All About N-Gage - Gsm Technic Service

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.

Quite apart from whether an official N-Gage game is any good in itself, there’s another problem that it may come up against occasionally. Sometimes a particular game genre will already have been ’done’ by an unofficial N-Gage game - in which case there’s something to directly compare the official one to. In this case, Midnight Pool comes up against the giant in the room, namely Virtual Pool Mobile (VPM). Now this itself hasn’t had the smoothest of runs in terms of support and availability over the years, but it’s been out for ages now and it’s really, really good . I have to confess to investing hundreds of hours of gameplay into VPM over the last four years, it’s a game with unlimited potential because it’s so challenging - however good you get, there’s always a computer opponent who’s better. Is Midnight Pool any good in itself and can it compete against such a titan?

In a word, no. On both fronts. I guess it depends on what you want in a pool game. If we’re talking about a casual gamer, happy to pop a few balls in pockets and generally soak up some atmosphere but with few actual expectations, then Midnight Pool will just about, and I emphasise the word just, do OK. For anyone expecting a challenging game then Midnight Pool falls short on several levels.

As usual with the ‘Midnight’ series of sports games, there’s a bit of a seedy night-club atmosphere, brought to life here by 3D animations and 3D-modelled pool halls. As each shot is taken, you get to see how it plays out on set of TV-style angles and there are digital sound effects to match. The production values applied to all of this are quite high and it’s just a shame that Gameloft’s (cross platform?) game engine isn’t really optimised well enough for N-Gage-compatible phones. Even on the N95 8GB, with accelerated graphics and oodles of RAM, animations are sometimes jerky. Moreover, when a shot is played, the ball animations can be seen, calculation by calculation, sometimes down to 3 or 4 frames per second (at worst). Which is a shame, compared to the silky smooth animations in Virtual Pool Mobile, running on the same hardware.

You’ll be wanting to know about how the game actually plays though. There are the usual game modes to try: Instant (you vs a computer player, no set up), Arcade (you get to pick opponent and ‘difficulty’) and Story (where you take on a character and gradually up the dollar stakes you’re playing for, travelling the length of the USA to find opponents willing to play for more and more cash).

‘Story’ is where the rubber hits the road, of course, but over the course of 3 hours gameplay and about ten matches, I err… well, I managed to get myself to $1,000,000 or so and the ‘end of game’ screen appeared. Say, what?

You see, disappointingly, although extra opponents gradually get ‘unlocked’, they a) don’t get unlocked fast enough (and you end up playing the same person that you played an hour before, but for ten times the money, which doesn’t seem very realistic) and b) don’t get anywhere near hard enough. Even at the very end of the game (i.e. 3 hours in), the computer opponents were still not anywhere near clever enough to beat me. Their potting gradually seemed to get a bit better, but when faced with a ’snooker’ (for example) they just blasted away at the blocking ball - and when they had ball in hand, they would just take the ball from its default location. Making defeating them rather easy. Even if you can’t pot that well, it’s easy enough to play a strategic game and get the opponents to make silly mistakes.

Potting. Ah yes, now we’re getting to the crunch. Luckily, the pool interface here is really rather good and compares well to the one in Virtual Pool Mobile. As with the latter game, all the number keys are used to provide full control over spin, side, cue angle, and so on. One shortcut shows the overhead view of the table, vital for planning ahead.

Power is controlled using a vertical power bar and two d-pad clicks and this works out just fine. I found the aiming increments a little frustrating though - using left/right on the d-pad, jogged the aim appropriately, but several times I felt I needed finer control, to aim a ball between two of the aiming directions offered.

By default, there’s a ‘the balls will fly in these directions’ crib on the screen, but you can turn this off in Options if you either find it distracting or would rather aim shots ‘by eye’. Confusingly, the crib doesn’t take into account any cue ball spin or side that you’ve chosen to apply, making it sometimes misleading.

Also confusing (especially in 9-ball mode) is that you’re not automatically aimed in any sensible direction. For example, you’ve potted the yellow and blue is up next. But the screen might show your cue ball aiming for the red instead, simply because that’s the last direction your cue happened to be pointing in. With your wits about you, you can press ‘1′ to manually get pointed towards the next ball to be hit, but it’s disappointing that this isn’t automated in some way (as it is in VPM). If you don’t pay attention, you’ll end up hitting the wrong ball and incurring a foul…

The net effect, game by game, of considering the jerky ball animations and the poor opponent AI are that games proceed fairly slowly, and it’s not helped by quirky 3D animations of your player reacting when he or she knocks in breaks of more than one ball in sequence, or fouls, or does anything else of note. These animations take a second or three to play out and can’t be turned off in Options, so you have to click your way through them.

There are three pool variations on offer here: 8-ball, in both UK and US colour variants, and 9-ball, the purest form of pool and the one I settled on for working through my brief virtual career. After each match (each of which only consists of one frame, which is a bit sudden-death), there’s a chance to try your hand at a trick shot for extra cash. These are fun enough and can also be accessed from the main menu but don’t really add anything to the main game.

Most gamesters will grab the trial version and be put off by a) the jerky ball animation and b) the utterly, ridiculously stingy 90 second limit before the trial stops - the end result being that almost noone buys the game. Which in this case might not be a bad thing, since it’s ultimately so disappointing.

The one thing that might have saved Midnight Pool would have been an online mode that would have let you play against real human beings. It would have been easy to do too, as it would be turn-based. A missed opportunity again.

I really, really wanted to like Midnight Pool and, to be honest, I’ve seen worse in terms of pool games on computers and phones over the years. But it makes the cardinal mistake (for any game) of being far, far, too easy. Anyone wanting to experience real, quality, adrenaline-inducing, addictive pool gameplay should opt for the unofficial N-Gage games Virtual Pool Mobile or even the ‘lighter’ Micropool 2007, which both have the additional advantage that they will run on many non-N-Gage phones too.

Steve Litchfield, All About N-Gage, 27 June 2008

PS. In addition to the links above, you can find out more about where to get Virtual Pool Mobile and Micropool 2007 in All About N-Gage’s special feature on unofficial N-Gage games.