All About N-Gage - Gsm Technic Service

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.

Gameplay

Hooked On: Creatures Of The Deep is one of Nokia’s flagship first party games, and one of the most eagerly awaited titles of the new N-Gage platform’s launch. It’s been published by Nokia itself, and the developers are the Polish company Infinite Dreams, who are well-known in the smartphone community for their acclaimed high-quality games such as K-Rally, Sky Force and Super Miners (all of which are available for N-Gage phones, just look for the versions labelled “Symbian S60 3rd Edition”).

HO:COTD is a sort of combination of a fishing simulator and a role playing game, with every successful catch earning you experience points (XP) that bring you closer to “levelling up”, which unlocks new features, playing areas, items and even mini-games. You can just fish at random if you want, or you can choose to take part in a quest (usually to find a particular object lost underwater, or to catch a certain creature), or you can take part in tournaments which are held several times a day in the game world (they’re offline tournaments against computer players, so you don’t need an internet connection). All three activities can be done at once, so for example if you get bored of a quest you can go off to join a tournament.

The game takes place in four real-life fishing resorts in Costa Rica, Alaska, Scotland and Thailand. Some of the characters you meet exist in real life, and the resorts themselves are represented by locations in the game based on real maps. You start the game in Costa Rica but as you earn experience you’ll unlock the other locations, and you can fly to them from each resort’s airport. As you level up, new fishing tackle will be available to you from the resort shop (you don’t have to pay for it, just reach the right level of experience and go and collect it).

The controls for the game are very, very simple: you move with the direction pad, and you select things with either the direction pad button or the top gaming button (the A button). You also occasionally have to choose an option with the blue soft keys. The simplicity of the controls means you can play the game just as easily with one hand as two, and the game plays just as well in horizontal/landscape mode as it does in vertical/portrait mode. HO:COTD is suited to practically any phone model with any button layout.

You choose where to fish from a detailed 2D map which you drive your boat around. The map is animated, so for example you can see where other boats are fishing (if there are any), and the depth of the water is visible from the colours of the sea or lake. Once you decide on a place to fish, you just click the button and you’re presented with a 3D view of the spot where you can look all round and up and down.

Using a golf style power meter, you press the button to cast your line, and then press it again to choose how far out you want the line to go. If you’ve managed to obtain a depth meter, you’ll see a chart showing how deeply your lure has sunk, which is important as different lures sink at different speeds, and different fish live at different depths. Reeling the lure in keeps it at that depth, though it may drag it away from an interested fish. When a fish does try to take the bait, the game’s camera zooms in on the end of your reel, and if the fish is ready to be reeled in a blue icon will appear telling you to press the game button.

This is where the excitement begins: you have to get the fish all the way back to the boat, with that distance represented by a blue bar. At the same time, the fish has to get away from you, so it tries to pull on the line as hard as it can, and the strain on your line is represented by a green and red bar next to the blue bar. If you don’t reel the fish in it will get away, but if you do reel the fish in it will cause strain on the line. Your task is to balance the strain with the reeling, and this is where the essence of the game lies, in “playing chicken” with the strain gauge so that it goes as close to breaking point without actually breaking. This is made very difficult by the constant changes in direction of the fish, and you see it spinning you around in the main display, occasionally even jumping out of the water in a rather spectacular manner.

If the above process sounds complicated, it isn’t, you get to know the game very quickly and fishing becomes an instinctive process. Catching a fish feels very much like a duel, which is probably as it should be.

If you manage to get a fish reeled all the way in, you receive experience points based on how rare the fish is and how difficult it is to catch. You can then either keep the fish or release it (the game generally rewards you for releasing fish, especially rare species).

Sometimes you’ll find a fish is very easy to reel in, and then you’ll discover it isn’t a fish at all but an object of some kind. It’s worth keeping all the man-made objects you find, as you receive bonus experience points for removing rubbish from the water, and the objects may help you solve certain quests. Particularly interesting are the messages in bottles that you catch from time to time, which reveal the back-story to the location you’re in at the moment. For example the Costa Rica resort has lots of ancient maps and messages from Christopher Columbus.

