Nokia hints at immiment location-based games for N-Gage, shows off unnamed racing title

Location-based services have long been hailed as the Next Big Thing in the mobile world and mobile gaming types are especially excitable about them, yet so far no-one has really managed to deliver on the promise.

Based upon its presentations at the recent Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, however, it looks like Nokia might be poised to do precisely that on their N-Gage platform.

Whilst no specific titles were announced, the location-based theme came up repeatedly throughout Nokia's presentations.

First up in his GDC Mobile keynote, whilst discussing potential innovations, Tera Ojanpera (Executive Vice President Nokia) showed a glimpse of a game with a car racing around Nokia's offices.

Later Mark Ollila (Director of Technology & Strategy, Games) showed the same screen alongside some really interesting R&D testing shots (see above) in his presentation about innovation. Then finally, when we got to chat to Mark Ollila one-on-one we got to see the game in action and get our hands on it.
Although the build we saw was still very much a prototype and unlikely to see the light of day under the temporary moniker of Nokia Maps Racing, the concept of creating a race track based on map date of your location (or any location for that matter) and then speeding around it Super Sprint style seems like a pretty cool one.

Especially so when you team it up with the ability to take on ghosts, share maps with friends or even potentially fix maps to a certain location so other players who visit can challenge your times.

As usual you can be sure that more info on this and Nokia's other location-based experiments will be speeding its way towards your precise position very soon.