In this topic you will learn about:
1. taking screenshots from N-gage;
2. video capture from N-Gage and tools for this;
3. development and creation of the game Shadowkey;
4. other related topics: magazines, community, etc. d.
Text version for those who for some reason do not watch the video:
Hello friends, Pavel Char is with you again. It all started when I watched the old-games podcast. It talked about N-Gage, some games interested me. I especially wanted to try Shadowkey, especially since they wrote in the comments that the game should not slow down if you use the patch.
I am a curious person, I was interested in playing on an unknown platform, because it is not emulated. There are few reviews on it, but I love everything unusual.
I wanted a classic N-Gage, but as luck would have it, the opportunity to buy an N-Gage QD turned up. I liked everything in the photos, when I asked about the shortcomings, the seller said that only the keys were worn. He modestly kept silent about the wheezing speaker, dead pixel, broken case and lack of localization. The phone was restored.
At first, of course, I was upset when I received the parcel, but I still began to figure it out.
It was funny to watch how I tried to turn on Nokia: the button is located on the right under the rubber band. Next, I was greeted with a message that said the phone would not turn on without a SIM card. After digging for about 15 minutes, I found an old card. The card is already blocked, and to prevent warning windows from popping up, I put the phone in offline mode.
Capture screenshots.
I tried to record a video on my tablet. It turned out to be nonsense and I decided to beat the game first and then come up with something. Fortunately, there is a program built into the phone that allows you to take screenshots in all games and applications. Wonderful thing! It can take screenshots in soapy JPEG and clear MBM. For the first few hours I took pictures in JPEG, but then I decided to deal with the unknown MBM format. This is the standard graphics file format in Symbian OS.
It’s very simple. A screenshot running in the background is waiting for you to press a key combination. Then enter a name or leave the default one and save. The process takes about 10 seconds. I agree, long, but not fatal.
Everything saved can be viewed directly on the phone, rotated, zoomed in. This is great, you can share your screenshots! Boast to friends, and not unfoundedly, but with confirmation. Or use these pictures to write articles and walkthroughs. Modern laptops don’t allow you to take screenshots without dancing with a tambourine, remember the same 3DS.
All that remains is to save the file in a convenient place, and convert it to the desired format on your computer.
Voila! Here is a picture, enlarged three times without loss of quality. I took screenshots while playing and then sent them to my favorite site, GameFAQs, where I used the walkthrough. Russian screenshots on a foreign website. It’s funny, but more people will get an idea of the game. It’s strange that there are so few good screenshots of N-Gage on the Internet, even on gaming sites.
How I Got My Only N-Gage Game.
I would like to get the original, but I played from a regular card. The Russian translation became a consolation for me. Overall it’s good, although there are some typos.
I only have one game so far, but it came to me in an incredible way. I joined the N-Gage fan community. There was a competition held there. One of the collectors from Ukraine, Mikhail, decided to stir up the community. You just had to write your nickname in messages on your phone, take a photo, and send it to the organizer. And then the matter was decided by chance and barrels from the lotto.
Mikhail: Now there will be a final. All that happened before was purely to play. We have to prank this baby. Let’s go. *takes a lotto barrel out of a bag* Number twenty wins the Tomb Raider game, Pavel Char! Pavel, we congratulate you on your victory! This was a good draw.
Then some of the prizes came to Russia through another collector, Timur.
Timur: *takes the game out of the box* Tomb Raider, it seems, is getting Pavel Char.
About magazines about mobile games.
There were a lot of prizes. At my invitation, Igor from the Binary Edge channel took part in the competition, and luck smiled on him too. And then N-Gage fascinated us, and together we looked for literature on the topic. We managed to scan several pages about mobile games from a rather rare magazine Videogames Inside. We posted them in our groups. Much cooler was the official magazine from Nokia itself: N-Gage Insider. It was intended for product distributors. The first issue is very rare, I even found the only cover like this. There are photos of the second and third issues online. So if you have these magazines, scan them or send them to me. At least take a photo of the first one. Let’s make them more accessible.
About capturing video from N-Gage.
https://reelsgrandecasino.co.uk/withdrawal/ />Let’s return to image capture. Old, “veteran” smartphones from Nokia, playing N-Gage games, do not have a TV output.
Fortunately, these are smartphones, which means there are many different devices for them. The solution may be a Bluetooth keyboard and a good camera with a tripod. Native keyboard – Nokia SU-8W. Quite rare, I’m looking for one like this. At first you will play clumsily, but nothing will shake in the frame.
“Royally” of course, play on the classic N-Gage with an overclocked processor. Among other phones, N70, 7610, 3230, 6680 or, as in our case, 6630 are perfect. It is probably the best in terms of compatibility. It is in Shadowkey that there will be no sound, but considering the sound quality in this game, it’s not a big loss. The 6630 handles most games from N-Gage without any complaints. Notice how smoothly the game runs on it. This is not surprising: the processor here is twice as powerful as on the N-Gage.
You can capture the image with software MobileWays Remote S60 Professional v2.68, but frame rate drops will be noticeable.
