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I know that this Game Gripper for Nokia N900 have been around for some time and I’ve had mine as soon as I could manage to get one shipped to Australia.  But I just wanted to give it a quick spotlight, for those that aren’t aware of it. I enjoy the occasional game on my trusty N900, even more so when I know I have a charger on hand.  One of the best parts of gaming on my little mobile computer, over something like an iPhone, is that is has real buttons.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Now, given that it has real buttons, a smart bunch of fellas thought they could make a neat little overlay to cut down the clutter and give me a direction pad to boot.  All of this while still allowing me access to my charging port, and headphone jack.
Now all of a sudden my amazing gaming machine is reminiscent of a Super Nintendo controller, and my favourite games like Doom, Jazz Jackrabbit, Duke Nukem 3D and Super Mario War are awesome to play.  Not all games need one of these, but for the ones that can make use of them, and can remap their keys, these things are ideal.
Maybe it’s me showing my age, but who doesn’t like reliving their childhood through the games we played. You can buy the Game Gripper for Nokia N900 at Amazon for 16.99$.

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Today I am just go do a brief review on the NAMCO recreation of Space-Invaders-Style game, GALAGA. Came across this game while I was browsing through the Ovi Store. It is available on the Ovi Store for free. Here it goes:

The Start Menu
I would like to comment on the gameplay. Playing on a resistive touch screen was never fun for me. But in this case, it is quite easy and relaxing I think. The whole process of picking up a game and start playing it was fun. One of the good ways to kill time when you’re bored. Due to the resistive touchscreen of the N900, it still lacks multi touch control such as shoot and move at the same time. But fortunately NAMCO has included a way to overcome this.

A little bit on how to play Galaga
See the red button with two arrows? Pressing it on the red left button would make your ship move to the left and shoot. The same goes for the right. The yellow button is to move left and right while the big red circular button is for you to fire.
The problem comes in here. Mistakenly pressing the RED LEFT or RIGHT button forces you to move when you don’t want to. This could be frustrating to some who has big thumbs to play with. And again, they added another feature. The slider.

Conclusion on Galaga Game
You practically need to slide using the green button and shoot by tapping on the playing screen itself. One disadvantage of this slider is that it tends to move when you let go your thumb to enable another thumb to shoot. So there you have it, the brief review on the game itself.
Graphics : 6
Sound: 5
Gameplay: 5
You should try the game and beat my highscore posted on the screenshot. Till then.
UPDATED:
The link to the game is here. Accessible from other countries are not guaranteed. Thanks

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Dear nokia N900 website readers, My name is Pang Zi Yang and I am the co-writter here with Maciej. I hope you like my articles. I’d like to start showing you how to install Preenv on N900 so that you can be able to play webOS games easily.
Those of you might get this error when trying to install preenv using the .deb file
“Incompatible application package”
Some may not find Preenv in the App Manager
—It isn’t there—
So to install Preenv is actually very simple.
You will need to activate extras , extras-testing and extras-devel repository in Application Manager
Go to Xterminal and type this in sequence
root
apt-get install libgles1-sgx-img
apt-get install preenv
apt-get install libsdl-net1.2
This would get your Preenv up and running.
Next is to install your webOS game onto your N900.
METHOD 1

First download the *.ipk file
unpack the *.ipk file using e.g. 7zip and extract the /applications/ folder from it
put the extracted /applications/ folder to /home/user/ on the N900 using SSH
Go to X-Terminal and type the following in sequence

sudo gainroot
cd /home/user/applications/ folder
chmod +rwx filename
To run the game, simply type ./filename in X-Terminal (where filename is the name of the executable file. eg. nfsuc in the case of Need For Speed Undercover)

METHOD 2
Download the .deb file and install it through Hildon Application Manager.
You can find on the web where people have repacked the .ipk files into .deb files.
This method is much easier and faster for beginners

