14 DAY TRIAL // Ideaworks3D, a well-known London-based game developer, announced that its Airplay SDK 3.5 is now compatible with Nokia's recently launched N-Gage gaming platform. Airplay is a cross-platform native execution environment created to lower costs and fasten deployment over different hardware architectures and software environments, allowing the creation of games and applications that can be ported on all Airplay-compatible devices without any extra requirements.
Airplay is already compatible with all the important mobile platforms: Symbian (both S60 and UIQ), Windows Mobile, BREW and Linux. With the new support for Nokia's service, developers can now easily deploy games to N-Gage, offering users a wider range of titles to choose from. To get a clue of what games can be brought to the N-Gage platform, you should know that Ideaworks3D's Airplay is behind several cool mobile games, including the new, award-winning "Metal Gear Solid Mobile" developed by Konami, and EA's Need For Speed Most Wanted.
"Ideaworks3D has a long and proud history of collaboration with Nokia around mobile gaming," said Tim Closs, Ideaworks3D's CTO. "We are tremendously excited to see how Nokia has relaunched the N-Gage brand as a compelling service for next-generation mobile games on its handsets. Airplay SDK is the only technology in the world that allows mobile publishers to create a single SKU that can be deployed to N-Gage as well as other native environments such as BREW, Symbian OS and Windows Mobile. There is zero cost for porting between handsets, as the Airplay platform does that for you. The advent of N-Gage is making publishers really wake up to the huge cost savings offered by this approach."
Rob Taylor-Hendry, Head of Ideaworks3D's Studio, added: "Our Studio has delivered two launch titles for the N-Gage service: 'System Rush: Evolution', and 'Mile High Pinball', both of which were created using Airplay SDK. Additionally, Ideaworks3D offers publishers a professional service to port existing content from BREW, Java, Nintendo DS and other platforms to N-Gage using Airplay. Not only does this offer a rapid and proven route-to-market, the games can then be redeployed to all other native platforms for minimal cost. Several leading publishers are already committed to using Airplay SDK to achieve these savings."
Nokia's N-Gage 2.0 (click here for the website) was officially released a few days ago and is available for Nokia N81, Nokia N81 8GB, Nokia N82, Nokia N95 and Nokia N95 8GB.