It’s faster than taking screenshots if you don’t care too much about quality and want to capture the exact moment. The sound will have to be captured separately and then combined. But not all games work correctly, and the frame rate leaves much to be desired. The program is ideal for recording software operation.
The video capture option for the elite is DevKit. This phone has an intermediate cable between the screen and the board. The picture goes along a cable to a special piece of hardware. And if DevKit can still be found if desired, then the miracle box itself is terribly rare. It got to the Poles and the guys started doing good: capturing gameplay from N-Gage and uploading footage for free use. While preparing the video, I found out that they are streaming directly from N-Gage on the second channel. It’s a miracle! In general, third-party footage was used so as not to damage your vision.
Shadowkey game review.
I will name the strengths and weaknesses of the game and try to remain objective. Sometimes the game really starts to make you angry, and sometimes you catch yourself thinking how good it is. This contradiction is difficult to explain logically.
As usual, you will be given a choice between several races and classes. In the first half of the game the difference is unnoticeable. Apart from differences in statistics, this choice has almost no effect.
The adventure will begin in a small village that was captured by bandits. You need to go to their lair and save your fellow villagers.
Another war has broken out in this world again. Those who attacked the village were just pawns in the hands of a powerful battle mage. Who is he looking for throughout Tamriel?? What plans does he have?? Why is there a huge crater near our village?? We will find out this later, faced with mysterious keys of shadows, hitherto unknown magic and a wizard who has lost his memory. He will explain that an ancient and powerful demon is awakening. All the horrors of war are nothing compared to it: the fate of the world is at stake. Only fragments of a star collected together can stop him. Only they can weaken the ancient evil that must be defeated. This is what we will do.
The music is familiar themes from Morrowind, but it’s compressed, which is why it loses quality. The sounds are average, and there are few of them. The repeated dying cry for most enemies sounds terribly ridiculous, becomes boring and boring quite quickly. The sound scale is one of the weak points of the game and is generally not remarkable.
Most of the game is combat. The battles are simple, press button 5 and the character hits with an ax, sword or casts a spell, depending on your choice.
There are ranged weapons, such as bows, crossbows, throwing daggers. The supply of throwing weapons is unlimited, so such weapons are suitable as the main.
Consumables, all sorts of potions, are used with button 7, which is convenient during battle.
But I played as a mage and didn’t use any potions at all during the entire game. Is it for nothing that I had the magic of healing??
Plus – fully customizable controls: you can assign buttons however you want.
The equipment is inconvenient. You have to constantly go through all your things to get new ones. If you take a new sword, the old one will not be deleted automatically.
Attacking enemies is quite difficult, because it is impossible to understand what determines hits.
The game’s combat system is flawed due to insufficient control and crooked hits. You will have to use your phone keyboard instead of your computer mouse. Shots depend on the whims of the game. Spells are unreliable because even a direct hit does not mean the enemy will take damage. When you hit an enemy, they will sometimes turn red and groan. But sometimes he won’t get any damage at all.
This is especially noticeable when you release several fireballs one after another. Needless to say, even walls and tables interfere with spells. The game is based on battles, they are everywhere, so soon the curvature of hits will begin to irritate.
Magic sounds reveal enemies behind walls. They seem to start fighting when the player gets close to them. And it doesn’t matter what’s in their way: a wall or a door. They don’t get along with doors at all: they can’t open them themselves. So you can lure enemies into rooms and lock them. For a game where everything is tied to battles, this is unacceptable.
Enemies drop the same bags with things, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a person or a wolf. Everyone wears bags. They usually contain consumables that temporarily change parameters or healing items. Sometimes things are in drawers or tables, you need to come up and look carefully. A couple of times things were in the “iron maiden”, which is generally a decoration. Therefore, you must approach all tables, cabinets and drawers and check the inscription “inspect” or “take”.
Speaking of leveling. I always pumped up only one parameter: intelligence. And since I was a very reasonable magician, I sold a rare crossbow for 20,000 gold.
To the rescue, I hired teachers in the mages guild and increased the parameters. What I mean is that I didn’t experience any particular difficulties from choosing the wrong statistics; to beat the game you only need patience.
Perhaps the main trouble is the small drawing distance, which makes it quite difficult to find the right places or characters. The screenshots look good from the outside, but believe me, when you start playing, everything is much worse.
Imagine standing near a torch, taking a few steps away, and only darkness ahead. Looks stupid. N-Gage does not have enough resources to display large 3D spaces. I had to reduce the draw distance. It’s dark all around.
Game development and unique features.
By the way, there was a special sub-series for mobile platforms: Travels. The first two games will also go to N-Gage. They are made on an old version of Java.
Mark Jones participated in the development of mobile games in the series. But N-Gage was a more complex beast and allowed the use of three-dimensional models. On his website mjonesgraphics.com, Mark shares development details. He was responsible for character creation and design, first-person weapons and spells, level creation and texturing. Also created the cover.
This game is one of the most voluminous in the device’s game library. To fit everything on the card, they saved space. For this purpose, many models were reused, but with different textures. Due to this, they tried to diversify the enemies.
