N95 product codes
0534841 - Euro 1 - Sand
0534842 - France
0534843 - Alps
0534844 - Euro 2
0534845 - Turkey
0534847 - Scandinavia
0534848 - BALTIAN
0534849 - Russia
0534850 - Ukraine
0534851 - CIS, Bulgaria
0534852 - Euro 3
0534853 - Balkans
0534854 - Greece / Cyprus
0534857 - Israel
0536058 - Belarus / Moldova
0534833 - Singapore
0536062 - Euro1 - Plum
0536063 - France
0536064 - Alps
0536065 - Euro2
0536066 - Turkey
0536068 - Scandinavia
0536069 - BALTIAN
0536070 - Russia
0536071 - Ukraine
0536072 - CIS, Bulgaria
0536073 - Belarus/Moldova
0536074 - Euro3
0536075 - Balkans
0536076 - Greece / Cyprus
0536079 - Israel
0534832 - Hong Kong
0536084 - Hong Kong
0534830 - Taiwan
0536083 - Taiwan
0534833 - Apac 1
0536085 - Apac 1
0534834 - Philippines
0534835 - Australia
0534836 - New Zealand
0534837 - Indonesia
0536086 - Philippines
0536087 - Australia
0536088 - New Zealand
0536089 - Indonesia
0548298 - India Apac 2
0548299 - India Apac 2
0535053 - Thailand
0536093 - Thailand
0534839 - Vietnam
0536091 - Vietnam
0548986 - India
0534856 - Arabic
0549001 - Australia (sand)
0534849 - Russia (sand)
0534850 - Ukraine (sand)
0536070 - Russia (plum)
0536071 - Ukraine (plum)
0548763 - USA (N95-1)
0548763 - Brazil (plum)
0546222 - Brazil (plum)
0549028 - Brazil (plum)
0534862 - Latin America (plum)

N95 Operator Specific codes
0548170 - Orange UK
0548020 - Movistar Spain?
0548364 - O2 (CPW) UK (Graphite)
0547869 - Vodafone UK
0546659 - T-Mobile UK
0536065 - KPN Netherlands
0547867 - DTAC Thailand
0547686 - T-Mobile (P4U) UK
0549533 - T-Mobile (P4U) UK
0548021 - O2 UK
0550199 - O2 Ireland

N95 Language Packs
EURO1 - English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
EURO2 - English, French, German, Turkish, Dutch, Italian
EURO3 - English, Czech, Slovakian, German, Polish, Hungarian
Scandinavia - English, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Danish
Baltic - English, German, Estonian, Russian, Latvian, Lithuanian
Russia - English, German, Ukrainian, Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian
Balkans - English, German, Croatian, Slovenian, Serbian, Greek
Arabic - English, Arabic, French, Farsi, Urdu
Hebrew - English, Hebrew, Arabian, Russian, Romanian, Spanish
Africa - English, Portuguese, German, Italian, French

N95 8GB product codes
0550348 - FRANCE
0550352 - ALPS
0549487 - EURO1
0550359 - EURO2
0550370 - TURKEY
0550372 - SCANDINAVIA
0550373 - BALTIAN
0550798 - RUSSIAN
0550799 - UKRAINE
0550800 - BELARUS/MOLDOVA
0550375 - CIS, Bulgaria
0550378 - EURO3
0550379 - BALKANS
0550801 - GREECE, CYPROS
0550802 - ISRAEL
0555180 - SINGAPORE
0555181 - MALAYSIA
0555187 - EMERGING ASIA
0550455 - INDONESIA
0550454 - NEW ZEALAND
0550453 - AUSTRALIA
0550459 - THAILAND
0550457 - VIETNAM
0557980 - HONG KONG / CHINA
0557877 - MALASIA
0550388 - AFRICA (NIGERIA)

N95 8GB Operator Specific codes
0558166 - SFR France

It’s Tetris, which if you don’t know (cue the usual comments about being from another planet) involves arranging falling blocks or “tetrominoes” into horizontal lines which makes them disappear.

There are six modes, all variations on the usual Tetris formula:

- Marathon: Pretty much the classic Tetris, you try to score as highly as possible while making up to 150 lines.

- Ultra: Score as much as possible in two minutes.

- 40 Lines: Create forty lines as quickly as possible.

- Versus: You play against a computer opponent. Each of you has your own Tetris playing area, and you can “attack” your opponent by creating more than two lines at once. Attacks cause extra blocks to appear in their playing area.

- Clash: Another player vs. computer mode where you both try to get to a certain score first by placing blocks in the same playing area.

- Challenge: A “pass around” multi-player mode for up to four people where you pass the phone between players and the winner is the one who scores the most. Everyone in the round gets exactly the same tetrominoes in the same order, so it’s a level playing field.

These modes successfully cover all the main playing styles and skills, though it’s a shame that only one of them (Challenge) involves other humans. All the modes have numerous options which let you tweak the game to suit your personal preferences, and you can also redefine all of the keys too. There was no option to change the screen orientation though.

Actually playing the game works without any problems, the blocks drop fine and you can use any control keys you want to. This is Tetris, and it’s an addictive game on practically any gaming platform.

The main problem with the gameplay though is the menu system you have to navigate, which makes even simple actions cumbersome. Tetris is the ultimate instant-play title, but for example if you want to change modes while playing, here’s what you have to do: pause the game, select the menu option, confirm you want to leave the current game, press the single player option (even if you’re using multi-player Challenge mode), then within the next few seconds press the d-pad button to be taken to the “game settings” screen. If you wait too long to press the button, it takes you back to where you started. The graphics make this hopping from screen to screen even more frustrating but more on that later.