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Long time ago I’ve seen a movie, futuristic vision of what’s going on inside computer. Tron was revolutionary and now we have sequel and GLtron game for Nokia N900. Let’s see what can it do.
When I was lying with fever for last few days (winter in Poland is scarry this year ) I was watching, if I can call sleeping with TV turned on watching, a lot of movie trailers, commercials of movies and games. Tron kept my senses intact for few minutes, first movie was released in 1982 and was major step in computer-rendered special effects. Following years revealed many ideas of adapting movie solutions to games, mostly with bikes like Armagetron. When I was watching Tron: Legacy trailer I thought about porting Armagetron to N900, but in catalogues I’ve found…
GLtron, very nice 3D game for N900, really good-looking, placed in Tron realm. The best part is that this game is running very smoothly on N900, without any glitches, framerate drops, freezes, it gives very good gamers experience. Game is quite nicely configurable, so how it will look like is up to you. I’m playing with most of default options and speed set to ‘Crazy’, with my fever I’m mostly loosing most of runs, but I’m still having a lot of fun.
Summarizing, I really like this game, it looks nice, has very addictive gameplay, it may still look like some PC game port, but who cares? If you haven’t seen the first Tron movie, I think you should, at least to know how it looked like quite some time ago, if you want to see the new one, I think GLtron will be nice game to play in the line for tickets

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Winter in Poland is fully-blown now and I’m lying ill again. When I’m ill I’m playing more games, also on N900. This time I propose you something like a game, something every geek should know, something that may be simple model of life in bacteries colony, so something exacly for geek in fever like me .
Conway’s Game of Life is actually 40 years old cell life simulation. Everything happens on square grid filled with living and dead cells and is based on four simple rules (from wikipedia):

Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

On such simple basis geeks have developed many interesting patterns, immortal structures, most of them have their own names. One of them, glider, became hacker emblem.
N900 users now have own game of life, pretty simple as the idea itself, with (not working, at least for me and hopefully not for long) placeholder for standard patterns like glider, lightweight spaceship or Gosper glider gun.
I was playing with this gadget for hours, lying in bed with fever. Try it yourself, playing with life is pretty much fun
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MJ

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A top speed of 75km/h, 3D, a good object to use and an objective, its called Tuxrace! It is compatible with your Nokia N900. Use a penguin to catch each fish with many different levels. The sliding penguins name is Tux. That is the origin of the name of the game.
The Nokia N900 accelerometer allows you to get the maximum speed avoiding the tress and rocks.The game is simiar to bounce. It has great graphics.

First up is the start screen then you press play followed by the choice of level and finally the game.The time clock is on the top left while rhe cought fish counter is on the top right.
Its a great amusing game. Have a look at the game on the video.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-AQqMd-h1I
If you need to exit or the game has frozen then please press q.Its wonderful and easy for the user to control.This game was firstly developed for Linux desktop users only but then the developers transformed it for the Nokia N900.

Try to excel in this game and beat your buddies with it. Enjoy.

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Not something as good as expected but it makes you think what are the controls, its called Duke 3D shareware.For people that are wondering if it shares the applications on your mobile, it unfortunately doesn’t. It’s a simple game. It doesn’t have 3D like qualities and it also isn’t 3D but I still wonder why the developers inserted the 3D in the name? A planet overtaken by aliens and it is your job to achieve the next level and defeat them all.

The start is easy and if I am not wrong then you have to exterminate to monsters using a pistol. For all that to occur than you have walk around to find the bullets(I don’t know where it is but have encountered) and shoot the fan going down finding an alien to your right which should appear before you go to it. There are two things available : a shareware version that installs the shareware game data and a CD version that comes without game data and but requires you to copy it from the original CD.
This Duke 3D includes guns so I recommend this game for download user above than the age of 13. Enjoy responsibly!

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Many people get angry and relieve their stress in a wrong way so I found a solution to it and it has the word Angry in it. Its called Angry Birds and it is compatible with the Nokia N900. Very user friendly and easy to play. It has a good background and especially good sound for the kids if they are playing. Give the green pigs what they deserve, take back your rightful chicken eggs. Each of the levels need logic, skill and brutality to crush the enemy.

