About a month ago, my cell phone contract finally ran out and I was in the market for a new phone. I was disappointed at Cingular’s offerings at the time and I didn’t have any particular inclination to stick my balls in their vice for another year so that I could pick up a marginally-better better phone for a couple hundred bucks and and the privilege of dicking around with rebates.

I don’t know where the idea came from, but I decided to try something different. Since the N-Gage flopped so badly in the United States, I decided to see if I could find one and use that as my phone. My rationale was simple:

1. The N-Gage supported all the phone features I wanted - Bluetooth, Mac sync’ing, a calendar, and an address book.

2. Given that retailers were treating them like festering carcasses taking up valuable shelf space, they would be pretty cheap and I could get it without a new contract or any of that rebate circus.

You’ll note above that there is nothing up there about getting it to play games. I needed a phone, and I was reasonable convinced that the N-Gage was a crappy games console. It ended up being a decent phone, but the critics were right - as a console, it bombed.

The first person shooter genre fails to work on a cell phone.

With morbid curiosity a few weeks after the initial purchase of the phone, I actually picked up two games - just to see, you know? I picked up “Ashen” and “X-Men Legends”. “Ashen” is a first person shooter that is a direct rip-off of the classic Doom. Only that you control using a directional pad and you have a numeric pad to work with. And no sound, unless you use Nokia’s proprietary earbuds. I tried playing the game after purchasing it, but it was hopeless - the game is simply unplayable.

Haven’t I seen something like this before?

After that, I tried “X-Men Legends”. It’s billed as an RPG, but I can’t figure out what the hell it was supposed to be. In “Legends”, you run around with four X-Men saving the day and fighting bad guys. To me, it felt like an updated port of the disastrous NES X-Men game from the 1980’s. I might have spent fifteen minutes trying the game before giving up on it. The controls were atrocious, and I could care less why the X-Men were beating up random people on the street while trying to find Mystique and the Blob.

Oh yeah! It’s just like that crappy X-Men game I threw out as a kid.

Up to this point, it’s easy to make the educated guess that the N-Gage is a bust as far as gaming is concerned. However, even this is not the case. After getting frustrated that I couldn’t fit all my contacts, my calendar, and my Super Mario MIDI ring tones on the device’s built in memory, I splurged and picked up a gigabyte MMC card for my phone online. Yes, you read that right - my phone has a gig of storage. The MMC card fits in the same slot as the games and the N-Gage sees it as another hard drive. That was cool because I could poke around and play with all the Series 60 software written for the device.

During this phase of exploration and discovery, I found a free application called GoBoy. GoBoy is a GameBoy Color emulator. It runs on the phone and looks for Game Boy ROMs. (Kids - don’t steal games!) In the spirit of testing, I downloaded the software and a few ROMS. Before I knew it, I was playing Tetris and Super Mario Land. The games didn’t feature thousand of colors or faux three dimensional environment, but they make it up for it by actually being playable and fun. Given that I have about a thousand megabytes to spare, and Game Boy cartridges tend to be a megabyte or two in size, my crappy Nokia portable game player may have just become the ultimate classic Nintendo gaming rig.

Now you’re playing with power!