WIRED Staff
Culture

Slideshow: Nokia Puts on Its Game Face

Gaming industry insiders may be blasé about most of the developments at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo. But Nokia's new multitasking mobile-gaming device has gamers buzzing. Suneel Ratan reports from Los Angeles.
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Nokia has made a big splash at E3 with its N-Gage mobile-entertainment device. The $300 gadget is part arcade, part cell phone and part FM radio.Courtesy of Nokia

See related story: Nokia Puts on Its Game Face

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Red Faction, a shooter-action game for the N-Gage.

Courtesy of Nokia
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There are many critics and skeptics for the N-Gage at E3. Many think that the GameBoy Advance and its games like Donkey Kong Country (top), Final Fantasy Tactics (center) and Mario & Luigi, are cheaper and more practical for gamers than the N-Gage.

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N-Gage's luminous screen allows for 3-D graphics (seen here in the game Pandemonium) for a rich visual experience.

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Perhaps another big score for Nokia in attracting a market of 16- to 35-year-old men who are ready to take their games on the road, and to play against each other wirelessly, is the addition of the title Tomb Raider to their game library.

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Sonic the Hedgehog is one of several games created for N-Gage.

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Nokia is betting big that they can create a new market for mobile games with the N-gage. The goal is to create games like Moto-GP to be shipped on multimedia flash memory cards that can hold 128 MB of data or more.

Courtesy of Nokia