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

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

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

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

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

If you like games which makes your brain work a little more efficiently, which train your memory, coordination and ability of thinking logically you should like Brain Party.
This game by Hudzilla Games has a history already on other platforms, recently it was open sourced and released on Linux and subsequently on Maemo. Original game source code is pretty clean, so porting game to N900 was rather simple, it’s available in extras-devel right now. I expected good performance, stability and really nice gameplay from product with history like that and I wasn’t wrong.
Brain Party provides a bunch of mini games to challenge your reaction time, memory, skills in counting, logical thinking, overall orientation and perception. Every time you get score in form of your brain weight and you can follow history of your results, so that you know if you’re getting any better. If you’d like to improve your skills without spoiling your scores there is also practice mode with choice of which game you want play.
As long as I’m not typical gamer this game have already taken quite big piece of my time and it seems like I won’t stop easily. I like keeping my brain fit, Brain Party will help me do that in nice and easy way.
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For more info on devel and testing catalogues visit Application catalogues tutorial
Please visit Nokia N900 Forum

Most of you probably know sudoku, logic game of placing numbers in 9×9 grid following few simple rules. This games comes to almost every phone or mobile device in general and it’s no different for N900, even more, at the moment you have four alternative applications.
First of all we have EightyOne already available in extras, so it appears as pretty stable and well written piece of software. It has few difficulty levels, so everyone may be satisfied with playing. On exit current progress is saved, so you can take hard level and little more time in few parts. I also think that interface is quite good, numbers placed initially are different color than placed by player, you can easily tell how far you are from the beginning. Also gives few intresting options like statistics, tips or solving all game to check if you’re following good trail.
Another sudoku-based game is masudoku, for now available in extras-testing and extras-devel. It’s also equipped with few difficulty levels, but I find it more difficult to play because of one-colored numbers, only wrong placed pieces are shown in different color. It also gives you possibility to solve all, check if you can still solve the game and take hints. Unfortunately no option to save, so you have to start from the beginning every time.
masudoku – levels, marks, tips, devel&testing
Third I’ve found is gpe-sudoku (in extras-devel) and I was pretty confused seeing it’s interface, not so intuitive to be honest. It lacks level distinction, description of basic functions on screen, but also has some neat functionalities, like saving game or placing checkpoints to which you can go back to specified point.
The last one is Thumb Sudoku available in extras-devel. Following the name, it can be played using only your thumb, because runs in portrait mode, so it’s easy to operate with one hand. Nice interface, large grid, good visibility and comfort to play anywhere are most obvious pros. Save on exit is another useful thing, but unfortunately it doesn’t give you choice of difficulty level. Nevertheless still in devel, so it can improve soon.
As you see …

After a little break, here I am and this post is due to the Maemo Summit 2009 which I talk about later on some posts. The Maemo Summit 2009 bring us the fists apps, in this case, the already famous game Quake 3 Arena.
The game runs very smoothly as expected because of the powerful processor of the Nokia N900 and this game already ran very good in elder Nokia’s phone such as the N95 which they are a little less powerful. It´s shown over the TV-Out function and the interesting thing is the controls. These are over accelerometer, the movement controls such as jump, left, right, forward and back. Then trough the touch screen you have the auto aim and aim control, and the proximity sensor to fire. The auto aim says the creator is because this is a very an alpha version. Probably we would see some improvements in the near future.
Up to the first video, that is all. However, on the other video embedded on this post you would see on just a few seconds length, playing the Quake 3 Arena in Multiplayer Mode.
May be this is not the best app for the Nokia N900, but this is a trace. We still have to wait to see more interesting apps but this waiting time is getting shorter.

Multiplayer

Little by little are emerging new applications for the Nokia N900. Today, I bring you a famous SNES game better known as Super Mario World! One of the most entertaining and fun game of the history of the video games running on a promising device.
As you will see on the video, the game runs very smoothly and to control the game he uses the QWERTY keyboard. Exactly the same as you were playing it on your home computer, using the arrows to move and another two buttons from the left part of the keyboard. Actually, the way to control video games is a separate issue due to the lack of Multi-touch on the Nokia devices, but I will write about this issue soon. Later on the video, he replaces the keyboard controls for a Wii control, just like the old days where we played with the Nintendo console on our homes. And on the last part, he uses the TV-out and we have like 10 seconds of this demonstration of the game being display on a TV, where I totally agree with him about the game working beautifully.
Here is the video, take a look!

As I said on the beginning there are for now just a few applications going around for the N900. Probably because it´s a new phone that it´s not available on the market yet and just a few fortunate people have the phone already. Also we have to take into account that it´s a new platform too and the developers have to interact a little bit with it. When the Nokia N900 comes out, everything would be different, we simply and unfortunately have to wait.

This is how I decided to title this post, and why is that? Because I am going to show you a game that was presented on the Nokia World on the firsts days of September which was placed on Stuttgart, Germany.
The game it´s called Bounce and it´s based on the accelerometer. You have to move the phone in order to move the ball in the game, and moving it up&down you get to make the ball jump. Your objective it´s to guide the bouncy red ball trough different levels, avoiding  obstacles and collecting some kind of fruits. We can say that it´s a common game now-a-days with more and more phones having accelerometers but it´s still very fun to play tough.
On the video demo, the game is shown using the TV-Out feature. And that´s not a simple detail!  Because you can appreciate how awesome the graphics are, very vivid for a mobile device, making the experience of gaming pretty cool due to a new level of gameplay.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBzUNe5ov_o
I would like to stand out that this game was specially designed for the Nokia N900 using Maemo 5. So this shows the power of this new platform that Nokia is introducing. In my opinion, Nokia has already prove before that knows what they are doing, so the choice of this platform it is not a deliver idea or a simple way of dropping on the costs, it´s something more than that. We would talk about this platform sooner.