A couple of the vs. computer modes: Versus and Clash

Graphics & Sound

Graphicswise EA haven’t exactly pushed the boat out here. It’s Tetris, it’s the same old blocks you’ve seen since the 1980s with the same playing area too. It’s perfectly functional, but there’s absolutely nothing spectacular here.

This simplicity might be okay if it helped the flow of the game, but this is marred yet again by the awkward menu system, this time in its graphics department. Apparently suffering from CSI syndrome, the N-Gage version of Tetris takes the terrible design decision to make every single screen appear with animated sweeps, and every single word appear with nonsense-turning-into-english animation. This might be okay for the opening credits but it should not appear every single time in every options menu of a phone game, particularly one like Tetris where you play it in very short bursts.

Sound is very disappointing. There’s no music at all except a very brief clip of the classic Tetris tune on the title screen, and the in-game sound effects are utterly forgettable.

N-Gage Arena

There’s an online rankings sytem with global leaderboards which show the top ten players in each game mode. That’s it.

The vast majority of players are extremely unlikely to ever get anywhere near the top ten so you can safely ignore the leaderboards, and if you’re not in the top ten it doesn’t even tell you what your current ranking actually is.

Overall

A universal phenomenon on new gaming platforms is that the third party software during the launch period is extremely shoddy. This has always been the case since the very first home computers and consoles, and it will probably always be the case. Third party developers hate the financial risk of releasing games on a new platform, and they will be technically unfamiliar with new hardware too, so their first games tend to be quick and easy ports of games from older platforms.

If you want the real official Tetris on your N-Gage-compatible phone then this will probably do the job, and to an extent reviews like this are pointless because a lot of people will buy this game on the name alone.

However, if you want a quality conversion of a classic game which makes full use of the N-Gage platform, this is not it. There’s no online multiplayer, no Bluetooth multiplayer, only one hotseat mode, the menu is needlessly difficult to navigate, the graphics are bland and the sound is practically non-existent. This reeks of a cheap “will this do?” cash-in using a famous licence.

And now System Rush Evolution graces the new N-Gage Platform, and again it’s a mass of whiz bang graphics, slick presentation and lightning fast gameplay. If nothing else it looks impressive during a thirty second demo to your friends (which means that I see no reason why everyone shouldn’t be carrying the demo on their memory cards for those ‘ah but it’s just a phone’ discussions down the pub.

Setting aside the exciting plot of hacking into corporate computers and somehow evading the security programs in a co-vec (code vehicle), System Rush is a rather good futuristic racing game – a genre arguably started by F-Zero and Wipeout on the gaming consoles.

Evolution has made some changes when compared to the original, and these make it more suited to a mobile environment than previously. Rather than long flat racing tracks with inclines and banked corners, you are racing around inside a twisty tunnel, sometimes fully enclosed, sometimes parts of it missing - maybe it’s meant to be a wire, with the plastic sheath stripped away at certain points?

What this change of environment does is radically change the control system – whereas the original had your full ‘accelerate, brake and turn corners’, the new System Rush is more about positioning your Co-vec inside the wire, rather than navigating the wire. You follow the course of the wire no matter where you are on the inside of the wire. Left and right spins you around the wire, while up and down activate your power ups – one of which is a temporary speed boost. Otherwise everything runs on rails.

All you have to avoid are the obstacles inside the wire, the enemy co-vecs chasing you, and try to stay on the parts of the wire that are still sheathed, otherwise you’ll lose points and energy.

While this may sound silly and simple when compared to the complexities of console drving games, it really is all in the environment. I don’t mean the environment of the wires and obstacles in the game; I mean the environment you are playing the game on. A mobile phone. On an Nseries smartphone, you can’t have pixel perfect controls in a game like this – hence I suspect the move away from driving around the course and hitting the apexes of corners and then stomping on the power, towards more a high tech gunner with collision avoidance as a primary duty.

And you can forget about this being simple – the difficulty curve on System Rush Evolution is perfect for me; but as you may all recall, I’m a sucker for complicated games that provide a hardcore challenge, and that means I’m really enjoying having to really learn all the wires and courses in Evolution. You’ve got to hit the power-ups, you need to pass over the parts of the course that give you a short burst of acceleration, and you’ve got to miss all the obstacles. That’s a surprisingly welcome challenge, but for casual gamers who aren’t used to investing a lot of time to pass a single level, it may be just a little bit too much.

The single player ‘storyline’ mode shows the two main styles of game play: infiltrate and shutdown. See, this is where the hacking story helps, because these are essentially timed races – get round a number of laps of the wire in a fixed amount of time (usually barely enough), or shoot down enough enemy code with your auto-firing nose cannon before you run out of time.

And then there’s multiplayer. You have the same game options, plus the additional head to head mode where the power-ups can be used to affect your opponent – I love the ‘reverse their controls’ option just to mess with their heads. Finding a game can be a bit hit and miss. Searching for people who have a similar skill level to you (ranking search) finds you an online opponent in short order, but searching through the filter – where you can choose the track and type of game - is less successful. This may well improve as more people purchase the title, but for the moment be aware that the numbers of people playing are quite low.

System Rush Evolution sums up the new N-Gage platform perfectly. The gaming is perfectly suited for a mobile device, and offers a comparable challenge to console based gaming, thanks to the strong consideration of the devices the game will be played on. It’s fast and furious, and looks like a modern game, with speed, light and action all in abundance (and it looks gorgeous through the ‘TV Out’ on an N95). Yes it’s hard, but that makes it all the more rewarding.

Right now, as the games roll out, it will be perceived as the flagship title of N-Gage, although strictly speaking it’s probably one of the wingmen to some of the titles coming up in the next few months. That shouldn’t stop you seeking this out as soon as possible.