N-Gage: N-Gaged for Success!

As we all doubtless expected, Nokia has been burning up the sales charts with its brillaiant new N-Gage portable system. With is amazing lineup of games and great features its hardly surprising that the system has sold so well... there were riots in the streets when people learned that their favorite gaming stores had run out of systems. The smashing success of Tomb Raider even spurred calls for a third Tomb Raider movie!

A senior Nokia exec was quoted as saying "PSP? What PSP? We'll own the market by the time it comes out, no question! With our quality and game lineup nothing can stop us!"

http://www.1up.com/article2/0,4364,1358051,00.asp

I thought I returned to reality #21 (notations based on order discovered)! *reads article* Oh, sarcasm powerful enough to do... stuff. I get it now. Never mind that first comment...

Most humor I'm not very good at doing, but sarcasm I can do. :)

... the only problem of course is that often people can't tell when I'm not serious.

I'm surprised it did THAT well. What a piece of shit that thing is.

For a rough historical comparison, Atari's famous failed Jaguar console also sold approximately 5,000 units in its first week of release, at a $249 prince point. However, it racked up those sales solely in the metropolitan New York area, where Atari initially released it to test the market.

Hahaha, even the Atari Jaguar sold better!!

Yeah, isn't it great? Nokia must be proud!

Nokia PR Guy: Our sales have surpassed that of the Atari Jaguar!

Nokia Shareholder: So...that's good right?

Nokie PR Guy: Uhh....Yes!

Seriously... this is just so hillarious. Nokia came in with no clue... everyone knew this would be a huge, spectacular flop. Yet they pressed on, spent huge amounts of money... and it flopped. Miserably. Its just so great... Nokia is so incredibly clueless! When you act like they did you're bound to fail...

Now, the question is if they press on with the thing or write it all off as a loss.

I'm willing to bet that I personally have sold more Game Boy Advances than Nokia has sold all over the world. Seriously.

6-10,000? 5,000 in the US, 500 in the UK, who knows about the rest of the world. :)

Still... its an amazingly small number for a brand new console. Or rather... it'd be an amazingly small number if it was anything but the N-Gage. :D

Meanwhile, Nintendo's Cube price cut sends European sales up tenfold.

http://www.planetgamecube.com/news.cfm?action=item&id=4785

Yay!

Haha, you should see some of those viewo interviews with the N-Gage people that are up at ign. Those people know absolutely nothing about games. It would be like me and GR getting into the shrimping business and expecting to make millions of dollars. I kind of feel sorry for those guys.

Well, Forest Gump was retarded and managed to make millions in shrimping. Then again, he knew someone who knew a lot about it.

:stupid:

I knew you'd mention Forrest Gump. :chuckle:

Well duh, that's the whole reason you said it anyway.

Actually that's the only thing I could think of. Well, the best thing.

Not knocking it, just pointing out your little jab or whatever is flawed in it's very conception by the fact we both knew it would come to that anyway. One of those "you knew I knew you knew I knew" things.

So uh, did anyone here buy one of these door stops?

They are just so ridiculously clueless... reading articles with or about them can be pretty funny. :)

http://ngage.ign.com/articles/456/456139p1.html
http://ngage.ign.com/articles/454/454018p1.html

-400,000 units shipped to retailers. Note that retailers aren't consumers. :)
-"good" sales in Europe and Asia
-"we're in this for the long haul"
-no new model soon to fix the many problems
-Sales of several million expected by the end of 2004

Well, if they admitted publically that it was a failure WHILE doing it, that would be the final bit of idiocy. Denial of failure WHILE failing is something ALL businesses do. Does it save them... AT ALL? I can't think of any that have, but at the very least it means any investors won't be pulling out quite yet until it's a CONFIRMED failure. After such a spectacular failure, the one in charge will get promoted. You see, the more money is wasted, and the more spectacular the failure, the most succesful the individual who spearheaded it will be. Yes, that's a VERY cynical observation, but looking at many things like this, it seems it's VERY true. Dogbert first noticed this...

That's why the guy trying to make the Phantom is actually GETTING investors, even after the countless failures before this doomed project :D.

This once again proves that no matter how bad something is doing some will say something positive about.

The Titanic sinks.

Random Person: Only about %50 of the people died. I think that's a pretty good number.