Of course, they were low-poly: 150–200 polygons with 64×64 textures. Speaking of textures, we had to tinker: with such a resolution, even one pixel can make a big difference.
Mark decided that the character’s face attracts the most attention and decided it was worth sacrificing body textures. So a quarter of the texture is exclusively for faces.
Why is there no emulator available to everyone?.
To remove the brakes, we simplified the animation. That’s why she’s so clumsy. Tests gave good results. Here is an early version of the game from the advertisement. It was launched on an emulator for developers, which was not publicly available.
If you get this emulator, you won’t be able to run other people’s games on it. It requires sources and compiles them for x86 processor. That is, you can only write a game from scratch.
Therefore, to create a public N-Gage emulator, you need a version of the emulator for developers and the source code of some game. The probability of finding such a treasure is almost zero.
It may seem like the game has been artificially slowed down. This is wrong. The emulator was used for development and debugging on the computer. It’s just that no one bothered with phone processor emulation.
The character and environment models are good for a mobile game, and it’s a shame that the phone doesn’t pull up the picture.
The graphics have some charm. Enemy models are detailed and even a little scary. The textures are good, no obvious seams are visible. I was especially impressed by the geometry of the world. It’s full of hilly areas, different heights to climb. The player’s weapons and hands are pre-rendered and shown as sprites. Everything else is three-dimensional.
From the very beginning you can roam freely anywhere in the world, even if your character is too weak.
When jumping, you need to tilt the camera to see where you land. I stopped liking jumping after the Ice Cave. There it was easy to miscalculate and fly into the abyss. If you die, you will have to endure the agonizing wait of loading the game again. You have to wait for the entire level to load, and so on with every death. It’s a shame to fall into another abyss, having previously cleared the entire cave and discover that you only saved at the entrance. On the other hand, making saves before each jump is unsporting and tiring.
In addition to the main tasks, the completion of which affects progression through the plot, you can complete additional tasks. There is not much variety here, all the classics: “bring and serve,” that is, searching for objects, or “find and win,” that is, destroying enemies. Or a mixture of these components.
Simple dialogues are depressing.
The levels are very large, their creator did his best: each place is unique, the labyrinths are not repeated, the world is interesting to explore. Sometimes there are beautifully decorated corners that make it clear that here is a guardhouse, and here is a warehouse with supplies.
In order not to get lost, you have to constantly open the game map. It is simple, does not show important places and does not contain marks.
The included paper map of the world will come in handy: after all, you will have to wander on foot between cities and caves.
If you put the game aside for a few days, the built-in log will help. Usually task descriptions are vague, leaving only a short note, but it’s better than nothing.
About multiplayer.
Greg Gorden, the game’s chief designer, admitted in an interview that development took about 9 months. A small team of 4 people gradually grew to 50, including translators. Creating a game was not easy: the 3D engine was new, multiplayer support appeared.
That’s right, the series used to be exclusively single-player, which is why one of Shadowkey’s most entertaining features stands out: Bluetooth co-op. Initially, the advertisement showed a game for four. We found out through experience that only two people can play. Fun fact: the indication of the number of players on the cover and manual is different.
One takes the quest, and the second helps. After completing it, a note appears in his journal that he also completed the quest. Only a server can buy things, and a guest can transfer money for purchases. Things are thrown on the ground, then you need to pick up these bags. Weapon skin and model change. Essentially, only one player can benefit from this alliance. Perhaps the only advantage of playing with two players is the opportunity to show off your character’s appearance and have fun.
My conclusions about the game.
You say, since I speak so highly of the game, why didn’t I abandon it?? Why did I continue playing?? It’s hard to say, but the game is kept at such a pace that it’s always interesting to know what’s next. Shadowkey borrows key elements of the series: a large open world, combat.
New challenges appear frequently and intricate dungeons are fun to explore. The point here is not about crooked leveling or boring battles. The very spirit of travel and exploration is in the game. The script is interesting, despite the lackluster execution. Much depends on the player’s imagination; it expands the clumsy boundaries of this little world and adds color.
If a little more work had been done on the game, it would have become a gem in the N-Gage game library. Unfortunately, an interesting adventure is buried under a heap of shortcomings and numerous concessions related to the novelty and limitations of the platform. But you shouldn’t forget interesting games.
Conclusion.
When starting this video, I naively believed that no one collects phones. I thought why an ordinary person needs many phones? He won’t call from everyone. Of course I was wrong. Symbian has many loyal fans to this day. Sometimes they even gather in Moscow to remember the old days and organize online battles. Their community is very friendly and ready to help newcomers.
Thanks to my interest in Nokia phones and Symbian OS, I learned so many interesting things and made new friends. Many people helped me create the video, thanks to all participants and to you, dear viewers.
Of course, something was left behind the scenes: other games, experience using this phone. If this topic is interesting, write. I’ll tell you. Look at the description of the video, there is useful information there. I will be glad to receive your feedback, wishes and constructive criticism.
