A group of bloggers we’re recently invited to a Nokia Insider’s Night to play some games running on Flash Lite for Nokia mobile phones developed by Breakdesign; and also to brief us on how the Ovi Store is doing in Malaysia.
First, a little bit about the Ovi Store. Nokia’s proprietary app store will be turning one in June and Nokia claims that it will be going big into the local with Bahasa Malaysia support and very soon, operator billing.
This means people using Nokia devices will be able to purchase apps via their device and pay for it through the operator that they’s subscribed to. This would make app purchases palatable for people who are a bit apprehensive when it comes to keying in their credit card details in Ovi Store itself.
Moving on to the Flash Lite games being showcased. Currently game apps are amongst the top three app categories most downloaded from the Ovi Store. With over 1.5 million apps being downloaded from the Ovi Store everyday, it’s pretty easy to see that there is a huge market for game apps. Breakdesigns are one of the Ovi Store’s leading game developers and are working closely with Nokia to promote Flash Lite games for Nokia devices.
Currently Breakdesigns have in their catalogue five Flash Lite based games for the Ovi Store but only the touchscreen friendly ones were demoed at the event. So we had our hands on a tap-fest styled game called “That Cockroach Game”, an action role-player called “Ninjani” and a bejewelled lookalike called “Mosterilla”. The games are casual in nature and is very easy to pickup and play while waiting for the LRT. Nothing too serious but are quite addictive. The option to upload your scores online ads another dimension in the engagement level and will get you coming back for more.
In the pipeline, the developers will be adding three more games on Ovi Store making the total tally for Breakdesign Flash Lite games up to eight.
Rick Treweek, Co-founder of Breakdesign was on hand to explain all about the Flash Lite games his company has developed for the Nokia Ovi Store.
Like all games developed for mobile phones, there are social elements built in. All five games currently available will allow you to upload scores to see who gets the braging rights to brag that they are the best in the world. The social scoring system developed by Breakdesign will also pool scores from countries and rank them accordingly. So you’ll be able to see which nation has the best mobile gamers. this we find is pretty interesting.
To turn up the heat even further, Nokia is running monthly competition offering Nokia X6, bluetooth headsets and other Nokia goodies to top gamers playing the Breakdesign games. The competition is running for four months starting May and Nokia will also be offering a “mystery device” as the grand prize in August.
We had a chance to chat with Nelson Wee, Nokia’s Regional Services Marketing Manager for the APAC region to find out what the “mystery device” is and when will the Nokia N8 be launched in Malaysia. Try as we might, he is very tight lipped on the launch date of the N8 and the “mystery device”. But our chat left us with a feeling that the grand prize device will be one of the latest crop of Nokia phone running the S^3 OS.
Will it be the N8? That is something we are looking to find out.
He did assure us that the N8 will be coming to Malaysia this year but can’t tell us when.
For more information on the competition, head on over to Barkingseed.com.
All the Breakdesign games are available for download here.
