catharton

Umm, I'm a bit new here but please don't hold that against me I tried searching for Jeff Minter posts on here but I didn't find exactly what I was looking for, which is an explanation of how Mr Minter got involved with the Jaguar in the first place. I'd grown up seeing him as some kind of weird British 8-bit computer programmer, so how did he end up doing Jaguar games and the virtual light machine? I assume this might have been via his Atari ST games...? Sorry if this is a bit of a silly question, I'd just always wanted to know how it happened.

I've got a QD too and I think SteveW put it quite well. Just to add my views too though... I think it's taken a while for developers to get used to the new screen, but there are good games appearing now. Certainly the average score has started going up since they passed the one year mark, and sites that used to hate n-gage games are starting to praise them a bit more. Asphalt just got released and is probably the best arcade racer, it doesn't even try to be realistic but it is fun to play and takes account of the screen's proportions. It also uses the same 3D engine as Ghost Recon so it looks quite good too: http://www.gamespot.com/ngage/driving/high...ear/review.html The best realistic driving game is Colin McRae, which has also just come out. That also has some pretty smooth graphics but it handles much more realistically, and it has online gameplay too: http://www.gamespot.com/ngage/driving/coli...ew_6109272.html On the way is also Driv3r and Glimmerati (some kind of "glittery" racer, no idea what it's like as it's a first party title). This is funny, because I really hate shooters and couldn't get anywhere with Ashen! It does look very nice though, once you get past the slightly jerky opening room. I think this is one of the most underreported plus points of the N-gage, it is amazingly brilliant as a retro portable. Because it runs the Symbian operating system, you can use any Symbian-based emulator, but because the N-gage has an 8-way direction pad you can play the games as they were meant to be played (Symbian devices normally have a 4-way pad so you can't move diagonally which spoils some games). There are symbian emulators for NES, 2600, Genesis / Megadrive, C64, Sinclair Spectrum, Game Boy etc.. As it uses standard MMC memory cards (which go up to 1 gigabyte in size) you can fit every game released for a classic system, and the emulator to run them, all on a single card. I use a Sinclair Spectrum emulator called Spectrian, as I'm a true Brit You haven't played online? Poor you! The phone side works well. The old n-gage had the speaker in the spine so you had to talk into it sideways, which was partly responsible for a lot of the bad reputation it got (and gave birth to wonderful sites like http://www.sidetalking.com/ ). Amongst many other improvements the new QD model put the speaker on the front and you talk into it just like a normal phone. You can also use it as a speakerphone which is handy if you get a call while using a PC. I've heard that phone contracts are very expensive in America, sometimes $30 or $40 per month... I pay a monthly fee of about $5 believe it or not. I think you guys are getting ripped off. I actually bought my 'Gage for online games, and they've just launched a massively multiplayer game (the first on handhelds) called Pocket Kingdom ( http://www.pocket-kingdom.com/ ) and a strategy game that's group multiplayer called Pathway to Glory ( http://www.pathwaytoglory.com/ ). I think you mean Symbian software, and there is a LOT of it out there, far more than just games. The idea of Symbian devices is that they're essentially pocket-sized computers, and you can find Symbian software equivalent to almost anything on a PC. Symbian isn't just on Nokia smartphones, it's jointly owned and used by all manufacturers except Motorola (who've decided to go with Windows on their smartphones for some reason). I actually maintained my website using my QD while my main PC was broken. There's a catalogue of Symbian software at http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/software/ MMC was meant to be an open standard rival to SD (I think you meant SD?) cards. Some devices used them because they didn't want to make royalty payments to the owners of the SD standard. They are a bit harder to find in real life stores but there are lots of places that sell them online. Here's the place I use, for example: http://ngage.allack.co.uk/Extras/index.php MMC cards work in SD devices, so I use one in my digital camera and then email the pictures using my QD. This is a bit more cumbersome than having a cameraphone but they're much higher quality pictures because cameraphone cameras are usually pretty rubbish. SD cards don't work in MMC devices though, even though they're the same shape. There's also a load more games coming out now, almost all better than what was available at the launch as developers have gotten to know the system and are developing for the n-gage rather than just doing playstation ports. The online-compatible stuff is the highlight (e.g. Worms World Party and the aforementioned PK and PtG) but there are decent non-online games like Elder Scrolls, Ghost Recon and FIFA 2005. For the future, I'm looking forward to Civilization in the new year (I got the original Civ for Xmas when it first came out and I only stopped playing it when we had to eat. Now I can carry on under the table ).