I’m going to be frank here. When Nokia launched N-Gage—the phone, not the service—in 2003, they were the undisputed mobile leader. There was no Nintendo DS, no Sony PSP, and no Apple iPhone. Its only competition then was the Nintendo GBA, which many will say is still better than the N-Gage, but after years of playing Snake as my main form of mobile entertainment for the longest time, I for one was excited that a mobile company was taking gaming seriously. Handheld gaming back then was still fugly and unwieldly, which meant that Nokia had a lot of potential to grow the market. I was one of the few that big the N-Gage a fond farewell.

And then Nokia came up with the brilliant idea of bringing N-Gage back – in the form of a service for most of their S60 phones. You can see how this could have pushed them into the forefront of mobile gaming again since Nokia was still the largest mobile manufacturer in the world. When I was attending press events for the new N-Gage, some of the quality of 3D games available were actually impressive, and we got quite a few excellent end products, such as the Dirk Dagger Adventures, Reset Generation, Snake Subsonic and a couple of EA ports. I admit I enjoyed Sims 3, and MGS on the N-Gage was better than MGS on the iPhone IMO.

Of course, I had my reservations, as to the quality of the phones itself that support N-Gage and firmware woes. And the gaming experience was soon too diverse that some people had horrible experiences, while others loved it. Still, Nokia had something to shout about, especially as the N-Gage Arena started to have a growing community.

It was only recently that I was trying out the N97 mini; logged in to N-Gage to see what other touch games were available other than Boung Boing Voyage, when I got a pretty confusing message from the site. N-gage seemed to still be running, but Nokia’s now heavily shifting its focus to their Ovi store. You’ve probably noticed all the big yellow banners all other (even on this site), that their giving away Ten FREE games on their Ovi store in a Gameloft promo. Clicking on Ovi Games goes back to N-Gage, but N-Gage itself is asking people to register at Ovi. The Ovi site is definitely more polished and integrated than the current N-Gage one.

Is Nokia converging all their services under the Ovi banner for easier access? Time to ring up some Nokia folks to get some info regarding this. In the mean time, I’m going to get my ten free games before they decide to stop that too. If N-Gage is going the way of the dodo again, I’m at least going to have some more games to play.