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Go Play: Nokia shows off next-gen N-Gage concept games

Creebies, Play Make Share, and Dirk Spanner reveal fresh future directions

Go Play: Nokia shows off next-gen N-Gage concept games
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Nokia used today's Go Play event to showcase some of the big N-Gage titles, but also some of its in-house concepts, which are likely to become games next year.

The company revealed three work-in-progress ideas, designed to illustrate what can be done with the N-Gage platform.

"It's to show that we're making games for everybody, we're not just casual or hardcore," says Ari Tulla, marketing manager at Nokia's Games Publishing unit, who was demoing the trio.

The first was Creebies, a 3D virtual pet game that looks like Nintendogs transplanted to the land of the Teletubbies. You can have up to three pets, who interact with each other and go off and do their own thing when they get fed up with you.

Online features include the ability to send your pet to someone else to look after it, should you go on holiday, for example. Tulla says Creebies is aimed more at girls and teenagers although, thankfully, no ponies were in evidence.

Second up was Play. Make. Share. (it's a working title), which is a really innovative concept, mashing up user-generated content with mobile gaming.

We'll let Tulla explain: "You can take a photo, video or sound clip and make it into a mini-game. I can get photos of my friends and turn it into a puzzle, and then send it to them," he offered as an example.

"It's the user's own content in a new way, and you can also download games from the community, and get people to rate the games you've made. If you're into quizzes or puzzles, you can do those. You could make a Top Trumps game out of your relatives! It's kinda fun."

We think Play. Make. Share. could be huge, specifically in terms of viral spread (if you turned your mate into a rubbish Top Trumps card, they'd clearly want to retaliate with their own version).

Lastly, there was Dirk Spanner, a detective game with a strong comic-strip look, and a film noir setting. However, the innovation here will be the use of the phone's camera in order to navigate – you wave your phone about, and your camera input is translated into in-game movement, so that when you pan your phone, the game view pans, too.

Nokia is clearly keen to get the big brands like FIFA onto N-Gage, but these three games show it's also looking to push the boundaries with its internally-developed titles games.

We're sorry not to have any screenshots of these games: they're just too top-secret. But do watch this space for more info in the coming months.

Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)