New Games added to N-Gage First Access

N-Gage First Access is released since a few days now, but only with a little number of games. Nokia announced to add new features and games in the next weeks and months.

Today they have been starting to do so by adding the following games:

The first game is “World Series of Poker”, a nice poker game for your N-Gage supported phone. It can be downloaded in the “Game Showroom” of the the N-Gage application.

The second one is a classic “Tetris” game from Electronic Arts. As well as “World Series of Poker”, you can get the game by having a look at the “Game Showroom”.

If the new games aren’t displayed, choose “Options” -> “Update Now”, then everything should work fine.

Tetris:

Although “Tetris” might seem unspectacular to you as a part of the revolutionary N-Gage platform, it was great fun for me to play this game.

Of course there’s no place for amazing 3D animations in a game with such a simple principle. Anyway, the developers took care of making the game also optical as attractive as possible by animating the blocks nicely.

In my opinion, the proper field that displays the blocks got a little bit too small, however I like the game’s optics.

Let’s have a little look at the “Options”. Apart from the normal ones like “Volume”, enabling/disabling of “Sounds” and the “Language”, you can activate a nice “Vibration” effect.
Also important is the “Ghost” setting which displays how a block will be will placed.

Like in all the N-Gage demos, the possibilites are very limited. You can only play one game and the “Highscore” can’t be displayed.

“Tetris” is a very nice game, although there aren’t any innovative ideas. It’s quite a “classic” game whichpackaged in nice optics.

World Series of Poker:

Here you can see the main menu of “World Series of Poker”. You can start a “Career”, play only one game by choosing “Versus”, have a look at the online “Rankings” or create your own “New Player”.

I am starting a “Career”, actually the only thing one can play in the trial version. If you want to, you can set the “Table Setup” before starting the game.

A nice start screen displaying the players’ names appears at the start.

The opposing player is displayed in full 3D, although you can see the individual pixels. I won’t explain the certain steps of Texas Hold’em here.

When you have a turn, various information and buttons are appearing. You can choose between the normal possibilites “Raise”, “Call” and exiting the round by choosing “Fold”.
Nice animated again is how the player has a look at his cards. Sometimes he is also playing with his chips while you have a turn.

The cards belonging to both players are located in the table’s middle, your own are displayed like they were held in your hands. Nice!

“Showdown!” I’ll better avoid to tell you how the game has ended…

Again the trial version is highly limited: One game and the “World Series of Poker” exists.

In addition, the menu point “Versus” can not be used.

I like Poker and “World Series of Poker” is the nicest mobile transformation I have ever seen. Anyway, I hope the developers will release a version that uses the graphic chip of the N95, N95 8GB and N82, because the optics could still be improved. On the other hand, the animations are created nicely.

All in all, we can say that the N-Gage platform has a larger variety after the release of this two nice games.