All About N-Gage - Gsm Technic Service

Official Screenshots:

So far, all we have about this game is the official press release.

Gameplay

Space Impact: Kappa Base (SIKB) is an old-fashioned scrolling shoot-em-up, inspired by the original Space Impact games which were embedded on Nokia’s older mobile phones such as the 3310.

In Kappa Base you pilot a craft (or “skyblade”) through ten levels of baddies and hazards in space, in the upper atmosphere and near the ground. The plot goes like this: the Earth has become so polluted and difficult to live on that some humans have chosen to alter themselves mechanically and become a race of cyborgs called “MEKS”. The MEKS have decided that the remaining unaltered humans are “obsoletes” and should be destroyed. Cue the usual man vs machine malarkey…

The plot has various interesting twists and turns and there’s a sequel-hunting ending, but the main aim of this game is to score well. This isn’t the kind of title where you play through it once and feel that you’ve “beaten” it. In fact SIKB’s playing structure is much more like Mario Kart, as you receive a grade for each level and the challenge is to go back again and again to improve the grade.

The gameplay revolves around choosing the appropriate skyblade and weapon loads for each level. As you collect money in the game you unlock more options, and eventually you can choose from eight skyblades and seventeen types of weapons. Because you can take several weapons at once on the same craft, there are 200 different combinations of weapons load, and what you choose will make a lot of difference. Some levels are almost impossible with a bad choice of weapons, but become much easier when you select a more appropriate combination. The choice of skyblade can also be important, as they have different properties in terms of speed, armour, and kinetic energy gathering.

That last phrase might have sounded a bit weird, as it refers to an unusual central concept of SIKB: to build up the energy for certain powerful “kinetic” weapons, you have to let enemy bullets graze you. Once the kinetic meter has been filled, you can use the special weapon. The kinetic weapons aspect turn the usual gameplay on its head, as you often find yourself desperately trying to get hit by bullets so that you can use the special weapon and wipe out all the baddies on the screen. The kinetic aspect also comes into play when you’re trying to get a high score, as there’s a separate bonus meter which fills up as you get hit.

You occasionally receive wingmen to help you, but they generally just sit there shooting and getting hit, rarely moving about. Your bullets don’t harm them so you can just ignore them if you like, or you can dive for cover behind them if you’re worried about taking damage.

The controls on SIKB are very simple: you move with the direction pad and shooting is automatic. You can optionally set it to shoot manually, but there’s little point in using this as you have unlimited ammo. The only other control is pressing 2 to fire your special weapon, which is not covered by the autofire because its use can depend on building up precious kinetic energy.

Rather awkwardly, there seems to be no way to play the game in horizontal mode. You can physically hold the phone horizontally of course, but it’s difficult to use the keypad on slider models, and SIKB did not use the N81’s gaming keys at all.

There are four savegame slots, and three characters to choose from for each slot. The choice of character doesn’t make a huge amount of difference, it mostly just determines which skyblade is unlocked at the beginning of the game, and it also means the cut scenes are slightly different.

You can choose to play the game in easy mode or normal mode. Easy mode is very easy indeed, this reviewer played the game all the way through on the first go in easy mode, but normal mode offers much more of a challenge. The levels are the same in both modes, but you have four continues in easy mode compared to one in normal mode, and the enemies are harder to destroy in normal mode.

Graphics & Sound

The gameplay and most of the graphics are in 2D, but there are some 3D objects and enemies too, and the mixture works very well indeed, with a pleasing alien look. There are 3D renderings of all the craft and weapons during the weapons selection process, and the larger “boss” enemies are all in 3D as well. The backgrounds are nicely detailed and varied, ranging from snowscapes to forests to space stations to alien planets.

The speed of the graphics can get very fast indeed and on some levels it’s extremely frantic, like watching a video on fast-forward. There are often many dozens of separate moving objects on the screen at once, and trying to find your ship among all the enemies and bullets can be like trying to see dandruff in a snowstorm.

Cut scenes consist of anime-ish characters with text and dramatic music in the background. These are sprinkled throughout the game, appearing between and in the middle of levels as the plot unfolds. It gives the game a real 16-bit feel, which is a good thing in this style of game.

Soundwise the game’s soundtrack has a nice mixture of ambient and dramatic music, and the very last level sounds like a dance version of a Gregorian Chant. All of the music enhances the game without getting in the way. The music and sound effects have separate volume controls, so you can mix them to your own liking.

N-Gage Arena

As befits an old-style shooter, the only online feature is a “World Battle” global high score table. We could not get the Arena connection to work in SIKB though, so we couldn’t see if the promised clans feature was present.

Overall

Whether you like SIKB depends on what kind of gameplay you enjoy most. Although the offline game is called “story mode”, the aim is really to play and replay levels constantly chasing after a better grade, and to unlock more items.

If you just want to play through the game once, then you will be missing the point of SIKB. This is an “old school” scrolling shooter where high scorers receive the greatest rewards, with a smattering of 3D graphics to give it a 2000s look.

In short, if you like classic shoot-em-ups then SIKB is for you. If you hate them, stay away.

PS: You can see a gameplay video of Space Impact: Kappa Base over on the Unofficial Nokia Gaming Blog.

