Gaming highlighted a rash of announcements made today at the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association’s Wireless I.T and Entertainment show in Las Vegas, providing a peak at what might be some of the hot-selling offerings for the holiday sales season.
Nokia and AT&T Wireless said they will begin offering the N-Gage game deck, an advanced gaming console with a built-in digital music player (MP3/AAC), FM radio and internationally capable mobile phone. The N-Gage game deck and N-Gage game titles are available online at attwireless.com.
Nokia said the N-Gage game deck allows for online, mobile, multiplayer game play with some of today’s hottest titles including Tomb Raider starring Lara Croft, Pandemonium, and Tony Hawk’s pro Skater. It features high-quality, 3D color graphics, nine-way directional game controller, and an ergonomic design optimized for mobile game play.
The N-Gage game deck also gives customers access to entertainment, messaging and information services available with AT&T Wireless’ mMode service. mMode offers an additional 300 games, access to e-mail, ring tones and graphics.
Customers can purchase N-Gage game decks online for $299.99 when they sign up for a select AT&T Wireless service plan. The $23.98 per month service offer has no contractual commitment, requires recurring credit card billing and automatically replenishes a customer’s account every 30 days or when customers use up their allotment of voice/data service, whichever comes first.
Cingular Wireless announced an expansion of its mobile gaming capabilities with a series of new publisher partnerships, game titles and Java-enabled handsets. Cingular said it now offers hundreds of downloadable games and applications from a choice of 20 game-enabled phones.
Cingular has formed partnerships with leading gaming content developers and publishers, including Digital Bridges, JAMDAT Mobile, Mforma, Moviso, THQ Wireless and Tira Wireless to provide games from a variety of genres.
Among Cingular’s newest applications include its introduction of multiplayer games, such as IHRA Drag Racing by Mforma and an exclusive multiplayer game, NCAA Football Challenge 2004. Other new single-player games include Fox Sports Basketball from Fox Interactive Television and Prince of Persia from Gameloft.
Vodafone and Verizon Wireless said they will work together to develop exclusive games and content for their customers. The companies said the relationship will bring customers of Vodafone Live! and Verizon Wireless Get It Now an unrivaled games experience. The first games available to Vodafone and Verizon Wireless customers will be from Konami.
Tira Wireless and Babel Media said they are collaborating to bring together Tira’s Jump mobile application porting service with Babel’s localization and testing processes in a single offering. The result will be cutting the costs of manually porting games for deployment on multiple handsets in multiple languages and providing benefits in source-code management by eliminating the need to manage multiple versions of code for the same game.
Babel also announced that it is the first accredited mobile games testing company for Vodafone Live!
