I hand my boyfriend my N-Gage QD and the game card for The Elder Scrolls: Shadowkey. I feel like I'm doing something vaguely wrong, vaguely illicit. Like I'm handing him drugs or something. "See if you can put in the game, turn it on." He takes it, turns it over in his hands. After a moment he pulls open a flap, inserts the game--upside down. I correct him. "Okay. Now turn it on." He flips the unit over on its face, begins looking at the different buttons. After scanning them, he begins pushing them at random. Nothing.

After a few minutes, he hands it back to me. "I can't." I turn the unit over to the side. A circle with a line on it is inscribed on the rubber rim on the unit's side. I hold it down for a minute. It lights up.

"Don't feel bad," I say. "It took me about ten minutes to figure out how to turn it on myself."

I've always been a big proponent of the axiom, when in doubt, see if Mr. Casual can do it. Games ought not to need big instruction booklets. They should be simple enough to figure out by picking up and fiddling for a moment or two. Turning a system on, that goes without saying.

I feel like I'm taking a copout route by poking fun at the N-Gage's unintuitiveness, its user-unfriendliness. It's taking the easy way out. My punchlines are written for me. And it's somewhat unfair. After all, they did revamp the system greatly. Originally, one had to take out the battery pack to change games.

I'd played Morrowind briefly--about two or three evenings' worth of time--enough to be familiar with it. I'm not a PC gamer by any means. My computer isn't good enough for the majority of games that come out nowadays. I'm a dedicated console gamer. I'm used to console-style RPGs. But I am always open to something new. My unfamiliarity with the style does not disqualify me from making statements such as this:

Shadowkey falls very short of the bar.

My friend Vince is a big Morrowind fan and I subject him to the same test I did my boyfriend. He fares better. He puts the game in correctly, and eventually he finds the power button. He doesn't realize you need to hold it in for a few seconds--three, by my count. He expresses dismay at the series of unskippable splash screens and freaks out when the backlight turns out in the middle of them. "I haven't figured out how to keep it on," I say. "I don't think you can." He creates a character and begins to play. Among his comments:

1) "I can't kill the villager? What kind of an Elder Scrolls game is this?"

2) "Why can't I jump over this barrel?"

3) "There's a loading screen? But this is a game chip!"

4) "Does this loading screen ever finish?"

5) "Oh. It's halfway done."

6) "Why is it slowing down?"

The loading screen does indeed take a long time, and there is major slowdown in the game. It doesn't always happen when you'd expect it--like when there are two or three enemies on screen. It will occasionally happen when you're merely walking.

What is the effect of load times on a handheld?

When I play games on a handheld--my Gameboy--it is generally either to pass the time on a train or because I have a few spare minutes to kill while witing for friends. I don't play handheld games that involve a big time investment. I'll play my port of Yoshi's Island and finish a level, or I'll play Wario Ware, which I consider to be the ultimate example of handheld gaming--you can play for one minute or ten minutes and it won't really matter when the train stops and you need to shut your game off. I have the port of Dragon Warrior III and it goes relatively unplayed--not the type of game I like to play in five-minute bursts. I'm not going to pretend that there aren't a great number of RPGs for the GBA--the popularity of Golden Sun alone would prove me wrong--I'm just saying that it's not my style.

It takes roughly a minute to load a level in Shadowkey. For a handheld, that is too long. The nature of the handheld is to pick up and play and quit relatively easy--that's why all the Mario Advance games have added the ability to save at any time--that's why many games have a Sleep mode. Even for a console, where one expects to be sitting playing for an extended period of time, a minute is too long to load. We're too impatient for that. Especially after Jak and Daxter proved that a game can exist without loadtimes.

Shadowkey's storyline is traditional. Go on quests. Save the land. I don't think that's a bad thing. It's certainly easier to remember than Final Fantasy's angstfests.

Is the gameplay memorable enough to merit a simple story?

I would have to say no.