You’ll also very occasionally catch a creature that isn’t a fish, such as a turtle, crocodile or even (if you’re lucky) the Loch Ness Monster.

Some Important Hints

One of the problems with HO:COTD is that it doesn’t really have a tutorial to get you started, so let’s take a break from the review for a moment and look at some important things you should know before playing the game:

• The “Pause” menu is your best friend, it contains all the important information you need to play the game.

• The “Pocket” section of the pause menu contains your tackle box (where you can choose the fishing equipment you want to use), as well as a Pokemon-style bestiary of the fish you’ve caught in that resort, and a “Live Well” section containing all the objects you’ve kept.

• Don’t repeatedly pound the game button to reel in the fish, just keep it pressed down to reel in and release it if line tension is too high.

• When you’re at an appropriate level you can collect new tackle from the resort, represented by an orange circle with a house in it. You have to collect it for it to appear in your tackle box, and you have to then select it from your tackle box in order to use it.

• Tackle unlocked when you reach a higher level is NOT necessarily better than tackle from a lower level, quite often a lower level item works better than a higher level item. For example some of the higher level lures sink much more quickly, which means they’re useless in trying to catch fish which live near the surface. You need different kinds of tackle for different kinds of fish, there are no simple tackle “upgrades”.

• The green and red dots represent quests, just go to them and click on the button to find out what they are. If you want a further hint or a reminder of what you’re supposed to do, go back to the dot and click on the button.

• The game does have a variety of different lures, rods, lines and other equipment, but these aren’t open to you when you begin. As you progress, the fishing techniques you can use become more subtle and complex.

• Different fish live in different places, come out at different times of day, and live at different depths, so try to vary where and how you fish as much as possible. The depth meter will help you do this, as will an appropriate choice of tackle.

• Your level, experience and tackle box only count in the resort you’re in. You earn experience, levels and equipment completely separately in each resort, so for example you might be level 10 in Costa Rica but only level 2 in Alaska. In effect, each resort is a separate game.

• If you want to use the rumble feature, as well as switching it on in the options menu you also have to have vibrating alert switched on in the phone profile you’re currently using. For example, if you have the phone in offline mode, you’ll have to activate vibrating alert in the “offline” profile for the rumble feature to work in the game. You can usually find the profiles icon in the “Tools” folder on the main menu screen.

• Let the main menu of the game run on its own and you’ll see fish and objects you’ve recently caught float by in a virtual aquarium.

Graphics & Sound

The very first time you play the game you may be disappointed by the sea looking a bit pixelly compared to the preview screenshots, but the more you play the game the more you realise just how spectacular and detailed the visuals are.

Everything is exquisitely done: the surface of the sea moves convincingly, the boat bobs up and down appropriately to current conditions (and recoils realistically if your fishing line snaps), the sky and landscape change their appearance (often quite radically) in relation to the current time of day and weather conditions. The sky is populated with flocks of birds, jets flying overhead and even the occasional hot air balloon. Around you the sea has other boats, fish close to the surface and bottles floating by (though the bottles you can see don’t seem to be catchable, you can only catch bottles that are under the surface). If you’ve gotten wet from reeling a fish in or because it’s raining, there are photo-realistic drops of water which gradually run down the camera lens, and if you look directly in the sun you see the classic “lens flare” circles you’d expect from a camera. If it’s night time you can see the lights on the coastline, and now and then the hot air balloons will light up as their pilots turn on the flames of the heater.

Even the map changes colour with the time of day in the game world, and is animated with clouds floating over the map in a parallax fashion, fish swimming through the sea and other boats trying to find a good spot.

You really have to play the game for some time to fully appreciate just how much work has gone into the graphics, as a location in bright sunshine looks completely different in a storm, and completely different again at sunset. When it’s not raining the sun can be shining directly, or hidden by cloud, or creeping behind the mountains, and when it is raining it can either be boring showers or a full-blown thunderstorm with lightning striking the sea (and, unlike films, there’s a realistic delay between the lightning and the thunder). The effect of weather and sunlight on how the game looks is amazing, it makes the game feel much more real and adds to the atmosphere tremendously.

