N95 8GB, N96) have a TV Out feature which lets you connect the phone to a television set. This can be used for playing N-Gage games, or for any other phone function.

All N-Gage phones are compatible with Bluetooth keyboards that use the HID Bluetooth standard, and such a keyboard can be used to control games or any other phone function.

The graphics suffer greatly when viewed on a television screen, they’re still just as fast and smooth but the 3D object textures are incredibly pixellated and look quite nasty. The sound is good through the TV speakers though.

Bluetooth keyboard controls generally work on Sims 2: Pets, though there’s a slight delay between pressing the keyboard’s selection button and the game acknowledging the command. This makes it difficult to hit the mark when throwing a ball or frisbee, though other gameplay aspects aren’t affected that much.

Overall

Sims 2: Pets has a good graphics engine and an easy-to-use interface. It’s made even more easy to use by on-screen hints that appear when you first encounter a new aspect of the game, so practically everyone should be able to play this straight away.

Unfortunately the developers have neglected to provide an actual game, either conventional or unconventional. There’s absolutely no enticement to continue playing, this game doesn’t feel as though it’s been properly playtested.

The tasks you have to do are far too simple and boring, they don’t develop at all, it’s simply a question of how often you want to repeat them. Even if you do go through the tasks, the game can be 100% finished in just a few hours.

That wouldn’t matter if it worked as a fun virtual toy or an intricate dolls house, but it’s neither of these things: there’s nothing to customise, only two or three items you can buy, and nothing ever changes. The only major unlockable is a mechanical dog which behaves just like the normal dogs.

There are too few breeds, just five (or six if you include the robot dog). It would have been nice to see more available, perhaps as unlockables or even as downloadable content. Dog sim fans enjoy a good choice of breeds just like football sim fans enjoy a good choice of clubs.

Worst of all though you never really feel any kind of attachment to your virtual pet. It doesn’t have any kind of individuality or personality, and it doesn’t grow or change either so there’s no feeling of achievement. The dog won’t even try to collect balls or frisbees which you’ve mis-thrown, and the mini-games in general don’t involve any proper team work. The animation of the dog is good but it doesn’t vary enough to suggest a creature with a personality.

The score we’ve given this game reflects its value as a full price title. However, if you want to rent it with a day pass or week pass you may well get a lot more value from it, as the entire game can be played in just a few hours.

If anyone from EA is reading this with future sequels in mind: keep the graphics engine and interface the same, but put some meat on those gameplay bones.

Play the full game below:

A brief blast from the past

From 1992 until 2000 (or so), I was the author and ad-hoc developer of Fairway, a golf simulation/game for the Psion Series 3 and then Series 5 range of palmtops. I even did a conversion onto the Nokia 9210 Communicator. Here’s what it looked like:

I mention this because, after playing Pro Series Golf for something like 10 hours of gamplay, my recurring impression is that if I’d carried on developing Fairway (and had enough talent and resources!), it would have ended up not unlike Pro Series Golf. Which you can take as a compliment, hopefully, in that the basic 3D mechanics, the speed of gameplay, the way the ball is tracked during a shot here all sit well with me and I found picking up Pro Series Golf’s interface very quick and intuitive. The simulation itself is as quirkily flawed as Fairway but the result still makes for a fun and challenging game.

But, obviously, there has been some serious money poured into this current day golf sim - in a world of Tiger Woods 08 on most consoles, something fairly polished was needed - and Nokia (via Mineshaft) has delivered it.

Pro Series Golf - modes and online

Which is not to say that Pro Series Golf is perfect - far from it. Sometimes jerky animation, inexplicable pauses mid-swing, awkward shot changing and poor modelling of ball lies are blemishes which threaten to spoil the game. Luckily, there’s one huge advance which outweighs all of the above - Pro Series Golf uses the N-Gage Arena to good effect, meaning that you can play against real people in real time even if they’re on the other side of the world. Or, in Rafe’s case, Sussex.

First impressions are great, as the game title screens look and sound very slick. Pro Series Golf works in portrait or either landscape mode, so it’s easy to play the game in the way which suits you best. Interestingly, the number keypad is almost completely ignored, with the interface simplified to just the d-pad, plus ‘1′ a couple of times per round, for the somewhat awkward procedure of changing your shot type (e.g. ‘Chip’ to ‘Pitch’). The game’s developer does admit that Mineshaft weren’t able to put in all the things they wanted to - I’d have liked to see number keys mapped to applying ball spin, for example - something which isn’t possible in this version of the game.