Pretty much. Their denial continues... though they have some business sense. Note that they haven't released the actual number of sales to consumers, only stores... smart when you know that that number is low. :)

I was laughing about that Midnight Madness thing with some clerks at Gamestop. They also saw that PA strip.

I bet that it was pretty much just like it was in the strip... :)

They didn't even bother with it over here. They got about two pre-orders for the system.

Sounds about right... :)

The N-gage would need new games and not recycled trash from the psx 5 years ago.

They would need a 1st party support , Some killer aps namely getting somthing from sqauresoft or some other big name developer.

Right now Tony hawk is its only big name game as Tomb Raider is a vanishing out of history, But Gameboy advance has much newer versions of Tony Hawk so it does absolutely nothing.

the N-Gage will fail no one has ever succeeded in challenging nintendo in the hand held department, If you were to beat nintendo you would need alot of sales soon after launch and clearly the N-gage does not.

Sega gamegear was a great handheld system despite a few hardware flaws.

The closest any ever came to challenging nintendo dominance was the Bandai wonderswan color, Its most memorialble games were the special edition final fantasy 1-3 which even made it to number one on the japanese sales index.

No, I'd say that Game Gear was most certainly the most successful other system. It, after all, came out here too while the Wonderswan was Japan only... the Neo-Geo Pocket Color had some good games too, but SNK's running out of money killed that thing. Wonderswan? It did okay, but best competitor to the GB ever? No way.

The Wonderswan did rather well in Japan, but it never got released anywhere else. That's the main reason it never was a competitor for the GBA. The Gamegear on the other hand, was released world wide and sold a bit before everyone got tired of the lack of good games and having to use 6 batteries to get only a few hours of gameplay.

The N-gage would need new games and not recycled trash from the psx 5 years ago.

I doubt if even some good games could save the N-Gage.

It would definitely help, though... when has anyone ever launched a system with NO new games?

Maybe they wanted to be the first.

Well they succeeded. Lucky them...

http://www.spong.com/index.asp?art=5781

Ahaha... Nokia is dumb... :D

Poor Nokia.

The GBA was cracked fast too... but playable on other cellphones? That's awful... :D

Hahaha, that's so funny and sad at the same time.

Nokia hasn't got a clue...

Nokia is mad and promises to go after the dirty hackers with all the force of the law!

*woman with annoying voice* Don't get mad, get Glad!

I can't stand that Glad woman!

Ooh, let's all be hicks who work at fast food restaurants and complain about stupid commercials like we were the first to think of them as stupid! No, let's not, now SHUT UP! :D

Awww, poor Nokia. I'm sure this has resulted in unbelievable losses in sales :D.

:erm:

:D

So... saying that I find someone in a commercial annoying somehow means that I think I'm the first one to make that discovery and that also makes me a hick? :erm:

No, the correct answer is another smily, not starting an argument.

:cool:

:erm:

You win!

:eek:

You started it!

No, I started it!!

...

...

...

With MIND bullets!!

Like... in The Matrix?

Yes, complete with that really cool thing they did where everything was in slow-motion.

Yes, she is really annoying..

Chronic boredom is painful and I say! ........ very painful!

Originally posted by A Black Falcon
Yes, she is really annoying..

Sshhhh!! You'll make DJ insecure about being a hick or something like that.

:D

OB1, that was actually a reply to

I can't stand that Glad woman!

. :D

:chuckle:

Now THAT'S a slip of the Freudian kind!

You mean I missed page 2. Not sure how I managed to do that, but I did... :)

...

See, my computer was broken like all day yesterday... I was on on another computer sometime in early afternoon, but other than that I wasn't online until about 2:30am this morning when I finally fixed the stupid thing. Over three hours straight, about... after having it running much of the day doing something that didn't help. Evil, evil, Microsoft!

ABF, I know that you were talking about the Glad woman. I said that because DJ made a remark about how people that talk about commercials (even though DJ started an entire thread on Nintendo commercials, figure that) are hicks.

Ah. I wasn't sure who you were referring to...

And no, I did not have a fun day yesterday.

I am NOT a hick!! *realizes no one was talking to him over even vaguely in his direction* I mean...hey look over there! It's a UFO!! *runs away*

You see, this is what I mean... It's called humor.

What I wanna know is how you managed to start and CONTINUE an argument with someone that wasn't even arguing with you!