One serious disappointment is how the game handles graphics when you finish reeling something in. While you’re reeling it in the graphics are absolutely excellent, as you and the line get dragged about by the creature in all directions and you often see it leaping out of sea, but for some reason when you’ve actually got the creature all the way to your boat the game pauses, then presents a dialogue box with the creature’s name and a 3D rendering. It feels like the graphic artists didn’t know how to handle the end of the capture so they just left out the ending completely, which is a bit of a cop-out.

In general though, this is one of the most beautiful and lovingly put together phone games at the moment, and really raises the bar for what you can expect from graphics in a mobile phone title.

Sound is also very good, with a separate soundtrack for each location. The Costa Rica location you begin in sounds a lot like something from the Monkey Island games, and the music uses a separate volume control from the effects so you can turn it off if you don’t like it. The music is contextual, so it only plays when it’s appropriate and changes itself to suit current events. The music plays on the main menu and the map, but fades away when you start the actual fishing. There’s then an exciting bit of music when you start reeling in a fish, which speeds up the nearer you get to making a successful catch.

As the game itself points out, if you turn the game’s music off completely you can listen to your own music instead using the phone’s music player, though this won’t be in sync to the game’s events because it’s running in a separate application.

The sound effects all suit the game well, though of course there’s not a huge variety of effects in a fishing game as they’re mostly related to water. The thrashing of the fish is convincing, and if you listen carefully you can even hear the faint “plop” of the lure as it hits the water.

N-Gage Arena

As far as we can tell, the only Arena features on here are online scoreboards, and various in-game actions also earn you N-Gage achievement points for your N-Gage profile.

Overall

Hooked On: Creatures Of The Deep is great fun to play once you’ve worked out where all the options and status screens are, and it gets even better once you’ve unlocked things like the depth meter, extra tackle, and the other resort locations. People who invest time in this game will be rewarded.

Unfortunately the game’s designers haven’t made it very easy to do the things above. The “Pause” menu is far more important than its name suggests, and the “Pocket” menu also needs to be much more prominent so people can easily find some extremely vital things like the tackle box. There really ought to be a tutorial at the beginning of the game taking the player through finding all these features, because progress will get very very difficult without them. Infinite Dreams know how to do tutorials, they have an excellent one at the beginning of their K-Rally game, so it’s a shame they didn’t make one for this game too.

Another problem is that the amount of experience required to unlock certain parts of the game is far too high. The main reason this reviewer has taken so long to write this review is because it took about two or three days of long playing sessions to unlock the first extra resort. Considering the average phone gamer is only likely to be playing this on their way to and from work, it may take them weeks to unlock even one extra resort, by which time they could well have become bored as progress seems so slow. It also seems odd to lock these resorts at all, as the player starts on level 1 in all of them and progresses in each resort completely separately.

It’s also a shame that N-Gage Arena hasn’t been used for more than just scoreboards, and some features touted last year (such as putting your own message in a bottle for other Arena members to read) seem to have been dropped.

This is a frustrating situation because all the ingredients are here for one of our ultra-rare “Mega Game” awards, but unfortunately HO:COTD doesn’t quite make it.

However, this is still one of the best phone games out there, it has great gameplay which suits long and short playing sessions, it has wonderful graphics, it has depth and longevity, the controls are simple and intuitive, and it brings a new kind of game to phones too. At 10 euros this is really good value for money, there’s so much to discover in HO:COTD that it will keep you going for a long, long time.

We feel very happy to give Hooked On: Creatures Of The Deep our first “Recommended” award for a next gen game, and hope that Nokia will get Infinite Dreams to do lots more N-gage games. If they’re this good on their first attempt, they definitely deserve a long term contract.

The FIFA franchise from Electronic Arts is a mighty one. First appearing in 1993, since then it has appeared on pretty much every single gaming platform of note, including the original N-Gage system. Having it appear on the new N-Gage platform is a smart move from Nokia, lending an air of respectability to the system both to the gaming press (”ah, the Finns can attract developers”) and to the end users (”cool! FIFA! I know this!”).

