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Go Play: ONE beat-'em-up to rule them all?

Nokia shows off its 3D N-Gage fighter title

Go Play: ONE beat-'em-up to rule them all?

Nokia is sensibly keen to stress that despite the 3D capabilities of phones running its new N-Gage platform, it's not just about shoving console games onto phones.

However, there's clearly a place for some hardcore titles, with first-party beat-'em-up ONE staking its claim to be regarded as the Tekken or Virtua Fighter of the N-Gage world.

The game sees you customising your own fighter, then duking it out in full 3D motion-captured glory. There's also a global rankings system, enabling you to prove that you're the hardest fighter in the world (or, more realistically, the 7,893rd hardest).

A quick confession: this writer is rubbish at beat-'em-ups. So our hands-on experience of ONE at Nokia's Go Play event involved confused button-mashing and quick defeats. But we could see enough to tell that if fight games are your thing, this can't be written off lightly.

The restrictions of mobile mean controls are necessarily stripped down from the sort of complex joypad schemes seen on console brawlers. But that might actually help broaden ONE's appeal to, well, more casual button-mashing mobile gamers. Like us.

ONE is set to be the poster boy for the new N-Gage platform, in a 'feel the power of my graphical capabilities' stylee, to build credibility within the games industry. But our cackhanded hands-on at least taught us that there's more to it than slinky visuals.

Stuart Dredge
Stuart Dredge
Stuart is a freelance journalist and blogger who's been getting paid to write stuff since 1998. In that time, he's focused on topics ranging from Sega's Dreamcast console to robots. That's what you call versatility. (Or a short attention span.)