Long term readers of All About N-Gage will know that I am a big fan of the Snake game, and especially where Nokia have taken it , from the little bundled game on the Nokia 5110, through the release of Snakes for the original N-Gage, to the subsequent polish of the code for S60 3rd Edition devices (such as the N95). SO… the sight of Snakes Subsonic in the second generation N-Gage platform was like waving a vial of white powder at me.

The graphics and tweaks just looked fantastic, with more enemies crawling around the playfield, the spectre of an evil snake getting in your way, and the fact that this was going to be even more of a mind-bending playfield, with horizontal and vertical surfaces to climb through just adding to the visual fun.

And then I played it.

It’s just a horrible mess on top of a cracking game – because make no bones about it there is a great game here. Having taken the basic principle of ‘move around the grid and eat things’ of the pure Snake game, the arcade elements added in enhance the gameplay tremendously. The controls are still a relatively simple left and right, with the fire button to activate your pick-ups, back and forward to give a temporary boost or brake to the speed of the snake, and a key to toggle between the 3D and 2D (top down) view of the game. That’s it, and they are all very responsive – there’s little lag between the keypress and the action.

As you tour around the almost Escher-esque game world of walls, ramps, curves and tunnels, you can pick up the green power pills and a ‘bonus’ strip of blue pick-ups will then appear somewhere on the board. These are worth a lot of points, and multiply up if you can eat a whole strip without stopping – 10 points per square on the first strip, 20 per square on the next, 30, 40, and so on. Given that you’re looking to score a certain number of points per level (against the clock!), successfully navigating these strips is one of the major keys to getting past the later levels, especially once they start twisting and turning.

You’ve got speed up (and slow down) squares in addition to the temporary changes you can make to the snake, although these are usually in the most horrible places around the board, designed to disrupt any rhythm that you’ve built up in your mind to keep you on course, so you’ll need to be constantly focussing on the board, the environment, and where your snake is (and was, don’t forget your tail!). To add to the mix, in Snakes Subsonic you can go on the offence by picking up rockets to use against your opponents.

So where does it all go wrong?

That’s actually tough to detail, but let me try. For our American readers, it’s an Edsel; a clunker. There are so many tiny little things that are just not right, which mount up over time to just destroy any enjoyment of the game. For a ‘pick up and play’ title, where the first impressions and memories of the game are key to having you return, Snakes Subsonic just keeps presenting you with reasons to not pick it up.

Let’s start with the speed while playing the game – overall, it’s just too slow. I’ve always expected these arcade versions of Snakes to be fast, giving you just enough time to plan your next move, but not much more than that. Perhaps the clue was in ‘subsonic,’ because it’s certainly not Snakes Supersonic. With this slow speed, you might think this is because the rest of the play environment has a lot going on, and needs the extra processor time. Unfortunately, this isn’t the case either.

The frame rate seems low, to the point where it does visibly stutter on the screen (and this on the games-speedy N95), especially when you flip from one surface plane to another – when you make the transition, the whole play field rotates to keep the camera in the same relative position to the snake, which is the effect you would expect but it is comparatively lethargic and just feels clunky and poorly animated.

And finally, perhaps most frustratingly, there are numerous instances of pop-up. This is where items in the distance are not drawn until you get closer to them. So what looks like an empty playing field in Snakes Subsonic suddenly has a green translucent wall appear when you are 8 or 9 squares away from it. This is just frustrating and also really un-intuitive, because single items, power-ups and roving enemies are visible at a much greater distance. When you’re planning a route a few turns ahead, you don’t want to be thinking ‘what if there’s a wall there I can’t see yet’?

There’s just no ‘slickness’ in the game play; it feels like Snakes by numbers, as if the programmers were doing their job, not because they loved it or truly believed in the project, but because they were getting paid to do it. Perhaps the change in developers from the first N-Gage developers Iomo to Barking Lizard has something to do with this? Whatever it is, there have been some amazing decisions in the design process on this title.

First you don’t see it… now you do. Ouch.

There are also two idiosyncrasies in the game that really send me up the wall. First of all, and a really small but frustrating audio item for me, is that it’s impossible to switch off the background music but keep the sound effects playing – the volume control acts on all the sounds so you can have the full mix, or no mix at all.

Second is what happens when you die in a level. You get the death screen, one of your lives just pops out of existence (there’s no stylish fade over a second, just an instant delete as it slides to the centre of the screen)… and you get a loading screen! Nothing more than a pixel bar across the screen with ‘Loading…’ flashing out at you. I understand a long loading time for a new level, but to not have the starting state stored in memory for a quick restart, and instead asking the player in a ‘fast paced arcade game’ to wait a relatively long time to try again is an… ehrm… interesting design decision.

It pains me to do this, it really does, but I can’t recommend Snakes Subsonic. While there is a good, perhaps even a great game in here somewhere, it’s hampered by too many small failings, performance issues and poor design decisions that the game-play and intriguing 3D levels can’t overcome.

What I would recommend is to download the original Snakes game (available online and via the Download application on most devices) for your Nseries device. It’s free, fast, doesn’t have the faults on display here, and is playable and addictive. The biggest condemnation of Snakes Subsonic is that, to the untrained eye, ‘Snakes’ looks the sequel, not the ‘merely updated for compatibility’ three year old precursor.