And here comes the rub. I’m not a great football gamer. Truth be told I’m rubbish at football in real life as well (hey, I am from Scotland, what do you expect?), and FIFA 08 has consistently been the game that was left behind when we all lined up to choose titles to review. We weren’t devout fans of the franchise, we’re not sports fans (beyond Formula 1, but is that really a sport?)…

…but maybe that should work in the N-Gage’s favour. After all, we’re talking about a platform targeted at casual gamers here, not the rabid fan (even though I suspect this title will gather a lot of them). And it’s not as if most of Europe doesn’t know how to play football (we’ll leave the discussion of FIFA in North America for another time). You’ve just got to kick the ball about till you get it in the goal, and do that more times than your opponent. [Hey, what about the offside rule?! - Ed]

What does help this casual discovery of the game is that during your first match, the action will pause whenever a new option is available to you – such as your first ‘pass’ of the ball, the first opportunity to shoot the ball, the first tackle, and so on. These can be switched off from the ‘My FIFA 08’ menu (i.e. the options).

This is great and, as I soon discovered, the key combinations needed are quite small – the cursor, to move around the screen, the fire button to switch to the next nearest player to the ball, and the occasional press on the ‘5’ key for a main action and ‘0’ for the secondary (e.g. pass is ‘5′ and shoot is ‘0′). Yes, there are more in-depth controls, but frankly this is enough to be going on with.

Probably the only control to flag up, and which is on by default as the game starts, is auto-run. This means that, rather than holding down a direction key, you can just tap it and your player will happily keep scooting off in that direction.

FIFA presents you with a number of types of game play, including a season long campaign or a number of tournaments, mostly regional cup games, or the International Cup – eagles eyed lawyers will spot that this avoids referencing properties such as the FA Cup or the World Cup, as this would probably drive up the licensing costs.

Team selection is well represented, with the major leagues of each country (although I’m disappointed the UK representation is only the English Premiership, when most other versions of FIFA 08 also carry the Scottish Leagues and I could play my beloved Cowdenbeath). For those of you not au fait with the teams of Europe, each has a star rating (out of five)… How the Scottish national team gets a big 4/5, I don’t know.

There are two other modes. First is the quick game, where you choose two teams and just go for it. I suspect that’s where most casual players will start before deciding to move into a longer League or Cup mode. And then there are the challenges, which are a lovely idea. You get presented with a scenario - Liverpool are 3 goals down after 20 minutes and went on to beat Milton Keynes by 5 goals. Can you do the same - and you’re asked to play it through. It’s a nice touch, and gives you a little slice of pick up and play if you don’t want to commit to a series of matches.

Now, while the controls are pretty simple, the choices you have in the game are varied. You can do the classic kick the ball up the pitch and run after it, you can lob balls in the air between your players from opposite sides of the pitch, or you can pass the ball between your players who are close, slowly working it towards the goal. Those were the three basic strategies I used on novice level, with a little bit of success… by using just those, it made the game challenging but not overly difficult – which is good for me. More experienced FIFA players will appreciate the higher difficulty levels, and the gamer in me is glad that ‘novice’ doesn’t translate to a ‘we’ll let you win to make you feel good’ level of skill… the five skill levels available significantly ramp up the difficulty.

You can also change the team formation – where players stand on the pitch and what areas are covered. This is the mystical number chant of 4-3-3, 4-2-2-2 or even 1-4-3-2 (see, we have silly numbers just as much as American Football), but luckily you get a graphical display of where your players would end up. This can be changed at any point in the game, so you can re-organise to defend, attack, or have lots of players in the middle for passing the ball around. You’ve also got the option to substitute out injured or tired players.

Where I found trouble is when the computer AI team has the ball and I’m trying to get the tackles in. There are no complicated key strokes, just your player next to the player with the ball, and the tackle is then made (success depends on the relevant simulated skill of the actual football player) – the problem is getting your player close enough. The switch to nearest player isn’t intelligent enough to snap to the closest, and the AI controlled players on your team are as dumb as… well… footballers. Maybe I’m missing something, but it’s rather hit and miss, and infuriating trying to muster the defense.

