Fun with Tomb Raider for the N-Gage
Okay, so now that I'm able to play my Tomb Raider on my 6600, the problem is that I wasn't where I left off on my N-Gage. Obviously I'm going to want to play most of the time on my N-Gage rather than my phone, but for those quick minutes during the day when I have some downtime (read: bathroom breaks) I'll want to keep going on a level so it'd be nice to be able to continue where I left off.
This is actually really simple. In c:\system\Apps\tombraider\ there's a bunch of files called "save" and some called "slot". The slots are where the files are saved and I had just saved my latest game in the top spot, so I copied over slot00.bak to my 6600 and *poof* I'm right where I left off. Here's the save file for you N-Gaged TombRaiders.
Okay, so that's great. But I'm not the world's most patient gamer (or smartest either) so it's taken me a couple weeks just to get to the third level. But I'm flying now because I found this four year old TR1 walkthrough on the web. I emailed the guy to see if he'd let me copy the pages (which it says not to do) and reformat them for the N-Gage, but the email bounced. So I took that as a "yes".
Here's the TR1 Walkthrough reformatted and stripped down so it'll display with the integrated XHTML browser on the N-Gage. Simply unzip, copy the .html pages to someplace like c:\tr1walk\ on your phone and then enter that path into the Services app as a new Bookmark. Or you can just grab a copy of FExplorer, find the index.html and launch it that way and then save that first page as a Bookmark after Services launches).
Now when I get stuck, I just hold the menu key down, multitask over to the walk through and get myself through that problem, and then flip back to the game and continue. Works like a charm. As much as I bitched about the N-Gage, you have to admit the onboard browser and file system a pretty unique feature of this device...
A discussion about this on #mobitopia made us realize that this could be a whole new type of for-pay downloads for the Series 60 devices. Downloadable and readable books offline, perfect for guides like this one. This one doesn't have any images, but you can imagine that you could provide quite a rich-looking offline "ebook" in XHTML-MP without much effort.
Enjoy. :-)
-Russ