The Unofficial N95 User’s Manual

A couple of days ago, I took a photo with my N95, closed the camera app, and put my phone down. Less than a minute later I picked it up and flipped the camera switch to take another photo, and something went wrong. The camera app started to open, then a semi-transparent white screen flashed and the app closed, and I got the following alert:

Application Closed:
RRSensorServer
KERN-EXEC 0

It wasn’t just the camera app, either–it was any application that used the accelerometer in some way, including Nokia Step Counter and emTube (which I use to search for and download YouTube movies). Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything online about the error, so I tried the following things in this order, testing it after each step: Read the rest of this entry »

Thinking of using Lonely Cat’s Profimail? Think again: their “product” is really a “service” that won’t work unless their servers do, which means you can only check your mail if they allow you to.

Look, I get it: any company that wants to stay in business has to deal with piracy. When the mobile app you spent weeks or months developing suddenly spreads across the mobile landscape free of charge without any revenue coming back upstream, a perfectly good company can suddenly find itself struggling just to stay afloat. But sometimes those perfectly good companies turn to such hairbrained schemes to thwart piracy that they ruin their software—and screw over their paying customers in the process.

Lonely Cat Games did just that when they inadvertently locked out all of their paying customers over the weekend of July 5-6, 2008—an eternity for email. Complaints on their official forum went unanswered, leaving users around the globe echoing each other in empty space. Some were able to find a workaround by  taking advantage of a loophole in the program and bypassing the server-side license check, but unless you were near a computer and able to go onto the LCG forums this weekend you wouldn’t have known about it, and the workaround was slow and only partially restored functionality.

Suddenly, a little before midnight GMT on Sunday July 6th, the application started working again, but LCG still hadn’t posted an explanation or a response.

I use the software, and until this weekend I was a huge fan of Profimail and LCG. I recommended it to anyone with an S60 device. But being locked out of a program I paid for because of bad security programming and poor technical support has turned me off of the company and their apps.

I’m not just being vindictive. I can’t recommend Profimail, or any product from Lonely Cat Games for that matter, for two very important reasons:

1. They claim to sell you software but in actuality you can’t use it without their ongoing permission. This means if they go away tomorrow, so does your ability to use the software (that you paid for).
2. They made this change retroactively to their software and failed to properly alert customers who had already bought the application—they snuck it into an update. In other words, they misled their customers.

In its zeal to prevent piracy, Lonely Cat Games stomped over the rights of its paying customers–the people who play fairly, who pony up real cash for software, and who were trying to support LCG’s business model. Unless LCG changes their software back to the way it was in the past, when buying a license unlocked the app for real, you should avoid any of their programs (the secret license check is built into other LCG products as well).

Or hell, just grab a pirated/cracked copy that you can trust will work properly.

http://www.google.com/reader/i

“Supermodel Empire” is obviously a product of a reality TV world, in particular one in which “Project Runway” and similar fashion and design competitions exist. For its setting it borrows heavily from the world of “Project Runway,” introducing you as the winner of a design competition and the new small-business-owner of your very own label. You challenge is to design amazing fashions and build both your bank account and your fame.

Okay, that’s out of the way, here’s what the game is really about. You play a mini game consisting of matching cards of like colors within a limited number of moves. You have a limited amount of time to play these games, and each game takes up a set portion of that time; what’s more, each card game takes up a different amount of time and offers a different number of turns, and costs a different amount of money, so you have to choose you games wisely to maximize your winning color match counts. This is important because for every card you remove through color matching, you reveal more of a “fashion” image, which you then compare to a long list of images in an attempt to reconstruct the final image before you run out of time. Read the rest of this entry »

There is nothing remotely New York City-ish about “Megacity Empire New York” from Gameloft, so disregard the last half of this game’s title immediately. This is a city-building sim that presents you with a series of escalating stand-alone challenges (there’s no narrative thread to call it a “story mode”) where you’ll have to grow a population, deal with crises like fires, crime, and sanitation, develop commercial property, and educate and train a workforce. It’s a resource-juggling game, basically, and it’s great fun if you like micromanaging simulations (i.e. pretty much any game with “sim” in the title).

This is another phone game with too few pre-built scenarios that are too easy to master, and a set of game rules that are too easy to learn, which means that after you’ve played through the built-in scenarios and are dumped into sandbox mode, there’s no challenge left. I’m not sure why these sorts of games (see Ancient Empires II for another example) can’t develop some better way to introduce randomness and smarter AIs or rule sets to ensure repeated playability.

The graphics are nice, and unless your city gets really busy and crowded, there’s no obvious slowdown or playback issues (I did discover a couple of stutters in accessing menus when I was playing really crowded, well-developed cities). Your basic building blocks are residential, commercial, and office spaces, and these work in trios to grow your city into a thriving metropolis. Of course, there are a couple dozen other buildings and improvements you can add, as well as simple road-building tools, so that you have a fairly satisfying array of tools to work with over the course of a game. You can also set taxes, and isolate and review the effectiveness of various resources on your population.