The look of the game is wonderful – all the players may be small, but they are crisp, you can make out where they’re going or trying to do – you can even watch them loose balance on a slipping pitch! And just to make it a bit more TV like, whenever something spectacular happens, you’ll get a replay of the action from a dramatic camera viewpoint, e.g. to relive the perfect goal into the top corner of the net.

I was expecting a multi-player option to be available on FIFA, either over local Bluetooth or through the N-Gage Arena. This would be the perfect game for that – unfortunately there’s no sign of it at all. I wish there had been, and I’d be intrigued to know why a local option isn’t in the design. Is this because of the focus that everything has to go through the N-Gage client (and server) model?

And while FIFA 08 is going to lose a few marks for that, the rest of the title holds up very well to this casual gamer. The menus are clear, the graphics are sharp and understandable, there’s little confusion in what’s happening in the game (even if how I’m playing is a bit inexplicable), and there is enough variety in the types of game, and in the changing nature of league and cup competitions to keep you playing FIFA 08 for a long time.

Gameplay

Dogz for N-Gage is a puppy simulator, supposedly related to the long-running “Petz” range of PC games, but in reality this version of Dogz has absolutely no connection to the originals. This is more like a very poor attempt to copy Nintendogs.

You start by choosing a dog from three breeds (Labrador, Jack Russell, Shiba Inu), and for some breeds you can choose a colour too. You give it a name and take it home.

There then follows a laborious tutorial process where one feature of the game is introduced at a time, after which you have to exit and restart the game if you want to find out about the next feature. However, by the time you’ve finished the tutorial you’ve also exhausted all the gameplay that Dogz has to offer, and there isn’t really much more to do or explore, because none of the game’s activities have any lasting appeal.

The gameplay is made up of a few basic tasks, all of which require little or no skill:

- Feed Or Water Your Dog: Put a bowl of food or water on the ground, the dog consumes it. It doesn’t really matter if you do this though, as it takes a very very long time for the dog to notice anything amiss.

- Stroking Your Dog: Click on the dog, then click on various parts of its body. Nintendogs-style glitter appears.

- Throwing A Frisbee Or Ball: You throw the frisbee or ball at a certain angle and power, the puppy goes to get it and returns it to you. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that Gameloft have dared to use the word “Frisbee”, which either means they’ve paid for the licence or they’ll be receiving a knock on the door from Wham-O’s lawyers very soon.

- Digging For Treasure: You mark a spot in the garden or on the beach and the dog digs there. You will either find a gift (some kind of food, frisbee or ball), or the dog will point in a particular direction where you can try digging another hole.

- Going To The Vet: The vet says your dog is fine, even when the game’s indicators say that the dog is starving and thirsty.

- Tug Of War: You pull on one end of a rope, the puppy pulls on the other, and you have to keep it going as long as possible by watching a strain meter. The longer you keep it going, the happier the dog becomes.

- Playing With Other Dogs: There’s a beach next to the house which always has another dog on it, and in theory you can take your dog there so they can play together. In reality it’s just two dogs running around and occasionally running through each other (yes, through, it seems that the developers forgot to put any solidity into their 3D engine).

- Washing Your Dog: You click and move a soap bar back and forth over the dog, then a shower head, then a brush.

- Picking Up Dog Mess: If your dog does a poo, you click on it.

- Swimming Pool: Your dog swims through a swimming pool while trying to avoid moving inflatables. Press the direction pad button to go down, let it go to go up. If you touch an inflatable you lose. Incidentally, when you do touch an inflatable the game plays an animation which implies the dog is drowning, and may upset younger players.

- Slalom: Similar to the “weave poles” of dog agility, you have to steer your dog through the correct sides of a row of wooden sticks by pressing up and down on the direction pad. It’s not quite like real life though, especially as some of the poles move about.