So its up to you, if you want to play Angry birds or protect wildlife.

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If you’ve seen my previous game reviews you may know I like logic games. Some time ago I’ve found another nice and good-looking game for Nokia N900 similar to Brain Party, but with few nice features.
First of all you can find SPB Brain Evolution 2 in Ovi Store for free. At first glance it looks like another set of logic games, but I got to like it from the very beginning. The game offers daily training with various games, including simple arithmetics, memory training, visual recognition or stategic planning. Training plan involves few minutes every day, making play more challenging as you advance. You have progress history, high scores for and few difficulty levels for every mini-game. Moreover you can create few profiles, so you can easily compete with your friends using the same N900 to play.
But what I like in this game so much is not variety of games, but pause system. I can play whenever I want and I don’t need to worry that I won’t finish any game, because if I lock screen game pauses, so when I’m on bus or tram I can freely take a break, get off and resume from the moment I’ve finished when I have time to do so. The same situation goes when you close the game (even by accident), when running it next time you can resume playing from the moment you’ve finished earlier.
If it comes to games this one fits most of my needs, doesn’t take much of my precious time, covers my interests and allows me to automatically pause every time I want or when I have something more important to do.
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MJ

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Ovi Store for Nokia N900 appeared quite a while ago and offers more and more applications, media and other stuff. Among free games from Ovi Store I’ve found another simple and absorbing time consumer – Xploder for N900.
This N900 game idea is simple, on every level you have small bombs flying around the screen and on every level you need to detonate at least the given number for the level. The bomb blows up when comes to explosion range of previous bomb or initial explosion given by player, the point is to cause long enough chain reaction. Sounds easy, at least for first few levels when you can blow up everything you need with first blow, but gets more tactical and challenging every level, even with more bombs flying around.
Apart from easy rules and really nice and smooth game-play Xploder for Maemo 5 gives really nice visual experience. The best thing is that all of games from Ovi Store are very nice-looking. Full screen theme of game, really nice shading of explosions, well designed and implemented. I’m still grounded around 8th level, but I feel Xploder will give me much more entertainment.
I really encourage you to visit Ovi Store and check applications there, they’re well written, run very smoothly and don’t be afraid of ‘Store’ in name, many of applications available there are free!
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MJ

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N900 still awaits automatic portrait mode to take advantage of it’s accelerometer. In the mean time developers are producing applications that show it really works.
You’ve probably seen Bounce Evolution, it was installed on my N900 by default. Very nice 3D game controlled only by device tilt and space for jumping. This was the first application I remember with accelerometer support.
Some time after when Ovi store was opened another applications came, including Level or Angle Meter, small applications that show how exact the accelerometer is, showing quite accurate level or angle in degrees. I think it may be nice replacement for engineering tools, when you need to measure something and you have no proffesional level in your pocket .
Some time ago 3D and accelerometer joined their forces to show another nice application showing 3-dimentional picture of earth depending on phone position. It’s rather a toy to show power hidden inside N900 than useful software but I like the idea.
There are other applications that I’ve never tried, like PlayStation pad emulator, but knowing how bit potential hides in this small device I assume that it’s just the matter of time when something really cool will come. I’ll be waiting for that day, even if PR1.2 update won’t have full rotation support I can still use accelerometer in some way
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For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial
Please visit Nokia N900 Forum