It could just as easily be called Houston or Tokyo or London, it’s that irrelevant to the gameplay. It’s as if a marketing team came up with the title and a development team ignored it in order to bring in a playable game on time and on budget. Do not buy this game if you think you’re going to get a satisfying New York sim. City sim? Yes. New York City sim? Only if you know nothing about New York City, in which case any city sim should do the job for you, so we’re back to the title being irrelevant.

Navigation and game play are, for the most part, well thought out. There are a few small issues that, if they’d been addressed during development, would have made the game even easier to pick up and play—things like not being able to loop back to the top of a list after you’ve scrolled to the bottom, and a confusing system of backing out of the stats menu without jumping back directly to the play screen. Overall, though, it’s a well built game and very entertaining.

One annoying small issue: the incredibly sexist approach to characters. It reflects not just a male-centric game culture but a Japanese-centric treatment of women in games, where women are too often presented solely as perky girls who serve as both helpful sidekicks and angry “better halves” who scold the main characters like tarted-up Jiminy Crickets.

It’s almost Halloween, and that means it’s time to outfit your phone with some appropriately creepy/spooky stuff. I’ve created a Flash Lite application that lets you create your own jack-o’-lantern directly on your phone. You launch it via your Flash Lite player, then scroll through pumpkins, eyes, noses, mouths, and even backgrounds until you’re satisfied with your creation.

The app will save your creation so that you can look at it the next time you run it. For now, it won’t work as a screensaver because the N95 can’t read data into the Flash file at runtime when it’s launching something as a screensaver. This is very annoying and I hope it’s something that can be fixed with future Flash Lite iterations.

Download it on the MOSH website, or use the Qcode below to jump to the mobile version of the page on your phone:

Have a low-rez camera? Click here to view a much larger version of the Qcode.

Ancient Empires II, from Glu, is a turn-based strategy combat game where you create and move small groups of units, each with unique abilities, on a game board against up to three other opponents. Although the name is clearly a reference to the popular PC series “Age of Empires,” it’s closer in spirit and game play to Advanced Wars. If you’re a hardcore Advance Wars addict and need a mobile fix no matter what, this and “Age of Empires III” will be your best bets.

If you haven’t played these sorts of games before, let me give you a brief overview. (Feel free to skip this paragraph otherwise.) You and your opponent will start on opposite ends of a game board or map with many small structures scattered across it—houses and factories, in this game. You take turns producing units, capturing houses to generate gold, then using the gold to produce more units via the factories you capture. And then you fight—your units and your opponent’s will clash and, based on firepower, defensive capabilities, and a little luck, someone will take a lot of damage or even be destroyed. Eventually, one side will prevail.

In some versions of these games, you can play in real time, which adds another layer of challenge to the game. Ancient Empires II is turn-based, though, so you have all the time you want to look over the map and plan your moves.

The graphics are simple but clean, and the interface is well-conceived—one of the reasons I return to this game so frequently is that it’s so easy to move the pieces around and make the appropriate menu selections. There’s a main story mode that begins with a tutorial battle and quickly advances into fairly challenging battles. Unfortunately, right when you’re starting to get good at the game, it ends.

There are a few small problems with the game.

• The start-up screen is far too long—you’ll be incredibly tired of it by the 50^th time you’ve launched the game.
• There’s no volume setting for the audio, so I’ve never tested the audio. Lack of a proper volume setting, or the ability to use the handset’s de facto volume toggle switch, makes audio a dealbreaker for me.
• In the first half of a game, rounds can go on for several minutes as all the pieces are moved by the phone’s AI. This will invariably trigger your N95’s energy-saving screen or screensaver, which will pause the game. I’ve discovered that in order to prevent the pause screen from kicking in, I have to press on the dpad occasionally while watching the AI play through its turn(s).
• The game rules are a bit soft and the AI isn’t smart or aggressive enough, which makes it too easy to beat the AI with tried-and-true strategies that you never have to change. It also makes predicting your opponent’s next moves remarkably easy once you’ve learned the AI patterns.
• Finally, the game is a battery-drainer—it kills my phone’s battery reserve quicker than any other of the 50 or so games I’ve played on it.

However, there’s one crucial reason I can’t recommend this game or “Age of Empires III” for purchase, even if I love them both: there’s no map editor. You have a criminally small selection of maps and once you’ve played them a couple of times each, you’re done.

Although the Glu website demos the game as having an online component where you can download maps, in reality there is no such thing; you have approximately a dozen maps and no more, and there is no online component for the N95. What that means is that this game ages fast and it ages poorly; I’d go so far as to say it’s one of the few games I’ve ever played that you can actually use up by playing too much. I don’t want to encourage developers to create more games like this, games that are so disposable they can’t be revisited from time to time over the course of a year.