Russell Beattie

Yeah! Check it out! Another neat app from Agile Mobile called Agile Fighter - it's a Bluetooth-based fighting game and it looks pretty great.

I just downloaded the trial, and though I haven't played anyone over Bluetooth yet, from a video-game point of view, it looks great and works very smoothly. The motions are the classic Street-fighter motions: Upper punch, upper kick, lower-punch, lower-kick, upper defend, lower defend and jump. The buttons have been arranged for the 3650 perfectly, so that the above is operated with the 1,2, and 3 keys, which are on the left and makes it very accessible (jump is activated by pushing down on the directional keypad). There's a practice option in the trial which lets you beat up on a guy who doesn't attack (i.e. not a video game) and a non-playing demo which shows you what a real fight will look like (yeah!) which is pretty great.

I meant to write about this before on other posts, but the Nokia's have several problems when it comes to using them for video games: 1) No diagonal supported on the keypad, and this is because there's no 2) multi-key support. In other words, you can't do combos in this game (or any other) by holding down multiple keys at once. Want to jump and kick? You can't just click and hold the jump key and click the kick key, because it seems that the hardware doesn't support this. The lack of diagonal, I gather, is the same reason, if the hardware doesn't support up and left at the same time, you're not going to be able to simulate diagnol in games.

Anyways, this has nothing to do with Agile Fighter, which works its way around this problem by making the game respond to quick combinations like click forward then click jump immediately will make your guy jump forward over the opponent. Pretty cool, I can't wait to play it against someone.

One has to ask, if the N-Gage is just a repackaged 3650, has this limitation been lifted? It really affects games, so I can't imagine it, but still... companies have done more dumbo things.

-Russ