I'm killing rats because a shopkeeper asked me to. I walk up to one. It hisses at me. I hold down the 8 key and jam on 5 to slash my dagger. The hit detection is funny. It seems to be more accurate when you step away from enemies rather than when you come closer. I let loose a few shots of my Blaze spell. I miss several times but then eventually hit it. I'm out of magic now so I stand around to let it replenish and go find another rat. Later I find myself in the bandit's fortress with a broadsword. The place is corridor after corridor and I refer to my map often. I get easily lost in these situations.

The world is a hostile place to launch a new console if your name is not Nintendo or Sony. Even the sacred cows are not immune--enough people make comments under their breath about the Nintendo DS. Videogames inspire fierce loyalty, fervent loyalty, nigh-religious loyalty. The essence of the fanboy. An attack on my favorite console, my favorite game, is an attack on me. Even the existence of another system is perceived as a threat--hence the fact of the console wars. Nokia is a brave company. The N-Gage is cowering behind the cocky GBA and fearing the release of the PSP.

Imagine the audacity one must have to decide to launch a new system. One pictures Timothy Roberts proudly sending out a press release for The Phantom and logging on to the Internet to see everyone deriding it as a hoax--for how rare must that audacity be? "We were serious about that," one pictures him saying. "It's in development right now." Then, in a lower voice: "We were serious."

My hand begins to tire after about a half hour of playing Shadowkey. That's not necessarily a complaint about the N-Gage. It's a problem that plagues handhelds in general. Most of us are college-age guys. Most of us have large hands. I need to take rest breaks while playing my GBA.

Requiem of Hell fares slightly better. I'm not used to playing bloody games and for a second I'm almost shocked at the intro screen which is relatively tame when compared to, I don't know, Manhunt. Skeletons rise from the ground and swipe at villagers. The two characters you have a choice of playing have been killed by an evil demon; they are resurrected--

--by a kawaii little fairy named Gigi.

With my sweet fairy friend, I eviscerate grotesque demons. It's not until my character tells Gigi that she's like "the mother from Hell" that I realize: this has to be camp.

Whether it's writing, or paintings, or videogames, one has to consider audience when making art. It's all well and good to say, "I write for myself," but no, you don't. You write to be read. This begs the question: Who is the audience for the N-Gage?

It is not the hardcore. The hardcore are the ones who refuse new systems, who already have good games and will not accept mediocre ones.

It is not the casual gamers. The casual gamers will be daunted by the mechanics of the system, are happy with merely playing Snake on their cellphones. PC-style RPGs are not for the causal gamer.

Who is the audience?

Games are art, I say. But Requiem of Hell is not art, you say.

Maybe we're both right.

Requiem of Hell is poorly translated, has the shell of a plot. It reminds me of the old-school games of yore that I used to play all the time. It's not all that different from the original Legend of Zelda. One slashes through a field of enemies, grabs trinkets, and eventually faces off against the evil final enemy.

I've said before: That style of game fell out of fashion.

I've been intrigued by the N-Gage ever since it was first announced. Its audacity. And I appreciate the N-Gage's existence. Truth be told on some level I want the N-Gage to succeed. I'm told it's a good cellphone. Games like Puzzle Bobble are a natural match for the system. Give it some Tetris clones. Partner up with Popcap and get some of those games. Truth be told, N-Gage wants to be a non-gamer's game system. It wants to be a system one plays between calls. Light puzzle games--light platformers--that's a natural for the system. Investment-heavy RPGs are not the way for it to go.

I take out my GBA and it feels comfortable in my hand. I put in my Wario Ware cartridge and within 15 seconds I'm playing. If I want to stop I don't feel like I've wasted a loadtime. I don't feel like I've lost an investment because I'm just playing to get a high score. And you know something? I'd sit through a load time to get to Wario Ware, because Wario Ware is a great game. I've said it before: great games make great systems. All the features, all the processing power, all the redesigns, all the flash in the world won't make a system without the games to back them up.

Embrace casuality, Nokia. Find your niche. Your niche is not to be Nintendo's competition. Sony is going to do a much better job at that when it releases the PSP--just as it did when it released the Playstation. We need games for the casual gamers. We need legitimization, Nokia. We need a wider audience. We need a different perception. Give me something to play between calls--give us all something to play.

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