Westerners shout, "don't forget us!"
Nokia announce mobile gaming through Genie; companies club together to form "global gaming standards"
Although the results won't be quite as advanced as Tekken Command Battle on the i-Mode phone, Nokia and Genie have teamed up to produce a number of software titles for Genie users according to trade website Telecom.paper. Under the terms of the agreement, Nokia's Mobile Entertainment Service (NMES) will provide Genie users with a selection of new mobile games from the third quarter of this year. The company's entertainment service includes games from developers/publishers Rage, Eidos, Activision and Morpheme.
The games will work on WAP and SMS-compatible handsets with black and white displays. So bad luck to people who don't own phones… (Editor's note: apologies, but we had no idea what else they could possibly mean by saying that the games will work on handsets with black and white displays. We only have black and white displays, guys, sort your lives out.)
On a related note, telecoms giants Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson and Siemens have announced this Wednesday their intention to promote open standards in mobile games. Gaming services, it is thought, will help recoup some of the financial cost of supporting 3G development that big telecommunications companies are currently facing. In a joint statement, the four said that they hoped to produce a "global standard" and measures to help enforce it.
Whether or not this will apply to Japan, where the world of mobile phones is about 10,000 years more advanced than ours, remains to be seen.
Source - Reuters