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I remember the times when I used to spend really lot of time sitting in front of low resolution CRT monitor, playing this old games, having fun with something that (in comparison to todays game industry productions) looked bad, didn’t have cool 3D graphics or fancy symphonic music, but the idea was just marvellous and kept me playing for long time. Some of this games appeared on N900, let’s get closer look on Free Heroes 2.
This game ports good old Heroes of Might and Magic 2 to N900. Since the game is still protected by copyright (haven’t become abandonware yet) you get only data from demo version and if you want to play full game you need to have original and copy needed data files. Nevertheless this is enought to have fun for some time, we can see well known main menu screen, with all of it’s meedieval elements. The game was originally made for lower resolution, so main menu, town or hero screens are always 640 pixel wide, but rest of the game is nicely fitted in 800×480 screen. Gameplay doesn’t differ from regular, actually I advise to use stylus here, it was much easier for me, but my fingers are rather  thick and clumsy, so it’s up to you. I’m eager to play some more, lunch break is way too short to bring all memories back
I hope that more games from regular PC will come to N900 in time. If you dig more you will find at least few of them already in devel or testing catalogues, some may not work yet, but I hope it will change in the nearest future.
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For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial
Please visit Nokia N900 Forum

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This time let’s have a look what’s going on all over the world.
N900 with PR1.2 available in Hong Kong!
We’re all waiting for new update but apparently Nokia wants to make us wait for PR1.2 some more time when users in Hong Kong will test it in the wild. During last few days it was released in there and some time after Jussi Mäkinen confirmed that it will be released soon for the rest of the world. I hope that ‘soon’ is a little bit closer than the one mentioned on maemo.org wiki. In the mean time we can watch (below) and get more and more excited.

Motion controlled games on N900
While looking all around the web you may have found johanneskuhlmann’s youtube channel. There you may see some exemplary videos of what can we do with front camera and some software used for face recognition or movement tracking. If games will look at least a little like this I’m really interested. After some productions using accelerometers to control action (for example Bounce Evolution) this will be nice step ahead and I’m looking forward to see at least good demo on my N900. Have a look at videos on youtube.

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For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial
Please visit Nokia N900 Forum

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If you follow the blog you should already have the idea that I like puzzles, almost any kind of ‘simple’ logical game that can take few minutes of my time while excersizing my mind at the same time. That’s why I’m wondering why Puzzle Collection came to my N900 when it’s already available in extras and I haven’t tried it earlier, but that’s another story.
In this case collection means full variety of various puzzle games. Some of them you may already know, like classical fifteen, well known minesweeper (I’ve spent hours on various types that!), old good peg solitaire, yet another clone of sudoku called solo and many more, total of 31 games! This is only a part of fun, every game has difficulty levels, depending on type various board sizes, number of colours or whatever game takes to make playing more challenging. Everything is packed under simple and straightforward UI, nothing special but functional, clean and easy to use. Developer was predictive enought to include right (control + click) and middle (shift + click) mouse buttons functionality so you shouldn’t miss any part of playing similar games on desktop computer.
I know I said such small game takes only five minutes, but I have the feeling that 31 of them in one place may be terrible time eater, even if you don’t know the game you have good help with rules. Try it if you have few spare moments
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For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial
Please visit Nokia N900 Forum

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After releasing Maemo SDK PR1.2 package dependencies in new builds automatically changed to new ones. I’ve already mentioned it in one of previous posts. So now imagine situation when you want to install a piece of software but newly built package is broken. First solution is turning off extras-devel catalogue. If you look at the maemo.org packages you can see that extras-devel contains newer versions (with unmet dependencies) than extras-testing (that contains  installable packages).

There is also a way to cope with that problem without disabling extras-devel if you’re not scared of console. First of all every package has few versions available to download. You cannot see it in App Manager since it’s always proposing the last possible release. And now latest version is broken and we want to install previous one. First of all open X-Terminal and gain root rights by typing sudo gainroot (you need to install rootsh application before). Then you can check which version of desired package are available by typing apt-cache policy <package_name> like in example with qtirreco on the screenshot.

We can see available candidates of the package and we know that the newest one is broken, so let’s try with the previous one, in case of qtirreco is 0.3.0-1 and to install that you need to type apt-get install <package_name>=<version> like in example below.

Sometimes you will need to answer if you are sure to install some additional packages, answer yes then. If everything goes well you should have application installed. This method applies to every package that has at least one previous version in any catalogue.
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For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial
Please visit Nokia N900 Forum