Uh... agreeing with ABF on something was contiuing an argument? :erm:

I don't think DJ was paying attention...

That's the most accurate thing I've heard all day! Let's eat!

:D

How about saying once again that DJ, you really need to "read" our "posts" before complaining to us about what we say... its getting really old to hear you constantly complain about us "arguing" when we aren't, like you have done several times recently... talking about a subject is not by definition arguing!

Not getting it King award goes to.... YOU! Congrats! :D

You must admit you do that fairly frequently...

No, I do that farley...frigum...dem...lop...what?

N-Gage R0><0R!!11!!

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/december03/ngagevirtues/

thats scary to think.

Those features would be good if the games and the console itself didn't suck so much.

Verdict: N-Gage is teh poo. GBA roxorz.

Yeah, those features could be useful in some cases (well, except for the 12 buttons thing... trying to make that awfully designed pad with so many buttons so close together into a feature is ... creative ... and I really don't mind the GBA's shoulder buttons...), but with all of the drawbacks of the N-Gage? Not at all. Trying to make it sound good just makes them look foolish for trying. :)

Gamespy must be on Nokia's payroll.

I wonder how much N-Gage's Bluetooth multiplayer is really worth when you consider how unlikely it is that two people in the same city own one.

Heh heh :D

Remember the infrared multiplayer the GBC had? That thing was so worthless.

As a basic calculation, considering that there are about 10,000 N-Gages in America right now, here's how useful Bluetooth multiplayer is.

The range of Bluetooth is 33 feet. There are ten thousand N-Gage users in America. Therefore, taking the size of America into consideration, and assuming that the N-Gage user does not know another N-Gage player, there is a 1 in 565,749,600 chance they will ever take advantage of a multiplayer game on their unit.

That's not very good odds, especially considering that there are only 250 million people in the US.

That's because it used a poor wavelength of light, infrared, for communication! Blue tooth is far better, but Weltall is dead on accurate about why that feature sucks when it's on an N-Gage. When the link thingy Triton Labs is making is released, THAT will actually proove far more useful than the plain worthlessness of the GBC infrared (with the distance of 2 inches if I remember correctly) and what sucks is some features FORCED you to use that rather than at least give one the option of using a link cable, so it's currently VERY hard to find a way to unlock certain things that required that.

However, N-Gage also has the online network via Nokia's cell phone network. Again, sucky due to the utter lack of owners so there's likely to be a hard time finding any online games. Also, you'd be playing against people who actually bought an N-Gage, so there's that. However, on a Gameboy (or any succesfully introduced Non-Nintendo handheld), it'd be a great idea. Nintendo, if everyone will recall, even tried doing online play via the GBC with Pokémon Crystal, but only in Japan where there's a common standard in ports on all cell phone brands so their device for linking a GBC to a cell phone could actually be sold without making about a million adapter parts. That's why one can only catch Celebi in-game in the Japanese Crystal game, via the online colloseum. Suffice it to say it never took off in Japan so they haven't considered the online thing since.

I actually used the GBA infared once... to get that Mario Deluxe medal... but yeah it was pretty much useless, and even with the advantages Bluetooth has over it, when the system is as rare as the N-Gage...

And as for internet, it's a good idea, but doesn't the N-Gage online arena mostly have just minigames and stuff and not the actual full games because of bandwidth problems?

Originally posted by Great Rumbler
Gamespy must be on Nokia's payroll.

I was thinking the exact same thing.

Hmm, hadn't heard about that, or even thought about it until now, but yeah bandwidth would result in some pretty big lag issues I think. Telephone systems are grossly outdated anyway. Oddly enough, ham radio in and of itself isn't outdated :D. Anyway, I suppose it'd take stuff that doesnt' require a lot of data, like an online turn based RPG or whatever sort of minigames N-Gage is using there, to make use of it I suppose.

Ya know, when the price finally drops to around $50 or less like the poor Virtual Boy did just before it blinked out, I might just pick one up JUST to have one :D.

Like Tomb Raider. It's got a netplay mode, all right, but it's just some minigame, not actually Tomb Raider...

Uh oh, I'm responding to yet another one of DJ's posts! What ever shall you do?? :chuckle:

Explode. What? That's what I'd do.

Huh.

Yeah, I guess you could do that.

The sequel!

http://www.gamespy.com/articles/february04/7sinsngage/index2.shtml