None of these activities are things you would want to return to after playing them once. It takes a few minutes to try each one, so there’s a total gameplay time of about 30 to 40 minutes for Dogz, and all of that is pretty dire gameplay too.

What makes it even worse is the really clumsy interface, which has a constant row of icons at the bottom of the screen that have to be reached either with * and # or by scrolling the pointer to the bottom. The camera angle also demands a lot of attention so you can see where you’re supposed to be doing something. The default settings on Dogz make it difficult to play in horizontal mode on slider phones (N81, N95 etc) as you can’t reach the camera controls so you’re forced to use the keypad. You can redefine the keys though.

Graphics & Sound

The still screenshots of Dogz give the impression of a reasonably pretty phone game, but the truth is rather disappointing. Yes, the locations are in 3D, but it’s jerky and the camera is at an atrocious angle most of the time. To add insult to injury, you can only change the angle left or right incrediblyslllllooooooowwwwwllllyyyy, with no option at all for up or down. The camera angle is so narrow that it’s often very difficult to see where your puppy is, or even just see the current location properly. Sometimes the camera puts you behind a fence or other object so you can’t see anything.

The graphics are also very deceptive as they show lots of objects that you cannot interact with at all. For example, if you try to throw a ball from one side of the garden to the other it bounces off invisible walls before it gets anywhere near the edges, so despite the large location you are effectively stuck within a small box.

Of course the graphics star of games like this is the dog itself and its animations, which are supposed to be as sweet as possible. They’re okay as far as they go, but there aren’t really enough of them, and watching the dog playing gets boring very quickly. It spends most of its time walking round in circles, which is pretty much how the player feels about this game.

Sound consists of awful, dreadful music. It seems they’ve tried to ape the soundtrack from Nintendogs and Animal Crossing, but the result is unlistenable. There are occasional sound effects but nowhere near enough, and this reviewer kept the sound switched off most of the time.

N-Gage Arena

There’s an online rankings table, but the score you upload is just a measure of how often you’ve done the game’s activities. If you throw the dog frisbees lots of times you’ll get a higher score, it doesn’t matter if they catch it or not.

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.

Dogz through TV Out runs without any problems, though a lot of the textures do look very pixellated when close to the camera. The dog’s shadow is especially bad, but the dog itself looks good, quite detailed and high resolution.

Our Bluetooth keyboard worked fine, the game responded instantly to commands, and the option of redefining the keys in Dogz allows you to alter the controls to suit your keyboard.

Overall

Dogz is quite simply the worst next gen N-Gage game released so far.

N-Gage’s other puppy simulator Sims 2 Pets has fast, smooth and pretty graphics, good camera angles, okay sound, an excellent intuitive interface, but suffers from a severe lack of things to see or do. You can read our review of it by clicking here.

Dogz has jerky and slow graphics, annoying camera angles, poor sound, an awful interface, and has an even greater lack of things to see or do. It’s a worse game than Sims 2 Pets in every way.

It’s a mark of how boring and unimaginative Dogz is that its point pickups are things like playing frisbee thirty times (80 points) or uploading your score fifty times (200 points).

Pet simulators aren’t meant to have conventional gameplay of course, but they are meant to offer at least something to occupy the player’s time. Games are meant to entertain, but Dogz doesn’t. It feels a chore to play and there aren’t really any rewards to unlock or things to customise. Nothing develops, nothing changes, there’s no progression or genuine interaction with your virtual pet.

As a real life dog owner it’s also very frustrating to see this game, like Sims 2 Pets, perpetuating the myth that a dog must be punished to be house-trained. For most dogs it’s far more effective to use positive feedback, i.e. reward the dog when it does its business in the right place, and ignore it completely when it does it in the wrong place. (The same technique works for potty-training humans, interestingly enough.)

Dogz’ lack of any kind of gameplay will put off most children and adults, and the difficult controls will put off the youngest gamers. It’s impossible to imagine anyone getting much joy from this game beyond the first few minutes.

Even the most casual player can probably explore all of Dogz in well under an hour, with absolutely nothing to tempt them back.