Hands on with Gameloft and EA launch games for the Nokia N8

With the largest phone manufacturer in the world busy prepping the release of the first Symbian^3 handset, it was keen to demonstrate the versatility of the device at Nokia World in London.

People wearing branded shirts accosted passersby, a row of TV sets were hooked up to show the power of the HDMI output, and, more relevant to the subject at hand, games were playing on the big screen TVs.

Both Gameloft and EA Mobile had sent representatives to the event to demonstrate their titles running on the N8.

With launch titles including Real Football, Need for Speed: Shift, The Sims 3, and Avatar, the two companies looked to be taking this latest handset seriously as a gaming device of the future.

But how would it match up to the current gaming phones on the market?

Luckily, I just so happened to have a Samsung Wave sitting in my pocket, already loaded with a few of the games being shown so we could compare, side-by-side, how the 680MHz ARM 11/ Broadcom BCM2727 [GPU not confirmed] N8 handles complicated graphics when compared to the current top-of-the-range bada setup.

The Wave runs a 1GHz Hummingbird ARM Cortex A8 CPU with PowerVR SGX540 GPU.

Comparing the screens, we found that the new standard for Nokia phones, dubbed Clear Black Display (CBD) – an AMOLED screen – was slightly less detailed than the Super-AMOLED used for the Wave, but not by any significant margin, certainly not enough to warrant the ‘Super’ moniker.

To note, however, the N8s we tested the games on were pre-production models, so these titles could potentially run faster when the device launches in October.

Shift ran well on the N8. There were a few jerks at the start of the race, but otherwise it was smooth, with no noticeable slowdown once the race was underway.

Interestingly, on the menu screen in which the camera pulls around a car driving down a straight piece of road, the N8 was noticeably faster than the Wave at processing the trees flashing past.

All the games we played during the show were hooked up to an HD TV via the N8’s HDMI-out socket, to demonstrate the HD playback of the device. Naturally, for a game that’s designed to be played on a 640x360 display, the graphics on the HD TV ended up looking like an early PS2 game.

It was, however, easy to focus on the TV while using the accelerometer to control the car, making the phone feel like more a controller for the game than the source of it.

Gameloft’s line-up is more ambitious than EA’s, consisting largely of 3D games released in the past year on iOS and Android devices.

One such title was the surprisingly good Avatar film tie-in, which managed to snag a Bronze Award when it was released on the iPhone earlier in the year.

The good news for N8 owners is that the game looked to be running just as well as on the similarly-powered 3GS, with no noticeably slowdown and with rich graphics and colours.

Control-wise, this was a good game to test the quality of the N8 touchscreen’s sensitivity – one of the most important aspects of a new phone. The N8 felt very solid in this regard, with none of my touches requiring a heavy second poke to register.

It did, however, reveal quite a major flaw in linking up to a big screen. While it may be all fine and dandy for watching HD films, not having any physical feedback from the touchscreen controls meant that controlling games while looking away from the mobile felt like a leap of faith.

As long as you stay away from that HDMI port, though, Avatar looked to be a good launch title.

I have to admit, I’ve never really enjoyed the Asphalt games outside of the Java versions. It’s not that they’re terrible - they’re just incredibly average.

The N8 version of Asphalt 5 obviously wasn’t going to change my mind about the gameplay, and the game was jerkier than the Wave or iPad versions, which made keeping the car on the track tricky.

To be fair on the N8 version, though, the controls and speed of the game have never been particularly solid on any of the formats I’ve played it on, with the iPad one being smooth but badly calibrated, and the bada version stopping every 20 seconds to load.

Given that the system ran both Avatar and NFS:S so well, though, I expect this slowdown is more due to the code than any issues with the hardware.

The N8 doesn’t sound like it should be that strong a gaming device on paper, with its slower-than-high end CPU and ominously censored GPU, but the games demonstrated at Nokia World were almost all perfectly playable and attractive to look at on the CBD/AMOLED screen, if not on the HDTV.

The gaming functionality may not be as instantly impressive as its other media functions, like the video playback or 12MP camera, but pocket gamers upgrading from an older Nokia smartphone, or indeed some of the current mid-range Android devices, won’t be disappointed with the results.