Game modes include ‘1′ through to ‘4′ player games, made up of mixtures of local humans and computer players, plus ‘Career’ and ‘N-Gage Arena’. I played through several rounds on the opening course, trying to unlock the second course, to no avail - it turns out that you have to progress through stages of Career mode in order to unlock courses for general play. This is a bit of a hassle as the opening few challenges in Career mode involve multiple computer players and you have to have patience to sit through the animation of all their shots. A hotkey to bypass such animations would have been nice. Incidentally, the trial version gives you three full holes in 1-player mode - but this is fine for casual players and is in fact exactly the same slice of trial action that the famous EA’s PGA Tour Golf used, back in the early 1990s - and which in turn inspired me to write the aforementioned Fairway - those parallels just keep on coming.

But all game modes pale besides going online to play against others. Once you’ve tried online multiplayer gaming, it’s hard to go back to pitting your wits against a mere computer. Previous N-Gage games have scurried around online play but Pro Series Golf hits this full-on. It’s true there’s no overall online ranking for ability or ladder system, but it proved very easy to arrange to meet a friend (e.g. Rafe) in a particular course’s ‘lobby’ and set up an immediate online game.  Latency was very short, less than a second, so there was little time wasted while waiting for your next turn. I missed any facility to send messages to the other player(s) - maybe this was something else left out for time/resource reasons. Rafe and I resorted to chatting on Skype while playing instead, by the way! One tip - don’t challenge Rafe to a game without doing lots of practice first - he’s quite good!

Online play. N-Gage integration is pretty slick and setting up a game was a piece of cake

While waiting for a turn, a scrolling banner on the screen makes it clear that you don’t need to do anything yet. And when your opponent strikes the ball, you see him or her in TV-style, taking the shot, followed (again) by a TV-style tracking shot or landing. And after each hole, you both see the scorecard, of course. There aren’t any victory frills though - not even a ‘You won’ screen - another omission by the stretched developer?

‘Wait’ screens like this were quite brief…

Pro Series Golf - virtual courses and taking the shot

It has to be said that the half dozen or so courses in Pro Series Golf are stunning. The scenery is almost exclusively static, but it’s there, it’s in full 3D and it’s gorgeous - I particularly liked the texture/pattern on bodies of water, giving the impression of sunlight sparkling on the ripples. Each course is modelled accurately, as far as I could tell, and playing each hole has its own challenges. There’s full contour modelling too, so hillocks and dips (and bunkers!) are all here in 3D-navigable glory.

Look at that 3D contouring and modelling - plus ’sparkles’ on the water

The developers have done a stunning job in optimising their 3D code, with hole flybys and ball animations appearing surprisingly fluid and with only the occasional stutter and the rapidly warming device alerting you to the fact that the phone’s processor is working flat out to generate your virtual golfing world. (In fact, playing an hour of Pro Series Golf is enough to get through half a full charge on an N95 8GB - but seeing as I’ve just explained why the battery is being hammered so much, I think this is acceptable.)

Before taking a shot, it’s a good idea to examine the wind and ball-to-hole elevation. I’d say ball lie as well, but (apart from sometimes limiting which clubs you can use) this doesn’t seem to affect shots at all. You then compare the distance to the hole with the maximum distance of the club you’re using and work out roughly how hard to hit the ball (e.g. 95%). There’s then the standard three-click method (as used in PGA Tour Golf, Fairway and tons of others) to determine the power of the shot and the timing. This latter is crucial because any errors cause slice or hook and result in the ball swinging to right or left (into rough, bunker or water, normally!).

Replaying a shot (handily showing the swing indicator) and an example of part of a TV-style ball track shot

Putting is also three clicks, but aiming is accomplished by lining up the ball roll preview line with the whole - this is where the ball will go if you hit it perfectly. In reality you’ll mess up power or timing and so the ball’s path will vary. After 10 hours of play, I’d rate the difficulty level of the whole golfing experience as about right. It’s often hard enough just to make par and when you do get a birdie or even an eagle, it’s a whoop-it-up moment.

Putting uses a novel new method of aiming - you’d think you’d get the ball in every time with such a good aid, but you have to hit the power/timing control dead-on in order for the ball to actually follow that path

Pro Series Golf - problems

In the face of the positives above, it seems churlish to dwell on a few more negatives, in addition to those already mentioned, but I need to be complete. As I said above, Career mode throws up some relatively tedious matches, which you have to win (I think) in order to unlock new courses. This takes a lot of skill and luck and in the meantime you’re stuck with only one course to practice on, even though you’ve paid for the whole game.

Career mode also launches you into a ‘Skins’ game and there are no help screens in Pro Series Golf to turn to. With the complexities of computer golf, I’d have expected some kind  of help or tutorial mode. Something else that the developers didn’t have time to add. And add also outfits for the computer players, who all look alike. And play alike, sometimes hitting the ball to within a few inches of each other - there needs to be more randomness here.

Then there are the glitches, display oddities like a golfer’s feet being chopped off by a hillock or 3D hidden-line-removal madness or a ball shown 6 feet under the surface of a lake. (As a programmer myself, I realise that these sort of things come with going down the whole virtual world route, and the glitches are relatively rare, thank goodness.) Less understandable are the occasional breakdowns of the ball perspective routines, causing the ball to appear over-sized and floating in the air over the grass…

Glitches, showing underwater, hidden-line problems, chopped off limbs

One oddity which seems to have been planned in is that there’s what I’ve been calling pin-capture, and it’s only turned on when not putting. If you chip or pitch the ball in towards the flag and you get close enough (initial landing within a foot or so), pin capture leaps in and grabs the ball into the hole - a neat way of getting a few birdies and eagles on your card, even if it’s not exactly realistic.

Pin capture works its magic yet again!

And when you do get said birdies or eagles, there are no crowd samples of cheering or clapping, something which should surely have been easy to slip into the development cycle. Pro Series Golf takes up over 50MB of space on your memory card - you’d have hoped that there were a few crowd audio clips in there. You do get some looped music over menus, plus club swing and water plop sounds - and even a little birdsong if you leave the game alone for a while, but that’s about it.

Enough of the problems - is Pro Series Golf worth £8?

Undoubtedly yes. Despite the holes (hah, a pun!) that I’ve been shooting in the game’s design and implementation, Pro Series Golf is better than the majority of computer golf games I’ve seen in handheld format over the last 10 years. Even playing standalone it’s worth buying. Titles like Tiger Woods 08 on the Wii have spoiled us really, but then the Wii title is £40 and has had far greater resources put into its development.

As with any game, going online is where the fun really starts. You’ll get a little jaded by playing computer players, but come up against a real, fallible, surprising human being and all of a sudden you’re hooked. And excited. And challenged. I’ve a horrible feeling that AAS staff productivity is going to take a turn for the worse now that I can IM Rafe and say ‘fancy a quick 9 holes at Pinehurst?’ N-Gage Arena matches are easy to set up, can be password protected (useful for when the system gets popular in a few months time and there are possible gatecrashers to an arranged match) and you get to pick any of the built-in courses for ‘3′, ‘9′ or ‘18′ holes. For the record, an 18 hole Arena match with Rafe took about an hour - 9 holes would be better for a quickie game with an online friend.

Factoring in this working multiplayer facility, it’s even easier to forgive Pro Series Golf’s failings. If you have even a slight taste for golf, you’ll enjoy the online challenge - run, don’t walk and buy the game now. And I’ll see you in one of the lobbies!

Official Website:

http://www.n-gage.com/one/

Official Screenshots:

Gameplay

Mile High Pinball is a first party game published by Nokia, developed for the original gen N-Gage by Bonus.com and ported to the new N-Gage platform by the ever-reliable Ideaworks3D. The new version plays pretty much like the original, but has higher resolution graphics. Some of the original’s levels have been removed (there are no Snakes or Ashen levels for example), but the new version is much cheaper too (7 euros compared to the 20 or 30 euros that the original cost).

MHP features one of those ideas that’s so clever and simple you wonder why no one thought of it before. It’s basically a pinball game, but instead of separate tables there’s one huge table, and you win the game by getting the ball from the bottom to the top. The table is divided up into 45 levels (plus more hidden levels), with exits at the top and entrances at the bottom. If you fall through a level entrance you appear at the exit of the previous level, so you could in theory fall from the top of the table right to the bottom, though in reality the levels are designed to make such complete falls very unlikely. There are no lives in MHP, the only threat is to fall back down the table and be forced to climb back up again, so the game doesn’t end until you’ve won.

You interact with the ball by using right and left flippers as on any pinball table, and there are also the usual bumpers and holes scattered about the board. Added to that mix are a variety of enemies (including four end-of-level bosses) which you can defeat by hitting them with the ball often enough, and a few dozen types of bonuses that let you do all kinds of things such as turn the ball into a helium balloon. To spice things up even more there are spinners, mysterious boxes which throw the ball out at a random angle, vacuum tubes straight out of Sonic 2, brick walls, crystals and other oddities.

You expect MHP to be an arcade game, but each level has its own “puzzle”, a particular method required to get through to the next level. At the beginning these puzzles are very simple, you just have to hit a certain number of bumpers or earn a certain score to unlock the level exit. As you progress though, the puzzles can require real thought, and on some levels you have to perform a certain series of precise actions such as catching the ball with a particular flipper, holding it and then nudging it along the edge of the table to squeeze past a bumper. You frequently find yourself wondering if a particular level is impossible until you work out the solution.

Another interesting feature is the bonus system, which adds a strategic element. You can collect a very large number of bonuses and use these at any time during the game. Some bonuses are so rare, and some levels are so difficult, that you end up having to use them very carefully. While you’re concentrating on a fast-moving level, a part of your brain is considering whether you can spare a particularly expensive bonus, or whether a lesser one might do the job. You can collect them from the playing field, but you also occasionally come across a shop where you can buy and sell them. You really do need to pay attention to the bonus system, because parts of the game are virtually impossible without the helping hand that the bonuses give.

There are also ten medallions in special hidden levels which you can get to by touching whirlpool icons scattered throughout the game. These are like the chaos emeralds in Sonic the Hedgehog, you don’t need to collect them but it’s a challenge.

The game is only playable in vertical/portrait mode, with 1 and 3 operating the flippers and 5 opening the bonus menu (you can redefine these if you want). Normally we would complain about the lack of a horizontal/landscape mode, but Mile High Pinball is a very special case, as it just wouldn’t make any sense to have a horizontal version of a pinball game. Because it’s a vertical-only game, and because it uses keys instead of the d-pad, MHP is equally playable on practically any N-Gage-compatible model.

Graphics & Sound

Mile High Pinball’s graphics are weird and slightly psychedelic, as if some hippy technophile has decided to make a scrapbook of their favourite photos and drawings all blended together.

It works, the different backgrounds give each level a distinct atmosphere, and this is further enhanced by the absolutely excellent music (see below). The scrolling within each level is smooth and fast, though there’s a delay between moving from one level to another which also breaks up the music. This delay feels very annoying at first, but you soon get used to it and on the later levels you hardly notice it because you’re spending so much time within each level trying to solve the puzzles.

One nice graphical touch is the ability to choose a skin for your ball, and as you earn points more skins are unlocked. This is great if you’re bored of the traditional silver model, and we’ve used the acid house smiley ball in our screenshots.

MHP has probably the best soundtrack of any mobile game (the other contender for this title is Lament Island). It’s arguably nicer to play the game with the sound effects turned off so you can hear the music properly, and this reviewer sometimes paused the game just to hear the tracks play out in full. The soundtrack covers a surprising range of styles, with elements of gentle pop, world music, classical, prog rock, metal, electronica, dance and funk, and the tracks suit each level very well.

If you do want sound effects though, they’re the usual pinball table noises of flippers and bumpers, with satisfying loud clunks and bleeps when the ball hits something.

N-Gage Arena

Mile High Pinball has three online modes: Rankings, Duel Score and Duel Altitude.

Rankings are pretty much like those on other N-Gage games, your game stats are posted to an online league table and you try to improve them to rise up the table.

Duel Score and Duel Altitude are real-time multiplayer modes where you find a partner in the Arena lobby and race to see who can get the highest score or who can get to the highest altitude within a time limit. You can see your opponent’s progress next to your own, so there’s a real tension as the timer gets closer to zero. The winner gets an Arena point, the loser loses an Arena point, and both players’ positions on the Duel league tables are updated after the contest has ended.

Incidentally, the ordinary offline version of the game is called “practice”, so the developers seem to expect people to be play MHP primarily as an online game.

TV & Keyboard Test

Some N-Gage-compatible phones (e.g. Nokia N82, N95, N95 8GB, N96) have a TV Out feature which lets you connect the phone to a television set. This can be used for playing N-Gage games, or for any other phone function.

All N-Gage phones are compatible with Bluetooth keyboards that use the HID Bluetooth standard, and such a keyboard can be used to control games or any other phone function.

Mile High Pinball looks nice on a TV set, though it being vertical-only means you’re using just the middle-third of the television screen. Some of the sprites look a bit pixelly, but on the whole the game looks rather good.

The game worked fine with a Bluetooth keyboard, there were no problems in controlling it. You may possibly want to redefine the controls though, as 1 and 3 aren’t in the most logical positions on a QWERTY layout.

Overall

Mile High Pinball is very original, and perfectly suited to a mobile phone’s screen and key layout. As you make your way up the table the puzzle and strategy elements become more prominent, and the game starts to become very addictive. This reviewer played through the entire game in two multi-hour sessions, not because there was a deadline to meet but simply because MHP has such a strong “Just one more go” factor.

The major downside of the game is the frustration you feel when the ball falls down to levels you’ve already beaten. It’s no fun at all repeating the same difficult level again, especially when success on that level is determined by random elements (the volcano sequence is particularly annoying in this respect). On the other hand this is the main reason to pay attention to the bonus system, as it contains ways to prevent falling to the lower levels, and ways to skip forward if you do fall.

Mile High Pinball has clearly had a lot of playtesting and tweaking, its difficulty balance is generally good and you do want to play the game until you finish it. It’s simple to get started, but requires thought if you want to progress right to the end. The bonus system gives the game depth, and the hidden levels and online features give it longevity. The graphics might not be to everyone’s taste, but they have a certain kitsch Pop Art style to them. The icing on the cake is the price, at just 7 euros it’s one of the cheapest games on the N-Gage platform.